Mark Oppenheimer finds “national pledges of any kind … idolatrous,” but admits that as a kid, he “was kind of thrilled I had the Pledge of Allegiance in school, if only to rebel against”:
In sixth grade, when I was last in public school, I had to recite the Pledge every morning. And I decided for a time—a couple weeks maybe? a month?—that I would stand for the Pledge, but when we got to “with liberty and justice for all,” I would say, “with liberty and justice for some.” … There was another reason, besides the opportunity to test my Constitutional liberties and defy a teacher, that I liked saying the Pledge: It was something I did with my classmates. It was a ritual that all of us—the class was about a third white, a third black, and a third Puerto Rican, and overwhelmingly poor—performed every day. It was a common text, the one poem, if you will, that we all had memorized. It did not function as ideology. I now think that it rarely does.
In fact, I think of the Pledge of Allegiance mainly as part of two of the great pageants of American life: free, public schooling and spectator sports. Two institutions that tend to bring people together, across lines that otherwise divide them. Two institutions that make our country a bit more of a community. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is like that too, and the fact that millions of us are a bit sketchy on the words yet it never seems to matter proves the point that the words should not, indeed cannot, be taken literally. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be stirred to stand and sing that song—or recite that pledge—together.
The Dish 