Flag day on Sunday may be too much…

Flag Day, like Independence Day and Constitution Day, has become, for me, anyway, a predicament.

I want very much to enjoy the feelings of pride and mystic oneness with untarnished heroes of yesteryear.  I’d like to sing our anthem with joy.  I’d be delighted if I could feel that nationalism was about righteous unity and a shared experience of liberty and justice for all with my fellow citizens.  I wish I could hoist a flag and feel I’m expressing equality under constitutional rule of law, with truth, transparency, peace and prosperity now and forevermore.

But, dang it…

The flag is a symbol that, to me, and very sadly, has become an emblem of corruption and self-deception.  Our Pledge to obey it (written by an apostate socialist, BTW) was considered idolatry by Christians a hundred years ago.  Adding “under God” to it in 1953 changed what, exactly?

Do we stand in church with our hands on our hearts and solemnly pledge to obey God?  I’ve not seen that happen.

Besides, how CAN we obey a flag?  Are there any rules?  Who decides what the flag is telling us what to do, and how far we’re to go in obedience?

Do we mean what we’re actually saying?

Our Anthem is a similar self-deception.  Do we still believe we’re “the land of the free and the home of the brave” when… aren’t we struggling against liberties lost to fear of everything from impoverished Arabs, to marijuana and viruses?

Our nation is a corporate abstraction not so different from other corporate identities, tribes, corporations, clubs or clans.  We should be acutely aware that the difference between crime rings and nations is often more matter of scale than culture or law.  When Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel beat the Mexican government in a straight-up military engagement, wasn’t there at least a little confusion about who’s really running the country?

Governing is always by force.  But very, very rarely, a government rules by some authority higher than just brute force.  The USA’s national government was created, authorized and very literally delimited by constitutions, state and federal…that, unfortunately today, nobody reads, and most dismiss as outdated.

Yet it’s to constitutions that soldiers, police, politicians and new citizens are to pledge their support and defense against all enemies both foreign…and domestic.

And it’s to those constitutions that we all turn at some point when we want at least the parts we like (maybe a few of the Bill of Rights) when we feel we need defense from…our own government.

Yes, our government.  You know…the people with the flags on their uniforms, “Under God” on their money, and big bald eagles topping flagpoles guarded by soldiers.

You know…the people a lot of us are protesting against today for their injustice, lawlessness, corruption and brutality.

I get that flags are powerful.  Anthems are powerful.  Slogans are powerful.

But carried through generations, they become a religion unto themselves.  Tribal/corporate membership identity is powerful right down to our DNA.  We crave the feeling of belonging to a pack…often most when opposed to some other clique, clan, club or country.  Historically, and today, that tribal fervor becomes violent at the whisper of a rumor.

We actually tend to WANT us versus them, with all the emotions, symbology and triumphant, martyr-making images that go with that scenario.

My dad was a decorated WWII pilot and POW.  He weighed just over 90lbs when freed, and I believe all of his kids were deeply affected by his unspoken trauma.  The triangle of flag presented after his death means a lot to me.  But that particular flag is about my dad and not about our imperiled nation.

A lot of people see the flying flag more like a disgraced celebrity than a proud aspiration.  Others have good reason to see it as a symbol of class struggle and injustice.  Those who see it as a physical embodiment of virtue are history-whitewashing romantics…which must be pleasant – but is ultimately a destructive self-delusion.

But it may also be a dangerous red-herring bait-and-switch.  “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” *

I have a suggestion.

I believe we should drop the abstract, arbitrary symbols associated with our ungoverned, corrupt and dangerous government, and make this really, really simple.

We should make sure that what we espouse and pledge to support is written in black and white constitutions that we’ve read and actually do support, and not to feelings inferred from symbols no longer related to those words.

We need to be, in my opinion, razor-sharp in focus, and completely serious in our dedication to truth, justice, and …something better than what is now the American Way:

I propose we pledge our allegiance not to a bit of cloth made in China, but to constitutional rule of law under our existing state and federal constitutions as written and amended, full stop.

 

 

*Some say Sinclair Lewis said or wrote this.  But this has been pretty-well debunked.  Others ironically claim that Huey Long said it.  But that’s even less-likely.
But it doesn’t much matter who said it, because it’s turning out to be embarrassingly, damnably correct.

You say you want a Revolution?

It’s a little disturbing that one of the most common web searches bringing people to this blog is, “Give me hope, please.”  But what really worries me is how many people are typing, “violence” and “revolution,” to end up here.

My fellow Americans, what are you thinking of? 

What is violence going to accomplish that your votes did not?  You got what you voted for.  You want something else?

What?!?

I have nothing to say to “centrists.”  These human dandelion seeds have no senses, apparently; and just float the prevailing wind.  I wish I did have words that’d shake them down.  But I’ve never had any luck with people who think it’s reasonable to split the difference between Hitler and Stalin. 

And true socialist/authoritarians are twisted, ruthless monsters who know that their violence and oppression is self-serving to the elite group to which they feel they belong.  They probably know what I’d like to say to them, but they’d happily have it tortured out of me anyway.

However, most people of the so-called “left” are not those socialists, and they’re not hopelessly foolish.  They don’t understand that politics/government is violence, so they simply don’t know that they are invoking, promoting and unleashing violence upon their fellows. 

The multiply-pierced, tattooed but still smiling Obama fan you see at Whole Foods really does want a peaceful society; he just hasn’t thought any more deeply about politics and market economics than he thought about that ring in his nose.  He doesn’t know that his free-love-and-world-peace dreams drag us all into Stalinist nightmares.  But so far, I’ve found it rewarding to talk to these people. 

Sadly, most of the so-called “right” are much more difficult to work with.  Perhaps they’re worse in hypocrisy and idolatry, and thus inoculated and steeled against reason.  So while many righties seem to pray to God, they put their hands on their hearts and promise to obey a symbol  instead (really; think about that). 

While the word “constitution” invokes wonderful, abstract imagery to them (Norman Rockwell paintings, Bob Hope, and of course, flags), they have no idea what the constitution is for, let alone what it really says.  Just like the lefties, they advocate bigger, costlier, more intrusive government – but they deny it!  They’re just as opposed to individual liberty – but they deny it!   They tear up the constitutions and stomp on them  – but they deny it!  

Frankly, I’d rather hang out at Whole Foods than listen to self-righteous ignorami spouting off about the “coming revolution,” or even secession.  Far-Righties are maybe not as bad as centrists, but their rising mood of undirected, goal-free violence is certainly not helpful. 

What do they suppose a revolution is going to do if they don’t even VOTE for what they say they want?  And what would secession accomplish if it creates only a self-deluded clone of our current mess?

After years of trying to find ten Republicans who know what it is that they want, I’m hard pressed to see any difference between the “right” and the “left” other than the aforementioned tattoos, piercings…and the type and degree of hypocrisy. 

Well, actually, I like Whole Foods.  The one near my work in Houston has a great selection of Belgian beers.  The GOP has nothing like it.

Of course, now that they’ve given up their catbird seat, and there’s no expectation of them actually doing anything substantial, the GOP talks (almost) like Ron Paul. 

But when they held the reins of power, they did only evil, and then chose John McCain to lead them into more of the same. 

They had a chance – a very good, record-breaking, youth-energizing chance – to set things right according to the words they speak from their mouths.  But their voting arms, inexcusably, chose otherwise.

And now they complain?  Inexcuseable.  Shameful. 

Even so, I think we’re seeing that even Republicans can come to their senses in sufficient numbers to shake the centrism tree.  The so-called “Tea Parties” may exemplify this.

We all know we have enemies and problems.  But the question in battle is never so much what to attack, as what to defend.

What do you want?  Please don’t say you want “American Exceptionalism” unless you can explain to even yourself what that really means.  

How do you want to live?  Please don’t tell me “with American Values.”  We’ve all seen plenty of American Values, and I think that’s why we’re all so hopeless, disgusted, and crying for revolution.

On these pages I’ve said that I want my rules written down, and that’s true.  I don’t think we can live in peace without some hard and fast rules.

Good fences make good neighbors.

But if I were to paint my picture of The Good Life, here’s what it’d look like:

1. Citizens can do whatever they want to do as long as they don’t harm anybody else, or take what’s not theirs.
2. We’d have no more government than necessary to maintain #1.
3. We write this down in plain speech and call it law.
4. We invite others around the world to emulate our success, but otherwise leave them the heck alone.

So caveat emptor would replace the FDA, FTC, FDIC, FCC and a zillion other F’agencies.  Common sense, competition, voluntary associations, charity and free market options galore replace union/corporate monstrosities, Medicare, Social Security, lobbyists, regulations, litigation and price controls.  And because of the preceding, you get to keep what you earn, buy what you like (smoke it if you’re fool enough – and as long as you don’t blow it in my face), and live however and with whomever you want…as long as you leave others, and their stuff, alone.

That’s all.

Is that really so bad?  Could you live with that?

Because you know that the alternative plan is not working, right?

Finally, my last blog. This time I mean it.

Well, I have to hand it to them; they’re clever.  Our opponents know the power of words, and they wield that power ruthlessly.

They rename the cruel, ancient ideology of Nero “progressive,” so we’d seem regressive to oppose it.  They call the entrenchment of concentrated power, privilege, theft and violence “liberal,” when …wait a minute; weren’t the Founding Fathers the liberals of their time? 

Like the serpent to Eve our politicians call left right, and right wrong so that we’re so darned confused we think they must be brilliant.

Well, now Obama has been taking the phrase “Rule of Law” in vain.  A lot.  Obama’s Polo ponies in the mainstream media have gotten themselves all in a lather about this new Rule Of Law direction in justice, equanimity and, of course, freedom. 

“Freedom” was George Bush’s most common Golden Calf incantation:

We pay taxes for freedom.  We spend even more than we tax, for freedom.  We send our children to foreign wars for freedom.  We give up liberties …for freedom.

Sheesh. 

Freedom has become almost as bad as “security” as a hex-word of oppressors.  And now they pervert my “Rule Of Law” too?  It’s too much to bear.

But even the most nefarious word-abusing rulers aren’t our problem.  We liberty-loving patriots are our problem.  We need no others. 

Since my last blog, I’ve heard a resounding “Amen, we’re with you, brother” from several people, only to be told, almost without so much as a comma or parentheses, “but first we ought to do something about this flu scare (…or the supply of ammunition …or wild government spending…or this or that or that or this)”  Or they’d say “Great; let’s start a new political party! (or chat group, or 501c3, or…)”

I know I’ve asked for a paradigm shift of the greatest magnitude.  Consciously or not, we’ve come to idolize the abstraction we call “government.”   We’ve been trained to think of it as a thing, and that’s a hard paradigm to shift.

Government is, in fact, us.  It’s not anybody, or anything else. 

What we’re talking about, no matter how you slice it, is the dynamic of our choices and our consequences.  Yes, we delegate and infuse the political abstraction with our most violent, greedy and horrible choices.  Like an inner demon we want this deadly abstraction to make the choices that we, as individuals, find too abhorrent for us to make alone.

All this violence and terror is ours.  We can say “enough,” and push away from the feeding trough of public money and serf labor.  We can put a leash on the dogs of war and live the way we would, for ourselves, choose to live.

It’s our choice.

But from all but a tiny few I hear that “it’s out of our hands,” or “only a revolution will save us now.”  I hear that we must ignore the root of the problem and nibble at the branches since “we must be pragmatic.  That’s the just the way it is.”

That is self-destructive nonsense.  That is the reality and pragmatism of failure and death.  As a truly progressive liberal (in the most fundamentalist and radical sense), I’m disgusted that we’re pulling ourselves into the slaughterhouse by our own nose-rings.

Anyway, I’ve said my bit about what, I think, we should do.  I’ve said it plenty.  It’s all in the pages that precede this one. 

And I don’t want people to call or email me calling me “negative” or “defeatist” again.  I’m not going to blog anymore, but I’m not giving up.  I’m just giving up on what I can plainly see isn’t working.

To the small band of brothers who’ve replied to my earlier calls, I’ll be in touch shortly.  We have things to do.

There’s only one thing that, I think, needs to be said here:

 

Jeremiah 18

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.”

So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel.  But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

Then the word of the LORD came to me.  He said, “Can I not do with you, house of Israel, as this potter does?” declares the LORD.

“Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel.  

…

“Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the LORD says: Look!  I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’

But they will reply, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; we will all follow the stubbornness of our evil hearts.’ ”

 

Get ready.  I don’t know how much time the USA has left, but short of a miracle, it’s not long.  Don’t be fooled by the gambling houses we call the stock market, or by the shamen some call “experts;” this ain’t about “the economy.”  We’ve not seen the real economic conflagration yet, and there are things faaar worse than hyperinflation and just plain broke.

Love your family, cherish your time, and get down on your knees in prayer.  Collectively, we have made our choices, and now it’s coming time for the consequences.

An Iconoclastic Hoosier’s Flag Day Rumination

I wrote this in 2006.  Things have only worsened since then:

The USA flag is a powerful symbol. It’s in outer space, on T-shirts and bumper stickers. Coffins have been draped with it.  It even flies in other nations.  It’s been burned in protest and praised in song.

When we pledge our allegiance to it, we intend to (or at least are expected to) formally revere what that symbol represents to us, and what makes this nation special to us.

You can understand why we’ve had a national Flag Day, officially declared by the US Congress, since 1945.  The symbol is powerful to those who love the USA; and to even those who detest what this nation is all about.

It’s that Pledge of Allegiance I want to talk about…

A few generations ago some promoted the idea that the author was a high school student named Frank E. Bellamy, born in Madison, Indiana. His pledge won a contest, got published and famous, while Frank became an injured war vet, a poor artist, and died young.

But in truth, a fired New York minister named Francis Bellamy, unrelated to Frank, but employed at The Youth’s Companion that published the pledge in 1892, claimed credit for it, and energetically promoted it.  An investigation in 1939 concluded that Francis really was the author.

This was not a happy conclusion for many at the time, because Francis Bellamy was, unlike the other Bellamy, a zealous global socialist who angrily opposed replacing his words “to my flag” with, “to the flag of the United States of America.” This apostate Bellamy would surely have opposed the addition of “under God” in 1953, had he still been alive.  He’d meant the promise of obedience to be universally applicable to all countries, all people, and free of any religion…except faith in government, of course.

The pledge’s origin matters.  I believe it explains why we have an oath to a symbol, and not to the constitution.

Until 1892, the only nationalistic oaths in America were oaths sworn by politicians and soldiers to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. Our nation’s founders knew what had happened to the Jews and early Christians who refused to make oaths to idols, or to “Lord Caesar.” They wanted no citizen oaths to a person or abstraction like those demanded by feudal lords, churches, or the King of England.

After all, no man is above the law, right?
That’s why the Oath of United States Citizenship clearly replaces oaths to people or abstractions with a dedication to the written contract that binds us as a nation:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

What a great oath. A person could read the constitution and understand exactly, literally, what this oath entails because, despite what politicians tell us about that leash on their power, the constitution is very clear.

But how does one obey a flag?  Who gets to tell us what the flag commands?  To what end and degree must we obey it?  Are there any rules at all that apply?

It certainly seems contrary to the spirit of 1776.  And for any Christian or Muslim, can an oath of allegiance to a symbol be anything other than forbidden idolatry?  Why pledge to what was officially, until 1923, only a military banner?

Let’s go back 67 years before that first Pledge.

Modern Socialism, including the coining of the word “socialism,” started a generation before Marx and Engels with the Owenites in New Harmony, Indiana.  Robert Owen’s children later became very influential in Indiana government.  A little later, Terre Haute, Indiana’s Eugene Debs very successfully promoted this socialism through the early 1900s.

Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, et al., and of course Hitler (yes, he was a socialist – that’s why the original salute to the flag was replace by the hand over the heart) slightly tarnished the gleam on this Brave New World Order, but our government is now far more authoritarian than founding-fathers libertarian.  Even after repeated, inevitable failures of true socialism, it seems that Chinese Communist Party-style socialism (maybe even under the control of the CCP?) is the direction we’re headed.  We are, in other words, more 1984 than 1776.

Let’s be clear on this.  Socialism is the ideology responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the last century, and it’s not done yet.  Consider what you know of the words and symbols of socialism, and consider whether it bothers you that it was ardent supporters of this ideology that published and promoted our Pledge of Allegiance.

We should think hard about what we’re promising; and to whom. And the politicians we choose should keep their oaths of office.  And maybe we should even think about principled disobedience, instead of drilling allegiance to a flag into our kids?

As Erich Fromm wrote in, On Disobedience and Other Essays, “At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind, and the end of civilization.”

Is it too much to ask that our words mean what they say, and that our actions fit our promises?

How about we dust off that old U.S.Constitution?

I could face the flag and pledge allegiance to that.