American dream or nightmare

Every person seeking elected office in this country says that America is the "Land Of Opportunity".  It is a requirement.  The public must hear those words in every speech, along with "The American Dream", and every speech must now end with "And God Bless The United States Of America".  It has become mandatory.  What is the meaning and what is the purpose?  They are trite phrases without meaning or purpose, but if not said will result in reactionary criticism that includes being un-American and God-less.

Being reactionary used to be an undesirable trait in American politics, but the neo-con right and uber-Christian Tea Party wing-nuts have sadly convinced American low-information voters to believe that it is now desirable.  Low-information voters is not a description for people who are unintelligent or do not have the capability to understand issues, but rather they are people who, either intentionally or unintentionally, are poorly informed about the political issues in their country.  A large proportion of them are white, working-class people who make voting decisions often based on useless information such as gender or race rather than where a candidate stands on the issues.  They often vote against their own interests when purposefully misinformed about a candidate.  A classic example of this is the swift-boating attacks on John Kerry.

Before I get too far off track, I want to get back to the "God Bless" point.  For over 12 years I was an elected official and for much of that time served with a fellow official who was a couple decades older than I.  It is important to note his relative age, because it explains why, at the start of every official meeting, he always said the "Pledge of Allegience to the Flag" differently than most other elected officials with whom I served.  He was a very devout Roman Catholic Irishman who did not include the words "under God" in the Pledge.  Why not?  Because when he went to school, the Pledge did not include those words.  They were added in 1954 by a joint resolution of Congress, in reaction to the anti-communist fervor that swept the nation during the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  If you don't understand this point, refer to Senator Joseph McCarthy and Edward R. Murrow.  Check Wikipedia.  I'll wait.

So my fellow official learned the Pledge by rote, and seemingly never forgot the original words he memorized.  The interesting twist about this story is that the actual original Pledge was created by a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892, and specifically excluded any mention of God.  So a religious leader who wanted to encourage Americans to be more patriotic, and to celebrate the 400 anniversary of the Columbus voyage to the New World, saw no need to include "under God" or any reference to religion in the Pledge he wrote.  Yet here we are today expecting every political speech to include a trite statement that God should bless our country.  And supposedly, no other country.  At least not to the extent that God blesses our country.  Goes back to American Exceptionalism, doesn't it.