When the phrase "under God" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, it was meant to bar Communists from saying the pledge, because they were godless. I suppose their tongues were going to burn, or something.the Suburbs do go -- they're one of the more underrated bands to come out of Minneapolis https://t.co/G31jOx7oxF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2020
Which is really funny since Trump doesn't know the words to the Star Spangled Banner.
I'm not sure why Trump thinks "law and order" is a conjuring phrase. Biden did say the words last night; he just refused to play the semantics game of saying the phrase as if it means something. Trump wants it to burn Biden's tongue, or prove Biden is a radical leftist beholden to anarcho-syndicalists.
All Trump really does with this is throw more meat to his shrinking base. Nobody else cares.
This morning, thinking about Trump openly calling out a violent hate group to keep him in office the phrase "with liberty and justice for all" kept going through my mind. All I could think of was too complicated to write about without a lot more thinking about why that phrase doesn't take hold in the mind of those for whom the pledge of allegiance has effectively replaced the Our Father. Only you don't have to think about it too hard. A lot of them say the Our Father putting the whole thing except the requirements for personal responsibility into the first-person singular or limit the good of it to their small circle.
ReplyDeleteI've also been thinking more about the whole "pledge" thing and how it was a 19th century secular replacement of that kind. Only it will take more research than I can give it.
The pledge, I've heard, was written to be a kind of universal document promoting nationalism (back when that was considered a good thing, a "liberal" thing). Kind of like the Our Father, it got used/gets used, for other purposes entirely. The comparison is not exactly fair, as one has more vitality in it yet than the other. But I've learned that the best intentions in putting words together almost inevitably devolve into the worst effects.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe they don't, since the seeds of its destruction lay in the heart of the concept of nationalism from its conception, and the Our Father is still vital because we have to ignore it in order to misuse it. Sort of like that whole admonition to "love your enemy," which we don't really distort; we just don't even pay attention. I don't need to love my enemy; my enemy needs to love me. Besides, loving your enemy is crazy talk; everybody knows that!
It is. Which is precisely why it's still so vital, millenia later.