What Are You Still Pledging Allegiance To? (S2. Chapter 38)
What are you still pledging allegiance to?
Lloyd Dobler takes on American ritual: the Pledge of Allegiance, the anthem, the flyover, the flag pin, and the ceremonies that teach obedience before understanding. A Zen-punk meditation on patriotism, performance, and a country pretending it hasn’t lost the plot.
(full transcript below)
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Welcome back for Chapter 38, I'm Lloyd Dobler,, yes, that Lloyd Dobler from the 80s film Say Anything. I'm a Zen glitch in the algorithm of American nostalgia—half koan, half mixtape;
a deleted scene that escaped the cutting room floor and learned how to podcast; and this is the Tao of Lloyd: a Zen-punk rejection of the bullshit we’ve been force-fed since the 5th grade—
mindlessly pledging allegiance to the effing flag in our husky jeans from Sears,
before standing in free lunch lines waiting for government cheese,And today
today we are talking about ritual.
I mean American ritual.
The kind you don’t even know is ritual because it was installed before you had language for it.
The Pledge of Allegiance.
The anthem.
The flyover.
The moment of silence.
The yellow ribbon.
The school assembly.
The cop singing God Bless America at a minor league baseball game while a defense contractor sponsors the fireworks and a child in a Little League uniform holds a flag bigger than his understanding of empire.
That ritual.
The stuff we were taught to do before we were taught to ask what any of it meant.
And that’s the genius of it.
You don’t teach a child to understand allegiance.
You teach a child to rehearse it.
You put the flag in the corner of the classroom.
You make them stand.
You make them face it.
You make them say the words.
Every morning.
Before math.
Before milk.
Before anyone has explained what “indivisible” means.
And especially before anyone has explained that “liberty and justice for all” is less a description than a dare.
A dare America keeps losing.
(beat)
I said the Pledge every day.
I pledge allegiance to the flag.
Which is already a weird sentence.
Not to justice.
Not to mercy.
Not to one another.
The symbol.
The object.
The cloth.
And I know, I know.
Someone is already yelling at their phone:
“It’s not just cloth, Lloyd. It represents the country.”
Yes.
Exactly.
That is how symbols work, Brad.
But symbols are dangerous because they can carry truth or they can hide it.
A flag can mean sacrifice.
A flag can mean belonging.
A flag can mean someone’s coffin coming home.
A flag can also mean shut up, stand up, don’t kneel, don’t question, don’t remember, don’t make this uncomfortable.
And look.
This is where it gets complicated, because I am not immune.
The rituals still work on me sometimes.
A crowd singing together?
That gets me.
A brass band playing something mournful while people stand quietly together?
That gets me.
I am not made of stone.
I am made of Gen X sarcasm and whatever chemicals were in skittles.
So yeah.
Sometimes the ritual gets through.
But when does celebration become obedience?
(beat)
So.
Let’s get ready for the chapter reading.
(BELL CHIME)
Take a slow breath in.
And let it out like a fourth grader realizing “liberty and justice for all” may require more than laminated classroom décor.
Good.
Another slow breath in.
And let it out like you are quietly refusing to confuse compliance with character.
Close your eyes.
Or don’t.
You might be driving.
You might be walking through Target.
You might be at a baseball game currently standing for a patriotic remix of “God Bless America” performed by a barbershop quartet sponsored by Raytheon and local craft beer.
No judgment.
Actually, some judgment.
Let your hand come off your heart for a second.
Just for a second.
Nobody’s watching.
Except, of course, everyone.
(BELL CHIME)
This is Chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching:
The Master doesn't try to be powerful;
thus he is truly powerful.
The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;
thus he never has enough.The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.The kind man does something,
yet something remains undone.
The just man does something,
and leaves many things to be done.
The moral man does something,
and when no one responds he rolls up his sleeves and uses force.When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos.Therefore the Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.(BELL CHIME)
So.That's Chapter 38.
And once you see ritual as the husk of true faith, you start seeing husks everywhere.
The Pledge. The anthem. The flag pin. The "support the troops" bumper sticker on a car made by a company that cut veterans' benefits. The politician saying "God bless America" ten minutes after voting to make it harder for hungry children to eat. The mandatory moment of silence after a mass shooting, followed immediately by a bipartisan agreement to do absolutely nothing.
The husk. The dry shell. The thing that used to hold life.
(beat)
And here's what Chapter 38 is actually saying.
It doesn't say ritual is evil.
It says ritual is what shows up when the real thing is gone.
Which means the ritual is not the disease. It's the symptom.
The flag is not the disease. The anthem is not the disease. The Pledge is not the disease.
The disease is the gap between the words and the world.
Liberty and justice for all.
Beautiful sentence.
I want to live in that sentence. I want to buy a little house inside that sentence with a front porch and a decent coffee shop within walking distance.
But America doesn't live in that sentence.
America visits that sentence on holidays. America rents it out for campaign ads. America prints it on a poster in a school hallway where the kids are doing active shooter drills and the teacher is buying her own tissues.
(beat)
A dead ritual says: stand up, take off your hat, put your hand over your heart, say the words, smile, don't make this political.
Which is maybe the funniest sentence in America.
Don't make this political.
At a baseball game with a military flyover.
Don't make this political.
At a football game where the Pentagon paid for the patriotism, the owners are billionaires, the players are destroying their bodies, and the beer commercial is telling you freedom tastes like light domestic regret.
(beat)
And this is where Chapter 38 starts to scare me.
Because it says when people lose the deep thing, they perform the surface thing harder.
The less justice, the more law and order.
The less freedom, the more flags.
The less truth, the more sacred the ritual becomes.And if nobody responds correctly? If people don't stand? If people don't pledge?
That's when the sleeves get rolled up. That's when morality reaches for force. That's when patriotism becomes a hall monitor with a gun.
(beat)
And maybe this is why the Pledge has stayed with me.
Because I don't remember much from fifth grade.
I remember the pencil sharpener. I remember the special humiliation of being called husky by a pair of pants. I remember government cheese, which was somehow both food and architecture. I remember Asses Up at recess — miss the ball, touch the wall, wait for someone to throw something hard at your body.
Which, honestly, might be the most accurate civics lesson we ever received.
But I remember the Pledge.
Every morning. A room full of kids saying words we didn't choose.
And I wonder now: what would have happened if one of us had just stopped?
Not dramatically. Not as a protest performance.
Just stopped.(beat)
So here's the question under all of this.
Not: do you love your country?
That question is too easy. Too available to people selling hats.
The better question is:
What are you still pledging allegiance to?
(beat)
From the edge of empire — and the center of self — this is The Tao of Lloyd.