Wednesday, September 11, 2013

FOX: Bow down to my God or get out.

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

-George H.W. Bush-

Perhaps you're old enough to remember, as I certainly am, to remember when Dwight Eisenhower had his arm twisted by the Knights of Columbus into adding a mandatory affirmation of  individual and collective subordination of  national allegiance and legal obligation to religious belief.  It may have had something to do with the need to give the rabble some reason they could understand to make us seem like the good guys in the struggle against the Communists for world domination of the 1950's but it's really the same struggle for domination our founders participated in against tyranny over the human mind and spirit by Established Christianity in Europe and it goes back millennia - or longer.

Perhaps you're old enough to remember the days of the Vietnam war, the conflict that like the Civil War was never really won, never really resolved and which still divides the nation our kids are forced to call indivisible every morning. Anyone my age either cringes or puffs up in self-righteous idiocy when he hears "America - love it or leave it."

That fulsome piece of carrion of course deconstructs to "this country is only for those who agree with the lowest and angriest common denominator" and that, at the time, being the John Wayne/Martha Ray duo shouting that if you don't support the war and all it's horrors, lies and sinister motivations, you're not a "real" American. And of course real Americans believe in the correct god and them commies don't and there's the whole story. Napalm - God wills it!

Isn't it odd, by the way how we still make a hero out of that bloated, talentless fart-bag despite his support for the oppression and slaughter of two million people in order to preserve a system of government that had enslaved them?

Does anyone doubt that Fox, had it existed 50 years ago would have supported that national embarrassment, the stench of which still is detectable like some cosmic background radiation?  Fox, in fact has always supported the dichotomies the Right uses to foment anger, promote dictatorial colonialism and criminal exploitation and set us one against the other. Men against women, rich against poor, white against black, corporate against individual -- those contrived dichotomies have always set up the most ignorant, deluded, misinformed and stupidly self-righteous to be the good guys, the sensible, clear thinking guys who oppose science, empiricism, mathematics and indeed honesty in favor of myth and legend, whether corporate, political, religious or any mixture of them. Those clear thinking, God fearing deniers of evolution, geology, cosmology, nuclear physics, climatology and history.

Hence when a President like George Bush the Elder says he can't understand how someone who doesn't believe in some god or another can be considered a citizen and thus demonstrate his contempt for the letter and spirit of Our Constitution and indeed the Enlightenment and Humanist movement that produced it, you won't hear a peep of protest from the gaggle of birdbrain gigglers at Fox.

Yes, I'm tired of listening to the things Fox News is tired of and particularly since one of those things is my freedom. Every time some parent somewhere gets tired of his kid being cajoled, coerced, forced and even bullied into not only acknowledging some category of deity, we're affirming that our freedom itself is subordinate to what its shamans say that deity demands.

Dana Perino "is tired" of "atheist's demands" for freedom from religion and says "they don't have to live here."  I wonder if her  distaste for individual freedom of conscience includes the suggestion that the bones of Madison and Jefferson and Franklin and Washington be disinterred and dumped elsewhere in some free country, but of course even that obvious extension of her idiotic ire implies an intelligence far too great to exist in such an empty skull.

Dana Perino and the bastards who pay her are the enemies of freedom, truth, justice and what I used to think of as our great nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.Yes, I'm tired of you Dana and of the miserable, evil, corporate bastards who pay you to undermine everything special and praiseworthy about our country - or should I say my country, because not only are you not part of it, you're not worthy of being part.

The part of it you hate is the heart of  Democracy, the soul of freedom and if you won't tolerate the humanity, the humanism at the heart of America - you don't have to live here.

16 comments:

  1. "Under God" was added to the pledge in the 1950's. The founders must have been turning in their graves. It's certainly not what they meant and I doubt would support. They certainly understood that someone who believed differently than them, should have protections to believe what they believed. Dana is one of those who has been indoctrinated by words. There was resistance to change the pledge, but as usual the majority ruled, not sanity, or the meaning of the Constitution.

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  2. Well...

    I am an Eisenhower baby. It was kind of you to characterize his mistake as an arm-twisting. Doubtless, it would be very easy in the rear-view mirror to deconstruct this great American. My earliest memory of Eisenhower was a gag book that featured press release photos of Eisenhower, Kruschev and Nixon with comic one-liners typed in little cartoon balloons entitled Who's in Charge Here? It was a riot.

    As far as Vietnam goes, in 1969 I walked into a head shop in La Jolla and viewed with great interest a now famous poster with a tree of life, enshrined by the words, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." It has framed my perception of armed conflict and aerial bombardment to this very day. I too am among the legion that will forever be haunted by the Life Magazine photo of the little girl running in terror as the American napalm burned her young body. I read with great relish the underground newspapers published by the student body at UCSD protesting the war and president Nixon. I wished that I was old enough to go to an anti-war demonstration. Only years later did I learn about the chants the anti-war hippies leveled at president Johnson.

    The first time I saw the "America Love it or Leave it," was in a MAD magazine lampoon, my favorite periodical at the time. Years later, I saw the actual bumper sticker on a faded Cadillac or Oldsmobile.

    What's going on with Bush 41? I thought he was the mature and reasonable one? I guess FOX just brings out the worst in people. John Wayne smoked his way to lung cancer, a terrifying and painful death. I guess I'll just leave him alone. My favorite line of his was, "Ouch!" when he got shot in a gunfight.

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  3. apple tree
    one dingleberry begets
    another dingleberry
    an infinite progression
    or in this case
    an infinite regression !!

    Fuck Bush!

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    1. Yes, turn about is fair play and he sure fucked us good.

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  4. I was 9 years old when it changed. I recall thinking that at least we didn't have to say "under Jesus" because it wasn't all that much earlier that we had to learn and sing Christmas songs with lines about "little Lord Jesus" and "Christ the Lord" about which my irate parents had little control.

    But hey, it used to be worse. At least realtors and hotel registration clerks don't ask you about your religious views even if some states won't let you run for office if you don't believe in the mysterious old man, US Constitution be damned. Maybe some day we'll not only remember that no religious test may be required for public office and extend that to no religious test to attend public school.

    The idea that we were intended to be a secular nation built on humanist principles is one of those things like the origin of species, the age of the universe and the changing climate brings out a jealous rage in some people who think their chosen mythology conveys some special privileges: like the right to persecute and silence alternative views. Dana Perino seems to be one of them. Fox "say Merry Christmas or die" News is all about such people.

    I can speculate that they are so afraid that their bizarre certainties about a long dead Jewish rebel are nonsense, that they can't allow anyone to express doubt or cite history or even logic. That level of fear probably means that some part of their brains, long bound into a painful, malodorous lump like a 19th century Chinese woman's foot recognizes they are going to die and pass into oblivion and that there is no meaning to life or our place in an endless and violent universe.

    Yes, I remember the poster, but I don't dream of a time or place where violent conflict is an alien idea. I think it's man's nature and man's fate (with apologies to Herbert Marcuse)

    Yes, I think the organized swearing - in Florida schools it's mandatory - of a religious oath is offensive, unAmerican, unconstitutional and ironically, for many religious people, blasphemous. It's another one of the reasons I hold the United States to be dishonest in the picture it paints of itself. We're witch hunters, xenophobes, bigots and intolerant of tolerance and we hate each other for our freedom.

    And John F*cking Wayne, the man who got out of the draft for having hurt himself surfing pretending to be a warrior and made a career out of damning my disbelief in our divine mission to burn children rather than let them turn "Commie."

    The Duke makes me puke.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. The following anonymous post was inadvertently removed:

    I think we should change it back, and take out of the pledge "under God."

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  7. Dana Perino, C Plus Augustus's sometime press secretary, who, when asked about the Cuban Missile Crisis, answered that she didn't know what it was. (Well, Duh! How WOULD she, because she wasn't BORN then!).

    As a nonreligious Bostonian, I have always substituted "cod" for "god" when reciting the pledge.

    And why,I've always wondered, in the name of cod, do we need to pledge allegiance in the first place? I never had to pledge allegiance to my parents, or later, to my own family every morning. They KNEW I cared for and loved them and would be ever loyal to them. I've never understood why the politicians and insecure citizens feel the need to extract that allegiance from people who believe this is the greatest country in the world. I mean, wouldn't people naturally WANT to be true and faithful to the number one bestest place on earth without having to be coerced into saying so?

    Is there something I'm not understanding here?

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    1. A sign of dignity, a garish flag,
      To be the aim of every dangerous shot,
      A queen in jest, only to fill the scene.


      The 'pledge' as I'm sure you know was written for children back in the 1890's as America was promoting nationalistic and militaristic adventure - as was much of Europe as well. Of course it was written by a Utopian socialist preacher but that skeleton rarely peeks out of the closet today now that the "S" word is so loosely and maliciously applied to anyone left of Limbaugh.

      I resent being treated like a child at every club meeting I go to and have resented being made to pledge my allegiance to a symbol that waved over good and evil alike. I've often substituted Thor who is after all a better sort of God for the intent of the pledge and occasionally Zog, I god I made up back when I used to draw cartoons. As Zog exists only for purposes of parody - and of course to promote my personal interests - I have no problem with this being a nation under Zog.

      Liberty and justice? Whaddayou, a socialist?

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    2. The Pledge and the Pledge of Allegiance are two time tested ways for us republicans to change the subject when we are proven wrong.

      Since my forced transition to republican I've been saying the Pledge quite a bit recently.

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  8. Hopefully we have have to insert Allah as well and deal with Sharia law advocates.

    Pre Eisenhower indeed works for me.

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  9. There is no God but Zog and Fogg is his prophet.

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    Replies
    1. Indeed. But I thought his prophet was Mystic and Haze.

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