Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) Classics (2000-2011)
Rant #231
(published June 16, 2005)
Flag Day: Schools Should Not Teach Kids To Verbally Fellate Flags
(with Addendum)
by Rex Curry, Attorney At Law
(addendum by David Erik Nelson, Editor, PMjA)
Teachers, students, school boards and schools all over the USA received this open letter. Please help spread the word.

Flag Day (6-14) is a good day to remove the flag from schools. Please help, and also educate everyone about these new historical discoveries:

1. The original Pledge of Allegiance to the USA's flag used a straight-armed salute and it was the source of the salute of the monstrous National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis). The gesture was not an ancient Roman salute.

2. The Pledge began with a military salute that then extended outward toward the flag. Due to the way that Francis Bellamy (the Pledge's creator) used the gestures, the military salute led to the Nazi salute.

3. Bellamy was a self-proclaimed socialist in the nationalism movement and his dogma influenced socialists in Germany, and his pledge was the origin of their salute. Many people forget that "Nazi" means "National Socialist German Workers' Party." A mnemonic device is the swastika (Hakenkreuz in German). Although the swastika was an ancient symbol, it was also used sometimes to represent "S" letters joined for "socialism" under the German National Socialists.

How the discoveries were made is a fascinating story in itself. I made the discoveries by accident during legal research involving litigation about the pledge. As a libertarian lawyer, and the USA's favorite flagologist, I do pro bono work educating students and others about the right to reject the ritualism.

Fight the flag hags and their flag fetish. Government's schools should not teach kids to verbally fellate flags each morning. It is like a brainwashed cult of the omnipotent state. For adults it is childish. Remove the pledge from the flag, remove flags from schools, remove schools from government.




Listen to a new talk-show appearance by Attorney Rex Curry about the flag and the pledge http://rexcurry.net/rexcurry4.mp3

A more detailed version of the article above is at http://rexcurry.net/flag-day.html

Rex Curry
Attorney At Law

by David Erik Nelson, Editor, PMjA

When this dropped into our inbox, another editor—Mojo himself!—mentioned that his father has a similar rant he rolls out for every Flag Day, with the addition that Pa' Mojo's rant also includes references to Richard Milhous Nixon—who is a sort of archnemesis in the pantheon of Pa' Mojo, himself a process serving communist with a juris doctorate.

In reply, I noted that I had made a crack about Flag Day during the last week of school (I teach high school English at a small alternative school), and the kids didn't even know what the fuck Flag Day was. The kids didn't even really know the Pledge—which I guess is to say that hippie school is striking a blow in the battle to be too lazy and ill-organized to bother indoctrinating the kids with jingoistic hoo-haw. I imagine Mr. Curry and Pa' Mojo both would appreciate this.

As an aside, I noted that this made Flag Day a sort of secular Shavuot, in that you feel like you should know what it is, but can never quite recall when it comes up or what it's about; it's a very important holiday that everyone forgets, and no one recalls the importance of.

This was a cryptic remark for me to make, because Mojo is not Jewish, and thus has a very low probability of knowing what the fuck Shavuot is. For the uninitiated (spiritually uncircumcised?), Shavuot is the "Feast of Weeks," celebrating 1) the elapse of seven weeks after Passover (the very important celebration of the Jew's liberation from Egypt by an angry, cryptic and faceless God) and 2) Moses' receiving the Ten Commandments from God. This second part of the celebration is significantly downplayed, and often treated as something of a coincidence; "Yeah, Shavuot is seven weeks after Pesach; also, Moses did something. It mighta been when he hit that rock and pissed God off, but it could be something else."

We remember the important days: Rosh Hashanah and Yum Kippur(the dynamic duo of the Jewish New Year, which come in the Fall,) Sukkoth (also in the Autumn, an ancient harvest celebration), Chanukah (a bunch of secularized commercial bullshit only greedy 9-year-olds give a shit about), Passover (Liberation from Egypt, as well as a Fertility holiday, in the Spring), Shavuot ("Ahhhh . . . Wasn't that when Moses cut down the apple tree?") This probably seems weird; for most of America, if they are to associate anything other than Christ-Killing, Woody Allen or Sandy Koufax with Judaism, it's going to be what America sees as the centerpiece of the Old Testament, those Ten Commandments—shit, it's right on the goddam poster for the movie and everything! But, the Ten Commandments are not a really big deal for Jews. Firstly, "10 Commandments" is something of a mistranslation from the Hebrew. In Hebrew, the word for commandments is mitzvot and refers to any of 613 rules enumerated throughout the Torah, including such classics as to be hospitable [Deuteronomy 22:4], to know there is a God [Exodus 2:20], and not to withhold food, clothing, and sexual relations from your wife [Exodus 21:10]. (That's three rules, by the way, not five—the wife one is one commandment with three parts.) But, the name "Ten Commandments", in the Hebrew, is not Aseret mitzvot, but rather the Aseret ha-Dibrot, which best translates as "10 Utterances" or "10 Things That Got Said." The Commandments themselves are generally understood to be a system of classification for the 613 mitzvot which actually count.

I had a Jewish upbringing, and am a practicing (if doubtful) Jew. I have difficulty summoning all 10 Commandments to mind—much as I have difficulty getting through the entire pledge, much as most Americans have difficulty getting either out, error free and in toto. In fact, I can recall little to no Commandments-based religious instruction in my life, but can recall a great number of occasions that the Commandments were brought up and discussed in secular settings—specifically school, but also in politicians' speeches, news items, and in plaques and displays in public buildings. I don't know that I've ever seen the Commandments—entirely written out, in Hebrew or English—in a temple. I've seen it used as a decorative element in reliefs, statues and etc., but that was as a prop for Moses to carry, and not as a Guide to Life.

We love our mitzvot, we love our Torah, we love to tell long anecdotes that don't really go anywhere (Jesus, I'm looking at you, bud!), but we don't really focus on the Commandments.

Much as all of the Jews I know are Americans, and love our Constitution and our Bill of RIghts and our ACLU, but can't necessarily put together the whole Pledge, or our god-awful Anthem.

Or, fuck Jews, Americans. The Americans I know—which is just about everyone I know—love our Rights and our Land and our specific notions of Godhood, but don't give a shit for the Pledge, the Flag, the Tablets in the Ark of the Covenant.

Coincidentally, Flag Day and Shavuot were on the same day this year, June 14.

So, the coincidences, then, are the Roman Salute becoming the Flag Salute becoming the Nazi Salute, which is done for the flag which was made by the folks who started breaking up the British Empire, on whose flag the sun never set, and the celebrated Flag is now situated such (around the globe in military bases, in the sands of Iraq and the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, on the goddamn Moon) that the sun never sets on it. It's a holiday that you either feel is gravely sinister, or have difficulty identifying, and it coincides with Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, a document which has taken on far greater importance to secular America than it ever apparently held for the Chosen People to whom it was delivered, a document which we are now taught was the basis of our government (despite the ridiculousness of this claim, and the fact that the Founding Fathers themselves refute it.) Much as we are taught that the Flag and Pledge, that saying the first and honoring the second, is central to our Freedom and National Identity, despite the fact that it never was before, that both are highly mythologized recent inventions, and that it was, again, Hitler himself who, in the 20th Century, argues most persuasively and passionately for the need to honor the pomp and symbology of flags and symbols and ancient rites repeated nonsensically into the future.

And then, of course, there's God, poor God, in whom we Trust, who—according to Jewish Law—we blaspheme on every dollar, who we shoe horn into everything regardless of what the Founding Fathers or the Patriarchs or just our plain old immigrant grandparents might think. Poor God.

Shavuot, Flag Day, Pledges and Commandments: Guys in the biz (Priests, Politicians, the Devout, the Litigious) see these as touchstones and battle grounds, and the rest of us (the Struggling Masses Yearning to be Free, the Chosen Joe Sixpacks in Temple and Church), we don't even really notice or care.

In a way, it is the opposite of Democracy, the opposite of Faith, if the People don't vote for it and the Faithful don't buy into it, then it isn't really there.

But, whatever. The wheels on the bus go round and round.

In a post-script to that e-mail to Mojo, I noted the coincidence, that oft-forgotten Flag Day and place-holder Shavuot both came on June 14 this year, and voiced the possibility that I might jot off a little addendum for Mr. Curry's essay. And here it is.

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