"I Pledge Allegiance . . ."

Gladly. Why would I not? The United States has given me a precious, irreplaceable gift, a gift to which many of our allies among the "civilized, industrialized" nations of the world pay only lip service. That gift is the gift of freedom of speech.

As long as I do not shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, nor use "fighting words," nor place another person in fear of imminent threat to their safety or well-being, I can say what I like, where I like, when I like. It is a gift that I can use to pledge my undying loyalty to, and express my inexpressible love for, my country - not merely because I truly am loyal to, and love my country, but for another, equally-important purpose.

To do so pisses off people who have decided that they are going to be the civic shepherds who separate the sheep of true-blue, loyal, all-American, red-blooded citizens from the goats of hippies, pinkos, commies, faggots, fellow-travelers and other perverts and undesirables who dare befoul the great melting-pot (remember that from your high-school civics class?) of American society. The melting pot is, in the opinion of these self-appointed shepherds, properly peopled exclusively with Caucasians, preferably Anglo-Saxons, ideally professing some form of evangelical Protestant Christianity. That attitude may be the most annoying, dismaying and un-American manifestation of the decline in public discourse that has afflicted the United States for the past 25 years - the increasing tendency of certain segments of American society to attempt to suppress and silence their socipolitical conversationalists by branding them with the label "un-American."

The "Un-American" label is a useful muzzle to deploy against free, cacophonous public discourse. This would be a good place to ruminate on the virtue of cacophony, versus monophony. A humming babble of citizenry, each contributing what he or she is entitle by citizenship to contribute, is infinitely sweeter, more productive, and more reverent of the original intentions of the Framers of the Constitution than one lone voice, especially the lone voice of a sole lawgiver. The praises of justice and righteousness are best sung in choir, not as a solo.

Remember that majestic phrase, "We the People?" It was not merely a derision of the royal form, "I, the King." It was a statement that society must heed even now, 225 years later, as to who the Framers intended should wield the real power in this country. As long as the Constitution is respected and enforced in this country, the voice of the people must be the supreme and ultimate fount of civic authority. Vox populi, vox Dei. Power flows not from the Constitution to the people, but from the people to the Constitution. It was the people of the United States of America who ordained the new Constitution.

In the Tea Party's United States, I am a threat to the safety, stability and continued viability of the American Experiment, that great sea change in social governance that began with Common Sense in 1776, and which continues to this day. I am a cancer upon the body politic that must be eradicated - or at least reduced to silent impotence (or impotent silence, a redundancy).

"Forbid it, almight God!," say I, bowing in the direction of Patrick Henry's grave. The forces of suppression that seek to silence dissent would tar me with the brush of un-Americanism and lack of patriotism. They would deem me unsuitable to continue to live and work in American society, because I do not embrace the conformist mentality without skeptical examination.

They say that because I cling to an institutional, hierarchical Church, because I have developed and cultivated my intellect to take a hard, skeptical, questioning stance toward doctrine, I am not American. It is as though the circular argument that "the people elected our leaders, therefore our leaders do only what is right for the people" means that a political doctrine of separation, of classification, of stratification of society into the elect and the damned must be accepted without comment, at the price of sacrificing one's place in the society into which one was born, or into which one has been naturalized.

Nonsense. I might also say, balderdash. I am American because I demand that doctrines or propositions put forward for consideration as "the way things ought to be" should be looked at through a magnifying glass and subjected to tests of fire and acid, not despite my intellectual questioning.

Indeed, I am duty-bound, as an American, to look skeptically askance at any proposition put forth for the governance of the American nation, especially when its proponents urge that their proposition be accepted without comment. To fail, or refuse to cast a critical eye on the proposals of our leaders, would-be leaders, pseudo-leaders and non-leaders would be, in fact, the definitive abdication of my civic duty. That would be un-American.

So, where does all of this lead? To what end do I expound on civic duty and the right of place in modern American society? In answer, I submit the concept of allegiance.

A synonym for allegiance is loyalty. Someone who bears allegiance to a person, place, thing, or concept is loyal to it. The loyalist conforms her every thought and act to be in consonance with the views, aspirations and will of that to which she is loyal.

Allegiance is a universal norm; it is not situational. Unfortunately, neither is allegiance self-evident. Indeed, allegiance is a useful disguise worn by those who would betray the ideal to which they have pledged their loyalty.

This insidious treason goes forward because the rot is hidden under a veneer of soundness and "reason." Why, after all, does the wolf wear sheep's clothing, if not to lull the genuine sheep into a false sense of security that all is well, that there is no danger lurking, no threat of which they should beware? Is it not in the wolf's interest that the sheep should not be alarmed? Who is less likely to alarm the sheep than another sheep? Yet the wolf is a slavering beast, seeking only the destruction of the sheep.

Worse is the wolf who dons the shepherd's cloak, or picks up his staff. How much more readily do the sheep follow the supposed shepherd, the one whom they believe has their safety in charge! How great is their dismay when they understand, too late, that their shepherd has led them, not into safety, but to their doom.

The airwaves are full of conservative commentators who are able to muster, either from their own inspiration, or the inspiration of their staff writers, logically-sound arguments, correct in form if not in premise. "The most-listened-to talk show in the history of the world" comes most readily to mind. Rush Limbaugh's program is distributed broadcast to a yipping audience only too eager to receive a message it wants to hear, but which it cannot necessarily understand, or handle.

I give Limbaugh his due - he has sufficient grasp of the rudiments of formal logic that he is able to present an argument that does not abjectly fail as to form. The syllogism, "If my car is slipping, I must be driving on ice; my car is slipping; therefore, I am driving on ice," while formally correct, is of little comfort as my car plunges over the precipice. The parallel with the danger of Limbaugh and other conservative commentators who have discovered how to access the mass media should be clear. Formally-correct nonsense is still nonsense.*

Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." This axiom is ever more on display in political and social discourse in the United States today. The fact that we are in the midst of a presidential campaign only provides yet more opportunities for the candidates, their parties and their proxies to display this long-established truth. Reviewing the record of the Executive Branch in the 21st century, I cannot help but wonder if the United States received a wolf as their shepherd in 2001. Lest I be accused of embracing patriotism (another synonym for allegiance) as a scoundrel, I hasten to assert that my allegiance is to the republican ideals of Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and the Founding Fathers of the Republic.

I am no Johnny-come-lately who embraces the robust individualism of Common Sense as a licfense to indulge in antisocial behavior. I was brought up to honor Flag and Country, but the ideals that I was taught, from an early age, to revere, are the ideals that inflamed the Founders. It is to the basic, original notion of the new Republic built on the foundations of English colonialism in North America to which I first pledged my loyalty, and to which I remain committed.

On the other hand, the Militia and Christian Identity movements, to say nothing of the Tea Party (which has taken a debatable acronym and misapplied it to the historical record), as well as other testosterone-laced examples of neoconservative fringe groups, are to me prime examples of my assertion that allegiance is a disguise worn to cloak the disloyal in the habit of loyalty. By their rabid espousal of racial intolerance and segregation, by their determined efforts to excise homosexuals and sexual nonconformists from society, by their self-consciously juvenile attitudes toward male-female relationships - to say nothing of female sexuality - these ardent fundamentalist groups betray themselves as disloyal to the true ideals of the concept of the United States. By espousing a limited, warped, and bastardized vision of America, they turn their backs on the true meaning of the American Experiment as a fundamentally new social order in which there was a place for every person, regardless of identity, class, creed, social, or economic background.

The United States arose on the foundation of the radical premise that it was not where one came from (either geographically, or parentally) that mattered, but what one was capacities, both mental and physical, were, and what the individual could offer to society, for the individual's, and society's, mutual and collective benefit. Unlike the European feudal model, which called for all goods and wealth to flow upwards to the lord, the American republican model called for goods and wealth to flow back and forth through society, each person taking as much as he was entitled to have by his contribution.

Candor demands the admission that a sober review of the record of the American Experiment shows that the ideally circular flow of wealth has faced impediments, in varying degrees of crassness and egregiousness, placed by those who have wealth. Thsi is human nature; we all want more, and the more we have, the more we want. Nevertheless, the social experiment that we call America has always been founded on the notion and the promise that every person could have a canvas upon which to display his (and, much later, her) capability.

There were, supposedly, no preconceived barriers, no prior limitations, or restraints placed on the ambitious. Jew or Gentile, male or (admittedly, to a lesser degree) female, Black or White, professional or artisan, yeoman farmer or planter, America beckoned all people to come and display their talents, and to participate in democracy and the democratic debate. Thatmodel of America is a much more enticing prospect than the dim, dismal, futile model of simplistic conformity that so many latter-day wolves in sheep's clothing hope to bring about in our land.

In the literal sense, America was built with horses hitched to plows and wagons. But to what were the plows and wagons hitched? They were hitched to the human mind and the human spirit! How boring it would be to throw away all of the riches that human thought has bestowed on mankind, in the interest of intellectual conformity!

So, yes, I declare my allegiance, gratefully as well as gladly. The United States survived George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; it will survive the war on terrorism as surely as it survived and triumphed over Osama bin Laden. It has outlasted Jerry Falwell, as it outlasted Billy Sunday and Father Coughlin.

Despite her very real problems, none of which is either insurmountable, or intractable, the United States will survive herself. This can only happen if the allegiance that is pledged to her is pledged to her for her own good, rather than for the good (or the benefit, or the enhancement, or the promotion, or the profit) of those making the pledge.

*I drafted this essay long before the contretemps over Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke revealed the depth of Limbaugh's cynicism. I will have more to say on that subject in a later post.