The Pledge of Allegiance and Indoctrination

 

Why do we say the Pledge of Allegiance before public meetings in our town?

Mad Dog surely does not know, but he thinks it may have something to do with the reason we sing the national anthem before sports events: We are about to witness a contest, a conflict between different tribes, and singing the same song all together beforehand reassures us the fabric of what unites us is stronger than what is about to tear us asunder.

 You may scream for the Seahawks or the Yankees, and Mad Dog may root for the Patriots (ahem) and the Red Sox, but we have, as Obama pointed out in his most famous speech, more which unites us than that which divides us.

It's a cohesion ritual.

Mad Dog would be happier if we simply did not pledge allegiance to a flag, an inanimate idol which symbolizes an idea.

Mad Dog's wife is the daughter of a major general in the United States army. He was of "flag rank" which meant he could bring his two star flag to any ceremony or occasion he wished, and, in fact, when he arrived at his daughter's wedding which took place at the Naval station in Newport, R.I., he kicked himself that he had forgotten his flag, which he could have displayed in the front of the Navy chapel where the ceremony took place, along with all the dozens of other flags displayed there.

Mad Dog's wife was happy he had forgotten that flag. She has never permitted a flag to be flown on Mad Dog's house, despite Mad Dog's love for design and some flags are really wonderfully designed. "Flags divide people," she said. "That's the point of flags." She is a child of the 70's. 

Her father had to be called out of a meeting at the Pentagon because his daughter had been arrested. She had chained herself to a chain linked fence, along with the President of Mt. Holyoke College, protesting the war in Vietnam.

"I raised three sons and one daughter," her father told Mad Dog. "The three of them, in aggregate, never caused me half the trouble that one daughter did."

So no flags at Mad Dog's.

But what about that pledge, that ceremony of unity?

The "under God" phrase got added in 1954 at the height of the cold war against "godless communism," along with the "In God We Trust" motto which had been on coins since the Civil war but got expanded use during the cold war.

That motto, "In God We Trust," was derived from a visit by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase after his visit to Brown University, where he noted the Latin phrase, "In Deo Speramus," which was part of the university's seal, appearing on libraries and various gates on campus, so Chase added it to coins to suggest God was on the Union side in 1864.

Patriot

Mad Dog's reservations about The Pledge are not so much about its phrasing, (apart from the violation of Church/State) but about easy patriotism.

As far as Mad Dog is concerned anything which is easy, is not patriotism.

Patriotism must involve risk or sacrifice or  work to be real.  Wearing an American flag lapel pin is too easy. It's a phony patriotism. Saying a pledge is too easy. 

Paying your taxes, not easy: Patriotism. Going off to war, definitely not easy: Patriotism. Demonstrating to stop the Vietnam war: Patriotism. Holding up a sign on a street corner against ICE: Patriotism. Voting to support the First Amendment on a School Board: Patriotism.

"We must all hang together or we shall surely hang separately," Ben Franklin said. 

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were actual Patriots. They pledged their lives and their fortunes and their "sacred honor" to each other and to their country. How puny a group of citizens saying, "I pledge allegiance to the flag," sounds compared to all that.

Patriot

Why is Mad Dog ranting about something so trivial as The Pledge? It is because of a conversation he had with someone who  said he was opposed to public schools, the whole idea of public education because it was "all indoctrination."

Mad Dog asked him what he meant by that word, "indoctrination." 

"Telling kids there are more than two sexes. Hauling some kid into the principal's office and suspending him because, on the bus ride home from Exeter High School, he got into an argument with a girl and he said, 'There are only two sexes,' and she reported him for that. And the principal said that kid had violated some code about respecting all kids and their feelings or whatnot."

The boy was suspended and not allowed to play in the weekend football game.

Mad Dog agreed this was a grievous violation of that Catholic boy's First Amendment rights in the name of some sort of purity test, some sort of creed. 

If all the students at Exeter High School are forbidden to question the proposition that "sexuality is fluid and there are more than two genders" then what is being taught  there is not free inquiry, but dogma.

One Patriot, Dozen Thugs

Ironically, the case which established the right of the individual to not embrace the party line came from New Hampshire, to the Supreme Court of the United States in Woolely vs Maynard, 1977. In that case Mr. Maynard, a Jehovah's Witness, said that his religion taught him to value life over all else, especially someone else's idea of what constitutes freedom, and he did not want to have to drive around with "Live Free or Die" on his license plate, a plate the state requires him to display, in effect requiring him to embrace the state's idea which conflicts with his own. He taped over the motto and was promptly arrested.

The Court found that the right to not speak, to not embrace a state belief, is integral to freedom of speech.

So what of  the child in school who refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag?

The most famous case was West Virginia v Barnette, where a child, also a Jehovah's witness, refused to pledge, and Justice Robert O. Jackson (of Nuremberg fame) wrote:

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."

The state argued the Pledge was necessary for national cohesion in a time when differing opinions and beliefs were threatening to tear apart the nation.

But such insistence may, indeed, amount to indoctrination.

As Dave Chapelle said, "I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?" 

What the under educated principal of Exeter High School did was to insist a student embrace an orthodoxy rather than initiating a discussion of the idea of what gender is, if it differs from sex, chromosomal or preferential, and to seek a way students with different opinions could be brought to understand the other person's thinking. Exeter High School failed on every important level.

But that does not mean we have to fail in Hampton by opening meetings with a prayer or a pledge or anything other than, "Glad you all could attend today to do our town's business."

There is a determined core in the New Hampshire legislature right now, who want to destroy public schools, which they regard as nothing more than indoctrination centers. Of course, part of that coalition is determined to replace these government indoctrination centers with "protestant teachers" of the True Word, but that's another subject. 

The question is, what is "indoctrination" and how does it differ from "education?"

Mad Dog would venture that indoctrination seeks to teach a single version of any argument, whereas education, which means "a leading out" seeks to explore all aspects of every issue, to hear all sides and to weigh them and to allow the student to come to his or her--or "their" if you believe in all that-- own conclusions.

A Dog In The Fight

 

"Dying. And that's what these white boys been doing for three years, fool, dying by the thousands. Dying for you, boy. I know because I dug the graves."

--"Glory" the movie

Mad Dog has never much liked the expression "American exceptionalism," as if America is something unique over the 2,000 year history of nations on this planet, which have risen, fallen and blown away as dust in the wind. As if we Americans just so "special" like some pampered children of affluent parents. 

But there is one way in which America may be unique. Mad Dog does not know enough world history to be sure, but if there is another country in the world's history which has fought it's most costly, devastating war to free an underclass, a slave class, Mad Dog would like to know.

And they fought not for economic reasons, not for conquest, but for a simple principle: that all men should be free, that no man should be thought to be the property of another man, that a human being cannot be property. If any other nation has fought a great civil war to free a class of underdogs,  then Mad Dog would like to know it.

Oh, all the Lost Cause revanchists will try to tell you the Civil war was not about slavery (because they know they can't sell slavery as a good thing in the 20th century--although Margaret Mitchell tried in "Gone with the Wind,"--the way it was sold in the 19th century as the best thing for the slaves and for the naturally superior white race), and they'll tell you it was just an industrial North trying to subjugate an agrarian South, or that it was about any of a dozen things other than slavery. 

Well, Mad Dog was not alive then, so he cannot be sure. He can only read history. But who writes the history, and for what purpose? 

But Mad Dog believes a man who was alive then, who should know, and who summarized convincingly the cause of the war, Abraham Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural speech, with his assassin standing just a few yards behind him, visible in the photographs, Lincoln explained the cause of the war, and he said there was a "peculiar interest" not distributed evenly over the country, but concentrated in its southern parts, and that peculiar interest was the cause of the war. Of course, everyone knew then, and everyone should know now, what he was talking about: slavery. Nobody wanted the war, but as long as slavery existed, nobody could prevent it. "And the war came." Inexorably.

But not so inexorable: why should free White men in New Hampshire leave their farms and homes and jobs and families to go South to die at Antietam, Gettysburg and Shiloh? Walk through graveyards from Gilmanton to Hampton, and you'll see gravestones of men in their twenties who died between 1861 and 1865. Look at the bronzed plaques on Hampton town library and you'll see the names of men who served--and one of four died--in the regiment sent south. 

In the movie "Glory," an old Union Negro soldier (Morgan Freeman) gets in the face of a young hothead Negro soldier (Denzel Washington) who has been raging about the discipline from his white officers and Freeman tells the younger man that rage has blinded him to the good men can do, that these white boys have been dying in the thousands to free him and all his race for three years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLisMDlb8IE

That is the simple, powerful, astonishing truth.

And now we have White people in Minnesota dying to protect their Black neighbors, and we have White high school students from Winnacunnet High School holding signs on the street across from the Old Salt, denouncing the murderers, denouncing ICE, protesting murder of people in far off Minnesota by people who have only one argument, and that argument is blood.

It's sort of amazing really. White Minnesotan men and women in the faces of a masked white army of hatred. (Our very own Whitewalkers.)

Do those Minnesotans even have a dog in the fight? Well, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, they apparently think they do, and even before that they thought they had a dog in the fight.

And what is that fight?

It's White men, armed to the teeth with assault rifles beating up and absconding with Black people, out of hate, out of racial animosity.

There can be no doubt those ICE and CBP agents are not there to defend the borders. They are there to imprison and remove Black people on the orders of a White President who pictures even a Black President as an unevolved ape.

These shock troops of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, and J.D. Vance and Trump are the army of hate, fighting for white supremacy, fighting to dominate and subjugate.

And White people, who could just walk by it all, and go home and watch TV and cook dinner and ignore it all are not doing that. 

Not in Minnesota. 

Not in Hampton, New Hampshire.

If There Was Ever Any Doubt

 

Of all the things Trump obsesses over, Barack Obama has clearly got into his head most destructively.

The reasons are obvious: Obama is lean, still handsome, moves with the grace of an athlete, played basketball with no holds barred in the White House, and Trump is obese, barely able to make it up the side stairs to the stage. Obama is, and always has been effortlessly superior to the debauched and dissolute Trump.

But it goes way beyond the inferiority complex, the comparisons. It goes back to Obama's roasting of Mr. Trump at the White House Correspondents dinners, where President Obama eviscerated, humiliated and nothing of Trump but a greasy yellow spot. You can catch a glimpse of Trump, leaning forward in the dark, trying to disappear into a dot. He could never forgive such a public flaying. And Trump never attended a Correspondents dinner after that. 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nykVn_XAEks

Obama speaking of Trump's birther campaign, a clear attempt to say that Obama isn't really from here, not a true American, because, you know, he's Black, not to mention the Hussein thing and the Obama thing. 

Obama showed comically photoshopped images of Trump signs on the White House, to suggest Trump would try to put his name on the White House, which seemed funny back then, but, of course, today Trump demanded Reagan-Washington National Airport and Penn Station in New York be named after himself.

So, still seething, burning with humiliation and pain never staunched, Trump puts out an AI image as both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes.

Nothing wrong with that. They are laughing in Alabama, parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. 

Oh, that Donald! He's one of us.

One has to wonder what all those Blacks for Trump are thinking now.

Atticus Finch Comes to Hampton, NH

 

Sometimes, people will surprise you.

In deepest Red Virginia, Hanover County, where Donald Trump carried the vote by 27 points, at a meeting of their county council, a throng of protesters demanded that the county not enter into an agreement with ICE to use an empty warehouse for ICE prisoners.

In Rockingham County, New Hampshire, a board comprised of three county commissioners, one Democrat (Katie Coyle) and two Republicans reversed itself, one Republican joining Ms. Coyle to defeat a contract to set up an ICE jail in the County.

Atticus Finch

And Wednesday night, in Hampton, NH, the school board defended its unanimous vote against recommending the adoption by the town of a warrant article to set up a slush fund for the town's Catholic school, using taxpayer dollars for a religious school. This, in a town where the biggest voting block is the Catholic church. This in a state where state vouchers for private schools, religious schools are draining away money from public schools.

During the Deliberative Session, each board member was attacked by name for what congregation members believed was betrayal, anti-Catholicism and personal immorality.

Who are these women? Mad Dog has met three of the five: Wendy Riga, the town librarian and the chairman of the Board, Candice O'Neill, an attorney in town, and Andrea Shepard who has voted for the warrant article in past years, whose husband voted for it when they were on the Board together. And Molly McCoy and Sarah Elliott with whom Mad Dog has only a nodding acquaintance. 

By the bizarre rules of the Deliberative Session, which does not allow for "back and forth" --heaven forbid public officials be allowed to reply to citizen's concerns directly--the Board members simply sat there looking at their detractors, as members of the congregation, impassioned alumni of the school, the school principal waged war against them. 

But they did not waver, did not reverse their votes, as they might have done.

They stood firm. Stood tall.

Mad Dog was inspired by the book, and even more by the movie, "To Kill A Mockingbird," where Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) , a town lawyer defends a Black man accused of molesting a white woman. The courthouse floor is packed with angry white men and women who want to drag his client, the accused, out to lynch him, but Finch methodically picks apart the case against his client, which is clearly fatally flawed, and it is obvious the man is innocent. But Finch goes further: he speaks to the assembled townsfolk and says, "But what is Tom Robinson's real crime? Why is he really sitting in this docket? His real, unforgivable crime in this town is having felt sorry for a White woman." 

There, he said it. 

Of course, the jury finds Robinson guilty anyway. There was never any question about what the townsfolk would do with respect to the verdict. 

When Atticus gathers up his stuff to walk out of the courtroom, he has to walk under the balconies where the Black folk, the town's Negroes are allowed to sit. Among the Negroes is Scout, the White daughter of Atticus. A woman next to her tells her, "Stand up, child. Your father is passing!" All the Negroes rise as Atticus walks by, mute tribute to a man who braved the censure, the hate of his fellow townspeople on behalf of a principle, on behalf of the law, the truth and something that rises above hatred and ignorance.

But that was fiction.

John F. Kennedy, before he was President, wrote "Profiles in Courage," a book about eight American politicians who held resolutely to principle, despite attacks from their own party and friends: among them Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. 

Mad Dog hopes that someday a course at the Academy, maybe Civics, maybe history, will teach Hampton students about these five Hampton women who stood up to the hostility--rocks were thrown at their homes--and intolerance of their own neighbors that Hampton children might learn about what makes a nation a nation of laws rather than one ruled by passions.

Separation of Church and State

 For some years, the town of Hampton has been embroiled in a controversy over the use of taxpayer funds to create a fund for the town's Catholic church school  

Citizens who decried this as a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment's prohibition of government establishing a religion were vilified as being motivated by deep seeded anti-Catholicism masquerading as concern over separation of church and state.

Every year someone warned that Catholics are protected by separation of church and state but were told Catholics do not need that protection and that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution of the United States, echoing rants from Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert that separation of church and state (SC&S) is simply not a thing, not a real principle or idea.

John F. Kennedy was quoted prodigiously by supporters of SC&S, as JFK recognized that without that protection, people would think that as Catholic he would be under the spell of the pope. But JFK was adamant that "public funds should never be awarded to any church or to any church school." Without that absolute guarantee, Kennedy argued, "For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed...tomorrow it may be you."

So, defenders of SC&S protested they were concerned to safeguard Catholics, the congregation of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal did not believe that for a moment.

Principal of Sacred Heart

But now, in Concord, at the State House of Representatives, three state representatives have introduced an amendment to the New Hampshire Constitution to replace the guarantee of non interference by government in religious practice or support, of neutrality of government respecting religion:

Article 6: NH STATE CONSTITUTION

“BUT no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination. And every person, denomination, or sect shall be equally under protection of the law; and no subordination of any one sect, denomination or persuasion shall ever be established.”

And what the representatives want to replace this with is this:

“As morality and piety, right grounded on evangelical principles, will give the best and greatest security to government…the people of this state shall have a right to empower the legislature to authorize…religious societies within this state..for the support and maintenance of PUBLIC PROTESTANT teachers of piety, religion and morality.

At the Deliberative Session, a long time advocate for SC&S read this out. 

"If there was ever any doubt in your mind, that separation of church and state protects Catholic faith from attack, this amendment should be your answer."

The amendment does not say the state government should support Christianity, but Protestant Christianity.

Oddly enough, the members of the congregation, who testified as ardently as ever for the taxpayer slush fund for their Sacred Heart School, were unfazed by news of this amendment.

As is almost required by the format of these Deliberative Sessions, townsfolk talked past each other, never acknowledging they have even heard the other side.

Democracy in action, small town New Hampshire.

Go figure.

Fearing The People: Democracy in a Small Town

Last night, Mad Dog attended a "Deliberative Session" for the Winnacunnet High School school district where the budget for the high school was voted on.

Mad Dog was interested because he had been appointed to serve on the high school's budget committee, replacing an elected official who could no longer serve, and so he had learned over the course of four committee meetings about the complexities of the budget for a high school of just over 1,000 students, with over 200 security cameras, multiple playing fields, a windmill, 100 unionized teachers, and sundry custodial workers. 

During that time, Mad Dog learned that the school's budget could be wrecked if too many families with special needs students moved into any of the four towns which send kids to the school, and he learned about how the new state voucher program to fund private schools (including religious schools) and home schooling draws its funds, in part, by tapping into funds for Winnacunnet, bleeding the school's money, a strategy which delights people who don't like public schools.

In short, from his brief two months on the Budget Committee, Mad Dog learned why you need professionals, who do this sort of work all day, to manage the school. The spreadsheets alone filled a hundred pages.

So, the committee developed a budget, but that budget would have to be approved by "the voters" or "the towns" which pay for the school with their ever rising property taxes. This process of approval involves placing the budget on "warrant articles," but first the articles have to be "considered" by voters at town meetings so they can be changed, tweaked or outright destroyed.

Unlike the elementary and middle schools, where the kids all come from Hampton, the high school gets kids and funds from four towns: Hampton, North Hampton, Hampton Falls and Seabrook. These comprise a "district" with an odd name "SAU21." (Why they couldn't just call it the "Winnacunnet High School District," Mad Dog never learned, but presumably it had to do with the number of letters.)

Because he walked into the auditorium where the meeting took place, Mad Dog, having proved his place of residence, he automatically became a town legislator. The group of 25 people who showed up constitute, by law, the legislative body for the four towns, and they could vote to amend the budget, to kept it or to reject it, thus defunding the school.

That last may sound absurd, but Mad Dog once attended a similar meeting for the grade and middle schools, where in a bizarre series of amendments and counter amendments, the 100 people in the auditorium considered an amendment which would have directed the entire town school budget, which runs into the millions of dollars, entirely to the town's Catholic school of 244 students. (The amendment was defeated.)

As a newly minted member of this 25 person legislature, Mad Dog now legally represented 45,396 (give or take) citizens of the four towns. 

This was kind of a heady experience, as the representatives elected to the state legislature represent 3,300 citizens each, where Mad Dog was now a temporary, unelected official, representing 12,000 of his fellow citizens as their evanescent representative, by virtue of having shown up at 7 PM on a bitterly cold workday night a few days after a snowstorm, when most people of the town were doing dinner, trying to manage kids, their homework and then getting ready to go to work the next day.

The meeting of this Brigadoon-like legislature was presided over by a masterful "Moderator," who had been elected to this position. On the stage was a school board for the high school of roughly 12 members, drawn from the four towns.

The work of this fly-by-night legislature was now to vote up or down each of four warrant articles detailing the budget for the high school. A month later, the voters of the four towns would vote these refined warrant articles up or down. If the voters rejected these articles the budget would revert to whatever it was the previous year.

The Moderator ran the meeting by certain rules:

1. Any member of this rump legislature who wished to speak on one of the four warrant articles of budget being considered would have to address only him and the board.

That meant the speakers had to face only the Moderator, and could not turn around and speak to the audience. No exchange of views between the speaker at the microphone and members of the audience behind him is allowed. All remarks are director to the Moderator.

2. Speakers are not allowed to engage in a "back and forth" with any of the board members on the stage, who are not allowed to engage in conversation with any member of the audience/legislature. They are to sit on the stage like gods from Mt. Olympus, listening the the prayers of the legislators, but not replying to those prayers or asking any questions of those making the prayers.

Before the meeting, Mad Dog had asked the Moderator why the legislator/meeting attendees were not allowed to engage in a conversation (the dreaded "back and forth") with the Board on the stage or with each other, and he was told this system is designed to reduce rancor, to keep the discussion controlled and civil. 

Actually, this resembles "Prime Minister's Questions" --if you've ever watched that must see TV--which is the British Parliament, where the members of the British parliament (MOP's) address their remarks to a "Speaker" who remains mostly silent, as the MOP's conduct conversations with each other by addressing the Speaker as if the other MOP, the target of their derision, is not even there listening, referring to the right honorable MP from Finsbury: "I rise to inform the Speaker that the member from Finsbury has muddled his 'facts,' which are, in fact, closer to fantasy than to any event which has occurred in his majesty's islands or, for that matter on planet Earth. In fact, the right honorable MP has shot beyond the fantastic to the surreal."

Anyway, one member of this evanescent legislature offered an amendment to an article which made sense to Mad Dog--an effort to clarify on the ballot what the cost of the budget item would be for the average taxpayer--so Mad Dog seconded the motion, feeling very virtuous, having engaged in representative democracy, having participated in a small republic which would warm the heart of Benjamin Franklin.

But then another representative/member of the audience suggested that the clarification printed on the warrant article ballot would likely confuse voters because it would be a different number for each town--so the effort to clarify would, in fact confuse, and, at any rate, it seemed like a big change to be wrought at a late date with so little time to think about it.  

Mad Dog was moved to say that he felt a little uncomfortable voting on behalf of 15,000 Hampton residents (not to mention the 30,000 residents of the other towns) without having any input at all from any of them, so he wound up voting against the very amendment he had seconded.

What really stuck with Mad Dog is what a travesty this form of town hall government, called the "SB2" form really is. 

A small group shows up, while the rest of town is distracted, and speaks for the town and votes on "warrant articles," which will fill 34 pages of paper the voters will try to read through and vote on in March. 

Most voters will make that visit to vote on one or two articles which they care about and know something about, and then they will plow through the other articles, looking for the recommendations from the School Board or the Budget Committee, or the Planning Board, which are printed right above the Yes/No boxes, conveniently guiding the voter how to vote.

The whole thing feels like something somewhere between travesty and performance, a theater of the absurd.

And the thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. This SB2 system arose from a time when the towns had populations in the hundreds, and town hall meetings were actual democracies among neighbors who knew each other. 

This SB2 is a sort of mutant descendent of democracy, having about as much in common with democracy as Homo sapiens has with his ape ancestors.

It can in fact be changed, and several towns across the state have discarded it, although how this is done legally nobody in Hampton seems to know.