Tom Brokaw should be more careful.
When the famous journalist and author suggested the other day that Hispanic immigrants need to assimilate into American society better (read: faster), he set off all kinds of hot buttons. Just goes to show that someone with as much wisdom as he has can also, if not circumspect, go off the rails and have to backtrack with the dexterity of Michael Jackson.
It's a silly notion. I think of my Polish grandparents, coming here in 1912. They stumbled through the language, never learned to drive. But they raised four children who ended up plenty respectable and who gave them ten grandchildren, one of whom is currently addressing you. Can being American mean all that much more? What would Brokaw think of their assimilation, a century later--a bit slow? Inadequate? Hmmm?
But they were white. Brokaw's comments were strewn with plenty of racial and ethnic assumptions, unwitting though they might have been. Maybe he forgot that his "greatest generation" that he declared (let's put that evaluation aside for the moment) included black, Hispanic, Asian (especially Japanese descendants) and Native folks, who need to be considered in the 440,000 who gave their lives for future generations to live in free lands around the globe, ours included.
Okay, But--
He added something, though, that strikes at the heart of the current dilemma of our immigration issues deeper than we're probably ready to admit. To wit: He also hinted that plenty of white folks here aren't comfortable with racial intermarriage: even at this point, even while watching Tiger Woods blossom and dominate professional golf; even after watching Nikki Haley become governor of South Carolina and U.N. Ambassador; even after Barack Obama won two terms as President; even after Kamala Harris declares her candidacy and brings out 20,000 to approve (Granted, it's in Oakland, where liberals thrive). In the Heartland, where Brokaw is from (South Dakota), that still doesn't connect very well. Martin Luther King remarked that he'd never seen prejudice like that in Chicago.
Too many are still flat-out scared of it. They foresee a non-white nation, led by non-whites. In their minds, it betrays the legacy of our Founding Fathers, all of whom were white and Anglo-Saxon and, to the best of my knowledge, Protestant as well. The specter of semi-brown-skinned members of Congress and (gasp) President (note that one with some genuine chops is running in 2020) goes beneath the skins of enough whites to give 45 and his white supremacist lackey, Stephen Miller, plenty of traction in continuing to insist on a wall to create an absolute barrier to, you know, them.
But one of those Fathers, Jefferson, wrote in our Declaration of Independence that everyone has natural rights, the pursuit of happiness being one of the big three (life, liberty and....). So millions are rushing north to get a chance at what looks like a better opportunity than the ones they've had. That's all they ask for.
That's all Jefferson and the signers asked for, too. They could not have foreseen, of course, the kind of world we are now in, where travel and migration are far more facilitatory. But they could have understood what peoples everywhere still want and believe can have--a chance, just a chance, to be better, do better, and live better. In the Western Hemisphere, that's what the USA still represents. In the Eastern Hemisphere, it's what the European Union still represents.
Would they have been so narrow as to preclude the migration of peoples of color, now that they have been freed from slavery by their white masters and thrown off the shackles of colonialism, the surrogate slavery continued beyond slavery itself? They were people of the Enlightenment. They had vision beyond that present moment, tainted by the politics of that day though it was. But they also limited their conclusions about slavery and Native peoples, and expressed that narrowness within the same Constitution we live by today.
Jefferson had what we now believe to be six children by one of his slave women, Sally Hemings, so he clearly recognized their humanity--though, speaking of intermingling, not enough to declare it or his love publicly. He and Washington arranged to have their slaves freed, but not until their deaths. They struggled with their consciences the same way we do now, because like it or not, life is not always so simple. We would like to think of the Founding Fathers as magnanimous mavens of liberty and justice, but their selfishness clashed with their high-mindedness as much as any of ours does.
The white Europeans used black slaves for their purposes and nearly wiped out Natives en route to trans-continental settlement to establish what passed for "civilization", and we continue to teach it in our history classes as if detached from another time. But as Faulkner said, history isn't even past. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes it clear in his collection of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power, that the failure of white America to successfully deal with the black genocide of slavery hangs upon it like mildew-laden bath towels. They need to be cleansed, but who's going to do it? As time goes by, they don't get better looking and smelling, they get worse.
The Jumbled Legacy
That jumbled legacy is what Tom Brokaw was referring to: Yes, people are coming. Yes, they have an ingrown right to a better life. But what about the people already here? They have in-bred attitudes that they didn't just conjure out of thin air. We have to deal with them, and more of us have them than we are ready, or likely, to admit.
Some think that to make America great again, what amounts to ethnic cleansing, or at least continued domination of one ethnicity over all others, is necessary. That denies what history has done. Nobody can do that, but the results of the forced intermingling of races (which is what white European settlement of the Americas actually is) have been that one part of our society has chosen to flow with it, accepts it and even nourishes it, and the other part which has chosen to deny and defy it, hiding behind a slowly deteriorating demographic facade to do so. Few better manifestations of our polarization exist.
So let's not throw rocks at an otherwise respected journalist. All he's trying to do is define and interpret reality as he sees it, because we're all trying to do that, too.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
They Just Wanted to Be Normal: James Baldwin, Michelle Obama, Dontre' Hamilton
Here's the thing about "If Beale Street Could Talk", a film based on James Baldwin's book of the same name: In its normality, its utter averageness, it defies conventionalities of its genre.
We're quite used to Spike Lee's "joints", as he calls them: stories of black impoverishment, replete with drugs, crime, violence by whites against blacks and horrible prejudice--the depiction of urban life that we understand can only be black by now (though it isn't). It's not as if that is an exaggeration, though, or that it doesn't need to be explained or drilled down into.
It isn't as if we don't need to discuss it, either. We got this. In the sixty years since The Movement had its greatest impact--court decisions and collective action and great speakers and activists galore--the net effects on the worst circumstances stemming from Jim Crow are still there. This is being written in Milwaukee, after all, still one of the most segregated large cities in America: Come and see for yourself.
But something else has happened, so gradually and unspectacularly as to be tragically unnoticed--a growing black middle class. Let's define "middle class", though, the way it should be: Two parents working, a well-used car or two, a place to live (mortgaged or not), furniture that won't get replaced every five years, kids that might make it to college if they get some scholarship money, and going out to eat means hitting the pizza joint around the corner once a month. The kids are being raised with decent values, and though they may indeed rub up against the uglier side of the remnants of rough neighborhoods, they're tough enough to avoid them, and there's an increasing chance that they'll be okay. Too.
Michelle Robinson Obama came from such a neighborhood and home life (She called it a "working class" background, but according to her book, Becoming (terrific book), they were never hurting for life's necessities. Call it, if you will, the lower rung of the middle class ladder.). She escaped it, too, by working her way into a semi-elite Chicago high school and from it into Princeton. Her brother, Craig, became an excellent basketball player there as well. He went on to become a major college basketball coach; she, of course, went on to something even greater.
But "If Beale Street Could Talk" demonstrates that the fates of Michelle and Craig Robinson could have pivoted on a dime, if either had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had turned the wrong corner, had been in a store or at a concert, or on a bus when the wrong, misleading things happened to brand them with bigoted incorrectness. The young man and woman, Alonzo and Clementine, of "Beale Street" were working to create a life inside a New York world they didn't have a prayer of escaping--but they were in love and were prepared to be a family.
They were happy: Joyous, even, in their expectations of a child and arranging for a rough-hewn but workable place to live. And they were shattered by racism. A white man harassing the lovely Clementine, Alonzo's rage pouring out in putting him in his place; the white cop with an awful mustache who shrugged off an old white woman's defense of Alonzo's character; and the arranged arrest of Alonzo for raping a Hispanic woman on circumstantial evidence at best (this in the days before DNA became a lockdown kind of evidence), if not flat-out lies.
So as happens far too often, Alonzo is forced to plead out and serve time. The child is born and must grow up without a daddy who should be with him, who should guide him, who should help form him into the man he should be. Clementine proceeds alone without Alonzo, without intimacy, without her best friend for untold years. The story itself is fiction, but fiction is often just another way of telling the truth.
Moments of tragedy come and go and we recognize them for what they are. We rally to support the people who must absorb them, but the daily tragedy of normality that people seek, interrupted by jumping to conclusions because that's just the way the other people are, constitute a far deeper, far greater, and far more ongoing tragedy.
So it came visiting, too, to the family of Dontre' Hamilton, here in Milwaukee, in the spring of 2014. Hamilton was shot 14 times (which, as the film demonstrated, can be done in about three seconds with a police weapon) by a white policeman who concluded that he was in danger from Hamilton because, in a scuffle, he had pulled the policeman's nightstick from its sheath. But it didn't happen in the 'hood; it happened in the small, otherwise inconsequential Red Arrow Park, off Kilbourn Avenue and Water Street in the heart of the downtown business district--across the street from the Performing Arts Center, one of the jewels of Milwaukee's culture--where traffic rushes by and important people pace past with important agendas.
The other night, I watched a film entitled "There's Blood on the Doorstep," detailing the incident and its pathetic aftermath from the vantage points of the pivotal people--the policeman, the police chief, the district attorney, the president of the police union, the mayor, the family members. The final results are far too familiar: the fuzziness of the fact-finding; the mayor's attempt to assuage the family; the solidarity of the union, regardless of the facts; the helplessness of the police chief and the district attorney, both of whom know plenty of the facts but probably little of the truth; the policeman who would love to have that moment back but now can't; and the family, searching and finding some justice but nowhere near enough.
In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities of America, only one black officer comes to the defense of the white officer. Everyone else in Milwaukee power positions are white. The facts keep accumulating but something about the truth isn't being verified. It's as if the final result was preordained and everyone went through the motions.
Members of Hamilton's family--his mother Maria and two brothers, Nate and Damien--were in attendance at the Waukesha Arts Center and took questions after the film, which played to a full house at the Milwaukee Film Festival in October. There was nothing abnormal about them (as pretentiously as I must sadly add, as if I was looking for abnormalities any more than they might have been looking for mine), though Dontre', apparently, was schizophrenic, which may have led to the outburst which created the circumstances that led to his death. But Damien called him an excellent student in school. Nate, the oldest brother, has formed a group called Coalition for Justice; Maria has organized other mothers with similar tragedies they have had to confront into a group called Mothers for Justice United.
Sounds like something lots of people would do: Make a concerted attempt to make a decent legacy and create positive change in the wake of something terrible. Sounds, well, normal--as normal as its unfortunate futility has become.
Such normality lulls us into a sleep-like trance, much like mass gun murders are creating the same, numbing nightmare-state at present. If democracy hasn't successfully addressed the injustices of race yet, can we be the least bit surprised at our inability to address gun violence? And if so, could the two someday meld into a truly horrible scenario?
Yeah, I know. I don't want to think about it, either. Wouldn't be normal to think about it. The problem exactly.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
We're quite used to Spike Lee's "joints", as he calls them: stories of black impoverishment, replete with drugs, crime, violence by whites against blacks and horrible prejudice--the depiction of urban life that we understand can only be black by now (though it isn't). It's not as if that is an exaggeration, though, or that it doesn't need to be explained or drilled down into.
It isn't as if we don't need to discuss it, either. We got this. In the sixty years since The Movement had its greatest impact--court decisions and collective action and great speakers and activists galore--the net effects on the worst circumstances stemming from Jim Crow are still there. This is being written in Milwaukee, after all, still one of the most segregated large cities in America: Come and see for yourself.
But something else has happened, so gradually and unspectacularly as to be tragically unnoticed--a growing black middle class. Let's define "middle class", though, the way it should be: Two parents working, a well-used car or two, a place to live (mortgaged or not), furniture that won't get replaced every five years, kids that might make it to college if they get some scholarship money, and going out to eat means hitting the pizza joint around the corner once a month. The kids are being raised with decent values, and though they may indeed rub up against the uglier side of the remnants of rough neighborhoods, they're tough enough to avoid them, and there's an increasing chance that they'll be okay. Too.
Michelle Robinson Obama came from such a neighborhood and home life (She called it a "working class" background, but according to her book, Becoming (terrific book), they were never hurting for life's necessities. Call it, if you will, the lower rung of the middle class ladder.). She escaped it, too, by working her way into a semi-elite Chicago high school and from it into Princeton. Her brother, Craig, became an excellent basketball player there as well. He went on to become a major college basketball coach; she, of course, went on to something even greater.
But "If Beale Street Could Talk" demonstrates that the fates of Michelle and Craig Robinson could have pivoted on a dime, if either had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had turned the wrong corner, had been in a store or at a concert, or on a bus when the wrong, misleading things happened to brand them with bigoted incorrectness. The young man and woman, Alonzo and Clementine, of "Beale Street" were working to create a life inside a New York world they didn't have a prayer of escaping--but they were in love and were prepared to be a family.
They were happy: Joyous, even, in their expectations of a child and arranging for a rough-hewn but workable place to live. And they were shattered by racism. A white man harassing the lovely Clementine, Alonzo's rage pouring out in putting him in his place; the white cop with an awful mustache who shrugged off an old white woman's defense of Alonzo's character; and the arranged arrest of Alonzo for raping a Hispanic woman on circumstantial evidence at best (this in the days before DNA became a lockdown kind of evidence), if not flat-out lies.
So as happens far too often, Alonzo is forced to plead out and serve time. The child is born and must grow up without a daddy who should be with him, who should guide him, who should help form him into the man he should be. Clementine proceeds alone without Alonzo, without intimacy, without her best friend for untold years. The story itself is fiction, but fiction is often just another way of telling the truth.
Moments of tragedy come and go and we recognize them for what they are. We rally to support the people who must absorb them, but the daily tragedy of normality that people seek, interrupted by jumping to conclusions because that's just the way the other people are, constitute a far deeper, far greater, and far more ongoing tragedy.
So it came visiting, too, to the family of Dontre' Hamilton, here in Milwaukee, in the spring of 2014. Hamilton was shot 14 times (which, as the film demonstrated, can be done in about three seconds with a police weapon) by a white policeman who concluded that he was in danger from Hamilton because, in a scuffle, he had pulled the policeman's nightstick from its sheath. But it didn't happen in the 'hood; it happened in the small, otherwise inconsequential Red Arrow Park, off Kilbourn Avenue and Water Street in the heart of the downtown business district--across the street from the Performing Arts Center, one of the jewels of Milwaukee's culture--where traffic rushes by and important people pace past with important agendas.
The other night, I watched a film entitled "There's Blood on the Doorstep," detailing the incident and its pathetic aftermath from the vantage points of the pivotal people--the policeman, the police chief, the district attorney, the president of the police union, the mayor, the family members. The final results are far too familiar: the fuzziness of the fact-finding; the mayor's attempt to assuage the family; the solidarity of the union, regardless of the facts; the helplessness of the police chief and the district attorney, both of whom know plenty of the facts but probably little of the truth; the policeman who would love to have that moment back but now can't; and the family, searching and finding some justice but nowhere near enough.
In Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities of America, only one black officer comes to the defense of the white officer. Everyone else in Milwaukee power positions are white. The facts keep accumulating but something about the truth isn't being verified. It's as if the final result was preordained and everyone went through the motions.
Members of Hamilton's family--his mother Maria and two brothers, Nate and Damien--were in attendance at the Waukesha Arts Center and took questions after the film, which played to a full house at the Milwaukee Film Festival in October. There was nothing abnormal about them (as pretentiously as I must sadly add, as if I was looking for abnormalities any more than they might have been looking for mine), though Dontre', apparently, was schizophrenic, which may have led to the outburst which created the circumstances that led to his death. But Damien called him an excellent student in school. Nate, the oldest brother, has formed a group called Coalition for Justice; Maria has organized other mothers with similar tragedies they have had to confront into a group called Mothers for Justice United.
Sounds like something lots of people would do: Make a concerted attempt to make a decent legacy and create positive change in the wake of something terrible. Sounds, well, normal--as normal as its unfortunate futility has become.
Such normality lulls us into a sleep-like trance, much like mass gun murders are creating the same, numbing nightmare-state at present. If democracy hasn't successfully addressed the injustices of race yet, can we be the least bit surprised at our inability to address gun violence? And if so, could the two someday meld into a truly horrible scenario?
Yeah, I know. I don't want to think about it, either. Wouldn't be normal to think about it. The problem exactly.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Friday, January 18, 2019
John Yoo's Pretentious Federalism: Creating Constitutional Crisis
Let us remember that John Yoo, was brought in as a special advisor to President George W. Bush after 9/11, largely to figure out how Bush could gather an incredible amount of power to control events both here and overseas in the wake of the attack.
His legacy is bracing:
Yoo, a professor at the University of California's main campus in Berkeley, is an unabashed believer in the maximum amount of presidential power that can be absorbed by our constitutional system, which is practically anything. He doesn't think that 45's threat to slam the country with an emergency declaration would be all that big of a deal. In fact, he compares it favorably to what other, far more competent presidents, have done even more than 200 years ago.
Yes. On Fareed Zakaria's CNN Sunday show, "GPS", Yoo compared 45's suggested need to place the nation on alert with:
His legacy is bracing:
- The legitimization of "dark" camps, where overseas torture took place regularly;
- The disaster at Abu Graib, where the same things happened (except someone took pictures);
- The attempt to constitutionally justify "extraordinary rendition," which is torture by another name;
- FISA courts, which keep discovery of what it has taken to get hold of suspected terrorists and their information out of the public eye; and
- Of course, the continued denial of civil and constitutional rights of those held at Guantanamo Bay for 17 years running, since they remain in a legal kind of limbo where we're not at war but they're declared excessively dangerous nonetheless.
Yoo, a professor at the University of California's main campus in Berkeley, is an unabashed believer in the maximum amount of presidential power that can be absorbed by our constitutional system, which is practically anything. He doesn't think that 45's threat to slam the country with an emergency declaration would be all that big of a deal. In fact, he compares it favorably to what other, far more competent presidents, have done even more than 200 years ago.
Yes. On Fareed Zakaria's CNN Sunday show, "GPS", Yoo compared 45's suggested need to place the nation on alert with:
- Jefferson's decision to purchase the Louisiana Territory in 1803, instantly doubling the size of the nation--an unprecedented end-run around the Congress, made by a president who, to that point, believed in strict construction;
- Lincoln's suspension of constitutional rights such as habeas corpus during the Civil War;
- Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to gain power during the Great Depression--something he actually announced he wanted Congress to do in his first inaugural address; and
- Truman's decision to seize the production of U.S. steel, thus subverting a steelworkers' strike in 1950, during the Korean War, an act declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer in 1951.
A Simple, Flawed Philosophy: The Unitary Executive Theory
Yoo's philosophy can be summarized thus: first, presidents can take as much power as they want as long as Congresses permit them to do it, the only barrier being impeachment and removal; and second, these issues were never meant to be resolved by the courts. The Founding Fathers, he postulates, never meant the courts to get involved in these issues, and they wanted the presidency to be a position in which the nation's leader could address crises as they arose and act quickly. This philosophy, called the unitary executive theory, was a vital part of what the obsequious Dick Cheney utilized to seize extraordinary powers while Vice-President, circumventing the hapless Bush-43, controlling the messaging and much of policy leading up to the Iraq War (Please see the movie "Vice" to observe the disastrous results.).
Yoo's philosophy can be summarized thus: first, presidents can take as much power as they want as long as Congresses permit them to do it, the only barrier being impeachment and removal; and second, these issues were never meant to be resolved by the courts. The Founding Fathers, he postulates, never meant the courts to get involved in these issues, and they wanted the presidency to be a position in which the nation's leader could address crises as they arose and act quickly. This philosophy, called the unitary executive theory, was a vital part of what the obsequious Dick Cheney utilized to seize extraordinary powers while Vice-President, circumventing the hapless Bush-43, controlling the messaging and much of policy leading up to the Iraq War (Please see the movie "Vice" to observe the disastrous results.).
It's a nice, neat position, based on what any member of the Federalist Society would agree with, especially the part about basing any constitutional position on what they think the Founding Fathers would have thought. So not only is the Constitution unarguable in its literal, constricted, most simplified sense, but what the Founders thought about it--or, better, what current Federalists thought they thought about it, is also unarguable and isn't worth the discussion--except what it does is disguise the extension of extraordinary powers behind a facade of insisted constitutional limitations--a built-in disingenuousness while a few people roam about, skirting accountability while convincing themselves that they, and only they, can solve the nation's problems (As 45 said during the campaign, "I alone can fix.").
That is all nonsense. The discussion about the balance and separation of powers has been going on since the Constitutional Convention--in fact, far before that--and played out again within the state ratification conventions, in which some of the votes were precariously close (Massachusetts, New York, Virginia) and nowhere near what one could call consensus. What we were left with, and now have with subsequent amendment adjustments, are the same kinds of compromises that:
It is, and always has been, an attempt to promote government power to accomplish what government sets out to do without skewing and leaning too far in one direction at the expense of other, equally salient interests, creating and reflecting the popular will.
Yoo thinks that impeachment is the kind of thing that can, you know, always take place if people care enough about it. But there have been exactly three impeachment movements against presidents in our history, and the two that actually went to trial took place amidst an atmosphere of overreach and therefore failed to convict (The other, that of Nixon, did not need to proceed to the trial phase before he resigned--which is a positive by-product of that process; he saw the writing on the wall, but only after Republicans turned on him at the last possible minute.).
What Yoo conveniently chooses not include in his argument--and did not choose to mention in his interview with Zakaria--is that the Founding Fathers did not foresee the development and institutional hardening of our two-party political system after floating into place: stable but inflexible, giving voters too little choice within a presidential democracy, not a parliamentary democracy where branch parties can flow and create temporary coalitions to address where a nation happens to be at a particular moment to create legislation and helpful policy. But they are here and they do create patterns of behavior that are undeniable. No significant politician today acts without checking over their shoulders at what the party faithful feel so that they do not become the party unfaithful.
Political parties have their internal discipline, where one who strays can be banished and ruined instantaneously for reasons having little to do with justice and the rule of law and far more about mobocracy and tribalism. Thus the seven Republican Senators who saw the unconstitutional set-up of their fellow party members against Andrew Johnson (the Tenure of Office Act, later declared exactly that by the Supreme Court), bad as he was, then crossed over and voted for his acquittal in 1868 were never elected again. Thus the Republicans who managed to finally get Bill Clinton to lie about his love affair in the Oval Office on record could pretentiously strut their religiously-conjured, quasi-legalistic charges against him into the Senate in 1998, only to find that Democrats called them out for a set-up that didn't rise to removable violations. So there was a winking at the rule of law (the law in this case being a non sequitur of court-ordered and bureaucratic arrangements having little to do with each other, kind of like a shish-ke-bob of ham, muskmelon and celery; hey, it's all food except they don't belong together, except they forced it down our throats anyhow) to arrange for a messy kind of justice because one side was too hypocritically angry (exposed by, in a way that reflected the twisted attempts at justice, a pornography mogul) to see a president's popularity (polling a consistent 70% at the time of the trial) to understand that what it was doing was off the rails. (Granted, what Clinton should have done was resign, which probably would have gotten Al Gore the extra 538 votes in Florida, except the by-then lividly crazy Republicans probably would have tried to impeach Gore for the 9/11 that probably would have happened anyhow.)
The Salience of the Courts, More or Less
But perhaps the utterance that was most revealing from Yoo was something he said as kind of an aside at the end of the interview with Zakaria: that in his view, the Founding Fathers could not have concluded that the courts were the places to take the issue of the declaration of a national emergency by a president--that Congress could control the issue by refusing to grant funding for whatever and however a president chose to accomplish its observance. That's assuming a consensus that Congress rarely, if ever, achieves about anything, the portentiousness of which would make members get over the grudges they keep for a long, long time--and which are all-too-fresh, what with Merrick Garland and the present shutdown ever-present in Democrats' minds. 45 knows this all too well, and can step on those wounds and create agony, even with his popularity numbers beneath 50 percent for nearly all of the last two years.
What the nation's going to look like when this stalemate ends will be ugly indeed, and maybe that's part of 45's plan to make people rely on him for an answer regardless of how bad things get. In his mind, it's still all dependent on him. He would be wise not to declare a national emergency for that reason, because then the courts will have to intervene. That is an interesting part of Yoo's thinking: Founding Fathers, again, could not and did not foresee that with Marbury v. Madison in 1803, John Marshall carved out a place for the Supreme Court to exist in terms of defining what the Constitution means--beyond what it was originally intended to do within a rather limited focus of solving interstate legal issues, desperately needed at the time.
One can make the argument that Marshall's declaration was extra-constitutional, an expansion of authority that has transcended time and circumstance but through acceptance and observance has established itself as deeply as any other aspect of our jurisprudence--except its rulings are respected as law only to the degree to which other legal entities appreciate them. They can be ignored, too, as Andrew Jackson did when the Court said he shouldn't make the Cherokees leave their native Georgia in the 1830s. This observer is waiting, too, for 45 to ignore, and announce like Jackson that he is ignoring, something it will rule on in the near future--especially as it relates to turning over documents such as the upcoming Mueller report.
The Dangerous Result: A Crisis Just Around the Corner
Wait and see. 45 will use what he will claim as his own unitary executive power--now a buzzphrase amongst Federalists--to justify a new wall, that of preventing the viewing of the Mueller report or the most significant, most damning parts of it, and dare even the Supreme Court to make him turn it over: as in, I dare you to come and get it.
Looking for a constitutional crisis? It's just around the corner. John Yoo started it to justify one disaster, creating quite another.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
That is all nonsense. The discussion about the balance and separation of powers has been going on since the Constitutional Convention--in fact, far before that--and played out again within the state ratification conventions, in which some of the votes were precariously close (Massachusetts, New York, Virginia) and nowhere near what one could call consensus. What we were left with, and now have with subsequent amendment adjustments, are the same kinds of compromises that:
- Also arranged for slavery to continue in the United States, but to end the slave trade after 1808;
- To count slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of the census to tax states fairly;
- To popularly elect members of the House of Representatives, but (originally) allow the state legislatures to elect U.S. Senators, and a special select few to elect the President (also originally) with independently determined votes; and
- To make one house of Congress directly responsive to the people, while the other house represents the states as separate, semi-sovereign entities, answerable to the Supremacy Clause in Article 6, a very large part of what the Civil War was fought over.
It is, and always has been, an attempt to promote government power to accomplish what government sets out to do without skewing and leaning too far in one direction at the expense of other, equally salient interests, creating and reflecting the popular will.
Yoo thinks that impeachment is the kind of thing that can, you know, always take place if people care enough about it. But there have been exactly three impeachment movements against presidents in our history, and the two that actually went to trial took place amidst an atmosphere of overreach and therefore failed to convict (The other, that of Nixon, did not need to proceed to the trial phase before he resigned--which is a positive by-product of that process; he saw the writing on the wall, but only after Republicans turned on him at the last possible minute.).
What Yoo conveniently chooses not include in his argument--and did not choose to mention in his interview with Zakaria--is that the Founding Fathers did not foresee the development and institutional hardening of our two-party political system after floating into place: stable but inflexible, giving voters too little choice within a presidential democracy, not a parliamentary democracy where branch parties can flow and create temporary coalitions to address where a nation happens to be at a particular moment to create legislation and helpful policy. But they are here and they do create patterns of behavior that are undeniable. No significant politician today acts without checking over their shoulders at what the party faithful feel so that they do not become the party unfaithful.
Political parties have their internal discipline, where one who strays can be banished and ruined instantaneously for reasons having little to do with justice and the rule of law and far more about mobocracy and tribalism. Thus the seven Republican Senators who saw the unconstitutional set-up of their fellow party members against Andrew Johnson (the Tenure of Office Act, later declared exactly that by the Supreme Court), bad as he was, then crossed over and voted for his acquittal in 1868 were never elected again. Thus the Republicans who managed to finally get Bill Clinton to lie about his love affair in the Oval Office on record could pretentiously strut their religiously-conjured, quasi-legalistic charges against him into the Senate in 1998, only to find that Democrats called them out for a set-up that didn't rise to removable violations. So there was a winking at the rule of law (the law in this case being a non sequitur of court-ordered and bureaucratic arrangements having little to do with each other, kind of like a shish-ke-bob of ham, muskmelon and celery; hey, it's all food except they don't belong together, except they forced it down our throats anyhow) to arrange for a messy kind of justice because one side was too hypocritically angry (exposed by, in a way that reflected the twisted attempts at justice, a pornography mogul) to see a president's popularity (polling a consistent 70% at the time of the trial) to understand that what it was doing was off the rails. (Granted, what Clinton should have done was resign, which probably would have gotten Al Gore the extra 538 votes in Florida, except the by-then lividly crazy Republicans probably would have tried to impeach Gore for the 9/11 that probably would have happened anyhow.)
The Salience of the Courts, More or Less
But perhaps the utterance that was most revealing from Yoo was something he said as kind of an aside at the end of the interview with Zakaria: that in his view, the Founding Fathers could not have concluded that the courts were the places to take the issue of the declaration of a national emergency by a president--that Congress could control the issue by refusing to grant funding for whatever and however a president chose to accomplish its observance. That's assuming a consensus that Congress rarely, if ever, achieves about anything, the portentiousness of which would make members get over the grudges they keep for a long, long time--and which are all-too-fresh, what with Merrick Garland and the present shutdown ever-present in Democrats' minds. 45 knows this all too well, and can step on those wounds and create agony, even with his popularity numbers beneath 50 percent for nearly all of the last two years.
What the nation's going to look like when this stalemate ends will be ugly indeed, and maybe that's part of 45's plan to make people rely on him for an answer regardless of how bad things get. In his mind, it's still all dependent on him. He would be wise not to declare a national emergency for that reason, because then the courts will have to intervene. That is an interesting part of Yoo's thinking: Founding Fathers, again, could not and did not foresee that with Marbury v. Madison in 1803, John Marshall carved out a place for the Supreme Court to exist in terms of defining what the Constitution means--beyond what it was originally intended to do within a rather limited focus of solving interstate legal issues, desperately needed at the time.
One can make the argument that Marshall's declaration was extra-constitutional, an expansion of authority that has transcended time and circumstance but through acceptance and observance has established itself as deeply as any other aspect of our jurisprudence--except its rulings are respected as law only to the degree to which other legal entities appreciate them. They can be ignored, too, as Andrew Jackson did when the Court said he shouldn't make the Cherokees leave their native Georgia in the 1830s. This observer is waiting, too, for 45 to ignore, and announce like Jackson that he is ignoring, something it will rule on in the near future--especially as it relates to turning over documents such as the upcoming Mueller report.
The Dangerous Result: A Crisis Just Around the Corner
Wait and see. 45 will use what he will claim as his own unitary executive power--now a buzzphrase amongst Federalists--to justify a new wall, that of preventing the viewing of the Mueller report or the most significant, most damning parts of it, and dare even the Supreme Court to make him turn it over: as in, I dare you to come and get it.
Looking for a constitutional crisis? It's just around the corner. John Yoo started it to justify one disaster, creating quite another.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Monday, January 14, 2019
Jayme's School, My School, and the Dynamics of Tragedy
It was telling that, during the first news conference after Jayme Closs' rescue, the person beside the county sheriff who had the most to say was the Barron school superintendent.
It was a message of joy and welcoming back. Jayme will need all the support she can get in the coming weeks, months, and years, and school will be the place she can get it. For school becomes a community at high times and low, and it is the center of a 13-year-old's existence.
It is also a place that feels tragedy deeply. All schools feel it eventually.
Linda, a friend of mine in the school in which I taught, and married to a teacher buddy, died of a botched, hospital-based abortion nearly a quarter-century ago--a result opaquely kept from the community in the first days following her death; it was reported as "complications of pregnancy"--and the faculty, myself included, was badly shaken. Grown men to whom people looked for strength, wept like children. To his credit, the principal allowed me and a few other close faculty members to take several days off to assist with the funeral and simply rally ourselves to return to work with some semblance of rationality.
The students felt it, too. Linda was a popular teacher with them. With her passing, media attention was held to a minimum, emerging later when the real cause was revealed. Jayme's disappearance, on the other hand, created an instant Amber Alert and media saturation. That will return soon and some of it already has: this very morning, CBS This Morning's Gayle King interviewed mothers of three of Jayme's friends, who formed their own support-and-hope group in anticipation of Jayme's return.
It won't be the last interview attempted with someone connected with the murder, kidnapping and recovery. Media will buzz around Jayme's school as well, trying to interview administrators and teachers for their views and reactions. It will never completely stop, either; journalists will keep these events in their archives and return to talk with her as she moves through high school and, perhaps, into college. It may proceed as gently as it possibly can, but it will be relentless nonetheless. There's a lot we still don't know and we will eventually get to it, like the pages of an open book being turned by a breeze.
Pictures of Jayme in the first days following her recovery have been happy ones, with a loving aunt and faithful dog. Clearly, the bottom hasn't fallen out yet. Once it hits her, the devastating emptiness will change her life in ways no one can yet determine.
After Linda's death, as strange and unfair as it was, my school was never the same. So many of us live in small towns convinced that life goes on in predictable fashion with smiles and happy endings, so this unearthed the firmament. Some friendships intensified, some disappeared. This, too, may happen to Jayme, as much due to her sudden but unwanted status as a media star as by some otherwise harmless comment that will cause deep pain and resentment. After all, she's 13. Kids, too, say and do things that just come to them without measurement.
Amidst all this, school will go on but all will have to adjust. Yet, it will be the very center of Jayme's life in ways it never would have been had this terrible tragedy not occurred. It will be the one place she knows she can go where something absolutely normal will take place and contain whatever stability it can muster.
Teachers will be briefed on new developments in somber meetings. Some may ask whether they should even mention someone's death in English or History classes, in fear of setting off some delayed reaction. The guidance department will no doubt be sensitized for any reactions, not only from Jayme but her friends and fellow students. They will try their best to look after her but not stare, hoping that her mind can re-focus on what society will continue to demand of her--to get an education by earning grades, whatever they can possibly mean at this moment and in the future. Parents will call with information gathered from their children, whether it is factual or rumored (another unfortunate hazard of these events).
All of it will be cloaked with the label business as usual, but everybody knows it won't be. Jayme's parents won't be at open houses, at PTA meetings, or in the crowd at school games, and not at her graduation from middle school or high school, either. When Jayme sits with her aunt, it will be an unavoidable reminder of all that went before it.
When I returned to work after Linda's funeral, I allowed myself to enter her classroom before her substitute did, giving myself one last chance to experience something she loved to do before inevitably acknowledging the passage back to something akin to normality. I needed the closure, but that, too, was fleeting. Mutual friends still discuss it. It was that powerful.
It changed my life, though. Linda was our local union's treasurer, and I was the president at the time of her death. I decided, in her memory, to dedicate myself to the union far more completely than in the past, and rose to heights I couldn't have imagined.
Perhaps someone, perhaps Jayme herself, will take the energy of this disaster and harness it into some series of accomplishments in the memory of her parents, taken from her by the awful mentality that can fester from the loneliness of the rural regions, from which she saved herself by calling on whatever resources her parents left with her 88 days later. Those, too, are and can be the dynamics of tragedy, as life moves on for the living.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
It was a message of joy and welcoming back. Jayme will need all the support she can get in the coming weeks, months, and years, and school will be the place she can get it. For school becomes a community at high times and low, and it is the center of a 13-year-old's existence.
It is also a place that feels tragedy deeply. All schools feel it eventually.
Linda, a friend of mine in the school in which I taught, and married to a teacher buddy, died of a botched, hospital-based abortion nearly a quarter-century ago--a result opaquely kept from the community in the first days following her death; it was reported as "complications of pregnancy"--and the faculty, myself included, was badly shaken. Grown men to whom people looked for strength, wept like children. To his credit, the principal allowed me and a few other close faculty members to take several days off to assist with the funeral and simply rally ourselves to return to work with some semblance of rationality.
The students felt it, too. Linda was a popular teacher with them. With her passing, media attention was held to a minimum, emerging later when the real cause was revealed. Jayme's disappearance, on the other hand, created an instant Amber Alert and media saturation. That will return soon and some of it already has: this very morning, CBS This Morning's Gayle King interviewed mothers of three of Jayme's friends, who formed their own support-and-hope group in anticipation of Jayme's return.
It won't be the last interview attempted with someone connected with the murder, kidnapping and recovery. Media will buzz around Jayme's school as well, trying to interview administrators and teachers for their views and reactions. It will never completely stop, either; journalists will keep these events in their archives and return to talk with her as she moves through high school and, perhaps, into college. It may proceed as gently as it possibly can, but it will be relentless nonetheless. There's a lot we still don't know and we will eventually get to it, like the pages of an open book being turned by a breeze.
Pictures of Jayme in the first days following her recovery have been happy ones, with a loving aunt and faithful dog. Clearly, the bottom hasn't fallen out yet. Once it hits her, the devastating emptiness will change her life in ways no one can yet determine.
After Linda's death, as strange and unfair as it was, my school was never the same. So many of us live in small towns convinced that life goes on in predictable fashion with smiles and happy endings, so this unearthed the firmament. Some friendships intensified, some disappeared. This, too, may happen to Jayme, as much due to her sudden but unwanted status as a media star as by some otherwise harmless comment that will cause deep pain and resentment. After all, she's 13. Kids, too, say and do things that just come to them without measurement.
Amidst all this, school will go on but all will have to adjust. Yet, it will be the very center of Jayme's life in ways it never would have been had this terrible tragedy not occurred. It will be the one place she knows she can go where something absolutely normal will take place and contain whatever stability it can muster.
Teachers will be briefed on new developments in somber meetings. Some may ask whether they should even mention someone's death in English or History classes, in fear of setting off some delayed reaction. The guidance department will no doubt be sensitized for any reactions, not only from Jayme but her friends and fellow students. They will try their best to look after her but not stare, hoping that her mind can re-focus on what society will continue to demand of her--to get an education by earning grades, whatever they can possibly mean at this moment and in the future. Parents will call with information gathered from their children, whether it is factual or rumored (another unfortunate hazard of these events).
All of it will be cloaked with the label business as usual, but everybody knows it won't be. Jayme's parents won't be at open houses, at PTA meetings, or in the crowd at school games, and not at her graduation from middle school or high school, either. When Jayme sits with her aunt, it will be an unavoidable reminder of all that went before it.
When I returned to work after Linda's funeral, I allowed myself to enter her classroom before her substitute did, giving myself one last chance to experience something she loved to do before inevitably acknowledging the passage back to something akin to normality. I needed the closure, but that, too, was fleeting. Mutual friends still discuss it. It was that powerful.
It changed my life, though. Linda was our local union's treasurer, and I was the president at the time of her death. I decided, in her memory, to dedicate myself to the union far more completely than in the past, and rose to heights I couldn't have imagined.
Perhaps someone, perhaps Jayme herself, will take the energy of this disaster and harness it into some series of accomplishments in the memory of her parents, taken from her by the awful mentality that can fester from the loneliness of the rural regions, from which she saved herself by calling on whatever resources her parents left with her 88 days later. Those, too, are and can be the dynamics of tragedy, as life moves on for the living.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Monday, January 7, 2019
When Liberals Sound Conservative--But Make Sense: An Approach to Campus Correctness
Liberals rarely sound conservative. But two of them have put together a book that makes sense and sounds out a call for concern and reform.
Children of today are coddled, they say. They don't know how to handle adversity. They become too defensive and lash out at those who are actually trying to help them.
One author is an admitted liberal. The other is a centrist who occasionally leans leftward.
Their conclusions match the rants of conservatives of previous generations: Our youth is going soft and that's dangerous. It isn't as simple as that. But Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have written a book called The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure. It's worth a good look.
What they're ultimately driving at is a phenomenon that's been developing in our colleges for some time now: The inclination of students to resist and automatically reject speakers with views that aren't considered in their mainstream, sometimes very sensitive to race and gender issues. The students use confrontational strategies, including mockery and screaming of insults, to shout down these speakers. They issue threats that compromise speakers' safety.
All these people want to do is say something in a place where, up until now, not only the right to say it has been protected, but the invitation to do so has been cultivated--where free speech has been freer than ever before. But now, the authors say, students have become too ultra-sensitized to those who themselves mock and attack their worldview. Students have become walled off from that which they do not prefer to the extent where they believe they do not need to hear it--or get anywhere near it.
The result, say the authors, is that the quality of education is diminishing before our very eyes. The very idea of higher education is exposure to information, and with it, the endless but quite meaningful search for truth.
It used to be that such speakers caused more research and conversation, and no doubt some of that remains. It's just that the resistance to these challenging people--in fact, to ignore the challenge because it's just so obvious that they're wrong--flies in the face of the purpose of universities.
The Essence of the Problem and Its Causes
Now, though, say the authors, children are being raised far too often with three concepts in mind:
Children of today are coddled, they say. They don't know how to handle adversity. They become too defensive and lash out at those who are actually trying to help them.
One author is an admitted liberal. The other is a centrist who occasionally leans leftward.
Their conclusions match the rants of conservatives of previous generations: Our youth is going soft and that's dangerous. It isn't as simple as that. But Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have written a book called The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure. It's worth a good look.
What they're ultimately driving at is a phenomenon that's been developing in our colleges for some time now: The inclination of students to resist and automatically reject speakers with views that aren't considered in their mainstream, sometimes very sensitive to race and gender issues. The students use confrontational strategies, including mockery and screaming of insults, to shout down these speakers. They issue threats that compromise speakers' safety.
All these people want to do is say something in a place where, up until now, not only the right to say it has been protected, but the invitation to do so has been cultivated--where free speech has been freer than ever before. But now, the authors say, students have become too ultra-sensitized to those who themselves mock and attack their worldview. Students have become walled off from that which they do not prefer to the extent where they believe they do not need to hear it--or get anywhere near it.
The result, say the authors, is that the quality of education is diminishing before our very eyes. The very idea of higher education is exposure to information, and with it, the endless but quite meaningful search for truth.
It used to be that such speakers caused more research and conversation, and no doubt some of that remains. It's just that the resistance to these challenging people--in fact, to ignore the challenge because it's just so obvious that they're wrong--flies in the face of the purpose of universities.
The Essence of the Problem and Its Causes
Now, though, say the authors, children are being raised far too often with three concepts in mind:
- What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. It's just the opposite of the famous Nietzsche phrase. If you take things on and lose, it's a setback that you can't get over. Staying safe is paramount. Helicopter parents never let kids out of their sight and guided recess is required at schools.
- Emotional reasoning: Always trust your feelings. There's no need to actually pick up a book or have a conversation or listen to someone and test whether their facts lead to decent or acceptable conclusions. If a label isn't what you like, never mind.
- Us versus Them: Life is a battle between good and evil. There are no shades of meaning or degrees of truth. If people are disagreeable, they are to be rejected. Period. Not only that, but there should be somewhere to go if students don't like what's being said so they don't have to hear it.
The results of this are subtle, but rising in evidence (not an exhaustive list):
- A demand for safe spaces and 'trigger warnings' on campus. Instead of welcoming controversy and thought-provoking arguments, students are now demanding to remain safe within their own minds and be warned ahead of time that what's coming may not be something they prefer, kind of like movie ratings.
- A decided lack of conservative professors. Turns out this ongoing, conservative complaint has merit. Instead of responding with an effort to balance the philosophies of faculties, universities have doubled-down on retaining liberal professors to avoid the kinds of confrontations that upset students and create bad public relations. Yours Truly attended a consortium of conservatives while with the National Education Association leadership in 2005, and found a kind of Queen-For-A-Day, who-has-it-worst plaintive cries among conservative students bemoaning their plights of being repressed by liberals. Though some were exaggerated and emotionally bankrupt (for the same kinds of reasons the above-mentioned liberals point out the same thing), these complaints will only find more resonance as we go along.
- A lack of support for those professors who have been attacked by students demanding safety of curricula. It's silent, but devastating. Other professors sure don't want to be confronted, either, so although they will privately admit that much of this is nonsense, they won't take it on themselves only to find that they, too, are on islands without lifeboats. And it certainly applies to college administrators, who are beholding to alumni and donors to deliver consistent levels of student populations yearly. This universal defensiveness directly reflects the defensiveness that too many students now demand.
Bottom line: The university is abrogating its responsibility to its students to provide the widest possible exposure to ideas and their discussion in a genuine search for truth. They are threatening to become a rubber stamp for thoughts and mentalities that students have already come to college with--in which case, why are we bothering if they have no need to change their minds about anything?
Okay: Now What?
The authors boil down their solution to one overriding philosophy, oft repeated but needed as never before: Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. The latter can never be done well enough, though it will always be attempted. Nobody can know the totality of what any child will face before they face it. Beyond common sense efforts, what parents do to overprotect kids will only hurt them in the long run.
Practically speaking, the authors say, this means that, from early childhood and onward (again, not exhaustive):
- Guided recess is a contradiction in terms and does damage to kids' sense of independence. Let kids make up their own games and rules and beyond genuine pain caused by accidents and temper losses, let them figure things out on their own.
- Keep homework to a minimum in early grades. Younger buddies can't handle big assignments.
- Keep student use of social media devices down to two hours a day. As many of us came to say, it will allow them more time to "get a life." They will tend to avoid the inclination to submit to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) of things made priorities when they shouldn't be.
- High school graduates should be given a "gap" year to work or do community service before college. Let them grow up a little and see that the rest of the world isn't especially protected against bad ideas or disagreeable people. Let them watch and then do what others do about it. Some of the things that upset them in college now won't seem like such an impending disaster. In hindsight, Yours Truly would have benefited from such a practice.
- Colleges shouldn't respond to public outrage against controversial speakers. Outside of reinforcing the college's mission to provide intellectual stimulation, as well as the protection of the First Amendment, the college should let things happen (outside of genuine harassment and incitement, which aren't legal anywhere for any reason) as part of what it simply does and should keep doing. But excessive sensitivity narrows the definitions of these phrases so much that, along with knee-jerk administrative reactions, any discomfort falls under some seemingly damaging scenario.
- Inclusion of viewpoint diversity in diversity policies and trainings. Because people sometimes view each other negatively and with disdain if they disagree--the same as they do if they're of a different race, sexual orientation, or religion--dealing with such matters counts as the same inside of a university as well as outside of it. Students have to be ready for that, too.
There were vestiges of these behaviors and reactions as far back as my college days (1969-73), so such incidents can be recalled. The authors, too, utilize very recent stories that go far beyond what those experiences were. To the extent that this has proliferated, the university experience is diminished. It ought not to be so. Learning has more than one dimension. Let the universities get back in touch with all of them. Our intellectual lives, and those of the future of this country, depend on it.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
