“I Solemnly Swear...”

...And other bad language

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
3/2/08
http://www.mytown.ca

 

Marianne Kearney-Brown lost her job the other day. It wasn’t much of a job; it was part-time, paid a lousy $700 a month, and consisted of teaching basic math to the moronic offspring of well-heeled parents at the local California State University.

She didn’t lose her job because she abused a student for not knowing that 4 x 3 = 3 x 4, or for not knowing that is the transitive property of multiplication. There’s no reason to believe she was anything other than an excellent teacher. She didn’t insert politics into her arithmetic lessons, teaching, for instance, that odd numbers were liberal and even numbers were conservative, and therefore that two odd numbers always added up to one even number. It’s unlikely that her syllabus gave her much opportunity to opine on the daemonic possession of Charles Darwin.

No, she got fired for changing the loyalty oath that the University required of her so she wouldn’t do something unpatriotic like praise French cheese or claim hockey is better than baseball. Or whatever it is loyalty oaths are supposed to do.

She didn’t have any problem with the oath itself, which is the standard “protect and defend the Constitution” boilerplate. Most people are willing to swear to support the constitution, and the less they know about the constitution, the happier they are to sign. (Case in point: the people who fired her had to sign the same oath, and neither they nor their lawyer know much about it.) But, a lifelong Quaker, she crossed out “swear,” leaving the constitutionally-mandated option of “affirm,” and inserted the words “non-violently” in front of the “protect and defend” language.

She had been doing that for years. She did it 15 years ago. She did it 12 years ago.

But she hadn’t done it post 9/11, in the era of the Putsch junta. In the eyes of the East Bay Cal State administration, any modification to the oath was unacceptable, and when she refused to sign the unmodified version, they fired her. The school system’s lawyer, Eunice Chan, didn’t even try to pretend it was for any other reason. She reportedly said, “If she'd just signed the oath, the campus would have been more than willing to continue her employment.”

I have a jaundiced view of loyalty oaths anyway. I think they are an utter waste of time. They don’t stop anyone who is acting in bad faith, but will stop good people who have moral or religious reservations. As happened here. The law has long obliged Quakers in their determination to not embrace violence for any reason, just as it respects the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious groups are forbidden from signing such oaths. (Hitler was less forbearing: he rounded them up and gassed them. America during WWII just threw them in jail for the duration.) Loyalty oaths are rarely appropriate, and give nothing to the security of the country.

Case in point: every member of the Putsch junta signed such oaths before taking office. Do you think that made any discernable improvement in how they have governed America? Scooter Libby signed such an oath, and lied to the grand jury anyway. And Putsch didn’t even let the court put him in jail for it. So what gives him the right to demand that others sign such oaths?

One reason for my distaste for such is Joseph Heller’s book, “Catch-22." One of the funniest stories in it, at an air force base off the coast of Italy in WWII, is “The Great Patriotic Loyalty Oath Crusade,” in which a ambitious and publicity-hungry colonel hits on the notion that the more loyalty oaths the men sign, the more proof he has that his is the most loyal outfit in the ETO, and that this surely will get him written up in Life Magazine. So when the base general returns a week later, it is to the sight of the men queued up in lines everywhere, signing loyalty oaths so that they can get maps for the morning’s bombing mission, bedding, food, water, anything. Hundreds of lines, thousands of oaths. And of course, nothing else is being done, and the soldiers don’t SOUND more loyal than usual. Actually, they sound somewhat mutinous. The General barks a command, and the crusade ends instantly. Everyone is relieved, even the colonel.

My two cats are very loyal and affectionate when I am giving them food. The minute they have the food, the overt displays of attention and affection vanish, to be replaced with the usual sense of indulgent tolerance that the nicer cats bother to display to human beings. I’m sure that as long as I’m holding the cat food, they would – if they could – sign any loyalty oath I put in front of them. After they’ve eaten, well, they’ll look the language over and reconsider.

Any oath given in exchange for something the person wants is automatically suspect. In the case of employment, it teeters on the edge of duress, and no oath given under duress has any legal or moral validity.

There ARE situations where the oath is appropriate: the taking of public office, for immigrants entering the country, and upon becoming citizens. When joining the military. There are circumstances where the country – not employers, not school bureaucrats, but the country – has the right to ask, “do you pledge yourself to this task in my name?” Even then, allowances MUST be made for religious and moral beliefs. Forcing someone to sign an oath, with the result that it is given insincerely, is far worse than no oath at all.

You may have noticed that “teaching remedial math” isn’t in that list. Nor is getting a driver’s licence or signing up for little league. There are times – most times, in fact – when requiring an oath is just plain stupid and counterproductive.

The country is loyalty-crazy right now. Oaths for part-time teachers are bad enough, but you have a president who is trying to coerce Congress into giving major corporations immunity, so they can spy on the people of America on the president’s behalf. That’s fascism, and signing a loyalty oath didn’t slow this particular president down one bit. Over 900,000 people are on the FBI’s “terror watch list.” If America really has 900,000 terrorists, then America is already finished. I’m guessing there are about 1,500 people on that list who actually intend America harm, and 898,500 who merely think Karl Rove is an asshole.

Of course, the types of people who demand loyalty oaths rarely have any real interest in loyalty; not that of those of whom they demand the oaths, and usually not even their own. It’s merely a way of asserting dominance. But it’s done at some cost to the country.

Loyalty is a virtue, and one that comes from the heart. But it is given, it is earned, and usually, if it is demanded in exchange for nothing more than a part time job, it is diminished.

Cal State needs to apologize to that teacher and give her her job back.

And while they are at it, they should fire that lawyer.