Taking Things Personally

After a week of meditations on profound issues involving nature, "God" and the President I need to lay back a bit and update the indifferent world as to some of my own personal issues. But before I do, a word or two about yesterday's California court decision preventing several school districts from compelling their students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance because the inclusion of the words "Under God" imply a tie between patriotism and the assertion of a deity, which contradicts the separation of Church and State.

As a secular "Bright" I am in general agreement with the decision, although I think it will be overturned in a higher court (certainly Roberts' Supreme Court), and is really a tempest in a teapot. When kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance it is usually by rote, rarely orated in heartfelt comprehension. When I was a student I repeatedly declaimed it along with my class, with little thought except as to why we were saluting an inanimate piece of cloth. Though I was pretty brainy I really didn't think about it as a metaphor (though "the Republic for which it stands" might have given me a clue) or anything else except a thirty-second delay in my academic training. Nor did I know that the phrase "Under God" had been inserted by a red-baiting Congress during the McCarthy era to distinguish our republic from that of the Godless Communists, hoping, I suppose to get some brownie points for American citizens when they were applying for entry at St. Peter's Gate.

By making, literally, a Federal case out of this pretty innocuous recitation, the Bright plaintiff is likely to stir up a hornet's nest of opposition from the powers of Organized Religion, and this counteractivity is not likely to help anyone. Look at what theistic oppositon to gay marriage accomplished--it helped bring back Georgie Porgie for another term. And I can see some poor Democratic shlub having to waffle over this issue and having his patriotism and religious conviction challenged at the same time. Of course, the simplest solution to the entire issue is to excise the "Under God" phrase as a Cold War anachronism, and return the pledge to its original purely patriotic meaning, with its simpler cadence restored.

Yeah, that'll happen.

Meanwhile, to prove that it's not just the President who is evincing a learning curve by actually admitting that he is fallible, I am very pleased to report that I myself have successfully completed my first Sudoku puzzle. Huzzah! A sudoku, for the uninitiated, is a grid of 81 boxes, subdivided into nine squares, for which you have to enter every integer from 1 to 9, with none repeating across, down or within the nine boxes. It started in Japan and like sushi, can be addictive, but it wasn't until today that I acquired the sufficient logical wherewithal to complete my first one. It's good to know that my cerebrum can still adapt to a challenge, even though I am past 50 and occasionally smoke a joint.

And what of my Fantasy Baseball team? you must all be asking. Well, thanks for your interest. As of today we are still holding on to first place by our fingernails, though Elvis and Jesus are threatening to overtake us at any second. We need wins! We need RBIs! Help! Okay, I understand that non-Rotisserie people couldn't give the smallest rat's ass about any of this, but at least admit that interesting to see the words Elvis and Jesus used in the context of baseball statistics.

Finally, a word about the comments I am getting appended to my blog entries. Thanks for taking the time to read and consider my opinions; that itself is flattering. But I'd really much rather hear critical or laudatory comments than the vacuous "Good blog" which inevitably precedes an advertisement for your own blog or commercial web page. I do not really see a difference between these remarks and the spam that appears in my e-mail box. I suppose that in our free society I should appreciate that we are all trying to sell something--jewelry, cellphones, or our opinions. But try to be less venal about it, okay?