"Religious controversy is better than none" -- Augustus McCrae, "Lonesome Dove"
To paraphase something John Candy once said in the movies, the yahoos are on pins and needles regarding this Pledge business.
Let's review for a minute the state of the nation.
We are at war with religious fanatics who perpetrated nine months ago the great mass slaughter of Americans in our history. Their motiviation was as simple as pie and old as the hills: religion, specifically theirs. Yet in the world of the dull reality, we, the infidel, (sounds like a book Nabakov would've written) stomp their medieval keisters with our free markets, free women, free speech, and free pizza delivery. So the Islamists decide to attack us, kill us. The strategists among them fear most our economy (free minds being something they can't envision and therefore cannot even fear).
And they're right; it is our best weapon but, unfortunately, one we are undercutting through our own spasms of panic. The backbone of that economy, the stock market, has lost trillions of dollars in net worth over the past few years, and has recently seen a harsh (and I believe unwarranted, but then I didn't go to Wharton) panic selling by investors who, in so doing, are playing right into Bin Laden's hands. We are into the third year of the most wrenching bear market in four generations, and anyone who doesn't think that this kind of market collapse will have serious repercussions in our overall economic well being (and to the war effort) is deluding themselves. The stock market tanking is not just a bunch of callow telco whiz kids getting their greed and ambition handed to them, it's people's retirement accounts, faith in markets and investing, and all that. And as soon as I'm tempted to think that it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice for Americans to hold onto their stocks and not sell them, along comes World Con to take up residence next to End Con as a house of financial ill repute, and all of the other properties on the Street take another plunge in value.
So here we have two issues, war and the economy, that conservatives have always claimed to define themselves on. They love these issues, or so they claim. And I'm with 'em on both; I believe in prosecuting the war (in fact, a hell of a lot more than we are doing, and I often find myself agreeing with, of all people, the National Review here) and I believe that the health of the stock market is one of the most important things to our country, vital to our economy, and therefore vital to our success in the war against Islamists.
But what are conservatives doing? Declaring war on Michael Newdow and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who found on Wednesday (in case you've been on, say, a religious retreat) that the phrase "under God" is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the government.
Oh, the fur flies. Our nation is in the hands of Beelzebub, thunder the pulpits. Our President, who can no longer hide his sundry and endless ineptitudes behind the patriotic response to September, mustered more vitrol over the Ninth Circuit than he did over Worldcom. Paleoconservatives are gidder than they've been since Lewinsky, itching to fire up the culture war and not at all bothered by the unseemliness of so doing when we've got a real one going on. Their more established neocon bretheren are also panting with anticipatory glee, as a break from turning the tinhorn two-bit despot Saddam into HItler II. Stentorian in their rhetoric and apocolyptic in their warnings of what will happen if we don't invade Iraq, they're finding the that the charade of taking out Saddam has less and less resonance and versimilitude, not to mention urgency, especially as the revelations about the real garbage over there, the ghastly House of Saud, keep piling up. This Pledge issue is a ... er, godsend to 'em.
Let's blow one canard out of the water right now; the phrase "under God" has no business in a pledge of allegiance to our nation, that is if you take the Constitution not only seriously, but literally. The Constitution -- yeah, yeah, the Declaration of Independence says "our Creator" but that's not a legal document, guys, and so therefore irrelevant, not to mention Jefferson was a Deist who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ -- says that Congress will make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's a quote and, like a lot of the Constitution, pretty easy to understand. But in 1954, the Congress passed a law establishing "under God" as a part of the Pledge, and since schoolkids are made to recite (at least I was) the Pledge verbatim, then this act of Congress has the actual intent of establishing a religion. When you start about God, you are axiomatically talking about religion. A religion without a god is called philosophy. It's not an accident the Congress didn't amend the Pledge as "one nation, under John Locke." Of course, back in the McCarthy era, John Locke was probably considered a commie.
Ah, yeah, the commies. It almost always boils down to them, at least over the past half-century or so. In 1954, to distance ourselves from them thar pernicioius reds as much as possible, the Congress grafted "under God" to a perfectly servicable Pledge that itself has its origins in a socialist tract around the turn of (last) century. Everything old is new again, the saying goes, and this 1954 bit of Congressional buncombe was in the same tradition of brainless demagogery that we saw on display with such fecundity Wednesday when the Senate rushed to bash the Ninth Circuit's ruling. Mucking up the Pledge with this "under God" business was intended, back in '54, tthat most conformist of times, to indoctrinate all the little ones out there with the only possible antidote to communism: God. Funny how it was business, its tools (such as fax machines and video tapes) and rewards (private property, working for yourself) that brought the commies down. God didn't have much to do with it; Bill Gates and Vaclav Havel, take a bow. If we wanted to put the names of Locke, or Havel or, hell, even Bill Gates into the Pledge, at least we'd be keeping to history and to the facts.
This is what is so unsettling. The commies were godless, and so to prove that we weren't commies, it was all-God, all the time. All righty. Now, however, our enemies martyr themselves, define themselves, as being more godly than we are.
They wants to kill as many of us, whether we believe that Jesus is our personal savior, that Moses came down with the Tablets, or that the moon is made of Lindburger cheese, as possible.
So it's clear that the phrase "under God" was put in the Pledge to establish a religion, in this case the only religion that was acknowledged in the US in 1954, which was monotheistic Christianity. To hold otherwise is a violation of common sense, and any attempt to elide it is sophistry. So the issue is whether government should be in the business of establishing religion, which would trash the First Amendment and, basically, turn us into the kind of society al Qaeda could probably vacation in without looking to take flying lessons.
That's playing dirty, you say? Here are a few more facts, then, to muddy the sandbox. The "Allah" Atta mentioned 8,000 times in his goodbye letter is another name for "God." We've learned over the past six months that for the past sixty years, priests have been doing little boys on a fairly regular basis, all over the country. So we've got the two most blatant examples of the two most heinous crimes imaginable -- mass murder of innocents, and the violation of children. Practiced ... well, not by those like Michael Newdow or Madeline Murray O'Haire. And then there's Bernie Ebberts, former Worldcom CEO's who presided over five quarters of his auditors listing 3.8 billion dollars' worth of expenses as investments; guess what he is? Born again.
Yeah, that's playing dirty, and so what. This kind of crap was irritating before. Now it's dangerous. What's really playing dirty is the hundreds of people, good Christians all, no doubt, who have phoned in death threats to Michael Newdow. What's playing dirty -- and, much more importantly, acting irresponsibly -- is the Congress of the United States, with what you could call a fairly large agenda, rushing off and wasting time on Wednesday to pass a resolution 99-0 (kudos to the lone Senator who didn't bother to waste time on such idiocy) slamming the decision.
Some are saying that "under God" is more or less innocuous, and there's a lot of banter justifying it using the newly minted judicial standard of "nondemonationally monotheistic," whatever that means. I said earlier that when you talk about "God" you're talking about religion, but the inverse is not necessarily true. When you mention "religion" in vast areas of the world, you're not talking about the Yahweh. Most religions in this world are not monotheistic, and you don't have to be a brain-dead worshiper (pun intended, the far left and the far right coalese in the realm of the silly) of poliltical correctness to recognize that someone is really showing their parochialism on matters of religion when they toss around the phrase "nondenominationally monotheistic." Tell it to followers of the Buddha statues of whom, I'd remind the reader, were blown up by the full-court press of monotheism that is the Taliban, thereby bringing their unique worldview to the attention of the most of the world for the first time.
What's really important here is what the Circuit Court didn't say; it didn't say that someone could not recite the Pledge of Allegiance with "under God" in it wherever he wants to say it. There' s no law at all against someone reciting the Pledge, or for that matter the singing the Song of Solomon or shouting out the Ten Commandments or preaching the Book of Revelations. This ruling didn't proscribe the free exercise of religion one iota. But to these people, the free exercise of their religion means imposing their dross on the rest of us, by claiming the moral high ground. It's a zero-sum with these bastards, and I'm fed up with them.
To paraphase something John Candy once said in the movies, the yahoos are on pins and needles regarding this Pledge business.
Let's review for a minute the state of the nation.
We are at war with religious fanatics who perpetrated nine months ago the great mass slaughter of Americans in our history. Their motiviation was as simple as pie and old as the hills: religion, specifically theirs. Yet in the world of the dull reality, we, the infidel, (sounds like a book Nabakov would've written) stomp their medieval keisters with our free markets, free women, free speech, and free pizza delivery. So the Islamists decide to attack us, kill us. The strategists among them fear most our economy (free minds being something they can't envision and therefore cannot even fear).
And they're right; it is our best weapon but, unfortunately, one we are undercutting through our own spasms of panic. The backbone of that economy, the stock market, has lost trillions of dollars in net worth over the past few years, and has recently seen a harsh (and I believe unwarranted, but then I didn't go to Wharton) panic selling by investors who, in so doing, are playing right into Bin Laden's hands. We are into the third year of the most wrenching bear market in four generations, and anyone who doesn't think that this kind of market collapse will have serious repercussions in our overall economic well being (and to the war effort) is deluding themselves. The stock market tanking is not just a bunch of callow telco whiz kids getting their greed and ambition handed to them, it's people's retirement accounts, faith in markets and investing, and all that. And as soon as I'm tempted to think that it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice for Americans to hold onto their stocks and not sell them, along comes World Con to take up residence next to End Con as a house of financial ill repute, and all of the other properties on the Street take another plunge in value.
So here we have two issues, war and the economy, that conservatives have always claimed to define themselves on. They love these issues, or so they claim. And I'm with 'em on both; I believe in prosecuting the war (in fact, a hell of a lot more than we are doing, and I often find myself agreeing with, of all people, the National Review here) and I believe that the health of the stock market is one of the most important things to our country, vital to our economy, and therefore vital to our success in the war against Islamists.
But what are conservatives doing? Declaring war on Michael Newdow and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who found on Wednesday (in case you've been on, say, a religious retreat) that the phrase "under God" is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the government.
Oh, the fur flies. Our nation is in the hands of Beelzebub, thunder the pulpits. Our President, who can no longer hide his sundry and endless ineptitudes behind the patriotic response to September, mustered more vitrol over the Ninth Circuit than he did over Worldcom. Paleoconservatives are gidder than they've been since Lewinsky, itching to fire up the culture war and not at all bothered by the unseemliness of so doing when we've got a real one going on. Their more established neocon bretheren are also panting with anticipatory glee, as a break from turning the tinhorn two-bit despot Saddam into HItler II. Stentorian in their rhetoric and apocolyptic in their warnings of what will happen if we don't invade Iraq, they're finding the that the charade of taking out Saddam has less and less resonance and versimilitude, not to mention urgency, especially as the revelations about the real garbage over there, the ghastly House of Saud, keep piling up. This Pledge issue is a ... er, godsend to 'em.
Let's blow one canard out of the water right now; the phrase "under God" has no business in a pledge of allegiance to our nation, that is if you take the Constitution not only seriously, but literally. The Constitution -- yeah, yeah, the Declaration of Independence says "our Creator" but that's not a legal document, guys, and so therefore irrelevant, not to mention Jefferson was a Deist who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ -- says that Congress will make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's a quote and, like a lot of the Constitution, pretty easy to understand. But in 1954, the Congress passed a law establishing "under God" as a part of the Pledge, and since schoolkids are made to recite (at least I was) the Pledge verbatim, then this act of Congress has the actual intent of establishing a religion. When you start about God, you are axiomatically talking about religion. A religion without a god is called philosophy. It's not an accident the Congress didn't amend the Pledge as "one nation, under John Locke." Of course, back in the McCarthy era, John Locke was probably considered a commie.
Ah, yeah, the commies. It almost always boils down to them, at least over the past half-century or so. In 1954, to distance ourselves from them thar pernicioius reds as much as possible, the Congress grafted "under God" to a perfectly servicable Pledge that itself has its origins in a socialist tract around the turn of (last) century. Everything old is new again, the saying goes, and this 1954 bit of Congressional buncombe was in the same tradition of brainless demagogery that we saw on display with such fecundity Wednesday when the Senate rushed to bash the Ninth Circuit's ruling. Mucking up the Pledge with this "under God" business was intended, back in '54, tthat most conformist of times, to indoctrinate all the little ones out there with the only possible antidote to communism: God. Funny how it was business, its tools (such as fax machines and video tapes) and rewards (private property, working for yourself) that brought the commies down. God didn't have much to do with it; Bill Gates and Vaclav Havel, take a bow. If we wanted to put the names of Locke, or Havel or, hell, even Bill Gates into the Pledge, at least we'd be keeping to history and to the facts.
This is what is so unsettling. The commies were godless, and so to prove that we weren't commies, it was all-God, all the time. All righty. Now, however, our enemies martyr themselves, define themselves, as being more godly than we are.
They wants to kill as many of us, whether we believe that Jesus is our personal savior, that Moses came down with the Tablets, or that the moon is made of Lindburger cheese, as possible.
So it's clear that the phrase "under God" was put in the Pledge to establish a religion, in this case the only religion that was acknowledged in the US in 1954, which was monotheistic Christianity. To hold otherwise is a violation of common sense, and any attempt to elide it is sophistry. So the issue is whether government should be in the business of establishing religion, which would trash the First Amendment and, basically, turn us into the kind of society al Qaeda could probably vacation in without looking to take flying lessons.
That's playing dirty, you say? Here are a few more facts, then, to muddy the sandbox. The "Allah" Atta mentioned 8,000 times in his goodbye letter is another name for "God." We've learned over the past six months that for the past sixty years, priests have been doing little boys on a fairly regular basis, all over the country. So we've got the two most blatant examples of the two most heinous crimes imaginable -- mass murder of innocents, and the violation of children. Practiced ... well, not by those like Michael Newdow or Madeline Murray O'Haire. And then there's Bernie Ebberts, former Worldcom CEO's who presided over five quarters of his auditors listing 3.8 billion dollars' worth of expenses as investments; guess what he is? Born again.
Yeah, that's playing dirty, and so what. This kind of crap was irritating before. Now it's dangerous. What's really playing dirty is the hundreds of people, good Christians all, no doubt, who have phoned in death threats to Michael Newdow. What's playing dirty -- and, much more importantly, acting irresponsibly -- is the Congress of the United States, with what you could call a fairly large agenda, rushing off and wasting time on Wednesday to pass a resolution 99-0 (kudos to the lone Senator who didn't bother to waste time on such idiocy) slamming the decision.
Some are saying that "under God" is more or less innocuous, and there's a lot of banter justifying it using the newly minted judicial standard of "nondemonationally monotheistic," whatever that means. I said earlier that when you talk about "God" you're talking about religion, but the inverse is not necessarily true. When you mention "religion" in vast areas of the world, you're not talking about the Yahweh. Most religions in this world are not monotheistic, and you don't have to be a brain-dead worshiper (pun intended, the far left and the far right coalese in the realm of the silly) of poliltical correctness to recognize that someone is really showing their parochialism on matters of religion when they toss around the phrase "nondenominationally monotheistic." Tell it to followers of the Buddha statues of whom, I'd remind the reader, were blown up by the full-court press of monotheism that is the Taliban, thereby bringing their unique worldview to the attention of the most of the world for the first time.
What's really important here is what the Circuit Court didn't say; it didn't say that someone could not recite the Pledge of Allegiance with "under God" in it wherever he wants to say it. There' s no law at all against someone reciting the Pledge, or for that matter the singing the Song of Solomon or shouting out the Ten Commandments or preaching the Book of Revelations. This ruling didn't proscribe the free exercise of religion one iota. But to these people, the free exercise of their religion means imposing their dross on the rest of us, by claiming the moral high ground. It's a zero-sum with these bastards, and I'm fed up with them.
posted by citizen dilettante at
4:11 PM
