Damn but it is hard not feel all elitist and superior while watching this Pledge of Allegiance business next door in St. Louis Park.
As a proud member of the Not Much of a Joiner sub-group of the human race, I pretty much always look at these herd-like explosions of group-think with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment. (Don’t get me started on get-a-life, “I bleed purple” football partisans.) Such spectacles seem to me to lack, mmm, what’s word? Self-respect? Dignity?
In fairness, “both sides” of the political spectrum are susceptible to the kind of mass psychosis we see playing out at St. Louis Park City Hall. The significant difference being that pissed-off liberals tend to flash mob over stuff like the latest cop killing of a black guy, some incident that reignites the fight over equal pay for women, or, you know, an American government running concentration camps for toddlers on the southern border.
Not so much over hoary, perfunctory symbols lacking any real impact on our quality of life.
But from moment word got out that “The Park’s” City Council was going to pass on The Pledge of Allegiance at its (wildly popular? Heavily attended?) meetings you could see not only where this was going but who was going to carry the message and who would join up for the Army That Saves the Pledge.
Maybe it’s the utter predictability of this stuff, the rote, robotic gesturing and blustering and performative histrionics that embarrasses me.
Now, I would agree with anyone who says The Park goosed this march of raging bovines by offering as a reason for dropping the pledge that it didn’t want to discomfit new immigrants or others who might not be so cool with pledging fealty to “one God”, a phase patched into The Pledge back in the Joe McCarthy-era to rile the Rooskies. I mean, they had to know that mentioning anything about “new people” was like waving a red flag in the (white) face every Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson zealot in a 100-mile radius.
Next time try something basic, like, “We need to speed these meetings up. Four hours is long enough to argue over pothole assessments.”
One other thought, after reading the Star Tribune’s lastest editorial about this episode, the one where the paper of record boldly declares, “What’s clear for elected public officials is that decisions about the pledge must be made carefully, in consultation with the communities they serve.”
Am I wrong or isn’t part of the job description over there the obligation to form and defend a definitive argument? Bravely admonishing public officials to “make decisions carefully” isn’t even the paper’s usual view from between the 40-yards lines. It’s more like threading a needle down the chalk-stripe at midfield. Sheesh.
The paper does get points though for printing a letter from Plymouth resident Harold Onstad, who said, “We have become fixated on going through the motions of standing for the anthem and listening to ‘God Bless America’ for the seventh-inning stretch, forgetting that it is much more important to fight for what is measurably best for the majority of our citizens with our words, our funds and our votes.
“Let us quit wasting time on our silly showpieces of patriotism and move on to the effort that is really needed to assure we will continue striving to be one nation with the best of futures for all.”
Clearly though we can assume Mr. Onstad is a godless, ‘Murica-last eltitist who probably doesn’t even own a pair of star-spangled socks.
I like your prose because it veers dangerously close to the misanthropic without actually ever going over the edge.
I’ll take that as a compliment, I think. The (more) serious answer is that while there is an established community that thinks all commentary on serious relevant issues has to read like … well, like a daily newspaper’s op-ed section, the world is much wider than that. Moreover our leader here at WWP has placed his portfolio in a blind trust and consented to regular flow of “inappropriate characterizations” until such time as we are shut down.
After the Gobitis decision by the Supreme Court upheld the compulsory school recitation on the flag pledge, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were targets of violence in scores–perhaps hundreds–of incidents across the nation. The Court reversed itself just a few years later, in the 1943 Barnette decision, which I read about in our civics class textbook in 11th grade. The fact that the school administration (in 1967) insisted on compulsory participation anyhow, was very educational. Since then, I’ve compiled an extensive file on the flag pledge controversies. The pledge fanatics fetishize the flag at the expense of the notion of “liberty for all”, and in the process of doing so, manage to repudiate the basic principles of “the republic for which it stands.”
My guess is we both seriously doout the spangled flag fetishists at St. Louis Park’s City Hall have ever bothered to consider what freedom and right and hope every line of the pledge is meant to support. They’re a herd reacting on cue from a couple of for-profit hucksters. As I say, it’s embarrassing even if you regard them as fools.