A friend of mine sent me a beautiful patriotic commentary on it, in honor of Independence Day. A school principal told his students that he knew that the pledge bored them as a bunch of words they had to recite every schoolday. He gifted them with an oral commentary on each line.
I had to stop, though, at his idealistic respond to the phrase "and to the republic for which it stands": "And to the Republic--A Republic: a sovereign state in which power is invested into the representatives chosen by the people to govern; and the government is the people; and it's from the people to the leaders, not from the leaders to the people."
This memory of Red Skelton was spoken in a serious vein in 1969, referring to a childhood event, so it can be surmised that it happened sometime in the early twentieth century.
Would that that definition of a republic held true. Back in 2002, when Words, UnLtd. was a paper document, I had this to say about the GOP using the term "Republican" to refer to themselves:
"Democrats seem far more aware of the root meaning of their party name, backers of "rule by the people" than do the Republicans. What is a republic but a res publica, "a shared matter, a public matter"? When our government champions only one percent of the populace or less, then the republic is no longer a public concern, but the province of a few. When is a republic not a republic? Let's re-form the etymology. Res privata, "private, not public matter." Let's rename the Republicans Reprivatans. In spirit, the Democrats are far more the compassionate conservatives these days, those fighting to keep our country a res publica, something that involves the people, all of us."
*****
But rather than ending on a sour note, I found reason for optimism offered by political commentator and columnist Fareed Zakaria, writing in Time magazine in the July 11 issue. The context is a comparison between our hobbling economy and the dire situation in Greece.
In a column titled "It's All Greek to U.S.," he writes that, compared with the huge problems in Greece, ours are manageable.
He then lists a splendid array of positive components of our economy:" home to the leading companies in the most advanced industries," "has the largest capital markets," "continues to spawn new companies and new industries," wide array of exports, healthy demographics, "impeccable credit history," and so on.
Beyond that, the world has not lost faith in our economy and the solutions to its problems border on "simple": "Debates over money are always amenable to compromise. You can split the difference"--and we have more than a month to wrangle over what to do about the deficit, because neither spending alone nor cutting down on important programs by itself will solve our problems.
Solutions for the short term have been offered. In the preceding week's issue of Time, Zakaria quotes Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time, as observing that the Republicans' "playing games with America's creditworthiness . . . is almost certainly unconstitutional."
Greece is tackling its problems head-on with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, patiently and gradually explained to the people, whatever their response has been (recent rioting, e.g.).
Zakaria ends with the simple statement that we have a lot to learn from Greece in this regard.
"What it has proposed dwarfs anything contemplated in the U.S."
*****
I meant to end on a positve note. How about this? The eminent professor and political activist Noam Chomsky, who is merciless in his criticism of our country's policies here and abroad, was asked why he doesn't move somewhere else and how can he abide such polluted shores?
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