At the beginning of yesterday's graduation ceremony, there was a call for the pledge of allegiance. Like an automaton robot, I shot up like everyone else and even intimated to put my hand over my heart, as I had done every day for a decade in elementary school. Then, as the words started, I realized it was making me sick.
I pledge allegiance to the flag
And to the republic for which it stands...
And my first thought was: if the flag stands for the republic, and the republic is now on the hands of zealous morons who don't share one single belief system with me, then why the hell am I standing?
One nation, under God...
I know they've been trying to take this part out of the pledge, but when I heard "God," all I could see was George Bush's monkey face, jerky half-smiles of lunacy, his Alfred E. Neuman ears, his presence at the ovens of Auschwitz on the cover of the New York Times with that blank look of vapid discomfort, his sanctimonious horseshit gagging me in the back of the throat-
...indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Except if you're a darkie, of course. Before Dennis Miller became irreparably full of crap, he said of anti-abortionists: "they believe the right to life begins when you start agreeing with them," and it couldn't be more true now, for almost everything else.
On cue, the choir at graduation launched into "America the Beautiful," and I, alone among thousands, slumped back into my seat. I don't mean to be precious, but I just can't take it. I don't give a shit about our amber waves of grain anymore, and though the purple mountains' majesty is very beautiful, I am so ashamed of being an American right now, I want to cry. I know it isn't the fruited plain's fault, nor the spacious skies: it's my goddamn fellow Americans who are to blame for this. For their lack of intellectual rigor, for their ability to fall for cheap sloganeering, for their easy slide into nascent racism, and for their utter inability to think for themselves, my loved ones are trapped with this government, and will be for at least nine more years.
In my pretty damned prescient best-case prediction of the Iraq situation before it was fully underway blog entry, I predicted - or hoped for - the following:
"we do a thorough sweep of Iraq and come up with absolutely no weapons of mass destruction; Bush and his team - are humiliated on the world stage. Americans begin to think he's a liar. To distract us from this, he tries to enact some draconian conservative agenda (reversing Roe vs. Wade, etc.) to shore up his religious base, but miscalculates dreadfully. Then, one of any roiling scandals (Cheney's Halliburton, Perle's defense contractors, etc.) blows open, and a yet-to-be-named Democrat smokes him in a debate so thoroughly that even hard-core Republicans jump ship. Bush gets shellacked in 2004 and we all wake up from a terrible dream."
The first sentence has come true. But everything from "Americans begin to think he's a liar..." has not, nor will it. Americans don't fucking care. As long as the Fiddle Faddle gut-buster bucket stays on sale at Wal-Mart, Iraqi boys can get their arms blown off and screw themselves.
I have seen more of this country than anyone else except truckers; I have tacitly loved it since birth. I've fully lived in six different states, all four time zones, and broken bread in each of the "lower forty-eight." My great-grandfather came from Wales and walked to Colorado with "some books and an old violin." My accent is a mix of California orange, Iowa soybean and North Carolina barbeque. I am as American as it gets.
And now I can't even bear to stand up during the pledge of allegiance.
Posted by at June 6, 2003 12:03 AMThis port made me ill. You're such a moron.
