I was off taking pictures of the sunset when I noticed another ludicrous lawn sign. I don’t think I need to write a whole new dissection, or even, after correlating the overlapping dogmas, review the novel points of this declaration. However, I feel I need to tackle the opening line, “In Our America…”
In English, our “ours” are ambiguous. If A is talking to B and uses the word “our,” we can only look to context to know whether B is included in the possessive plural. If I say, “I totaled our car,” my listener may be expected to pity or throttled me depending on the circumstances.
Keeping this in mind, there’s a sort of insidious leveraging of ambiguity at play in the sign’s preamble. By this simple preposition, the sign is able to hide division within inclusion, as Joab grabbed Amasa’s beard and Judas kissed our Lord.
It is friendly, a call to unity, to peace, but there’s a knife hidden in it, betrayal; not one of these dogmas are part of the American tradition. Each one is alien, a vector; none are a part of the body.
They are, in fact, antagonistic, but that’s moot at the moment. Even were they good additions to the polity, they are not a part of “Our America” if by our you mean the shared traditions of the nation. If I thought all America should become Presbyterian, I might work for that, yet if I went around saying, “In our America, we’re members of the Presbyterian Church,” you would know that I was dividing the nation.
It is an old habit of liars to weaponize definitions in such a way. A symbol like a flag, or the name of a nation, is powerful because it is loved, but loved for what it should be and what it is. Redefine a word like America by the empty platitudes of a philosophy repugnant to her and you can at once call upon the loyalty of her citizenry to destroy her. Thus Satan casts out Satan, and the house falls. The Devil laughs: he is, after all, the father of lies and prefers rubble.
Tale Told 