Two Easy Pieces for July 4, 2008
The Pledge of Allegiance
By
Senator John McCain
As you may know, I spent five and one half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. In the early years of our imprisonment, the NVA kept us in solitary confinement or two or three to a cell. In 1971 the NVA moved us from these conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as 30 to 40 men to a room.
This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change and was a direct result of the efforts of millions of Americans on behalf of a few hundred POWs 10,000 miles from home. One of the men who moved into my room was a young man named Mike Christian.
Mike came from a small town near Selma, Alabama. He didn't wear a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old. At 17, he enlisted in the US Navy. He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967. Mike had a keen and deep appreciation of the opportunities this country and our military provide for people who want to work and want to succeed.
As part of the change in treatment, the Vietnamese allowed some prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing.
Mike got himself a bamboo needle. Over a period of a couple of months, he created an American flag and sewed on the inside of his shirt.
Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike's shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event.
One day the Vietnamese searched our cell, as they did periodically, and discovered Mike's shirt with the flag sewn inside, and removed it.
That evening they returned, opened the door of the cell, and for the benefit of all of us, beat Mike Christian severely for the next couple of hours. Then, they opened the door of the cell and threw him in. We cleaned him up as well as we could.
The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept. A naked light bulb hung in each corner of the room.
As I said, we tried to clean up Mike as well as we could. After the excitement died down, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath that dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was my friend, Mike Christian.
He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag. He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to Pledge our allegiance to our flag and country.
So the next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you must never forget the sacrifice and courage that thousands of Americans have made to build our nation and promote freedom around the world.
You must remember our duty, our honor, and our country
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
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Moses Speaks to Harvard
Edited for brevity by JBG
The late Charlton Heston gave the following speech to the Harvard
Law School Forum on February 16, 1999.
… it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of
liberty...your own freedom of thought...your own compass for what is right.
Dedicating the memorial at a Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great
civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think
and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing
lifeblood of liberty inside you...the stuff that made this country rise from
wilderness into the miracle that it is.
I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in
which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are
mandated.
For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 - long before
Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that
white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's
pride, they called me a racist.
I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I
told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights
or my rights, I was called a homophobe.
But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd
still be King George's boys - subjects bound to the British crown.
Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name
is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to
separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like
it."
Let me read a few examples.
At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team
"The Tribe" because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to
learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name.
In New York City, kids who don't speak a word of Spanish have been placed
in bilingual classes to learn their three R's in Spanish solely because
their last names sound Hispanic.
At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at
Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up
segregated dormitory space for black students.
For me, hyphenated identities are awkward...particularly "Native-American."
I'm a Native American, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated
brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife's side, my grandson is a
thirteenth generation native American...with a capital letter on "American."
What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has
evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far
behind.
Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did
political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you
continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas,
surrender to their suppression?
Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really
believe?
It scares me to death and should scare you too, that the superstition of
political correctness rules the halls of reason.
You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of
American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you
are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land,
are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since
Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that...and abide it...you are -
by your grandfathers' standards - cowards.
If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see
distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you
think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion.
If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a
homophobe.
Don't let America's universities continue to serve as incubators for this
rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism.
But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social
subjugation?
The answer's been here all along.
I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred
thousand people.
You simply...disobey.
Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely.
I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King...who learned it
from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those
in the right against those with the might.
Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient
spirit that tossed tea in to Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that
refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam.
In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with
massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous law
that weaken personal freedom.
But be careful...it hurts.
Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots
of balconies.
You must be willing to be humiliated...to endure the modern-day equivalent
of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma.
You must be willing to experience discomfort. I'm not complaining, but my
own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me. Let me tell you
a story.
A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD
called "Cop Killer" celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It
was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment
conglomerate in the world.
Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so - at least one had
been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash
cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was
black.
I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I
owned some shares at the time and decided to attend.
What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked
for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders,
I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer" - every vicious, vulgar,
instructional word.
"I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF
I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF
I'M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF
I'M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF..."
It got worse, a lot worse. I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me,
the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner
executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me
for that.
Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth,
where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and
Tipper Gore.
"SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY..."
Well, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the
room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps,
one of them said "We can't print that."
"I know," I replied, "but Time/Warner's selling it."
Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be
offered another film by Warner, or get a good review from Time magazine. But
disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk.
When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself...jam the
switchboard of the district attorney's office.
When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the
students graduate with honors...choke the halls of the board of regents.
When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and gets
hauled into court for sexual harassment...march on that school and block its
doorways.
When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays
you...petition them, oust them, banish them.
So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed
footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded
religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in
arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country.
If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.
Thank you.
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amen
JBG
WHO WILL BELL THE CAT?
