Word: pledgees
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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IT is unfortunate and unsettling to hear the vice president of the United States taunting his opponent for vetoing a bill which would require public school teachers to lead their students in the pledge. It is almost comical to see these two candidates falling all over themselves in an effort...
But what lies behind the pledge flap is something quite important, something which cannot simply be covered over and tucked away as a trivial low point in Campaign '88.
THIS context is vital to understanding the current pledge flap. George Bush--or more likely his advisor, Roger Ailes--is not simply capitalizing on a cheap means of portraying Dukakis as a flaming liberal. He is tugging on the strings of xenophobia which run from coast to coast.
BY raising the specter of the pledge, Bush is not so much demanding that Dukakis prove his loyalty to the flag as he is requiring that Dukakis hide his immigrant roots.
The novelist Philip Roth, who is one of the great chroniclers of what happened to many of those immigrants, observed recently that, by raising the issue of the pledge, Bush "manages to insinuate that there is something that remains unnaturalized in a man called Dukakis, an ineradicable alienness" which makes...