TUPELO, Miss. – A Mississippi judge again asked everyone in his courtroom to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag, despite an uproar over whether he has the right to make such a request.I agree with Lampley, but I must tell you that I have no issue with saying the pledge myself, nor do we have an issue with the young one saying it in his school. Ultimately, of course, it’s a free speech issue.
The furor began Wednesday when an attorney with a reputation for fighting free speech battles stayed silent as everyone else recited the patriotic oath. The lawyer was jailed.
A day later, Judge Talmadge Littlejohn continued to ask those in his courtroom to say the pledge.
"I didn't expect the Pledge of Allegiance, but he asked me to do it, so I did it," said Melissa Adams, 41, who testified in a child custody case that was closed to the public.
Attorney Danny Lampley spent about five hours behind bars before Littlejohn set him free so that the lawyer could work on another case. Lampley told The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal he respected the judge but wasn't going to back down.
"I don't have to say it because I'm an American," Lampley told the newspaper.
But this made me a bit curious about the history of the Pledge, so I checked up on it starting with this Wikipedia article, which tells us the following…
The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), a Baptist minister, a Christian socialist, and the cousin of socialist utopian novelist Edward Bellamy (1850–1898). The original "Pledge of Allegiance" was published in the September 8 issue of the popular children's magazine The Youth's Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas. The event was conceived and promoted by James B. Upham, a marketer for the magazine, in a campaign to sell flags to public schools and magazines to students,[2][3] while instilling the idea of American nationalism in them.[4][5]So a so-called “Christian Socialist” came up with the Pledge as part of “a campaign to sell flags.”
And do you want to know how the Pledge used to be recited?
Like this (using the so-called “Bellamy Salute,” which of course bears a suspicious resemblance to the salute given to a former goose-stepping Austrian postcard painter).I just think it’s interesting that the Pledge is now deigned to have a borderline religious significance (the “under God” wording was added in 1953 – the wording of the Pledge has morphed every now and again over its history) given its commercial (and “Christian Socialist”) origins. It should also be noted that the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last March that the “under God” wording is of “a ceremonial and patriotic nature” and did not condone an establishment of religion.
So there.
In March, House Republicans unanimously supported a one-year moratorium on earmarks. I voted for the moratorium, and for years now I’ve been calling on my colleagues to stop a practice that is subject to corruption and encourages free spending.(By the way, I guess the Chester County Republican Party has decided to pay attention to this race for a change since they’ve generated a ton of You Tube video hit pieces on Lois Herr, accusing her of being “a liberal” – horrors! – as well as these utterly saccharine and nauseating vids of Pitts pretending to display the empathy that is nowhere to be found in his thoroughly wretched votes.)
I stopped taking earmarks almost four years ago, and I’m the only member of the Pennsylvania delegation with a standing policy against earmarks.
Funny thing about Pitts’ claim to forego earmarks, though; this post from three years ago tells us that he voted No (as usual, along with former Repug U.S. House rep Jim Saxton)…
…to end the secret "earmarking" of spending items and tax breaks. The measure, part of H Res 6 (above) also restores pay-as-you-go rules that require tax cuts and spending hikes to be offset elsewhere in the budget.And if earmarks are such a supposedly big deal to Pancake Joe and his pals, then why isn’t a ban on earmarks included in the GOP’s “Pledge to America,” or whatever it’s called (noted here)?
Oh, and by the way, to send Pitts packing and help that “godless, li-bu-ruul socialist” Lois Herr, click here.
The counterculture of the late 1950s and early 1960s appears to be everywhere these days. A major exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s photography just closed at the National Gallery in Washington. A superb book, by the historian Sean Wilentz, about Ginsberg’s dear friend and sometime influence Bob Dylan recently made the best-seller list. “Howl,” a film about Ginsberg and the Beats, opened last month. And everywhere around us, the streets and airwaves hum with attacks on government authority, celebrations of radical individualism, inflammatory rhetoric, political theatrics.Siegel then tells us that comparisons between the “Beats” and the teabaggers are “frivolous,” though he proceeds unabated to make them anyway.
In other words, the spirit of Beat dissent is alive (though some might say not well) in the character of Tea Party protest. Like the Beats, the Tea Partiers are driven by that maddeningly contradictory principle, subject to countless interpretations, at the heart of all American protest movements: individual freedom. The shared DNA of American dissent might be one answer to the question of why the Tea Partiers, so extreme and even anachronistic in their opposition to any type of government, exert such an astounding appeal.
I’ll tell you what – I’ll give you a sampling of each, dear reader, and let you decide, OK?
As Matt Taibbi tells us here in the new issue of “Rolling Stone”…
It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.And I was kind – I didn’t even mention signs like this…
"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
By contrast, here is more information on the leading figures of the “Beat” generation, telling us in part the following…Central elements of "Beat" culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, and a rejection of materialism.Nested links to the Wikipedia article also tell us more of the following “Beat” icons: Jack Kerouac, recognized for his spontaneous method of writing covering topics such as jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel (Kerouac also wrote in French and died of alcohol abuse, a common malady for this bunch); Allen Ginsburg, a bisexual who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively and once wrote “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...; and William S. Burroughs, who became addicted to morphine and heroin and co-wrote with Kerouac a novel entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, in addition to Naked Lunch, a book that “seemed to forecast — with eerie prescience — such later phenomena as AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic fatalities, and the crack pandemic,” as Wikipedia tells us.
The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).[1] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize what could be published in the United States. On the Road transformed Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady into a youth-culture hero. The members of the Beat Generation quickly developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.
This seems to be part of a recent trend in the Times of glorifying conservatives, possibly to make their lunacy seem more “mainstream” somehow, as exemplified by a recent Sunday Magazine profile of Glenn Beck, and a huge article on Ann Coulter in yesterday’s “Style” section. This leads me to believe that the newspaper as a whole is suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome.”
To which I have only this to say: conservatives will never like you, so report on them straight and with all of their hateful actions and rhetoric in tact. Otherwise, you’re doing us all a huge disservice.
1 comment:
No one should say the Pledge of Allegiance. It was the origin of the stiff-arm salute of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Francis Bellamy and Edward Bellamy were American National Socialists who influenced the NSDAP, its dogma, rituals and symbols. See the discoveries of the historian Dr. Rex Curry (author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets").
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