Lemon Pledge

by Kathryn Blume

published in the July 4, 2005 issue of Seven Days

The Pledge of Allegiance is screwed up.  Deeply.  Hopelessly flawed.

 Let’s look at it again so we’re all on the same page:

I pledge allegiance to the flag

Of the United States of America

And to the republic for which it stands

One nation, under God, indivisible,

With liberty and justice for all.

What an enervating crumb of dopey doggerel.  It’s an amateurish poem and a lousy promise.  Can you imagine if people got married that way?

I promise to marry

The ring on your finger

Which is attached to your hand

Which is at the end of your arm

Which somewhere along the line

Becomes you, who I love.

The POA’s best part is at the end, but by the time we get to the chunk which could raise our pulse, we’re already thinking about lunch.

Who wrote this sawdust, anyway?  I’ve always suspected either some Jeffersonian wannabe – an 18^th century AV geek from the social backwaters of the Continental Congress who got tossed the writing job as a Bone of Pity, or a committee of reluctant right-wing revolutionaries who wanted some sort of mind-numbing oath of unquestioning loyalty so that we wouldn’t have too much freedom and liberty poisoning the minds of the newly independent populace.

Not so.  Not even close. Turns out (and this is going to bunch the undies of all kinds of oath-loving, under god-protecting conservatives) Our Friend The Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy – a socialist!  Well, a Baptist minister Christian Socialist, but one who was interested (according to his biographer Dr. John W. Baer) in “a planned economy with political, social and economic equality for all.”  He wrote the POA during his tenure as a committee chairman for the National Education Association.  As it happens, he really wanted to include the word “equality” in the pledge as well, but he knew that the rest of the committee was opposed to equality for women and African-Americans.  Oy!

Not only that, but, as you may know, he didn’t include the phrase “under God” in the original POA.  That was added in 1954 following a Supreme Deity Inclusion Campaign undertaken by the Knights of Columbus, a change Bellamy’s granddaughter says he would have resented.  Lest you doubt this, note that Bellamy left his Boston church under considerable duress in 1891 thanks to his socialist sermons, and quit attending his Florida church because of the rampant racial bigotry.

Bellamy’s lefty leanings aside, 112 years later, the POA has all the zip and pizzazz of a rainy day at the slug farm.  I mean, for starters, I pledge allegiance to the flag?  It’s a flag, a symbol, and a pretty abstract one at that.  Now, I get that some people are into symbols: crosses and stars and polo ponies and alligators and gigantic, gas-glutton, faux-military, pollutomobiles (a symbol for the large phalli they wish they had).  But that flag bears about as much relation to the actual United States as the zeros and ones in the code of a digital snap of the sun bear to the actual flaming ball-o-hydrogen, source-of-all-life in our sky. 

While we all know that the stars represent the states, most people probably don’t know what the stripes and colors represent.  I didn’t.  And after a quick trip to the Betsy Ross home page at www.ushistory.org, I discovered The Awful Truth: “There is no official designation or meaning for the colors of the flag.”  The only person to take a whack at it was George Washington, who, in a moment of what could only be hemp-inspired grandiloquence, said that the stars came from the sky, the red “from British colors” (whatever that means), and the white stripes symbolized seceding from England.  Cosmic thrills and chills from the dude with the wooden teeth.

Back to the Pledge.

And to the republic...  Ok, that just sounds too much like “Republican,” and we’re all way too het up over the Son-Dunce Kid’s Hole-In-The-Head Gang to get anywhere near that one.  Why don’t we wait until we find us some real compassionate conservatives before we start trying to rehabilitate the R Word.

Nevertheless, let’s finish the sentence: to the republic for which it stands.  Now we’re getting somewhere.  We’re about to describe our country, i.e. the thing to which we’re pledging our allegiance.  Except, who knows what pledging allegiance actually means?  It’s vague.  It’s like saying, “Support our troops!”  With what?  Lycra?  Be specific! 

Moving right along: One nation.  Ok.  Duh.  Got that.

Under god.  This is problematic for a whole lot of reasons, but I think I’ll hang my hat on the separation of church and state as put forth in the First Amendment of the Constitution (which is, by the way, a kick-ass document, and you should read it sometime) and leave it at that.

Indivisible.  This is clearly theoretical.  I mean, really, around which particular issue are we all united? 

With liberty and justice for all.  Finally, we’re getting somewhere.  But like I said, by now, we’ve already taken a Sudafed and fallen asleep operating heavy machinery.

This baby definitely needs an Extreme Makeover.  So, let’s start by asking the question: what is the point and purpose of the Pledge in the first place?  What is it used for – other than to get school children going on their day with a nice, meaningless group drone?  I have no idea.  I went to a little hippie high school in Oregon and never had to take a civics class, much less chant the POA.  But I think it has something to do with re-affirming our commitment to citizenship, civic responsibility, and the ideals such as liberty and justice (and equality), upon which this country was founded.  Which is nice. 

To tell you the truth, though, my real concern over the POA – apart from thorny issues of ennui and aesthetics – springs from the slippery slope down which Pledge could easily slide.  There has been too much corralling of loyalty, patriotism, and “what it means to be an American,” by Red-Blooded Poseurs threatened by anyone who doesn’t follow their authoritarian rule-set and ossified belief system.  I fear the POA will get turned into some kind of narrowly defined metric of Homeland Loyalty, and that certain Powers In Power will start to strenuously demand unquestioning support for their behavior.

Honestly, I don’t think having a national allegiance or loyalty is a bad thing – if it’s a conscious and re-negotiable one.  It just needs to be about loyalty to the country, not necessarily the government.  The Declaration of Independence (another fine read) states that governments get “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  Which means none of us should be required to swear a blind pledge of faithfulness and obedience if we don’t consent to, for example, a misbegotten, unjustified, militaristic, imperialist rampage. The POA is good, in that it requires us to give some thought to the terms of our civic responsibility – ideally to the land and to each other – but it was never intended to make individuals abrogate their forebrains in service of idiotic and dangerous leadership.  We are not the Borg.  Resistance is not futile – in fact, when things are going astray, it’s required, and the POA should reflect that.

Ok, now we know what we’re doing, so let’s get to the re-write.  First, let’s change the title.  I’d like to swap “pledge” for “promise.”  We all know what “promise” means, and what it feels like when one gets broken.  No kid ever says, “Aww, Dad!  Why can’t we go to the zoo?  You pledged!”  

Allegiance is a tricky word.  Technically, it has to do with fidelity and loyalty, and in some cases, obedience – but that starts to be a problem when you run it up against the ideas of liberty and disagreeing with your government.  So, let’s just call this thing The Promise.  Or, how about The American’s Promise, since that’s what this is really about – what we, as Americans, promise, as citizens of this nation, to do on behalf of the country and each other. 

Turns out, it’s a really hard thing to write.  My first draft came out looking like The Progressive’s Manual for Utopian America:

As a citizen of the United States of America, I promise to nurture and cultivate the democracy by voting in every election and working to protect the integrity of the voters and the electoral process (and see what I can do about getting rid of the lobbyists);

I promise to remember that democracy and free-market capitalism do not automatically go hand in hand, and to work for viable alternatives to our current system which has left millions of people without well-paying, meaningful jobs (and left about 5 people ridiculously wealthy);

I promise to uphold the ideal of Equality by working for equal pay for men and women and equal access to affordable health care (including stuff related to contraception and family planning because that’s nobody’s damn business but their own);

I promise to uphold the ideal of Liberty by vigorously protecting the First Amendment and politely respecting the Second Amendment - but not going overboard about it since we all know the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate AK-47s and shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft weapons;

I promise to uphold the ideal of Justice by transforming our revenge-based penal-industrial complex into a compassionate system founded on principles of prevention and rehabilitation...

Et cetera.  I could go on for pages regarding what I would love to have each and every American promise to do.  But that would be A) overtly partisan; B) supremely idealistic; and C) hard for school kids to recite.  We want everyone to think about this, right?  We want this to be something everyone in our ideally indivisible land can relate to. 

Gandhi says be the change you want to see.  I think that’s good.  Let’s try it from there:

As an American,

I promise not to be an asshole.

I promise not to be a greedy bastard.

I promise not to be a heartless, power-hungry egomaniac.

I promise not to be a short-sighted idiot.

I promise not to be a selfish prick.

Sigh.  Alright, let’s go back to the juice.  The core.  Bellamy was on to something, even if it came out sounding like verbal Valium:

As an American Citizen,

I promise to uphold our ideals of

Liberty, Equality, and Justice

By treating others as I would like to be treated;

By cultivating compassion for the people I don’t understand;

By respecting the people with whom I disagree;

And by sticking up for the people worse off than I am.

I also promise to ask for forgiveness if I hurt someone, and offer forgiveness if I am hurt by others.

All this goes for everybody in the world, not just Americans.

I know it’s going to be hard, but I promise to give it my best shot.

Good luck, everybody.

Well, at least it’s a start.  I haven’t figured out how to slip in stuff about yoga, meditation, and living an ecologically-sound lifestyle, but maybe I get can get that into a re-work of the national anthem.