COLUMN: Land of the free, home of the naive

From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00 From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00Morning in and morning out, with their bold faces forward and their hands solemnly covering their hearts, hundreds of thousands of elementary schoolchildren recite grandiose words of submission -- or what is sometimes referred to as the Pledge of Allegiance.From Ron Lin's, "Intellectual Pornography," Fall '00Morning in and morning out, with their bold faces forward and their hands solemnly covering their hearts, hundreds of thousands of elementary schoolchildren recite grandiose words of submission -- or what is sometimes referred to as the Pledge of Allegiance. I was one of those children, and chances are, so were you. In fact, to my recollection, I recited this pledge every day of my more than 14 years in public school. That's more than 2,000 instances of coerced repetition and mindless prostration, words that passed straight through my larynx and off my tongue, but never quite through my head. It might as well have been gibberish; the Pledge of Allegiance loses its novelty and becomes somewhat of a chore, like brushing one's teeth. Innocently, we entrust our brains to the American public education system only to find that we've been brainwashed. Reciting the pledge of allegiance is an act of submission, a vow of loyalty that a citizen owes a government. At 6 years old, we begin vowing our eternal faithfulness to a flag, a supposed symbol of liberty and justice for all. It seems preposterous to ask young children to make such a laden pledge to a flag, an ideal, a government or such a flimsy piece of fabric. In fact, it seems putridly grotesque, reeking of the worst kind of socialistic indoctrination that I can fathom. Interestingly enough, a little research reveals the apparent origins of the pledge. It was a Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance to express the ideas of his cousin, Edward Bellamy. The latter Bellamy wrote socialist utopian novels about how the government could manage a peacetime economy much like the present military-industrial complex. Forget about the pledge's socialist undertones. After decades of supposed disillusionment with our flag -- even after Vietnam and Watergate -- we still subject children to this cruel, asinine ritual of socialization. After griping about the imposed uniformity of commercialism, parents barely blink when children are told to recite oaths of eternal allegiance to a higher power. While the American dream is worth striving for, submission to any authority that trumpets these values is counterproductive. I, for one, will always question the flag and the authority behind it. I don't pledge my allegiance to any flag, or any authority that I can neither smell nor touch. I never even pledged my allegiance to my parents, let alone la Americana. I'd rather arbitrarily pledge my allegiance to something more valid, like my libido. What's the point of loyalty to a piece of fabric, a cloth that wavers wantonly in the wind like a limp phallus? We're misleading children and contributing to the vast disillusionment of American youth. Even after discovering that blind loyalty to a nationalistic ideal is a dangerous and unfathomably meaningless idea, we force 12-year-olds to rant and rave the Pledge of Allegiance like a wild band of Bolshevik midgets. I, for one, firmly believe that America truly represents a beacon of freedom and equality unparalleled anywhere else in the world. With all due respect to the principles upon which this country was founded, I still don't believe it's appropriate or "American" to have children methodically recite a nationalistic oath. Let's face it: as American as we all are, we can't agree on anything. Why should we start with the Pledge of Allegiance? Let's get health care figured out first, maybe work out the kinks in campaign finance and perhaps help resolve the many conflicts and conflagrations around the world before we start telling our kids to pledge their allegiance to a shroud of red and blue nylon. Pledges are for the mindless. It is like committing to one particular brand of sneakers or bottled water. Before children have the gift of independent thought, I say we're better off having them pledge their souls to something more worthwhile than the impersonal stars and stripes. That is why God invented PokZmon.