The scent of pledge

Ah, the pledge. It brings back memories.

Not the pledge that smokers make to quit tobacco, usually right before sucking down half a pack of Winstons behind the garage while the spouse is out playing bingo. No, the pledge of allegiance. That weird rote that gets us up off our duffs to half-heartedly proclaim our devotion to country.

Most of us associate the pledge with school. We’ve all done it. You walk into your grade school classroom, all innocent and dewy-eyed and ready to learn, and after shaking the snow from your boots and making armpit farts under your juice-stained T-shirt, you see your teacher stand and face the flag, hand over her heart. Classmates become quiet, the only sound in the room the scraping of chair legs against cold tile as everyone rises from their seats in unison. Then you launch into it, only half-aware of what you’re saying: “I pledge allegiance to the flag...”

Then everyone sits back down and colors farm animals with nubby little crayons. It’s one those universal experiences, like walking out of a theater in disgust during a Pauley Shore movie.

For the longest time, I thought my days of doing the pledge were over. Not that it’s an inherently childish activity, but school just seems to be the one place where it’s compulsory, a daily ritual as ingrained as drinking milk out of those soggy, infuriating little cardboard boxes.

Then I started attending meetings of various boards of selectmen. Some boards do the pledge, some don’t; I was astonished the first time it happened, just due to the random nostalgia of it. Afterward, I half-expected the chairperson to bounce over with a pair of pom-poms and ask me to the Sadie Hawkins dance, just in time for the homeroom bell. Apparently, when I flash back to school, I edit history to make myself the kind of guy who would be asked to a Sadie Hawkins dance.

The words came back easily, and why not? I recited the pledge almost every day of my life for years stacked upon years; I could have shown up to the meeting stumblebum-drunk and still spit it out flawlessly. But the question occurred to me: Why are we doing this?

 There’s nothing wrong with expressing fealty to one’s country, especially if it’s voluntary. It’s just that there isn’t much of a point. If you’re a true-blue patriot, the kind of person whose heart swells at the thought of Washington crossing the Delaware, then the pledge is superfluous. It won’t add to your national pride any more than a whisper will add to a full-throated scream. If you’re not a patriot, and you plan on ditching the States for an uncharted island so you can shun the establishment and spend your days talking to a volleyball, then the pledge won’t change that, either. Words are words; the unfeeling are perfectly capable of saying them without meaning them. A pledge is not a spell – it can’t instill national pride with the wave of a magic wand.

Plus it’s a little creepy.

Especially in a classroom setting. Picture it: Row upon row of children, all staring wide-eyed at the flag, all unmoving, all rhythmically reciting words programmed into them by well-meaning adults. If this was a Stephen King novel, that would be followed by a scene in which the kids sacrifice their teacher to the demonic boogermonster living in Jimmy Federman’s locker.

It’s not that I’m anti-pledge, exactly. It’s just that nobody, especially a child, should be forced to say it. And apparently, the Supreme Court agrees with me: In 1943, it ruled that public school students aren’t required to recite the pledge, saying that a democratic republic built on the freedom of dissent, with a First Amendment protecting a person’s right to refrain from speaking, makes it unconstitutional to foist it on the unwilling.

When the selectmen stand and do it, I stand with them, but I don’t say the pledge. My silence has nothing to do with my feelings about America. Heck, I live in a country where beer, burgers, and edible underwear are all waiting for me just around the corner. Take that, North Korea.

But if I’ve got a right to remain silent, then doggonit, I’m going to exercise it. And you know what? That’s pretty American, too.