Allegiance  

PG asks about how the (violent) insertion of under God into the pledge changes its cadence. I agree with the bit she quotes from Florence King, but I'll take the point even further: there's a private joke, I think -- and if not there's certainly a tremendous and poetic irony -- in the positioning of that under God, dividing the line as it does just before the word indivisible. It's an effect that nicely echoes the irony of a pledge of allegiance that serves, by virtue of its text, to divide a nation. So on that purely aesthetic basis, I'm all for keeping it in there...