What’s So Bad About Doing Good?

Or, for that matter, about feeling good? Or even doing good in order to feel good? These questions, of course, are directed at the authors and devotees of “Stuff White People Like.” Admittedly, I’ve only read bits and pieces of SWPL itself, mostly as quoted in other people’s blogs. But SWPL is only the most coherent popularization of a strain of thought that has afflicted our culture for nearly a century now. It has its origins in a kind of pop Calvinism that has by now forgotten its origins, but is still basic to the American psyche.

Jean Calvin (no relation to the tiger’s pal), who brought us the Pilgrims and the Presbyterian Church, believed that people are inherently sinful, and can’t “save” themselves by doing good works. We are “saved” if and only if God chooses to save us. We have no way of knowing who is saved and who is damned, and we shouldn’t care. We should, of course, do good, but not to save ourselves from damnation. We should do good purely because that’s what God wants. We must do everything possible to guard against ulterior motives. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is no better than not doing it at all.

There are, Calvin tells us, lots of wrong reasons. Earthly rewards, like money and status and power. Heavenly rewards, like not going to hell. And psychological rewards, like feeling good about ourselves. Ideally, we should do good as secretly as possible*, and in ever-present uncertainty about our eternal destination. Calvin didn’t, so far as I know, have any helpful advice on how to keep from feeling good about having done good. Presumably, if we are all sinners, awareness of that fact should be enough.

Well, these days, it isn’t. Unlike Calvin and his ideological descendants, today’s Americans believe deeply in their inalienable right to feel good about themselves. We bump up our self-esteem for our skills, our temperaments, and our sheer lovability. As Senator Franken, in his earlier incarnation as Stuart Smalley, used to say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and—doggone it!—the Minnesota Supreme Court likes me.” Or something like that.

We are entitled to feel good about every aspect of our selves except—oddly enough—our attempts to improve the world we live in and the lot of its inhabitants. Not only are we not allowed to feel good about doing good, we are not allowed to feel good about being good, except in the sense denoting excellence of worldly skills. We still believe we are all sinners. But we also believe that, as Smalley would say, “that’s o-kay.” We don’t need to feel bad about being sinners, we just shouldn’t feel good about being do-gooders. That would imply that we do good for ulterior motives—namely, in order to feel good.

This at least provides us with a solution to the eternal conundrum of how to bad-mouth people we don’t like but about whom we don’t actually know anything discrediting—just say they’re only buying Fair Trade coffee/living in integrated neighborhoods/going to church regularly/sending their children to public schools/buying hybrid cars/etc. to feel good. It’s even neater than calling them hypocrites, which was the ploy before we discovered feelgood.

Admittedly, I come from the Jewish tradition, which is mostly profoundly behaviorist. With some rather esoteric exceptions, we don’t much mind if you do the right thing for the wrong reason—even reasons a lot wronger than mere self-esteem, like looking good to the neighbors, improving the image of your business, impressing eligible members of the opposite sex, or even intimidating potential opponents—so long as you do it. We figure the world will still be a better place than if you don’t do it.

For the same reason, we aren’t keen on doing good secretly. If your neighbors don’t know you donate to charity, they may feel they live in a world in which most people don’t donate. This may lead them to stop donating. It may also lead them not to bother asking for help when they really need it, because they don’t know anybody to ask. At the very least, it is likely to lead them to depression and even despair.

Moreover, as St. Augustine figured out a long time ago, it is just about impossible to delete selfish motives from our actions. Either we deceive ourselves about our motives, or we get paralyzed into not acting at all. This is not worth the trouble.

So, please, spare me the Stuff White Liberals Who Aspire to a Moral Code Loftier Than Al Capone’s Like. Nice people feel good about nice things. Nasty people feel good about nasty things. Pat yourself on the back and go on your way. Make the world a better place.

*This was the whole point of Magnificent Obsession, a very popular edifying novel of the 1950s.

Red Emma

Magical Thinking, Al Queda, and Aliens

The origin of Guantánamo is pure magical thinking, as is the current mainland US resistance to bringing Gitmo defendants onto our soil for trial before federal courts. Perhaps the ancient Hindu practice of untouchability is the clearest analog. A person who can pollute places and people by his very presence in a room, or by casting his shadow upon a Brahmin’s food, is, on one hand, the lowest of the low. On the other hand, he also has a kind of super-power. Remember cooties? Back when we were fifth-graders and the boys had decided that girls had cooties, the girls could chase the boys halfway across the playground threatening to pollute them. Oh, to have that kind of power again!

Well, Al Quaeda, and anybody even remotely suspected of being connected with Al Quaeda, has that power. If any of them are allowed onto US soil, we will instantly dissolve into terror and anarchy. The super-max prisons that now securely hold the worst of our worst home-grown criminals are presumed to be utterly ineffectual against these Muslim super-criminals. Never mind that the latter’s accents and looks make them a lot easier to spot and retrieve than our home-grown murderers and rapists. Never mind that many of them have probably been deprived of most of their physical and mental competence by their treatment at Gitmo. Once their feet touch US soil, they will gain 100 pounds, get a foot taller, and turn green and even meaner than, say, Ted Bundy, Ted Kosinski, and Brian Dugan.

We knew that back in 2001, of course, which is why we created Gitmo in the first place. Those of you familiar with pagan magick know about wards and circles, which create places outside normal space and time to which the most dangerous forces can be restricted. Well, that was Gitmo. The detention facility there was created to be a legal black hole, under no one’s jurisdiction for purposes of legal review, but under the absolute control of the US government for purposes of keeping the Bad Guys from our shores. Of course, as anyone who saw “A Few Good Men” well knows, there is legal US jurisdiction at Gitmo. That’s why the US military servicemembers stationed there can be disciplined and even court-martialed, right there on the base, if they violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they don’t like the result, they can even appeal, first up the military chain of command all the way to the Pentagon, and then to the civilian federal court system on the mainland. But, apparently, the US public can’t handle that truth either. They/we can accept the novel concept of an “unlawful combatant” who is in a different category from prisoners of war, spies and irregulars subject to being shot on sight, and criminal defendants. Such a person therefore cannot be granted any of the legal rights of POWs or criminal defendants. But by reason of some strange compunction, he cannot be shot on sight either (perhaps because many of them were never encountered by US authorities on the battlefield in the first place, but were picked up from local bounty hunters.) Presumably that’s one of the three impossible things a good American is required to believe before breakfast. But we can’t imagine allowing these people to touch our sacred soil, lest they pollute it, and us, with deadly weakness.

Which is closely related to what happens to our sacred soil when the wrong kind of alien touches it. And also what happens to the right kind of alien (ie anti-communists and especially Cubans) touches that same soil—they are immediately free and legal. The soil that renders anti-communist Cubans free and legal is itself rendered vulnerable and polluted by capitalist-wannabe Mexicans. Does Hogwarts know about this?

Red Emma

How Do You Stop a Prosecutor from Overcharging?

It’s an old joke, of course. But not as old as the stereotyping of the relationship between police, and prosecutors, and what Hammett, Spillane, and in a somewhat milder vein, Gardner, used to portray as the intrepid but slightly disreputable private investigator or criminal defense attorney. Avid crime novel reader though I am, I always found that stereotype unpersuasive, perhaps because I’m also an attorney and occasionally do criminal defense work. And I have never been treated with anything but the utmost courtesy by cops and prosecutors. So I figured the hostility between cops/prosecutors and private eyes was just a literary device to generate conflict and complexity in an otherwise too-simple story.

Apparently I was wrong, at least in Cook County. Or, at any rate, the newly-elected Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez, reads the same crime novels I do and takes them a lot more seriously.

Some background: David Protess*, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has for ten years or so been running an Innocence Project which has succeeded in getting several convicted murderers off Death Row and getting several other convicts out of the Illinois prison system. His students investigate diligently, and then turn their information over to the State’s Attorney, to prove that their clients were innocent all along. Not just “not guilty” on some technicality or other, like improperly seized evidence or improperly extracted confession—actually innocent. As in “they didn’t do it.” As in “some other dude did it” who may even still be on the street free to do it again. They succeed often enough that the State’s Attorney’s office is evidently a bit embarrassed.

So our new State’s Attorney has decided to strike back. Presented by the Innocence Project with evidence that Anthony McKinney had not committed the 1978 murder for which he was locked up for life, she has subpoenaed the students’ grades, notes, expense reports, and class syllabi, all in an effort to demonstrate that the students were more interested in getting good grades by any means necessary than in getting an actually innocent man out of prison. They paid witnesses to give exculpatory testimony, she says, and the witnesses then spent the money on drugs. They were themselves then rewarded by getting good grades.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…: The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! Investigators who were themselves being rewarded for getting the evidence may have paid the witnesses who provided it, who then may have spent the money on drugs. Oh the humanity! Ummmm, don’t the cops get paid to dig up evidence? Don’t they occasionally pay informants, or at least cover their expenses? Is it at least remotely possible that some of those informants then spend the money on something other than food, non-alcoholic drinks, transportation, extra socks, a new copy of the Big Book, and a donation to the parish poorbox?

Aside from which, the students say the only pay they gave an informant was his cab fare, paid directly to the driver with instructions not to give the change back to the informant. But what difference would it make if they had given him drug money? Isn’t it the State’s Attorney’s job to check out the information provided by the students? Why is she expecting them to present in finished form, suitable for presentation in court? Why is she persecuting them for not doing her homework for her?

I’m not even going to get into the issues of privilege raised by Medill’s attorneys—if the students are journalists, their notes and personal and academic information should be shielded from seizure by the prosecution, but so what? Even if they’re not journalists, and even if everything Alvarez alleges is true, what difference does it make? There is no legitimate reason for pursuing this stuff, and the most obvious illegitimate reason is that the head prosecutor is finally in a position to pursue a vendetta against the people who have been embarrassing her office for years.

Back when I was working at the Federal Public Defender, my boss told me, while expounding on final arguments, “a lot of jurors vote to convict because they find the prosecutor really likeable and they don’t want to hurt his feelings. You need to point out to them that his feelings won’t be hurt in the slightest, because an honest vote to acquit isn’t a defeat for the prosecutor. He’s not like us—we only win if our client gets acquitted. But the prosecutor wins if justice is done, whichever way that goes.”

This prosecutor is losing.

* Full disclosure: David Protess and I were involved in draft counseling some of the same students at Roosevelt University in the 1970s. He’s a good guy.

RedEmma

Bigotry and Low Expectations

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

Hate Crimes, Special Victims, and the Rest of Us

The new Defense Appropriations Bill either has been or is about to be signed into law, with an amendment that places people under federal protection from those who object to their sexual orientation. I’m certainly in favor of whatever it takes to prevent atrocities like the murder of Matthew Shephard. But I’m getting uncomfortable with statutes that protect only certain groups from crimes that we should all be protected from. I just did a quick run-through of the criminal section of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, and found something like 34 categories of people who are specifically protected from homicide, battery, assault, or hate crimes.

Specifically, that’s:
peace officers
correctional officers
minors
emergency medical technicians
persons over 60
disabled persons
teachers and school employees
unborn children
family or household members of the perpetrator
prison or jail inmates
park employees
caseworkers
bus or cab drivers
state or city employees on duty
sports officials and coaches
emergency management workers
utility workers
pregnant women
judges
merchants detaining shoplifting suspects
child athletes, and
people being victimized because of their
actual or
perceived
race
color
creed
religion
ancestry
gender
sexual orientation
physical or mental disability, or
national origin.

Of course, I’m not including any of the specifications about: who the perpetrator is, or where or when the crime is committed. I just want to know whose life is worth more than that of the average person on the street. (And never mind, for now, that assaulting or battering anybody on the street is, by reason of that fact, aggravated.)

Most jurisdictions have similar catalogs, so far as I can tell. Certainly federal law does. I spent some years as a federal law enforcement official protected by a statute that, I think, imposed a possible death sentence on anybody who murdered me. At the time, I was handling a case in a small local jurisdiction where the mayor had recently hired the killing of the City Attorney with whom my predecessor had been negotiating, so I kind of liked having that protection. But my point, obviously, is that every such jurisdiction (except the feds, who have no generalized murder, assault, and battery statutes) supposedly bans assault and battery against anybody. So why should we need these extra protections?

As to homicide, we really don’t. Homicide statutes get enforced fairly uniformly, except for informal special considerations for Important, or at least Nice, People, as opposed to street people, prostitutes, and prison inmates, and perhaps illegal immigrants—people whom many of us believe we would all be better off without.

But as to assault and battery, we really don’t bother. Illinois apparently doesn’t have any anti-bullying statute yet, but some other jurisdictions do. Bullying mostly involves juvenile-on-juvenile conduct that also clearly constitutes assault and battery. But most of us object to “criminalizing normal youthful hijinks,” even if they would already be criminal if the victim were an adult. Adult-on-adult “simple” assault or battery, unless the victim is within one of these protected classes, or the locus of the crime is a protected place, also gets ignored.

So we have to invent 34+ protected classes of victims and roughly the same number of protected locations to notify our police and prosecutors that “we really mean it” as to those persons and localities. Then we get objections from conservatives and more sinister forces that we are granting “special rights” to some groups at the expense of others. And, unfortunately, they’re right. Some people have special rights to be protected from assault, battery, and other unpleasantries, and the rest of us don’t.

That’s not (conservatives to the contrary notwithstanding) because we value some people more than others. It’s because we cannot be bothered to recognize a general human right to be safe from assault, battery, and other usually petty crimes. We put it into our statute books, but we almost never enforce it.

And that, in turn, is because our law enforcement system doesn’t want to be hauled into every petty dispute between ordinary people. Our police and judges have been all too well trained by their mothers: “I don’t care which of you hit the other one first.
Both of you shut up and sit still, or you don’t get any TV tonight.” “Nobody likes a tattletale.” In school bullying situations, all parties are likely to get the same punishment. This discourages reporting, which is just fine with the teachers. With children, or with unimportant people in general, the point of a disciplinary system is not to do justice, or even to inculcate good habits of behavior. It is to relieve the authorities of all but the most necessary work.

For my sins, I have had to spend a great deal of time representing a couple of people who are trying to direct the attention of the law enforcement system to various infractions committed by people near and formerly dear to them. Both the police and prosecutors have told my clients repeatedly that they have unlimited official discretion not to arrest or prosecute, regardless of the enormity of the offense in question. Most of this discretion doesn’t even make its way into the statutes or the reporting of court cases, because exercise of this discretion means, by definition, that there will never be a court case. This is, we are told, essential if we are not to expend most of our gross domestic product on law enforcement. Choices have to be made. Designation of special victims and crime circumstances are the way we make those choices.

At the same time (see http://wiredsisters.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-flabby-arm-of-the-law/), we keep the simple assault and battery statutes, and all sorts of other statutes we have no intention of enforcing, on the books. Thus we maintain the appearance of being Nice People, while not having to pay undue attention to the ordinary behavior of ordinary people, and at the same time holding a weapon in reserve for when that behavior arouses serious public emotion. Creation of one more class of protected victim is now the standard response to any horrendous crime. Many of the laws embodying this approach memorialize the names of victims, to keep the crimes fresh in our memory, so we will continue to consider them important—Megan’s law, Amber Alerts, and so on. No doubt the most recent addition to the federal hate crimes catalog will become known, at least informally, as Matthew’s law. Which is a worthy memorial to a young man who deserved a lot better of his society. But wouldn’t it be better to take seriously the rights of all of us to be free of assault, battery, and homicide?

Jane Grey

Groups upset man wouldn’t marry interracial couple

“By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer – 6 mins ago

“NEW ORLEANS – At least two civil and constitutional rights groups in Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple.

“The head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana and the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice said Keith Bardwell should quit immediately.

“Bardwell is a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana. He refused earlier this month to issue a license or marry Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black.

“Bardwell said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace.

“He says children of such unions face troubling futures.”

Umm, like the President of the United States? Or Tiger Woods? Oh, never mind.

Red Emma

Why Are There Poor People?

Beck’s comment on my last post inspires this query. “[T]he existence of our poor,” says Beck, “emerges from a massively systemic problem with the way our political and economic systems are structured.” It also triggers my recall of an old album of comedian Bill Cosby about the joys of a college education, titled “Why Is There Air?” Cosby chats about the various kinds of people he met in college, from the philosophy majors who went around asking “why is there air?” to the athletes who knew perfectly well why there is air—it’s for blowing up basketballs.

Cosby, however, not having been a philosophy major himself, didn’t stop off and look at Aristotle’s multiple analysis of causality. There’s:

• The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.
• The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
• The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
• The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

So okay, the material cause of poverty is lack of resources. That’s easy. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway between them made it plain. The poor are different from us because they have less money, or none at all.

The efficient cause requires an economodicy (it’s a monstrous word, but I can’t think of a better one for justifying the ways of The Invisible Hand to man.) Maybe the Invisible Hand is the efficient cause.

The final cause: the perceived self-interest of everybody, I suppose.

The formal cause is the really difficult one, here. We tend to regard poor people as useless. In fact, they are anything but useless.

Let’s stipulate to two classes of poor people: the working poor and the begging poor. The begging poor are necessary as a spectre to frighten the working poor into continuing to work. If there were no homeless people or panhandlers, Wall Street would have to hire out-of-work actors to impersonate them. (In my conspiracy theorist moments, I suspect they did, at least in the early ‘80s.) Poverty gives people an incentive to work harder to make money for other people as well as for themselves. Without poverty, we would all be lounging in some Polynesian Eden, picking breadfruit off the trees and getting semi-dressed for the next luau.

And the working poor are necessary to do the things for which machines are still too expensive. In Saudi Arabia, where oil reserves have pretty much abolished poverty among native Saudis, they actually have to import an entire population of poor people to do their manual labor, mostly from Asia.

This explanation of the formal cause of poverty, of course, requires some entity to do the formulating. In economics, that’s a whole field of study in itself. The Invisible Hand? The Ruling Classes? I tend to the latter explanation, if only because I can’t get my mind around the notion of what an Invisible Hand can be planning. Yes, there are people in positions of power in our economy who consciously and deliberately see the existence of poverty as one among many implements creating The Workable Economy. That was, essentially, the thinking behind the developments that brought one generation after another of new workers into newly-created poor people’s jobs. First it was married women, to do the clerical work. Then it was teenagers, to flip burgers. Then it was former welfare recipients, now “reformed” into the private sector, to become temporary or part-time workers with no job security, even from week to week, and no benefits. Somewhere along the line, undocumented immigrants got into the act, to do anything American poor people wouldn’t or couldn’t do for the wages available.

Of course, most employers who pay poverty wages don’t actually like employing poor people. Poor people are fat, and ugly. They have lousy teeth and sometimes questionable personal hygiene. And they keep missing work, or being late, usually because they’re sick or their cars have broken down or somebody in the family has some dumb problem and can’t take care of it without help. Whenever possible, employers prefer hiring people who are middle-class by virtue of the earnings and assets of other family members, and who therefore won’t start living and looking like poor people simply by virtue of not having enough money. That is, the employer is looking for a subsidy from the worker’s family, in return for the inestimable gift of a job. If I show up at a Mercedes dealership with a bus token and assume that the dealer will stake me to the rest of the cost of the car, I’m pretty nervy. But an employer who pays poverty wages and expects the families of his workers to stake him to workers with the look and behavior and work habits of middle-class people is just being rationally self-interested.

Anyway, that’s why there are poor people. Beck calls this a problem with our economic structure. That depends, obviously, on what the economic structure is for. A case can be made that poverty is a solution, from some points of view.

Red Emma

Back Down the Rabbit Hole

I guess I must have repressed my memories of the Republican opposition to the Clinton administration. It required too much suspension of disbelief even for a long-time Coleridge fan. Reminds me of the time I tried to turn my experiences running a legal aid office in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago into a series of short stories. The one that finally ended that career detour was the two kids I interviewed about their juvenile court case, who told me they had run away from home because their parents were practicing black magic.* I realized, as I reviewed my notes, that there was no way I was going to be able to make truth as believable as fiction, and I might as well go back to writing briefs and memoranda.

So here we go again, with the MSM trying to make the opposition loonies as believable as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Remember poor Vince Foster, supposedly murdered by White House operatives because he Knew Too Much? Nobody could ever enunciate just what he knew too much about, but si non é vero, é ben trovato. And the apocryphal Secret Service agent whose job was to recruit lesbian bimbos for Hillary? Lesbian bimbos? Gimme a break. The scandalized reporters who discovered that Hillary, in her brief forays into the investment market, had actually made money? Omigod. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (sorry, I know I’ve used that before, I just can’t find anything more apt.)

Some saner conservatives are pointing out that the loonies are raising some valid points, such as the proper role and size of government, which deserve a serious debate. Some liberals have pointed out that we just had that debate, which, in this great country of ours, is called an election, and our guy won. Some other liberal commentators suspect that the reason the loonies can’t accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency is that he’s Black. Obviously, they have the same trouble I did remembering the Clinton administration, which the loonies also never accepted as legitimate, even though Bill is at least as pale as I am, and Hillary is a good deal more so. They just started with the axiom that the Clintons had somehow snuck in under cover of darkness and then changed the locks on the White House. Color was never an issue. The issue is, and has always been, who qualifies as a Real American. A few Blacks and Hispanics (especially Cubans**) actually do. But anybody who believes the government has a valid role providing help for non-rich Americans really doesn’t qualify.

Remember the New Deal?*** FDR made it happen by making a deal with the Devil, or rather, the Dixiecrats, that would guarantee that none of its benefits would extend to Black people. Social Security and Unemployment Compensation specifically didn’t cover agricultural and domestic workers, who made up the majority of employed African-Americans at the time. Black sharecroppers didn’t count as “farmers” for purposes of the New Deal agricultural programs. Aid to Dependent Families was off limits for Black single mothers, because it was too easy to prove them “morally unfit,” unlike White widows, or to show that, unlike White women, they could never qualify because they always had a way to support their children, namely domestic labor. And so on. Well, what the loonies are looking for this time around is a guarantee that Obama’s health care reform won’t just exclude illegal immigrants from coverage, but will guarantee that they can never, ever, get treatment for any medical problem in any medical facility that receives federal funds, or from any doctor or nurse whose education was paid for with federal grants and loans. Anything less than that will forfeit all support from that side of the aisle.

But everybody in this particular controversy, on all sides, seems to have forgotten that, unlike FDR, Obama doesn’t need the support of the loonies to get his program passed. Yes, it would be nice to end the LaRouchie/teabagger/loony-sponsored sniping and become One Nation. But every time Obama extends a hand across the aisle, somebody cuts off one of his fingers. Now, apparently, he has only one left. Let’s hope it’s the one he needs for the appropriate gesture.

Red Emma

* In fact, what the parents were doing was Santeria, which most people at the time didn’t know about, and which the kids didn’t know about because their parents had always told them “We’re Catholic,” until the kids came home from school early one day and found their parents and some friends in the basement doing stuff Sister had never taught them. The solution, as in most juvenile runaway cases, was to encourage better parent-child communication.

** In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m Cuban, but like many second or third generation Cuban- Americans, I do not consider Castro the AntiChrist.

*** See Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White for the best historical treatment of this era.

Living in an Immaterial World

A few weeks ago, Amazon.com did something that rocked the whole system of private property. And all most of us did about it was kvetch. We saw it as a mere inconvenience. You buy a copy of 1984 for your Kindle™, and some days later, you log back on and discover 1984 isn’t there. Since then, Amazon has explained, and apologized, and most recently cleared up the legalities between Amazon and George Orwell’s estate or whatever owns the rights to 1984, and most of those who bought it have had it restored. Most of us regard it as a mere pothole on the road of life. It’s patched now, all’s well that ends well and so on.

Given that most people buy books before reading them, rather than after, can we then conclude that those inconvenienced bibliophiles are only now reading 1984 for the first time, and only now realizing that Orwell pretty much predicted what has happened to his book? George Winston, after all, was in the business of making, and remaking, history, in the most basic sense, de-happening events that had now become inconvenient for Big Brother’s current ideology. Those of us who read the book before Amazon put it onto Kindle™, or at least some of us, are bloody spooked. Anybody who can make a book disappear from your library without any kind of notice, much less permission, can just as easily change the content of the book so that (for instance) Big Brother turns out to be the hero, and poor George Winston is just a pathetic dupe. Or rewrite the history of the Civil War to make slavery a noble cause. Or rewrite the JFK assassination to make Lee Harvey Oswald a Wahhabi Muslim and Marina Oswald a femiNazi.

How do you know that when you Google™ a news story from 2005, you won’t see George W. Bush™ filling sandbags and pitching in to reinforce the levees in New Orleans? Or Silvio Berlusconi™ inventing a new and vastly improved version of linguini bolognese? Or Governor Sanford entering a monastery?

Back in “the Sixties,” when Mr. Wired and I were active in all kinds of countercultural religion and politics, I took to clipping the papers regularly, to preserve stuff that I felt the next generation would never believe if I couldn’t produce it. (In the Talmud, BTW, you run across all sorts of weird stories to which the Rabbis themselves add a little note: “If it were not written, it would be impossible to believe this.”) I filled up most of a 4-drawer filing cabinet with high-acid-content paper (that was the flaw in my reasoning), which I only recently went through and mostly discarded, since it has mostly turned into stiff yellow snowflakes of indecipherable memory and I needed the drawer space for client files. Now, like most other people, I am at the mercy of the Mass Media and what little paper documentation the librarians have managed to preserve.

The Buddhists (with whom I have been hanging out occasionally of late) would not be seriously distressed by these developments. Nor would a client of mine from thirty-odd years ago who was trying to get discharged from the Navy as a conscientious objector because, while on maneuvers in Hawaii, he sat on a beach for an evening and became Enlightened. My usual approach to these cases is to refer the client to a psychiatrist who firmly believes military service is bad for most people’s mental health, especially that of people who think killing people is wrong, and encourage Uncle Sam to discharge the client for reasons of emotional stability. It’s usually faster and cheaper than using the official regulations for Conscientious Objector discharge. This client objected to the tactic. He wasn’t crazy, he explained. The Navy was crazy. They still believed in the reality of the material universe. The real universe is an eternally-flowing mesh of causes and consequences, assumptions and reactions.

Now, causality can reach backward as easily as forward. If we need the Reconstruction to have been a Bad Thing in order to accomplish some current political goal, we can revise it without even recalling and re-publishing the encyclopedias and textbooks that will shape the next generation’s understanding of history.

Which assumes, of course, that the next generation will have an understanding of history. Yesterday, a paralegal in our office, a smart and reasonably well-educated young woman, asked me who was on the other side in World War II. While Big Brother’s right hand is busy rewriting history, his left hand has managed to make the whole idea of history irrelevant to those who would ordinarily be expected to create its next chapter. When Seward, mourning the just-deceased Lincoln, said “Now he belongs to the ages,” he meant that Lincoln would always be part of what shaped America and the world. These days, when somebody says that a particular person or thing is “history,” they mean it’s gone, disappeared, never to be seen again. Even the History Channel™ is mostly taken up with the exploits of ice road truckers in Alaska and myopic analyses of the DaVinci Code pitting the Freemasons against the Bavarian Illuminati.

We are just now realizing that all the gee-whiz forensic technology that lies at the foundation of any criminal prosecution in which the State has somehow not managed to persuade the defendant to plead guilty, is highly fallible, precisely because it contains nothing so physical as a smoking gun, just a bunch of digital impressions on “a media” [sic] that the next generation of forensic “scientists” won’t even be able to read.

Friends of mine with libraries as extensive as the one in the Wired residence are contemplating selling them, or donating them to schools in the Third World, or recycling them for pulp, now that the best that has been thought and said is available in digitized format through Google™ or whoever, on “a media” the size of a good Cuban cigar. But a good cigar is, at least, a smoke. The best that has been thought and said can be rendered unreadable through a simple electromagnetic hiccup or an “updated” digitizing format.

We have already allowed ourselves to become accustomed to the best music and drama that has been composed and performed being recorded onto one short-lived medium after another. Those of us who really cared about such stuff now have more than six generations of it in our “media rooms,” accumulated over only a mere half-century. More reasonable people just throw out the last generation when the new one reaches an affordable price. The newest generation, of course, doesn’t exactly accumulate at all. Like the Kindle™ books, it merely takes up residence on our current “media” until we get bored with it, and then makes way for the next batch of stuff. We never own any of it.

I think (maybe I’ve been hanging out with Buddhists too long?) that this might be okay if the generations of ideas and songs and plays that wander into and out of our minds originated among real thinkers and artists, and not just the minions of media conglomerates who “own” most of what gets “created” these days. I’ve been through distributing the books and records and pictures of my deceased parents and friends, and part of me doesn’t want to put anybody through the same process again for my stuff. But if the alternative is to let Sony, Bertelsman, and Gulf Western do my thinking and my enjoying for me while I live, and leave no thoughts or music of my own to those who come after me, then, thanks, I’ll stay in the material world a while longer, even if it means stumbling over my accumulated books and music while I live and burdening my friends and family with them afterward.

Jane Grey

The Flabby Arm of the Law

Some of our colleagues are disturbed that the US government seems lackluster in its enforcement of immigration law.  If we were paying attention, this would surprise no one.  It is only a special case of a reality so long-established and widespread in this country that it isn’t even a “problem,” it’s just an essential component of our culture. Americans don’t like law enforcement roughly 50% of the time.  Or, as our daughter puts it, every American law includes one invisible clause: “except me.”

Our various ancestors came here in the first place to get away from onerous economic and legal systems in the Old Country.  Sure, the Puritans immediately set up what seemed like an equally onerous system here.  But read Perry Miller and George Demos on how it actually worked out.  The Puritans anti-sex?  Not if you count the number of public rebukes for fornication and adultery, and the number of “premature” births.  In the era before TV and central heating, the Puritans did what they had to to keep warm and entertained.  Anti-violence? Anti-theft?  Read the stats.

More important, consider what our ancestors, like our own legislators today, used the law for.  First, (Wired’s First Law) nobody legislates against what nobody does.  The existence of a law against fornication isn’t evidence of a society’s high regard for chastity.  It is precisely the opposite.  The people whose lawmakers pass such legislation know their constituents screw around (as, a fortiori, do the lawmakers themselves.)  They just want to get on the record, when they have the time to get out of that unsanctified bed, that they know it’s wrong.

Same goes for drunk driving, indoor smoking, drug use, and exceeding the speed limit.  We use these statutes mainly to proclaim that We Are Nice People.  Not that we are people who don’t drive drunk, smoke indoors, use drugs, and speed.

That’s purpose #1 of American laws. Purpose #2 is the control of “undesirables.”  We are also a thrifty lot, who don’t like to let useful stuff go to waste.  Now that we have all those laws lying around on the books, why not use them to keep Those Other People in line?  Prohibition, clearly, was a Protestant movement to keep those wine-bibbing, beer-guzzling Italian and German Catholics from having too much fun.  The War on Drugs began as a war on African-Americans and graduated to a war on hippies.  The only prosecution for fornication in an egregiously well-known Southern state in the 1960s involved two African-American honor students who were active in the Civil Rights movement.  You get the picture.  Once the statute books are full of laws everybody violates, everybody is vulnerable to prosecution.  We can pick and choose among our potential defendants.  Should anyone be surprised if those who do the choosing concentrate on Those Other People?

Every now and then, some court finds this bias too blatant to be acceptable.  That was what happened in San Francisco, roughly a century ago, in Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, the grandmother of all discriminatory prosecution cases, in which Mayor Mark Hopkins decided to close down all wood-frame buildings used as laundries, which—surprise!—included almost all Chinese laundries and almost no non-Chinese laundries.  Even the US Supreme Court of that era, hardly a bastion of equal protection (the same guys who brought us “separate but equal” Plessy vs. Ferguson and “three generations of imbeciles is enough” Buck vs. Bell,) thought that was too much.*  Every now and then the courts still follow that precedent, though mostly they just nibble away at it like ducks at a pizza, and hope for it to disappear entirely some day.

Legislators get lots of good publicity out of designating a Serious Problem and then passing a law against it.  Occasionally, they run into embarrassed staffers who, having been assigned to research The Problem and draft the law, discover there already is such a law.  Legislators do not get good publicity from merely proposing to enforce a law that has been on the books for a century.  That’s just “the nanny state.”  The laws that actually get enforced are a small proportion of those on the books, and the proportion of violations of those laws that actually generate prosecutions is even smaller.

Every now and then, one of Us gets busted for breaking a law clearly aimed at Them, and complains about it.  “The only reason I got stopped for speeding was that it was easier for the cops to catch me because I was only going five miles over the limit when everybody else was going fifteen miles over the limit. It isn’t fair.”  Most of the time, as noted earlier, the courts disregard this argument, unless it seems to have really blatant racial, ethnic, or religious implications.  Being the slowest-moving lawbreaker on the road is a bad idea.  Most people know better. OTOH, prosecutions for Driving While Black are actually attracting lots of negative publicity these days, and many jurisdictions are cracking down on them. (For more information, check this out http://www.jmls.edu/facultypubs/oneill/oneill_column_04b08.shtml)

But most of the time, even local judges are not too bashful to say, of a defendant who is about to catch an unexpected break from the criminal justice system, that s/he “is not a member of the criminal class.”  (I’ve heard it myself, and probably many of you gentle readers have too.)  At heart, we are all Aristotelians.  We believe character determines fate, what you are determines what should happen to you, and what you have done in the past is our best guide to what you are.  So if you are a high school dropout with no visible means of support and a record of minor misdemeanors, we have no trouble concluding you must be more guilty of buying or selling cocaine than the solid, middle-class citizen next to you.  This is common sense, and tends to be accurate more often than not.  As long as we don’t really feel obliged to determine whether the high school dropout etc. actually made the drug sale/purchase in question, we figure he will get what’s coming to him more often than not, and that’s close enough for government work.

In conclusion, the reason “the Sixties” are still a hissing and a byword among hard-line conservatives is not that people actually became less law-abiding, but that they became less willing to accept the American deal—act like a solid citizen most of the time, don’t flaunt your lawbreaking, and we will treat you like a solid citizen unless you are Black or poor or Indian or Mexican or gay.  People who were not any of those things suddenly began breaking laws in public, and worse still, objecting to laws against sex, drugs, and harmless recreation, proclaiming that We Are Not Necessarily Nice People, and shouldn’t have to be.  That way lies Armageddon, Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

So the immigration laws are a relatively minor casualty of something a lot bigger and a lot harder to clean up.  God’s Own Party has, wisely for their purposes, chosen to go about enforcing those laws by turning all illegal immigrants, and most legal immigrants, into Those Other People, unlettered Hispanics sneaking in here to take jobs and welfare benefits from good Amurricans.  It seems to be working.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.

Red Emma