What is an armed white man to do?

I intended to post the first of my new poems today, but not this one as I feel it's one of the weaker ones I've been working at. However, in light of today's Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, it's probably the most apt. 

WHY THE JUDGE IN THE KYLE RITTENHOUSE TRIAL IS RIGHT TO BAN 

USE OF THE WORD “VICTIM” TO DESCRIBE THE UNARMED MEN HE SHOT

Picture it, he found himself there, alone,
Frightened, among dark screaming shapes
Of all kinds. Singing, swinging stolen bats, TVs,
Signposts. Three detached themselves from the horde,
Ran howling and bloody-toothed at him. And he
Could only raise his fortunately-remembered rifle
In shaking hands, blindly firing off rounds that
Miraculously met their marks, stemming
The satanic tide, saving the car dealership, his medic training,
Allowing his return gratefully to high-fiving police.
 
Or say, he left home that morning,
Holding in sweating hands the rifle
He proposed to use to defend lives and property, but mostly property,
By shooting them for whom those words
Meant only destroy, loot, rob. He fired
First at one threatening target, then running
From the herd that would part him from his only
Means of defense, he fell but squeezed off more shots,
Striking surely his not-victims but foamers
At the mouth, angry deniers of his 17-year old body’s
Right to hold that Second Amendment solution,
After which he could only run home.
 
What else is a white man to do?

People the barricades without me

 I hadn't promised to anyone except perhaps myself, and had only mentioned my intention to my wife and mother-in-law, but I expected to attend a small protest here in my small midwestern city. It was sponsored by the March for Women's Rights, the same organization that had set up the anti-trump protest in DC around 2017's inauguration I had missed, as well as one in 2019 in Madison I managed to attend. 

I had somewhat made plans  in the way I do, keeping in the back of my mind while my day goes on were I intend to go and what I intend to do once there. But I read an article this morning--I forget where and can't locate it again--that was a recognition of the necessity of this sort of constant protest, spurred by the recent Texas Law and the number of states trying to ape it. It is a bad law and I am against both it and the attempts by other places to make the same law. But this article had one interview that stuck in my head all day and kept me finally away.

One of the article's interviews was with an older woman who said, and I am paraphrasing here, "Will I be at the protest today? No. It's a protest against the right thing, but Roe v Wade was decided 50 years ago, and I've marched in hundreds of protests to keep it safe, and it's obviously had no effect at all. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. I'm tired. Maybe we need to lose the right for a generation in order to remember why we fought for it."

Bitter? Oh, definitely. But it's an earned bitterness. In driving my mother-in-law home, I passed the park where the protest had just started. I saw a number of people I know, all of them over 60. 

Of course, there were other protests in other larger cities and I don't doubt there were thousands of people of child-bearing age marching and shouting and making a ruckus. But that isn't the point. This woman, whose name I can't locate, is right about one thing. We shouldn't have to keep marching after something becomes law. We've marched and made noise for a half century, and if all that has led to is the ease with which a Republican majority can effectively ban a legal and safe procedure, then we have done nothing. Is it wrong of me to agree with her that perhaps we need to lose the right to them for a generation to remind us why we marched? Maybe. But I speak from the perspective of metaphoric sore feet. Those women with more at stake and sorer feet have the right to suggest maybe it's time to step back. 

Jeremiad in a gentle voice

I've written in the past of the probability that future churches will need new, more secular hymns, and while this is too specific to be one of them, it is a very good one. It's a Jeremiad in a gentle voice, a reminder to our opponents that we love them and they believe better than they practice.

Evangelical Singer Calls Out Trump's Christian Supporters In Scathing New Song
Ed Mazza HuffPost
January 29, 2020

An evangelical Christian musician is calling out his fellow members of the faith for their widespread support of President Donald Trump in a new song titled: “Hymn For The 81%.”

“This song might ruffle some feathers, but maybe some feathers need to be ruffled,” Daniel Deitrich told Religion News Service, adding: 

Maybe some tables need to be turned over. Hear me on this, though: It is because I was taught to take the words of Jesus and the prophets seriously that I cannot stay silent.

The song’s title refers to the 81% of evangelicals who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Since then, they’ve remained one of his most consistent group of supporters despite the chasm between core biblical tenets and the president’s behavior and policies.

“Even after enacting deliberately cruel policies to rip families apart and put children in cages at the southern border, evangelical support is as fervent as ever,” Deitrich, who is listed as the pastor for arts and worship at South Bend City Church in Indiana, wrote on YouTube.

Deitrich also noted that he was raised on Christian values.

“I learned to take the words of Jesus seriously ― love God, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, fight for justice for the oppressed. I thought that things like love, kindness, gentleness, and self-control MATTERED,” he wrote. “I have been so confused and deeply saddened by the unflinching loyalty to a man who so clearly embodies the opposite of these values.”

Deitrich told RNS that while the song was a rebuke, it “comes from a deep well of love.”

Indeed, one line of the song is: “You said to love the lost, so I’m loving you now.” But the next line puts evangelical Christians who support Trump on notice:

You said speak the truth
I’m calling you out
Why don’t you live the words
That you put in my mouth

Deitrich said the song’s bridge originally was “an angry middle finger to the listener” that he found cathartic, but he toned it down in the final version.

“I remember gearing up for that angry bridge but being hit with a wave of sadness instead,” he told RNS. ”‘Come home, you taught me better than this’ came out. That’s the take in the finished recordin

Subversion

As a teacher in the early 21st century, when things started getting hot politically, I often argued with my students that the law demanded things be done certain ways. That, although republican operatives subverted the protections of the legal system by disrupting the Bush-Gore count, the Supreme Court ultimately held sway. And while I didn't agree with its decision, it had the final say, and adhering to its findings is what separates the US from, say, the Sudan.

But I didn't expect, and I doubt few did, that fealty to the law could ultimately be used as a cudgel. When he began his campaign, most of us were aware trump paid only lip service to the law and assumed that would undo him. When he assumed office, most of us were aware he could not hold to the strictures of what the law about what he could and couldn't do, and assumed that would undo him.

What we didn't expect, and what Dahlia Lithwick in this excellent commentary only hints at, is the number of people not only willing to look the other way when trump insists others abide by the laws he ignores, but who actively enable his flouting of those laws, who accept his unspoken credo that the law is for suckers. This period of our republic will ultimately be used as an example of how desperate things become when the system operates as if the rules are only used on the public, not for them.



JURISPRUDENCE
The Law Is for Suckers
Donald Trump’s impeachment acquittal proves that they let you do it.
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

FEB 05, 20206:21 PM

“The law is for suckers.” That has been the credo of Donald Trump throughout his personal and business life. James Zirin, in his superb book, Plaintiff in Chief, chronicles the 3,500 lawsuits to which Trump has been a party, a pattern of scorched-earth attacks that include deliberate “delay, counterattack, obstruction, deflection, confusion, threats of ruin, and blanket assertion of attorney/client privilege to avoid accountability.” These were tricks he learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, and they were largely successful in helping him evade legal accountability throughout his business career.

They were, it turns out, the same tricks Trump brought to the campaign trail and later to the White House. It was all, writes Zirin, a dangerous new approach for a president:

Trump is very different. His instinctive litigiousness; his abuse of the legal process to obtain leverage, not justice; his mean-spirited statements and conduct; his overblown damage claims; his many lies, exaggerations and prevarications; his willingness to sue, trash, or discard even those who did him a good turn along the way are abnormal by any standard.

It is a paradox that the most litigious country in the world—a country whose founding documents were largely drafted by lawyers, and whose constitutional true north has long been the constraints afforded by the law—elected a man who has spent the bulk of his life creating a two-tiered system, in which some men are bound by law and others float away from it. We knew long before he was elected that Donald Trump would not be bound by the rule of law, or by the norms of a system dependent on checks and balances. He told us as much. During the campaign he floated the prospect of torturing the families of enemies, and rewriting libel laws, and banning travelers to the United States based on their religion. Sure, it maybe sounded like hyperbole, and it maybe sounded like campaign-speak, and even as some of those efforts were effectuated, including the Muslim ban and family separations, and even as the norms about nepotism and self-dealing and disclosure were brushed away, it still seemed as if a country founded on law would locate some guardrails.

It hasn’t. Just as Zirin promised us, Trump has deployed all of his Roy Cohn strategies to show us that the law is for suckers, and that for great men it serves as a nuisance at most, something to be gotten out of with a squadron of well-paid lawyers, by terrorizing opposing parties and witnesses, by lying fluently and repeatedly, and by declaring victory even when you lost. It should not surprise a soul that he would have brought those tactics to bear as a candidate, as president, and as the subject of an impeachment inquiry. The legal arguments he has deployed throughout this process—that he should have “absolute immunity” from investigation; that he could not be removed from office for crimes; and that he could only be impeached for literal crimes, not high crimes and misdemeanors as the Framers intended—were vintage Roy Cohn. As was the argument, as proffered by Alan Dershowitz, that if the president believed his election interference was in the best interest of the republic, it was both not illegal and also not an impeachable offense. The fact that the Senate and the Justice Department helped him evade accountability, or that White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Dershowitz and Ken Starr served as Roy Cohn mini-me’s, should surprise nobody. Nor should the fact that the “trial” was not a trial and the jurors were not jurors or that a nontrivial number of the jurors voted to acquit him while still acknowledging that what he did was the thing he continues to deny having done.

Nobody should be surprised that in the wake of 3,500 lawsuits, Trump will conclude that he is indeed above the law, that the legal regime exists only for suckers, and also that he can repurpose the machinery of law to investigate, harass, and punish the whistleblowers and the witnesses and those who sought to constrain him. At which point the law won’t just be the thing that applies only to losers and suckers, but also the thing that can be used to put down those who sought justice in the first place. And nobody should be surprised that having invited foreign election interference and having been acquitted for doing so, this president will use the formidable power of his Justice Department to manipulate the 2020 election, and to call into question the results of that election in the courts.

We can debate the wisdom of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and the ticktock of the impeachment investigation and trial—whether it should have been broader, or gone longer, or relied upon court rulings that never came. But we can hopefully agree that what they attempted to do was use both legal processes and legal arguments to show that when a president abuses the power of his office and denies accountability, it should matter. They were trying to prove that the law isn’t just there to punish asylum-seekers trapped in Mexico or black men in prisons, but that it should apply to everyone, even the wealthy, and even the people who believe it doesn’t apply to them because it never has in the past. Donald Trump staked a decadeslong business career on the bet that if you’re rich, famous, brazen, and unrepentant, the law will let you do it. He staked his presidency on the same. Republicans who deplore the death of “unity” today should remember that this was once a nation unified around at least the hope that the law was for everyone, and that going forward, it will be divided around the certainty that some people don’t answer to the courts or the Constitution. Their president will answer to nobody. All of us now answer to him.

We won't leave

There aren't too many people, at least not that I know of or have heard of, who are seriously considering leaving the country because of trump and his policies, but I speculate about it sometimes. In a time when humanitarian advances in voting rights, women's rights, abortion rights, immigrant rights, gay rights, trans~ rights, worker rights, minority religious rights, and the rights of nearly anyone who isn't white and wealthy and self-described Christian are under fire when not in downright retrograde, it's an exercise in both pleasant self-deception and potential self-defense to daydream about it. 

But I won't. I don't think many will. Most of us, I suspect, will take our cue from this drawing. Many Americans may follow a bully, some Americans may be bullies. But most Americans hate bullying and know the proper response to a bully is protecting the bullied. It's what the angels of our better nature demand. 

Lift Every Voice

I will confess to feeling, if not burned out, then exhausted by the massive, deaf wall that is Trump and his supporters. They feign to be doing either what the law demands or what the economy demands or what the American people demand, and when it is proven, by polls or votes, that the people do not demand it but demand exactly the opposite, they purport that the polls are wrong or biased or lie or simply that the people don't really know what it is they want.

But as British columnist Emma Brockes reminds us, 

Trump’s presidency has been one long series of outrages [between] the twin risks of normalisation and outrage fatigue... [Citizens] are reduced to a state of numbness and apathy, caught up in a cycle of responding to each buffoonish Trump tweet while the bigger picture pixelates away to abstraction.

We run the risk by being so absorbed in the latest Trump scandal, insult, evasion, even missteps, that they become a huge Trump lump of just "another example how Trump and his supporters don't care about or pay attention to either the law or other people." As a result, we become that luckless employee who, with each new offense by his employer, rather than working to change it, prides himself on crossing off another day until retirement. 

I understand that because I feel it myself. I become mired in the constant battles with Trump supporters who insist people "like me" either don't understand the law/politics/history/reality or that our only problem with the situation is that it's Trump rather than Hillary or Obama making the policy. And when "people like me" post, over and over, proof in the form of primary sources or analysis by historians or research done by what for the majority of us satisfies the requirement of objectivity, we're told it's fake news, or that its source is biased against Trump, often in the form of a post from someplace purporting to prove Snopes is financed by Soros or The New York Times is a liberal front. There are only so many times we can be told Richard Specter is more legitimate a resource than Paul Krugman.  When everything is true, nothing is true. 

But I have to repress the natural instinct to turn from these blasts against reality because in the meanwhile, real people are suffering and afraid. I can't justify to myself staying out of the fray because it's too hot, it's too exhausting, it's endless, it's frustrating. To do so is to deny the humanity of the people whose humanity I want to uphold. 

I was among the hundreds of thousands of protestors (in the US alone; I don't have figures for the world sites of protests) at the Families Belong Together rallies. At mine, Congresswoman Gwen Moore of Wisconsin's 4th District spoke, and while I don't remember what she said I was impressed by the passion and indignation in her voice. Such fiery voices, speaking truth to power, are perhaps all we have in our arsenal. Can voices change abuse and evil into something better? It may seem like they can't, but voices after all were all the abolitionists had, and Women's Suffragists, and Civil Rights workers. It worked for them. It will work for us. Si si puede

258 candles-days 36-31

In the same way religious liberals decry that all faiths have their share of fundamentalist thinking and actions, so we must celebrate that all faiths also have a deeply progressive strain that often runs counter to that. These Pakistani clerics deserve to be recognized as pioneers.

258 candles-days 158-160

An important element of the American experiment is our dedication to the contributions by immigrants and our celebration of the diversity they bring to the melange of American society. Back in the hub where I used to live, there's been a battle for the opportunity to represent a Minneapolis district in the state legislature. The incumbent, Phyllis Khan, has been in office since 1972. Two challengers, Mohamud Noor and Ilhan Omar, were given little chance at replacing her. However, in the August 8 primary, Ilhan Omar won.

This is significant, not only for Omar and her potential constituents, but for what it means to America. She will not be the first former refugee to become a legislator or the first Muslim, but if she wins she will be the first Somali to serve in a legislative role in American politics, and in a landscape where we ask  whether we have a responsibility to, say, Syrian asylum-seekers or whether the so-called War on Terror is a euphemism for a War on Islam, that is an important voice. This is what makes American culture not only a fascinating experiment but one that's worthwhile as well.

258 candles-day 7

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Couple invite people to live with them.

it may have always been so but it won't always be so

This morning as I read a review of the newest novel by Milan Kundera I had a comforting thought. It is this: For a long while in our recent history (nearly fifty years) and not so long ago (within the life of nearly everyone reading this), the Soviet Union, however one wanted to think of it, was a given of the future. For people, like Kundera and his audiences of the time, there was a certain comfort in recognizing the USSR would always exist and provide a certain consistency that no matter what vagaries the future held, the bureaucracy and the politboro and der kommissars would always, always, be a force with which they would daily reckon. And then, suddenly, it wasn't.

Whether you subscribe to the theory that it died a death by a thousand cuts or it overextended itself like all empires do or that Mikhail Gorbachev somehow retained his compassion as he worked his way to the Supreme Soviet, the fact remains that, as one of Kundera's characters explains, "We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush." But then, so suddenly that to many of us outside it took place overnight, that was no longer the case. For good and bad, the Soviet Union was proven not the omnipotent, omnipresent, unassailable monolith it had seemed.

And so, I'm certain, the nation's unwillingness to face head-on its ineffective gun laws. The US is not the wild west and to allow our laws to reflect the wrong idea that the only safe citizen is an armed one puts us all at risk. We wail and grieve after every massacre and swear, "Surely, this time it must change," only to find that the money and influence of the NRA have been there before us and stacked the deck so that, not only will restrictions fail to be tightened they will actually be loosened. And we lose heart and get better accustomed to piles of dead children.

But just as the arc of justice does eventually bend, despite its looking from our perspective like a long cutting blade of indifference, so will the battle to resurrect some sanity to the Second Amendment someday seem preordained. Have faith.

as we watch Baltimore burn

I have been in Baltimore a handful of times, usually on my way somewhere else. I don't think I've spent more than a day there. Most everything I know about the city comes from the novels of Anne Tyler. And the Baltimore she writes about, needless to say, is not the Baltimore of Freddie Gray.

But I'm not an impartial third party either, insofar as I believe we can and should live in a single, worldwide beloved community. My recognition that we don't isn't an admission to the impossibility of the dream, only of our unwillingness to accomplish it. And I know if my city was aflame, I'd certainly want other people caring about it.

I read this essay by Brittney Cooper several days ago and it won't let me go. Try as will to understand the positions of the three black women who are the official faces of Baltimore-Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, it's mayor; General Linda Singh, of the Maryland National Guard; and just-confirmed Attorney General Loretta Lynch-indeed, even to commiserate with them (as she writes, "Not one of these women stands in the place of power she stands in without having battled for it"), she ends up recognizing that "American empire, in its most democratic iteration, is no respecter of persons. Any person willing to do the state's bidding can have a role to play." Cooper locates the sound of the shattering of the peace among the poor and disenfranchised of Baltimore in the sound of the snapping of Freddie Gray' s neck.

That is a horrible metaphor. It is also resolutely true and it's in the truth of it that the horror lies. No one in my community ought to be familiar with that sound.

More troubling has been the response of strangers, and even some people I know, to the riot in Baltimore as if Freddie Gray's death is excused because of the reactions to it. As if Baltimore police were somehow punishing him in advance for the temerity to ignite the CVS with his death.

The simple truth of the situation is that Freddie Gray should not have died. I contend he should not have been arrested in the first place, but even if we grant he had committed a crime, including murder, there is no reason for any person to die in police custody. To quote the character ML from the great Do the Right Thing, a film whose subject, the death of a young black man while being arrested, should not be nearly as contemporary twenty-five years later as it is: "It's as plain as day. They didn't have to kill the boy."

But most troubling is the epiphany I have come to. If I was in Baltimore would I join the riots and looting? And the answer is yes. Yes, I would. Not because there are things I want but that there are things I don't want. I don't want predatory lending in my neighborhood. I don't want a military presence in my neighborhood. I don't want to be called a thug when I strike back against a system that threatens me and my future. I don't want police killing anyone whose most criminal act is running away from them. And because of where I live and who I am, or specifically who I am not, I don't experience any of that.

Neither should anyone else. It's as plain as day.

mourning the lives that ended that night

I'm aware that in contrast with a majority of people I'm pretty fortunate.  For example, despite my nearly-two year state of being mostly unemployed, my wife's job has afforded us not only to continue paying the mortgage on our home on the rim and the occasional night out with friends but also the luxury of two cars and a subscription to satellite radio.  This last has been helpful since the weekend as I've used it to listen repeatedly to Krishna Das Yoga Radio devoted to ragas and chants and traditional Hindi calming music which has helped me to stay calm, focused, and my disappointment and anger at tolerable levels.

Like many, I was caught flatfooted by the verdict of "not guilty" in the George Zimmerman case Saturday night.  The determination leaves me feeling betrayed and confused by the American justice system.  I have spent the ensuing hours trying to understand what it means.

Unlike many of the people on the Internet who over the course of this trial have become legal critics and scholars I don't pretend to understand the ins and outs of the charges against Zimmerman, the strength or weakness of the case brought against him, or whether Trayvon Martin or Zimmerman initiated a fight, or whose voice was recorded calling for help, or the intricacies or need for Florida's "stand your ground" law.  I'm not convinced that, as some have said, "the verdict was legally correct and was the only verdict the jury could have reached," but I could be wrong about that.  But I am convinced of this, that a law that considers a man who does not deny he shot an unarmed boy and who does not deny he did nearly everything he could to provoke a confrontation "not guilty" in that boy's death, is a bad law.

George Zimmerman is a private citizen--not a cop, not even a security guard--who armed himself and who, when he saw a young black boy walking the streets, assumed the boy did not belong there and was planning a crime.  He was wrong about that, but he was within his rights to call the local police to report Trayvon Martin's presence.  That should have been the end of it.  But for his own reasons, and I would not want to guess at them because like George Zimmerman I could guess wrong, Zimmerman took his gun with him and got out of his car to follow the young man.  There are conflicting accounts from Zimmerman, Rachel Jeantel and Jonathon Good of what happened next, but for the result we have the mute incontrovertible testimony of Martin's body and Zimmerman's confession:  George Zimmerman shot an unarmed 17 year walking home.

There may be something in human nature that causes us, when faced with tragic circumstances, to seek someone to blame.  This may be why some have blamed Trayvon Martin and even President Obama.  George Zimmerman himself said it was God's plan.  But it does not strain credulity to place the blame squarely and fixedly on the man who could have avoided the situation.  George Zimmerman did not have to leave his vehicle.  The police had been alerted to the situation and no matter what someone thinks of their response time, a private citizen does not have the right to place himself or a potentially innocent person in a dangerous situation.  Sanford, Florida, is not Tombstone in the 1870s and George Zimmerman was not in a Batman movie.  At the very least Zimmerman is guilty for having exacerbated an already questionable situation into a lethal one.  There should be consequences for that.

There are, of course.  Two lives ended that fateful evening.  No matter what his defenders say, Zimmerman is no longer a free man.  He will have to live with the stigma of what he's done for the rest of his life, and because of the emotions his acquittal raises, he may have been safer in prison.  Ironically, he will live the rest of his life under a cloud of suspicion similar to the one he placed Trayvon Martin under that evening.  Except that, unlike his victim, he is guilty.  Nonetheless, we should mourn the loss of his life too.

There may be something societal to blame too.  Our young black men are dying and not all their killers are George Zimmermans.  Some are other young black men; some are the young black men themselves.  We need to determine why a young black man in 2013, if it's not true that he's more likely to end up in prison than in college, nonetheless is populating prison at nearly three times the rate that he populates the US.  I don't accept the notion that it is because he is likelier to do criminal acts and neither should you.  We deserve a better explanation.

In the midst of this I attended a vigil held at a synagogue in the hub for people who, like me, felt adrift and angry and betrayed, and who wanted to come together to sing our grief.  Shortly before leaving I sat on the deck surrounded by my dogs and listening to my wife placidly tapping on her laptop in the three-season porch.  As I started out by saying, I recognize how much more fortunate I am than many people. 

I was reading Walking towards Walden:  A Pilgrimage in Search of Place by John Hanson Mitchell. 
 Mitchell writes about a sixteen mile hike he and two friends made in the 1990s from a burial site in Westford, Massachussets, to downtown Concord.  The book is full of digressions about history, geography, literature, biology and botony, previous hikes the three have done, and this meditation on the friends' Ideal Place to Live. 

We would setttle outside a village ina small stone house with a flag terrace and half-wild gardens.  From the terrace you have a view of the distant hills.  The land to the west is unpeopled and wild and rises into sharp, unscaled peaks.  To the east, within view of the terrace, is the village, the essence of the place.  There is no traffic in this area, in fact we would be happy if there were no cars.  You walk to town.  In Thoreau's words, you saunter there, poking along as you go, looking at things, listening to birds.  The town is small but intelligent.  People read books there, and they sit in the cafes and talk about things, and furthermore, they are there all day and late into the night so what whenever you want some company, you have but to saunter along the thicket-lined track into town and find them.  And whenever you want the abiding peace of nature, you can walk back to your cottage.  If you want wilderness, you walk west to the mountains.  Sometimes friends from the village wander out to your house for dinner and you discuss things late into the night, and sometimes they fall asleep on the couches.  You find them sprawled there in the morning.

Mitchell insists "Such places exist."  Many of us have been there but for reasons we can't quite explain we end up leaving.  He describes his own experience of such a place on the island of Corsica. 

It was a good place.  You could lose yourself there, you could forget that you ever had a past or a future and simply fall into that idyllic, dreamy state the locals called la dolce fa'niente, and within a few weeks I became a sort of adjunct to the place and stayed on longer than I had intended.  I washed dishes and cleaned fish, peeled vegetables, helped with the table when the restaurant was crowded...Other than that I was free.  I read books, I went for walks, and at night I eavesdropped on the local gossip.  Mostly I stared into space and waited for something to happen.  For hours, for days, weeks, finally for months, I simply gazed out across the harbor to the green slopes of the hills and the high, jagged peaks beyond.  I rarely left the little island.  The Hopi would say I had found my tuwanasaapi.

My reflection was that, like Mitchell says, I had found that first place and, like everyone else, I left it.  I can't explain why.  But like he writes, I have also found, in some ways, my tuwanasaapi, my centering place.   If someone asks why I attend vigils like last evening's, why I mourn the lives of both Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, why I believe, with Martin Luther King, Jr, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I will answer:  Not everyone has an opportunity to locate his or her centering place.  Some, like Martin, aren't given the chance to find it and some, like Zimmerman, actively deny it to others.  I want everyone to experience what I have.  There is more than enough to go around.

stop praising dust

Jurisprudential theories...are generally categorized according to the element of their subjects they take to be essential.  A legal theory that stresses the logical consistency of judicial opinions is called formalist; a theory that emphasizes their social consequences is called utilitarian; a theory that regards them as reflections of the circumstances in which they were written is called historicist.  The problem with all such theories is that they single out one aspect of the law as the essential aspect...A case comes to court as a unique fact situation...There is the imperative to find the just result in this particular case.  There is the imperative to find the result that will be consistent with the results reached in analogous cases in the past.  There is the imperative to find the result that, generalized across many similar cases, will be most beneficial to society as a whole...There are also, though less explicitly acknowledged, the desire to secure the outcome most congenial to the judge's own politics; the desire to use the case to bend legal doctrine so that it will conform better with changes and social standards and conditions; and the desire to punish the wicked and excuse the good, and to redistribute costs from parties who can't afford them...to parties who can...

Hovering over this whole unpredictable weather pattern--all of which is already in motion, as it were, before the particular case at hand ever arises--is a single meta-imperative.  This is the imperative not to let it appear as though any one of these lesser imperatives has decided the case at the blatant expense of the others...[The court] wants the law to run in a politically desirable direction, but it does not what to be caught appearing to bend an anachronistic legal doctrine in order to compel a politically correct result.

There is also...,within each of these competing imperatives, the problem of deciding what counts as relevant within that particular discourse and what does not...[until it] ends with the question of what counts as a "just result"...Principles are malleable...When there are no bones, anybody can carve a goose.

--From The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (my emphases)

I ask:  why not?  Why not blatantly adjust the law to fit contemporary facts?  I can understand the lure of precedent, that a case has to stand on previous decisions in order to fend off arguments against it.  But if the law is, like the Constitution, a living document--and it is--then in the case of deciding a law based on newer, more modern ways of looking at people--whether or not it's legal for gay couples to marry, for instance--why not broker a whole new decision in which the case is decided on the human merits, the fact that human love is the imperative, in blatant disregard of anachronistic laws and public feeling?  Why praise the dust of dead decisions?  In such an instance, we might have avoided a Plessy vs. Ferguson or a Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission:  common humanity, once acknowledged, trumps all other imperatives (I admit I'm ignoring the specific counterarguments, that at the time of Plessy blacks weren't completely afforded their humanity--at least they weren't "as human" as whites--and for Citizens United, what determines humanity).

Here, I think, is why not:  Because I am human and prone to determine things by what Menand calls "the desire to secure the outcome most congenial to the judge's own politics."  I can't help but look from my perspective as a liberal male who wants to share the cultural wealth he has with others who have need of it but can't reach it and decide in favor of them, even at my own cost.  But I can't be trusted with that decision. It's the same reason we don't allow victims or their families to determine the punishment against their offenders:  some will undercompensate, some will overcompensate, and there isn't a happy medium when it comes to punishment.  If the meta-imperative is malleable then we all get our own cuts of goose but someone ends up with the piece he or she can't eat or isn't enough.  I don't like this way of deciding law; but, like Winston Churchill wrote about democracy, it's the worst  except for all the others that have been tried.

how we should behave when we win

as we would mourn when we lose the great decisions that mean a little death for many of us, let us also celebrate the great decisions that mean a better life for all of us.

last sunday's sermon

We are likely to remember at least a part of early October, 2001. The World Trade Center towers and a portion of the Pentagon in D.C. had planes flown into them, killing thousands, and in a Pennsylvania woods another plane crashed unceremonially. The newly placed President, George W. Bush, famously froze when given the news and eventually went on reading The Pet Goat to elementary schoolchildren. We were all in a daze at the notion that, like much of the rest of the world, we had been the targets of a terrorist attack. It ought to be noted, of course, that such attacks happen in other places on a weekly if not a daily basis, even if they don’t have the same loss of life.

Less than a month later, October 7, we woke to find our nation attacking the small country of Afghanistan, a country which we were told had financed and planned the attacks as well as harboring the mastermind of the organization accused of carrying them out. When our intention to bomb them back to the stone age was reported, one of my students from Afghanistan said, “Then this war should already be over; we are already there.”

We are nearing the beginning of our second decade of bombing the tiny nation back to the stone age. Osama bin Laden is dead; al Qaeda, whose greatest strength, its decentralized leadership, has also turned out to be its greatest weakness, is a sidelined terrorist group; the Taliban, whose name means “students,” were routed and forced out of Afghanistan, only of course to return, making inroads among a rural population long sick of being collateral damage; and ancillary war and military action in neighboring Iraq and Pakistan have blossomed. Despite the rhetoric of President Obama and the withdrawal of a tenth of our troops there, the war continues.

There has been no shortage, from drone bomb deaths on innocent neighborhoods to attacks on wedding celebrations to smart bombs launched at overfilled hospitals, for the Afghan public to turn on its supposed liberators—remember the promises of flowers thrown at the feet of advancing Americans?—and now its invaders and occupiers. On March 11, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. gave them yet another reason. A 38 year old four tour serving married father of two from Ohio who had enlisted in those heady days immediately after September 11 who was previously diagnosed with traumatic brain injury from a road accident, he is accused of having killed 17 Afghan civilians, almost all of them children and women, and setting fire to some of their bodies.

Staff Sergeant Bales is the person we blame although there remain questions about what witnesses saw—some have reported that the killings were done by American soldiers—as well as the way events played out—how did an American soldier manage to simply leave a well-fortified post like Camp Belambay, not once but twice, walk several miles in the dark to the nearest villages, and then after his grisly deeds were done simply reenter the camp without having been challenged by guards? The truth is no matter how much evidence is collected and no matter how much investigation goes into it, this is probably one of those wartime atrocities that, like My Lai and the Winter Soldier events of Vietnam, or like who shot JFK or what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa, will probably never be solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Already we are experiencing a notable lack of investigation on the part of American media which is more interested in finding rationales for Bales’ actions than for determining the way he might have done it.

On this last point the essayist Glenn Greenwald has written: “Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill [17] Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he ‘saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,’ etc. Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.” We do tend to relegate the actions of people we already disapprove of to evil and, when faced with proof of our—“our” in the same sense we talk about the team we follow—own evil acts, we experience what Greenwald calls “a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type…there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible…” We live in chaos; people behave in ways we can’t predict or control. Chaos, with good reason, frightens us so we paper it over with narrative, impose order on it, so it makes sense.

Similarly, we are trying to make sense of another, older killing, that of young Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, by George Zimmerman. His death occurred in late February this year and came to many people’s attention by way of social media, articles on websites, and the publicity of a large march by people wearing hooded sweatshirts. Unlike the Afghan killings, it was several weeks after Martin’s death before people heard about it—I’ve tried to trace back my own discovery of the incident and I think it was a report on the article-accumulation site gawker.com dated March 8, nearly two weeks after his death and five days after his funeral. I hate to say it but articles like this and events like this happen nearly every day in contemporary America and the only reason I’m likely to have noticed it myself is the use in that first article of the incredibly affecting photo of a tween Trayvon staring plaintively into the camera and wearing a hoodie similar to the one he was killed wearing and the title’s emphasis on the word “unarmed.”

In the short time since this story became a national headline so much has been said about and commented on the events of February 26th that it may be necessary to reiterate what we do know. We know that George Zimmerman, who has operated as a one-man neighborhood watch in the gated community for a number of years, sighted an unfamiliar black youth walking in the rain with his hood up. Trayvon Martin, who was on suspension from school at the time, was visiting relatives who lived in the neighborhood and had just come from a local convenience store where he’d bought Skittles and iced tea. He noticed Zimmerman following him and called his girlfriend, who has fortunately remained anonymous in the media, who was probably on the phone with him when he was shot.

Zimmerman, who has logged in many calls to the local police department—the number 46 seems certain although whether that is since 2001, 2006 or since December depends on the source—alerts 911 whose dispatcher tells him it will be checked out by police and that he should not confront or follow the suspect. Zimmerman, saying “These assholes always get away,” instead leaves his SUV, approaching Martin on foot.

This is the point at which we don’t know what happens, only what the result is. Zimmerman claims he had chased and lost the suspect and was returning to his SUV when Martin attacked him, breaking his nose and banging his head on cement. The 911 dispatcher, who kept the phone live, records someone yelling for help—the police say it was Zimmerman, Martin’s girlfriend who was also listening via his cell phone says it was Martin—and then a gunshot. Several witnesses report hearing multiple gunshots although no one alleges that Martin had a gun. All of this occurs between 7 and 7:25 that evening. The police have determined that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin with a shot to the chest at about 7:25 and approximately five minutes later officers arrived.

Zimmerman tells the officers he shot Martin in self-defense. An officer notes in his report that Zimmerman is bleeding from the nose and head. He is placed in handcuffs and taken to the station for processing. However, he is not charged, and when he is released his gun and his gun license are returned to him.

As more than one reporter has noted, the more we learn about this case the more complicated it becomes. George Zimmerman accused his former fiancé of having attacked him in 2005 and biting his face (she claims he attacked her and her dog bit him). Martin was suspended from school for having been found in possession of a plastic bag with trace amounts of marijuana in it (one commenter I read pointed out, quite realistically in my opinion, such a charge and punishment would be laughed off by most white suburban high school students). Zimmerman’s father, who is a judge, has pointed out that his mother is Hispanic and this point has been remarked on repeatedly by his defenders as a reason this couldn’t possibly have been a racist attack, as if racism is the result of a formula, the introduction of one element negates another, rather than an incident based on cultural and social assumptions, and there’s no indication Zimmerman self-identifies as Hispanic. The Sanford police chief, Bill Lee, has stepped down in the face of a state-led investigation of this and another case involving his refusal to charge the son of a prominent citizen for killing a homeless man. We have seen in the past few days the release of surveillance video of Zimmerman’s arrival and processing at the Sanford station that night during which he looks neither injured nor bleeding, and even if he had, as some defenders claim, been “cleaned up” before arriving, he certainly does not look like he’s suffering a broken nose.

The primary means for explaining the rather lenient treatment of George Zimmerman barring some rather strong and justifiable beliefs of racism on Zimmerman’s part or on the part of the police has been the Florida law on justifiable use of force by civilians, also known as the “Stand Your Ground” or “Castle” defense. Subsection 3 of Chapter 776 of the state’s 2011 Statutes, the relevant section of Florida’s Law Code, reads, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked…where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm…or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

I’m certainly no criminal lawyer but it strikes me by a cursory reading of the law and the information that we have of what transpired on February 26 that George Zimmerman may very well be not guilty of the murder or manslaughter of Trayvon Martin. But it strikes me also that Zimmerman, the Sanford police department, and indeed the law itself, are guilty of something.

What is that something? To answer, I’d like to return to the tragedy I began with, the killing of 17 Afghan civilians allegedly by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. What do these two incidents have in common? They are tragedies, surely, happening in both instances to people we must presume are innocent of anything punishable by a death sentence. Both became needfully more complicated the more information became available. Both too are examples of killings that should have been easily avoided: Zimmerman was told to stand down by the police dispatcher, Bales should have been confronted by guards when he first left Camp Belembay. Both too are examples in my mind of misplaced policy. There should not be a continuing war in Afghanistan in which a Robert Bales, Jr. experiences a fourth tour of duty—contrast that with the average experience of a Vietnam veteran, the penultimate suffering soldier of my generation, who served a single tour that was both shorter in duration and less intense—and there should not be a “Stand Your Ground” law on the books in Florida or anywhere, wherein anyone using a gun against a stranger is given the benefit of the doubt about his motives. Such use of deadly force should always be investigated thoroughly and its user, as the survivor, should be presumed guilty until proven otherwise.

But the two tragedies have another similarity and that’s the one I want to talk about finally. It’s a sense of entitlement. Entitlement has become a dirty word in our current political climate, used by candidates and politicians to mean something unearned, like food stamps or healthcare or voting rights. As if we lived by the maxims “no work, no food” and “if you’re sick you’ve sinned” and “you don’t play unless you have skin in the game.” But that’s not the entitlement I’m talking about.

Nor am I talking about the entitlement that most of us feel when we walk the streets unmolested by others, safe in our own environs or safe in the areas where we know, because of the color of our skin or the power of society behind us or our ability to fend for ourselves, that we won’t be bothered or at least not for long, that no one is likely to physically harm us or steal something from us or accuse us of something we haven’t done. I’m not talking about the entitlement we feel when a cop car passes us by, secure in the knowledge we’ve done nothing wrong and they won’t stop to ask what we’re doing.

The entitlement I’m talking about is the sense that, having been harmed somehow, whether by a horrible war whose ravages we suffer or by the predators, both real and imagined, that take advantage of society, that we are within our rights somehow to avenge ourselves, our families, our culture, on other people, on the representatives of those predators, willfully blind to whether they are adults or guilty. Perhaps, like the war in Afghanistan, this entitlement is a reaction to the experience of September 11, as if having been victimized on a national level gives us the right to ignore what the Gospel writers point out about our responsibility to turn the other cheek. It’s a human reaction, maybe even so universal as to be a mammalian reaction, to strike out against someone or something that harms us or harms what we consider our own. To take revenge for slights that are real enough to cause us pain.

But as much as it’s human it’s also arrogant especially when it’s applied against someone who, in the cold light of day rather than in the middle of the night or when it’s rainy, can have had no part in harming us. To do so is to sin. You might remember Michael Milken, the so-called Junk Bond King from Drexel Burnham who was indicted, along with Ivan Boesky, for racketeering, securities fraud and insider trading, and who spent two years in prison. Milken, of all people, has what I think is the most cogent definition of sin, probably by reason of his experience: “Sin is treating other people as means and not as ends.”

It is this sin that that the United States commits by continuing an unnecessary war against Afghanistan. It is this sin that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. and George Zimmerman committed against innocent Afghans and against a young black man in a hooded sweatshirt. To both men these people were only representations of forces that had impinged on them and theirs and killing them served to exorcise, but only for a moment and only in their own minds, whatever evil bedeviled them. Both Bales and Zimmerman gave in to their own sense of entitlement that they were the persons capable of determining guilt and punishment for other people. Both are wrong. In both instances, we demand justice over blood. We demand investigation over concealment. We demand responsibility over retribution. In pursuing answers in these cases we are demanding nothing less than that life, with uncertainties, messiness, and indeterminacy, is privileged over the certainty of death.

day after labor day

the author of the blog vagabond scholar did a good job yesterday of posting a labor day commentary, better than I might do (although I would connect too to this list). because I was involved instead in shabbating for the weekend, I'm taking the easier way out of simply linking to it. but as a way of making up for this lazy practice, I am reposting 1 of my favorite mashups from a year and a 1/2 ago.

mason city's billboard

the information is incorrect, the analogy is incorrect, even the grammar (the descriptor should be "democratic") is incorrect. but the right of a political group--in this case the northern iowa tea party in mason city--to rent a space on which to announce their view, no matter how incorrect, must be upheld. in exactly the same way this must be allowed, and this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and even this. the criteria is not and should not be communal agreement or communal standards--were that the case only the blandest ideas could be communicated between communities, and maybe not even those--and while I'm uncomfortable that the default position is that willingness and ability to pay should be the deciding factor, that is the fairest position I can see. why then don't we see billboards in favor of, say, drugs? in some cases, we do. the solution, in good old-fashioned free market style, is that if a group or individual is offended by a billboard, purchase the same space or another to run something counter. as the sainted saul alinsky proclaimed, make the enemy fight by his own rules.

also, the irony of the unintended message is delightful.

caveat fantasist

this is interesting.

"There are fairly ancient beliefs, mostly from religion, that stories can alter reality. The Judeo-Christian God spoke the world into being. Magicians can use incantation to make a person to fall in love with you. An impure thought might lead you to hell. People have attributed great power to storytelling, and therefore we sometimes mistakenly judge fantasies using the same moral and ethical principles that we use to judge reality. So if I enjoy the Twilight movies, it's the same thing as enjoying spousal abuse. Or if I like first-person shooters, I'm actually the kind of maniac who would love to kill wantonly.

"Basically what we're talking about here is an entrenched, unexamined idea that stories will take over our minds, and fantasies become real. It's the kind of belief that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, unless you really do believe in sorcery. Once you let go of this belief, you're free to understand fantasies as what they are: Bursts of emotion, metaphors, parables, ways of safely exploring the unknown in yourself and the world.

"But there is another, more pernicious belief about fantasies. And that leads to my second theory, which is that certain fantasies are deemed unacceptable because people fear the opposite of what I described above. They fear that fantasies are under our control, and that we can harness them to understand our place in the universe. Looked at from this angle, Twilight becomes a disturbing story because it's something that girls use to figure out their sexual desires. Violent stories are upsetting not because of all the bloodstains, but because they stand in for something more profound and socially powerful: They represent many struggles, from the push to escape the ghettos of GTA, to the fight for adulthood and autonomy."

I had hoped the author would take this a little farther, but she didn't so I will. is there a point at which fantasy, especially sexual fantasy, becomes dangerous? some rapists have fantasized about it for years although most rape fantasies remain fantasies. much of adult hetero porn is predicated on the fantasy of sex with teen girls--hence the prevelance of pigtails and catholic school uniforms and lollipops and titles like "innocent high"--but few consumers actually catch a flight to thailand for sex with underage girls (or boys). of course, all porn is based on fantasy: that this hot person wants to have sex with me right here and now.

sex researchers have known for decades that fantasy has a rightful place in actual sex, not only in fetishistic sex but in vanilla intercourse. if you close your eyes and imagine it's tom cruise atop you, your partner, who will probably never know that's what you're thinking, reaps the benefit of that and everyone's happy. is it the same if who you're imagining is your neighbor's 12 year old neice?

here's where it gets tough. part of me wants to argue that fantasy is fantasy, and if your imagination runs to preteens, and it stays in your imagination, then all's good, rock on, no one needs to ever know. despite many parents' willfull ignorance, we know pre-teens have sexual feelings, and most of us only need to remember back to our own tweens and earlier to know that's true.

but another part of me asserts there's something wrong with this. it's one thing for a 12 year old to touch herself in the middle of the night while fantasizing about doing something, she's not sure exactly what, with the 40 year old neighbor and quite another thing for the neighbor to imagine what he would do with her. most teachers and preachers would say the problem is in power and it's partly that but it's also got a lot to do with maturity and age-appropriateness. nabokov's lolita is a classic attempt to articulate what this difference consists of, and a.m. homes' the end of alice is a contemporary, more explicit try at it. the difference in both of these examples is between imagining and acting out, for both would-be participants, and maybe the difference lies in that completely.

we can't legislate what people fantasize, although we try to sometimes, and the ick-factor some of us associate with fantasizing about rape or bdsm or same sex or coprophilia or beastiality or pedophilia--and the discomfort I feel in lumping gay sex with beastiality is an indication of how far we have to go in articulating clearly a difference between acts between consenting and non-consenting participants--can't fool us into thinking that we can.

as newitz argues in her essay, "Without fantasies, especially extreme fantasies, our minds lose their ability to splinter a single moment into many possible options. Immersing yourself in the story of something ugly and horrifying, or silly and frivolous, is a way of saying, fundamentally, that things don't have to be the way they are." there's something fundamentally human in fantasy, especially sex fantasy, and I suppose the most realistic way of dealing with it is a form of caveat emptor: let the fantasizer be aware what he's getting into.