Word: pledgees
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I learned the Pledge of Allegiance before the words under God were inserted into it. We did not know anything was missing. Even without God, it was a Norman Rockwell scene: little white boys and girls with their hands over their hearts, facing a flag in the corner of a...
In 1954, around the time of the Supreme Court's decision outlawing school segregation, and around the time that Vice President Richard Nixon recommended the use of nuclear weapons to relieve the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu in what was then Indochina, Congress and President Eisenhower promulgated a bill...
After 1954, whenever I heard the pledge recited (in the ritual stream-of-consciousness way that one says, "ThirtydayshathSeptemberAprilJune-andNovembe ralltheresthavethirtyone"), it sounded somehow tampered with and wrong. The original version had been grooved into my brain. I mistrusted the addition of under God first of all on unconscious aesthetic...
The pledge became one of those gestures of an innocent and anodyne "ceremonial deism," like "In God We Trust." It's no big deal - not an organized religious agenda or otherwise a threat to the Constitution but rather a vague reassurance of collective goodwill. If you challenge the pledge, however...
But for now there are simpler things to attend to. Night is falling, and Newdow has to call his daughter. "Hey, sugar, it?s Daddy," he whispers into the phone. "Love you, miss you, kiss you goodnight." A burly teenager knocks at the door. "Are you the man?" he says...