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Add American history to the pile of things Dr. Ben Carson is a bit fuzzy on
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/13/1431661/-Add-American-history-to-the-pile-of-things-Dr-Ben-Carson-is-a-bit-fuzzy-on#“The pledge of allegiance to our flag says we are one nation under God,” he said. “Many courtrooms in the land on the wall it says ‘In God We Trust.’ Every coin in our pocket, every bill in our wallet says ‘In God We Trust.’” (...)
Here's some fun facts for you kids at home: In God We Trust does not appear to be in any of our founding documents, and in fact the bit about under God was not even a part of the original pledge of allegiance, which was itself a 20th century invention. The phrase was tacked on (to the pledge, to the bills in our wallet, and as "national motto"
in the rabid anti-communist fervor of the 1950s. The Godless Communists were, you see, Godless, and the anti-communism of the time therefore demanded true Americans do the opposite of whatever they did at every opportunity including, whenever possible, purely symbolic gestures that had little actual impact on anything but which made hardliners and shallow people puff up with self-congratulation.
That's right, kids, the omnipresent godbothering of our national government and that pledge you say in school is the direct legacy of Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts and the Red Scare that rolled through Congress, blacklisting so-called subversives and ruining so very many American lives. (As an aside, whether the addition of under God in the pledge of allegiance was meant to cause closeted American maybe-communist gradeschoolers to burst into flames when spoken or whether it was intended to just make them feel bad is lost to history; whether adding the phrase to courthouses was meant to ward off communists in a similar fashion, also unknown. A great deal of what arch-conservatives believed about communists in those days appears to have been gleaned from books about vampires.)
So the vast majority of those things Dr. Ben Carson is referring to are not in our founding documents or were part of American life at all until the 1950s, or roughly the time when Dr. Ben Carson himself was founded.
Here's some fun facts for you kids at home: In God We Trust does not appear to be in any of our founding documents, and in fact the bit about under God was not even a part of the original pledge of allegiance, which was itself a 20th century invention. The phrase was tacked on (to the pledge, to the bills in our wallet, and as "national motto"
in the rabid anti-communist fervor of the 1950s. The Godless Communists were, you see, Godless, and the anti-communism of the time therefore demanded true Americans do the opposite of whatever they did at every opportunity including, whenever possible, purely symbolic gestures that had little actual impact on anything but which made hardliners and shallow people puff up with self-congratulation.
That's right, kids, the omnipresent godbothering of our national government and that pledge you say in school is the direct legacy of Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts and the Red Scare that rolled through Congress, blacklisting so-called subversives and ruining so very many American lives. (As an aside, whether the addition of under God in the pledge of allegiance was meant to cause closeted American maybe-communist gradeschoolers to burst into flames when spoken or whether it was intended to just make them feel bad is lost to history; whether adding the phrase to courthouses was meant to ward off communists in a similar fashion, also unknown. A great deal of what arch-conservatives believed about communists in those days appears to have been gleaned from books about vampires.)
So the vast majority of those things Dr. Ben Carson is referring to are not in our founding documents or were part of American life at all until the 1950s, or roughly the time when Dr. Ben Carson himself was founded.
Fuzzy? He's so fuzzy he might make a good pet!
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