One Nation Under Santa Claus

     I have never said the Pledge Of Allegiance. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm unpatriotic. Take, for example, my opinion of John Walker Lindh. I think it's a shame that our Government has been so slow in hiring someone to repeatedly kick him in his tiny nut-sack.

Tastes like chicken

Ok, maybe I'm being a little too harsh. That's too much of a job for one person - after all, he should be kicked around-the-clock, so we'll need several people. Perhaps this could become the try-out for the US Olympic Soccer Team? Make Johnny scream over a certain decibel range and you're in.
     No, there are two reasons why I've never said the Pledge. The first is that, as a child, I could never get the wording right. This is what happens when you try to get a bunch of Kindergarteners to use words like "allegiance", "indivisible", and "one". (in my case, Kindergarteners residing in a crappy steel-town, many of whose lunch consisted of Spam and paint chips). We've all seen (and defaced) enough Family Circus cartoons to know that most children pronounce "indivisible" as "invisible", the same way that many kids make it all the way to fifth grade before they find out that there is no letter in the alphabet called "Ellemeno" coming between "K" and "P". What Bil "spelled with one 'Ellemeno'" Keane and his right-wing cronies fail to find amusing is the large number of speech-impaired toddlers who are, at this very moment, pledging their allegiance to the fag of the United States. Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Harvey Fierstein.
Oh, the other reason that I've never - technically - said the Pledge is that there is no God.
     You'll notice that I said that "there is no God" and not "I don't believe in God". That's because I could say...oh..."I don't believe in Mayor John Street." This would imply that I, like most Philadelphians, have chosen to ignore his sorry ass rather the wake up, every morning, screaming like a Banshee at the realization that the reigns of our city's Government have been turned over to a man who can't spell "allegiance", "indivisible", or "one". Now, if I were to say "there is no Mayor John Street" you could prove me wrong by flying down to the Bahamas and taking a picture of His Honor sleeping on the beach. I dare any of you true believers to show me a picture (By which I mean a photo - not a painting by your crazy Uncle Rudy.) of God sleeping on a beach. In fact, I triple-dog-dare you.

The only known photo of God. Like the late Kurt Cobain, God has left huge tracks all over the Pacific Northwest.

     I was about four when I figured out that there was no Santa Claus and it wasn't until I was about eight that I noticed other kids becoming wise to the ruse. "If Santa's real" I would say to other children, "then why isn't he using his powers to fight crime?" "If Santa isn't real," the rejoinder always came "then who leaves us presents." Fuckin' morons. Now you see why my childhood was a living Hell, and why I'm so bitter today. When I was five or six I applied the Santa Claus logic to God, and the rest is History.
     Speaking of History, our founding Fathers, unlike my classmates, weren't idiots. True, Jefferson owned slaves, Washington grew pot, and James Madison was only eleven inches tall and had a third nipple

James Madison. Only eleven inches?

- but they weren't idiots. Sadly, almost everyone who followed them was an idiot. In the mid-1950's (the heyday of American idiocy), a group of these idiots got together and decided to fight Communism by adding the words "under God" to the Pledge Of Allegiance. So, if you've ever wondered why you don't live on Trotsky Lane or Stalin Blvd., it's because a group of Hillbillies had the insight to add two words to the Pledge and not because of those long-range bombers that we threatened to fly straight up Yuri's ass if he ever even looked cross-eyed at Western Europe.
     But that was then and this is now. Unless you're living in Mississippi, in which case now is then and tomorrow - like a mouth full of white teeth and a cousin-less marriage - is an unreachable dream. We're not fighting the Commies. We're at war with a Theocracy. You know, the kind morons who not only believe in God, but wanna make it a capitol offence not to. Morons like the aforementioned John Walker Lindh, who's presently sitting in his cell praying to merciful Allah to spare his tender testicles from my new Doc Martin's.
     So that's my point. The most patriotic thing that we can do right now is to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge Of Allegiance and never put them back - just in case. After all, the Taliban were one nation under God and look what it earned them - a royal ass-kicking and a place in "The Big Book Of Stupid Goat-Fuckers Who Don't Have A Country Anymore."