The Pledge

My final project is a remix of a nearly ubiquitous American cultural artifact—the Pledge of Allegiance. Many American children are forced to recite it in school every morning throughout their entire childhood and adolescence, despite a lack of awareness of its meaning and implications. It was only when I reached high school that I was exposed to the Pledge, never having attended a public school before. I immediately saw it for what it is: a means of subtly indoctrinating children into the America-first mindset. It foments uncritical support of the country, encouraging students to a blind eye and a deaf ear to the injustices happening every day, both on American soil and at the hands of American forces abroad. Not only that, but it includes a religious reference that was not part of the original Pledge, but was later added during the Cold War with the rise of anti-Communist and anti-atheist sentiment. As an atheist myself, I was particularly incensed by this element of the Pledge growing up. After all, isn’t America supposed to be a nation with freedom of religion, including the freedom to not be religious at all? It seems to me a violation of the separation of church and state outlined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is often cited as one of this country’s ideals. The Pledge is therefore unconstitutional, exemplifying the hypocrisy of America and the discrepancy between the words of the state and its actions. Not only that, but it is blatantly discriminatory to non-religious students like myself. 

With this video, I aim to illustrate the truths about America that are obscured by and excluded from the Pledge. I asked myself, “What voices are missing here?” and incorporated narratives about capitalism, oligarchy, slavery, anti-Indigenous racism, and other generational systems of oppression. These are just a few of the American horrors that the Pledge conveniently ignores. This is the content that students should really be learning about in school, but frequently are not, due to the recent wave of legislation against critical race theory. My critique is based in social justice and seeks to expose the hypocrisy of a nation that claims to have “liberty and justice for all” while imprisoning thousands of people and forcing them to work all day for pennies. I aim to demonstrate the disparity between American ideals and American reality, to highlight our country’s resounding failure to achieve the goals set out in the Pledge. It is outrageous to claim that the Pledge is representative of reality. However, some defend the Pledge by painting it as a prescriptive document, outlining goals that we as Americans should strive for and always have in mind, goals that the government should use to guide how it creates and enforces policy. This view is also problematic, because it is abundantly clear that America isn’t even following its own guidelines for a perfect society, something I sought to communicate in this piece. 

Remixing is taking an object or piece of media and adding new meaning in a number of ways including but not limited to rearranging its components, combining it with outside material, removing pieces, and replacing certain pieces with other media. Originality is an incredibly complicated concept and is difficult to explicitly define in isolation, but it is easier to ensure originality when one employs a critical lens and incorporates aspects of one’s own identity. When one writes using their own values, developed as a result of the influences they’ve experienced during their lifetime, they are writing in accordance with how their identity shapes their interactions with the world. Since identity is unique to each individual, employing critique based in one’s individual identity and worldview ensures that one is making original contributions to a piece of media. Critique also involves prescribing changes, or at the very least, lamenting certain aspects of a cultural object. Because critique is so entwined with the notion of change, creating a critical remix involves modifying media significantly from its original form and adding new meaning to it. 

Remix, as established above, is an extremely valuable approach to introducing and communicating critique. The specific tools I chose to use in this project were cutting and pasting sections of the original Pledge, bringing in outside media, distorting said outside media, and recording a voiceover in my own words to create the final video. I began by outlining the visual and auditory impact I wanted the project to achieve and writing a script for the voiceover. I then collected all the media I wanted to incorporate into the project in order to best illustrate my words, by searching the Internet for photos and videos that connected to what I was saying in the voiceover. I found a recording of the U.S. National Anthem, which contains similar elements of blind nationalism to the Pledge, and distorted it so it would sound more like the soundtrack to a horror movie than a joyous march. I also used a video of a digital “glitch” pattern, which reminds me of TV static and thus of the mass media through which the American state conveys propaganda to its populace. I intentionally included the glitchy visuals as transitions to separate my voice from the voice of the original cultural artifact, but I also wanted them to communicate a sense of brokenness and disorder to mirror the state of our country. Finally, I gathered my materials and spliced them together into an integrated whole in the form of my video, over which I proceeded to record my voiceover. 

By modifying and recombining the raw materials I chose to use in my project, I modified the meanings they served to convey. For example, instead of sending a message of patriotic glory, the anthem now creates a sense of foreboding and doom. In addition, by placing the Pledge and snippets of the original recording directly before imagery of various America-sanctioned abuses, I was able to present a contrast between the nationalistic fiction America force-feeds its children and the harsh realities of this country.