In the last 50 years, has there ever been an American schoolkid who didn't recite countless variations of the Pledge of Allegiance?

Whether out of ignorance, boredom, or contempt, almost every kid does it. Mangling the Pledge is one of those shared experiences only stand-up comedians ever think to talk about--mundane, universal, and in the right hands, occasionally amusing. Not much more. At worst, it becomes a particularly edgy Family Circus.

The punchline is that kids usually have no idea what they're actually saying. That's why last week's Ninth US District Court of Appeals ruling--on a case from California, of course--seems simultaneously to be both a long-overdue burst of common sense and patently ridiculous.

Of course the 1954 federal law inserting "under God" into this monotonous chant, and then further laws compelling kids to recite it every day for 12 years, nre exercises in religious indoctrination, just as the pledge itself is patriotic indoctrination, devoid of meaning for almost every schoolchild. Ironically, making kids say it more--usually, every day, before they're awake--only drains the meaning faster. Not only are the words a bunch of abstract concepts foreign to most children, but the words themselves become a jumble, recited or avoided under the cover of a compulsory group drone as frightening as that in any sci-fi dystopia.

But it is a violation of the separation of church and state? And is that even the biggest problem? (I'm no fan of unthinking patriotism, so for me the words "pledge" and "allegiance" create problems long before the 1954 addition.)

The court ruling struck down both the 1954 version of the Pledge and a California law making that version mandatory classroom material on the grounds that they constitute state endorsement of religion in general and monotheism in particular. It's hard here to separate the words from the form. Is the problem two words--"under God"--or are those words OK in a lesson plan, but not OK when our kids aer forced to recite them en masse at least 20,000 times before adulthood? If it's different, what's the dividing line? If neither is OK, are we prohibiting the utterance of the word "God" on any public property?

On such grounds, conservatives have soundly ridiculed the decision. They're right on the legal hair-splitting, but wrong on the larger question of whether "one nation, under God" is appropriate. One needs no further proof than its history. Lawmakers didn't even think to insert the phrase until an era when it could no longer be assumed that everyone in the US, or the world, was Christian. "One nation, under God" was another way to separate "us" from "them"--"us" being God-fearing Americans, "them" being godless pinkos at home and abroad. For 150 years, no laws required that kids describe our country in this way. When it happened, it wasn't in the service of God at all--it was in the service of anti-Communism. It's a loyalty oath for kids, and the phrase "under God" was inserted at the height of McCartyism. Generally, Americans consider the McCarthy era, with its witch hunts and blacklits, one of the low points of American history. Funny how so many of them are now rushing to defend the necessity of inflicting that era's ethos on small children.

The comedian's mangled Pledge jokes rely on the premise that most children recite it before they know what the words mean, let alone understand them. In that sense, the whole Pledge, not just one phrase, is an expression of faith--faith that our flag, and our country, are what we're forced to say they are. As it happens, there are a lot of things in the contemporary Pledge of Allegiance that I don't believe--"under God" being one, and that bit about our flag and country standing for "freedom and justice for all" being another.

The Pledge isn't a problem because of a religious phrase; it's a problem because a lie, told often enough, becomes truth, and a truth, told often enough, either becomes meaningless cliche or leads you to suspect that it's all a lie. ("Why would they have us say this constantly unless they were afraid we wouldn't believe it?")

Fear of disbelief is at the heart of the Pledge. The ridicule from lawmakers has mostly been on the grounds either that they see nothing wrong with advocating God in the classroom, or, more simply, because it's an easy example of PCism run amok. There has also been the usual grumbling about liberal judges--though after two full decades of conservative bench appointments, rulings like this one and the recent US Supreme Court death penalty cases remind us that it's our constitution, not particular judges, that bars this sort of state social engineering.

But ultimately, in this era of John Ashcroft, the reason lawmakers will object is the same reason there's a "Pledge" of "Allegiance" in the first place: it is a suspension of disbelief, and these days in particular, our leaders seem to crave uncritical obedience.