If you read this to Glenn Beck, his head will explode
Salon.com posts a brilliant history of the Pledge of Allegiance by Michael Lind, which explains why it’s so darned un-American:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel “Looking Backward: 2007-1887,” which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an “industrial army” and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with “the Bellamy salute,” a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having “my flag” replaced by “the flag of the United States of America,” to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren’t pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God,” following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America’s enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
Actually, no. Read more
Harry Truman, Barack Obama, and the mythic ‘executive order’
Harry Truman in uniform in 1916, as an officer during World War I.
Gay activists have given mixed reviews to President Obama’s “big gay speech” the other night, with many, including radio host Michelangelo Signorili, saying they’re tired of words. They want action from this president — and they want it NOW — on repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” on killing off the Defense of Marriage Act (good luck getting that through this Senate…) and on an Employment Non Discrimination Act (much more likely to get done in my opinion…) Much of the heat on Obama is centered on the military policy, which many activists claim he can abolish (or at least arrest) with the “stroke of a pen,” either by issuing a giant stop-loss order (which would have the unpleasant effect of preventing ALL troops from returning home to their families…) or by issuing an executive order demanding the military stop enforcing the law requiring the separation of gay and lesbian soldiers who admit as much, from service. It all sounds very simple, and activists claim that if Harry Truman could desegregate the military during the far more racist climate of the 1940s, Obama can do it now, since polls show a majority of Americans, both outside the military and inside, approve of open service. Plus, the Europeans are already doing it (the weakest argument of all, since Europeans also don’t commit their troops to tough combat by and large, with the exception of the Brits and Canadians, and never in the numbers we do, and so Americans perceive them as “non-fighting forces” and don’t care what they do regarding their gay and lesbian troops.)
Well, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but it’s not quite that simple, and neither is the history. Read more
Good night, Teddy
Senator Edward Kennedy, the baby brother, the torchbearer of Camelot, who took the Kennedy family and mantle on his shoulders after losing each of this brothers, who failed to become president but became perhaps our greatest modern-day Senator, and in so doing, became the only one of Joseph Kennedy’s sons to achieve long life, is gone, at age 77. And what a loss. Read more
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