from transcripts of things...with some things that relate to today...

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DE dan ellsberg
AR arundahti roy
ES ed snowden
JC me

JC: They fly the jets over every opening game of the NFL …it’s become an imperial rite.
DE: The flags, Star Spangled Banner…
AR: I agree, cricket is like that in India, but then look at Mohammed Ali, Jesse Owens, Viv Richards…great sportsmen who’s politics was the opposite of that…
DE: I want to give you this historical footnote which I bet you haven’t heard. You can look this up on Google. The Pledge of Allegiance in America dates back to about 1892, [DEL, ]very late in the game. We’re the only country, as far as I know, in the world that takes a pledge to the flag; everybody has a flag, but nobody pledges allegiance to a flag, what does that mean, allegiance to a flag? It came out that the pledge was written by the editor of a magazine that had been around in all the schools, and the spirit behind it was...we have to remember it was the 1890s....you had all these immigrants...Eastern Europeans….
JC: Yeah.
DE: …like my grandparents. So the idea was, they’re all different, so we want them to have a feeling of unity for the flag—“I pledge allegiance to the flag...one nation under all...indivisible”—it wasn’t under God in those days. Eisenhower brought that in the Cold War to distinguish us from...
ES: From the godless Communists! (Laughing)
DE: That was the idea of it.... and it was somehow recognized in Congress. You were not obligated, actually, but they endorsed the idea of the Pledge of Allegiance, so every classroom...
JC: Strongly suggested that you’d better say it….
DE: ...should have a flag, right? This was new. Every classroom should have a flag so the children could pledge allegiance to the flag.
AR: And is that still today in the United States?
DE: Of course it is. If you read accounts of this, and I’ve read some accounts, they do not emphasize the point that, by coincidence, the guy who wrote that pledge was one of the largest flag makers in the United States.
ES: Really!
DE: And he sold flags to every classroom...
ES: That’s so capitalist.
(all laughing)
AR: Now they’re made in China. Outsourced nationalism.
DE: Indian flag makers haven’t realized the possibility...
AR: These days we’re being force-fed the Indian flag in India. They play the national anthem after movies…people who don’t stand up get physically attacked by others in the audience. I think I may have flag allergy…I need ointment..
JC: We love creating totems and symbols to which we must genuflect and bow down…legitimizing authority that is at best arbitrary…hiding what it’s up to… cultivating mass obedience…
AR: What are the ways in which the idea of the Nation teaches us to obey? There was just one more thing I wanted to say about cultivating obedient populations—I’m making a mental leap here—it has to do with creating societies that live on credit. It has been very carefully and very consciously done in the US. In the early 1900s, instead of giving workers’ the higher wages that unions were fighting for, they were given access to credit. It created a society constantly burdened by debt, brainwashed into equating self-worth with material possessions, running to keep up with their life-styles. You have students who ought to have the right to free education, whose minds should be free, who should be asking the most fundamental questions about the meaning of life about the society in which they live—but instead they are buried in debt, desperate to fit in to the system, desperate for jobs that will pay back their debts—an obedient population…and now they all know that on top of it all, they are being spied on. I wonder sometimes if the NSA is only pretending to be contrite about the public outrage about their spying—maybe they’re quite pleased—“Let people look over their shoulders, let them worry about what we know about them, let’s trip them up, keep them on the hop, always unsure, forever de-stabilized

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