Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

Should a Christian say the Pledge of Allegiance?

Is the Pledge of Allegiance a lie, idolatry or showing respect to the country?

Growing up in the 1960s in the United States, I started to wonder about the validity of saying the Pledge of Allegiance. That “liberty and justice for all” part seemed a bit, let’s just say, farfetched, with discrimination based on race, gender, economic condition, and so on. It was explained to me, though, that it was not a pledge to what is, but rather what the ideal nation could be. Hmm. Well, OK.

Back in 1940, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, the Supreme Court “ruled that public schools could compel students—in this case, Jehovah’s Witnesses—to salute the American Flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite the students’ religious objections to these practices.” But a mere three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette held “that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected students from being forced to do” these things. “It was a significant court victory won by Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose religion forbade them from saluting or pledging to symbols, including symbols of political institutions.”

And that was BEFORE the addition of “under God,” to the pledge in the 1950s, instigated by a sermon by a Presbyterian minister, and easily passed by a Congress in the midst of the Red scare, so that it now reads: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

More recently, I’ve been reading about Christians who do not, or did not, believe in saying the Pledge, and there seemed to be two overriding, and not mutually exclusive, reasons. One was like my early thinking, that it was untrue, and that one ought not to swear to a falsehood. More intriguing, though, is the idea that pledging allegiance to the flag equates to making an oath of loyalty to an earthly kingdom, a form of nationalistic idolatry.

Interestingly, the argument tends not to be a divide among the liberal/progressive church folks and evangelicals. Laurence Vance notes that “the United States is in fact about as far from being ‘under God’ as any country on the planet,” that it “leads the world in the incarceration rate, the total prison population, the divorce rate, car thefts, rapes, total crimes, illegal drug use, legal drug use, and Internet pornography production,” among other sins, reasons for refusing to say the pledge.

Conversely, as the Restored Church of God website points out: “Saluting the flag is merely a way of showing respect, and is not of and by itself an act of worship. God commands us, in Romans 13:1-7, to show honor and respect where they are deserved. We salute the flag not because it represents another god, but because it symbolizes the many blessings—freedom being just one—that the Eternal God has bestowed upon one’s nation.”

What say you? Is the Pledge of Allegiance a lie, idolatry or showing respect to the country? I’m particularly interested in how folks from beyond the US feel about similar pledges if in fact there are any in their countries.

Movie review: The Spectacular Now

But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

Last Friday, the Daughter was still with the neighbor, the Wife and I were back in Albany, and it’s HOT out. Let’s go to the movies at the Spectrum in Albany to see the 1 pm showing of The Spectacular Now. We’d recently seen the previews, and I knew it had reviewed well. It was directed by James Ponsoldt, and written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, based on some young adult novel by Tim Tharp I had never heard of.

Sutter (Miles Teller) and Cassidy (Brie Larson) are that popular couple in high school, a fun, hard-partying duo. She breaks up with him, though, for reasons he doesn’t initially understand. He crashes into the orbit of Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a nice girl, who he befriends, somewhat out of pity, and ends up in a rebound romance with her.

Sutter believes in the spectacular now, that growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His mom won’t even tell him where his dad is, and he thinks that geometry stuff that Aimee is trying to tutor him in is useless anyway. Yet he has an interesting streak of honesty and integrity that disarms people around him.

Telling more would probably give away too much. The coming of age movie went along, interesting and pleasant enough. But then a road trip really crystalized the narrative for me, making what has come before much more significant.

The performances are great. Miles Teller I had never heard of, but Shailene Woodley was wonderful in The Descendants. Also strong were Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sutter’s mother (a long way from Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Kyle Chandler. Halfway through, I didn’t think the movie was spectacular, but by the end, I thought it was at least very good.

H is for Health insurance and History (mine)

The doctor gave a very brief look at my foot and immediately sent me to bed at the infirmary.

When I moved from Schenectady to Albany in 1979, it was, in large part, to go to graduate school at the University at Albany (which may have been called SUNY Albany at the time – I forget) in the School of Public Administration.

A few days before the semester began, I went to a very nice party outdoors at a friend’s house, where I was walking in the grass with bare feet. A few days later, one of my toes on my left foot started to hurt, at first just a bit, but eventually, so badly, I thought I ought to go to a doctor. BUT I didn’t have insurance, and I WOULD in two days when I registered for classes. (Also, at that point, I didn’t even have a primary care physician, so it would have been a function of picking randomly from the phone book Yellow Pages.)

I sucked it up and somehow got through college registration, in tremendous pain. If someone had offered a wheelchair, instead of the single crutch I was using from a previous injury, I surely would have used it. That and/or whiskey. While the pain when sitting was great, the pain when standing/hobbling on one leg was almost unbearable.

Finally, I somehow made it to the college infirmary; it seemed so very far away. The doctor gave a very brief look at my foot and immediately sent me to bed at the infirmary. Seems that I got an infection beneath my toenail, it was going up my foot, and if it made it to my heart, it would have, literally, killed me. I spent the next six days in the infirmary.

This meant I was a week behind in classes, both academically and socially, from the get-go. I never caught up.

This meant two fundamental things in my life:
1) I dropped out of grad school and ended up working at a comic book store for eight and a half years.
2) I became an ardent supporter of universal health care coverage.

It’s interesting how an initially tiny pain in the foot can have life-changing consequences.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Labor Day: NOT invented by Hallmark

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor.

I’ve become convinced that a lot of people believe that Labor Day in the United States was invented to give those lazy workers a three-day weekend just before the summer ends. From the Census Bureau: “The first observance of Labor Day was likely on Sept. 5, 1882, when some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City for a parade. That celebration inspired similar events across the country, and by 1894 more than half the states were observing a “workingmen’s holiday” on one day or another.

Later that year, with Congress passing legislation and President Grover Cleveland signing the bill on June 29, the first Monday in September was designated “Labor Day.” This national holiday is a creation of the labor movement in the late 19th century — and pays tribute to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”

It’s long been my contention that all of the gains made by the American labor movement in the last century or so most people take for granted such as minimum wage and restrictions on child labor.

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor, not just in the United States but in other industrialized nations since the 1980s.

Workers on the “public dole” such as teachers and firefighters were castigated as greedy a few years back by Tea Party favorites such as Governor Scott Walker (R-WI). Now we are seeing in Detroit, and soon in a US city near you, workers who postponed raises in favor of money going into their pensions have discovered that those accounts were not funded properly and that they may have to back to work. Many workers in this class are not eligible for Social Security benefits since they did not pay into that system.

The state of labor, at least in the USA, is shaky at best, with a slow economic recovery – unemployment still well above 7% – and little political will to raise a laughable minimum wage.

Happy Labor Day.

Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! at Tanglewood, August 29

What one missed on the radio was Emmanuel Ax’s his utter humility, expressed well in his face.

Some months ago, The Wife contributed to our local public radio station WAMC, for which she got two tickets to watch the taping of the National Public Radio program Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, a weekly hour-long quiz program where “you can test your knowledge against some of the best and brightest in the news and entertainment world while figuring out what’s real news and what’s made up.”

While the Daughter stayed with friends, we went to western Massachusetts, dropped off our stuff at a motel, then on to Tanglewood. This is the lovely music venue that’s been the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for decades, the site of a pair of music schools, and is a beautiful venue for classical music, jazz, performers such as James Taylor, and John Williams, and the Boston Pops.

It had been a long time since I had gone to Tanglewood, almost exactly 15 years ago when I saw Tony Bennett and Diana Krall. The Wife had gone three or four years ago to a few concerts.

With all the inflexible rules about concert-going at other venues, we were surprised to discover that they actually encourage people to bring in lawn chairs, picnic baskets, blankets and the like.

From the lawn, heck, even from some seats inside the Shed, you can’t see the stage. The screens help – a LOT.

The show begins. They record about 90 minutes of material for a 60-minute broadcast. The announcer/scorekeeper is a “voice of God” type, Carl Kasell, who is pushing 80. Someone in the audience said she was probably the only 25-year-old with a crush on Kasell’s voice; almost certainly NOT true.

The host is Peter Sagal. In one segment that did not make it on the air, he admitted that he used to twirl around his wedding ring, which his wife at the time HATED. So she bought him another ring to play with, and now that he’s divorced, he still does. He also defined a collective: a “smug of NPR listeners,” which cracked up the audience.

The panelists this week were Tom Bodett, advice columnist Amy Dickinson and Charlie Pierce, author of Idiot America.

The show does a couple of its set pieces. It’s fascinating that the amount of time the phone contestants are on the line is at least triple what ends up on air, with some quips by the panel and Sagal interrupting the process.

Lots of guessing around us before the show who the guest might be. Would it be James Taylor, or perhaps Yo-Yo Ma? It turned out to be classical pianist Emmanuel Ax. He must have talked for nearly 25 minutes, only 10 of which made it onto the air. His discomfort with the idea of musical competition made it on the air, but the specific answer to Amy’s question about wishing his competiton to do poorly – no, he doesn’t – was left off.

So was a lot of information about him growing up in Winnipeg, Canada for two years, and his total inability to improvise musically. But mostly, what one missed on the radio was his utter humility, expressed well in his face, and his laugh.

There were a couple of jokes about WAMC chair Alan Chartock that might have been too “inside baseball” to air.

When the show was over, Peter did about four minutes of lines he needed to do over for the broadcast, then there was a lively Q&A. We didn’t rush to the car; we weren’t going anywhere soon – and getting out took at least a half-hour – but so it goes at Tanglewood.

Listening to the show on Saturday morning, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. It was good and entertaining, but the live show was a whole lot more fun. If you get a chance to watch a taping, I’d recommend it, but it might take a little luster off the show one can hear each week.

Ramblin' with Roger
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