The Many Layers of Brain-Dead Conservatives' Hell

[marmar]

from OpenLeft:



Scared Of Liberals? Well, The Pledge of Allegiance Was Written By A SOCIALIST!
by: Paul Rosenberg
Sat Jun 14, 2008 at 15:51


The Many Layers of Brain-Dead Conservatives' Hell

"What? I can't have layers?"
--Cordellia Chase, "Band Candy," Buffy, The Vampire Slayer Season 3, Episode 6.

Layer 0: What You Don't See Is What You Get

In a mid-week quick hit, Chris noted that David Boren has refused to endorse Barack Obama, saying:

Dan Boren, in Oklahoma's 2nd district, thinks that Obama is too liberal to be President. Love those Bush Dogs.

Actually, it was much stoopider than that. Boren plans to vote for Obama, and thinks it's historic and all. But he won't endorse him, because, well, his reasoning is virtually incoherent, which is sort of the point. But I'll get into that in a later installment. Right now two things.

(1) I said "installment." I'm doing something different this weekend. I'm following some threads through some weirdly inter-connected topics that I stumbled through this week, and the AP story about Boren is where it all began. The banality of evil and all that--or really, more like the evil of banality. I hope you'll want to ramble through these places with me. I'm hoping they can spark some interesting discussions. It's about hegemony, the culture wars, Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, how authoritarianism makes you stupid, various thoughts about the nature and functions of contradictions--in literature, religion and conservative political philosophy, among other things--the fact that neither Obama nor Kerry were the most liberal senator in the history of the universe, no matter what the National Journal said, one of the most laughable mid-level wannabe writers in the conservative stable, you know, stuff.

(2) But I start with layer 0. The layer that says I really didn't have to deal with any of the other layers. The layer that says, Liberal? You have a problem with LIBERAL? You say the Pledge of Allegiance like it's some sort of fascist zombie incantation, and you don't even realize it was written by a utopian Christian socialist!

You see, after Level 0, the rest is gravy.

.......

The Socialist Pledge of Allegiance

In a 2002 article in The Nation magazine, "Patriotism's Secret History,"
Peter Dreier and Dick Flats gave the basic outline of the story behind the Pledge of Allegiance:

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth's Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine hired Bellamy--whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward--to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program's flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line "One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all" to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

Bellamy's view that unbridled capitalism, materialism and individualism betrayed America's promise was widely shared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many American radicals and progressive reformers proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values--economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world's oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia and social injustice only fueled progressives' allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

There's more to the story, however. For example, the Wikipedia entry for the Pledge states:

The pledge was supposed to be quick and to the point. Bellamy designed it to be stated in 15 seconds. He had initially also considered using the words equality and fraternity but decided they were too controversial since many people opposed equal rights for women and blacks.

.....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=FA0EB098A7AC14D434E8B12A6CB12AE5?diaryId=6358