From a blogger friend, who often pierces through the emotional opacity and throws light on controversial subjects:
"There is a scene from To Think as a Pawn that has relevance to the current dialogue in America. The play was written in 1971 and has some time-sensitive distractions, but the conversation between Colonel Bruner and his son Johnny may be timeless.
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COLONEL: Patriotism is not dead. Look around you, Boy! Look at the flags. They’re everywhere. They’re on car windows, in coat lapels, on top of buildings. Flags are flying in the yards of good God-fearing folks like us. Don’t kid yourself, Boy! We’re not all Communists yet!
JOHNNY: How many things can you wear on one lapel? You’ve got a flag, a cross, a fish, a Masonic pin, and some civic club pin. If somebody asks you what you believe, you just wave the lapel of your coat at them. You pour out your soul and your mind with a row of ornaments.
COLONEL: We love our flag! We’re proud of it!
JOHNNY: But you have taken my flag away from me. You use it to voice only your philosophy. If I walk down the street carrying a flag, what do the people passing by think? They would say, “Hey, there goes a good kid. He is not one of those peace freaks. He believes in the draft. He believes in killing those ****s at My Lai. Pretty soon somebody’s knocking on my door to enlist me in the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
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During my memory, we have gone through cycles of patriotism, or displays of patriotism, directly proportional to our level of fear and the imagery of an enemy which we fear. During the Eisenhower presidency in the mid-fifties, in the aftermath of World War II, the threat of Communism provoked a high level of expression of patriotism and religion conjointly as one emotional manifestation of religious nationalism. It was a period in which we added “In God We Trust” to our currency, and added the phrase “Under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance. One of the weaknesses of reacting to fear and making changes based on emotionalism is that we sometimes fail to see the pitfalls. Many of us who take our faith seriously believe that the inscription of God’s name on currency or bumper stickers and decorative trinkets is an unacceptable level of trivialization bordering on sacrilege.
The same applies to the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge is a respected recitation of allegiance to one’s country. When Congress added the religious phrase it became also a religious document. Some of us exercise the option of reciting the original Pledge and consider it to be an expression of secular patriotism. Our allegiance to and respect for matters of faith are better expressed separately without the secular entanglement of government sanction.
The difficulty of this is that like the controversy of the Sixties and the recurrent dialogue of post 9/11 emotionalism, we compete for ownership of the flag and the cross. We speak of taking away, or taking back, patriotism and religion and the Bible and the Constitution, and the symbols of God and country.
The perception of a war on Christianity, or a decline in morality, or a decline in patriotism is an illusion based on fear. Christianity, patriotism, and morality are alive and well in America. These treasures have been repackaged and merchandised in the trappings of superficial ostentation to appeal to mass-market distribution at a reduced cost. Patriotism and faith are often packaged together in a box with conservatism and populism and offered as an enticing bonus. Anytime you offer quality merchandise at reduced prices, with billboard-size misrepresentation, you probably lose some of your potential market. We have not lost our passion for either God or country. We just feel untouched and ignored by the marketing technique."
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