In God We Bluster

I have it on good authority that what America needs is jobs, jobs, jobs. And Mitt Romney knows where they are, are, are, but it's kind of a secret. So it's probably true, although I would argue that not just any jobs jobs jobs will do. For instance, we could totally employ a huge number of people to hand-dig us a mass grave that we can then all jump in, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Not even if Exxon Mobil and Arch Coal say it is. They've been mistaken about things before.

So one reason to vote for Romney is because he knows where the jobs jobs jobs are, and he has a plan for the economy. To wit, he, for one, is not going to tamper with the little bumpy bits on our coins. He is not only not going to remove God from our money, he is going to make sure He is right on the faces and not on the edges. This is big. I can almost feel the engine of commerce rumbling back to life. God has, of course, been on our coins even during the great recession, but He's got to be breathing a sigh of relief knowing His real estate isn't about to be yanked out from under Him. God didn't move into the paper-currency neighborhood until 1957. At that time, I was four years old and not all that productive, but sure enough ten years later I was pulling down fifty cents an hour for babysitting, so I know it works.

It's certainly a timely declaration of policy, because those coins have been carrying God around for over seventy years now, and He could slip off at any time. He's also parked in the Pledge of Allegiance and has resisted attempts to pry Him out. So far.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 as a spare and sprightly little number, just something to dash off before your 'rithmetic drills, and it has gotten good and baubled up ever since, with one outfit after another hanging more and more trinkets off of it. By the time I learned it, it had gotten pudgy enough to require long pauses to prop it up with. Many people think that there is nothing about a simple statement that can't be improved by larding it up with more words. So the original "I pledge allegiance to my flag" became "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America" because someone fretted that little immigrant Irish kids might get confused over which specific flag required their loyalty. And later, in my lifetime, someone pasted in "under God" after the "one nation" part, in order to clear up any confusion that we were godless commies, which we by God were not. Well then. Now we've got a pledge stout enough to puff out the little chests we laid our little ten-year-old hands on. We didn't used to lay our hands on our chests, but times change. When Francis Bellamy got the ball rolling, schoolchildren raised their arms straight out toward the flag, palms down, but that little salute got the heave-ho in 1942 after Adolf Hitler ruined it, and the little hyphen mustache, for all eternity.

Theodore Roosevelt objected to putting God on our coins because  he thought, with some biblical justification, that it was sacrilegious to put the name of God on money, but modern Republicans recognize that it just makes money that much easier to worship. In God We Trust has thus become the official motto of the United States, replacing E Pluribus Unum (pluribus being Latin for "the 99%").

Nevertheless, some people still get upset about God being all over our money and our pledge, but a ruling in the sixties held that these practices were protected as "acts of ceremonial deism," which means that the rote repetition of the whole business has rendered it insignificant from a religious standpoint. Which is true: atheists still feel the prick of the word every time, like a splinter under the skin, but no one else really hears it anymore. So, legally, it is a meaningless enterprise that Romney is defending so fervently.

But times, as noted before, change, and the threat of commies has been superseded by multiple threats, from Islamists to scientists, so the pledge may be due for another implant:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, the real one who created the whole world and the sky and everything six thousand years ago and just try to get your other gods to pull off something like that, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, as long as you have photo ID.

Holy shit.