AMBER DAMPER

I want to give some credit where credit – a modest but very real bit of it – is due. In Sunday’s ‘Boston Globe’ they’ve got a chewy article entitled “Abducted” (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/) on how ‘amber alerts’ aren’t really very effective although they are great for getting the public worked up. Some of “the only outside scholars to examine the system in depth” have done a study. Which, by the by, says without saying it that most of the ‘science’ and ‘statistics’ given to Us previously were from ‘scholars’ who were benefiting from the system, or at least who were ‘advocating’ for it, it being such a good thing and all.

This ‘outside’ study finds “the statistics” that are usually given out to be “highly misleading”. What they do is to “create a climate of fear around a tragic but extremely rare event, pumping up public anxiety”. My my. Like creating – well – a stampede, maybe. This is treating the public, the citizenry, The People, like cattle. This ain’t American. Very un-American, actually. Kinda Reich-ish, if you get my drift. Ja?

In fact, the study calls it “crime control theatre” and says that “it fits into the wider complaint of some criminologists about crime-fighting measures – often passed in the wake of horrific, highly-politicized crimes that originate from strong emotions rather than from research into what really works.” Emotions such as fear and vengeance, I’d figure.

“Whether it’s child sex offender registries or ‘three-strikes’ criminal sentencing rules, these policies, critics warn, can prove ineffective, sometimes costly, and even counterproductive, since they heighten public fears and distract from threats that are at once more common and more tractable.” Such “politically expedient solutions … look good but do very little to solve the problem.” Kudos to the scholars and to the reporter, Drake Bennett. Although I’d add that the process of American justice (and it is a great Gift to the world) is still not a certain finder-of-truth on its best days, and during times of stampede the chances of its making mistakes are greatly increased.

And, I guess, if you’re really sure your pacemaker is up to it, imagine such stampedes taking place in the military system, where Outcome trumps Process as a matter of very very well-enforced institutional philosophy. Oy. That’s the same military justice system, by the by, that is creeping into actual Constitutional justice-process as We speak.

I’d also add that those “child sex offender registries” are actually registries for anybody convicted even of taking a wizz in the woods. It has always been a cagey stratagem of the thing that while ‘children’ were store-fronted, the actual machinery in the back was casting a much wider net.

The genuine academic criminology folks - as opposed to the make-a-buck, surf-the-wave, cottage-industry, 'expert' crowd - are quoted at length and substantively. When you read such documents as Amicus Briefs you find that they’ve been reporting their work all along, but the media have for the most part ignored them, very selectively, in favor of the faux-‘experts’ who help enable the stampede. This fake 'science', by half-trained 'professionals' with their own 'think tanks' has helped fuel wayyy too much of the revolutionary agenda, feminist and victimist.

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (a mouthful, no?), clearly unused to actually having to defend any of these programs (it also oversees the sex-offense registry), bleats "If an Amber Alert saves any child, don't you think it was worth it?". This particularly classic wheedle of the victimist Advocacy has been around a long time and has a lot to answer for. An appeal to emotion, it is irrational in its essence; it is the if-even-one enticement. If only one child's life could be saved by outlawing private motor vehicles, shouldn't we do it? If only one Iraqi kid could be saved by regime-changing Saddaam, shouldn't we do it? But life is a series of hard choices (ask those eerily mature boy-soldiers who fought the Civil War) and the ur-fantasy of the feminist-victimist gameplan - that this world can be made as safe as a doll house for the little dollies - is worse than utopian.

And when the price to be paid for it is the erosion of Constitutional process and protection and - even worse - the corruption and the stampeding of The People, the calculated reduction of public opinion to emotion and then the stampeding of that emotion down a chosen path ... that price is too high. And to say that 'the price of even one child' is worth the integrity of the Constitutional grounds of Our very national genius and existence is to demonstrate in a single question the vast danger posed to America by the feminist-victimist Advocacy. And it is a question that up until now they have been very successful in shouting down.

Its defenders include not only government apparatchiks who get paid to administer it but radio stations that can combine ‘public service’ with a great ratings-booster. They note that “it doesn’t cost anything”. Ummm … Engorging public fear? Running the risk of vigilantism if some well-meaning citizen tries to ‘stop’ a vehicle that is being sought? The article goes on to note that and other concerns. (And an impressive piece of actual reporting it is, too – it would be ironic if the Globe were to get a Pulitzer for starting to draw Us back from a dangerous path just as it had helped pave that path for so long. Go figure. But We, brethren and sistern, are in a heepa trubble, and can’t be picky about the small stuff.)

A ray of sunlight. And I’m sure as heck thankful for it. We face very tough times, and We have to muster the chops for a heepa “blood, toil, tears, and sweat”.

And not just Us. In all the discussion about how Iraq was invaded at least partially to ‘save the children’, nobody has ventured to ask whether Saddaam ever managed to kill or maim or render-orphan even a fraction of the number of children being thus handled currently in Our name.

To paraphrase Victor McLaglen’s cavalry top-sergeant in “Fort Apache”: ‘Tis an adult’s work We’ve ahead of Us today.

So let’s get to it then.

NOW IT STARTS HERE

You don’t often get the experience in writing – although it happens in these bizarrely troubled times more often than in less ‘interesting’ times – that something you had been discussing and warning about suddenly raises itself above the radar, tearing away the veil of daily habit and the miasm of the citizenry’s communal and individual concerns.
But it has happened.

I know it must seem a bit obsessive, maybe off-putting, that in the course of a number of Posts I have so often mentioned the sex-offense ‘thing’, this mania that has swept over the country in the past 25 years (if you start with the pre-school cases) and in the past dozen years (if you start with the sex-offense registry cases that flared up in 1997 and since then continue to morph even more ominously).

As I have said in other Posts: what fascinates me in all this is that such a mania has started, grown floridly, wreaked obviously significant damage to the legal system, degraded The People’s capacity to deliberate and to understand and to speak out, all in the space of such a short time.
That such clear abuses of truth and the justice system have been almost gleefully indulged; that so many ‘solutions’ and responses so clearly similar to those adopted by 20th century nations on the path to non-democratic government have been passed into legislation with less debate or objection (and, it must be considered) lack of mature legislative analysis than even went into the Patriot Act, the Authorization To Use Military Force, and the Military Commissions Act (to name only the largest perpetrations).

That so much dubious ‘science’ has been credited while more sober and cautious, substantive, mainstream scientific and legal thought has been ignored; that such dubious ‘true’ stories initiated many of the most damaging initiatives (the parents of the girl Megan Kanka who was taken, abused and killed by a neighbor, the case becoming the basis of the sex-offender Registry, did indeed know all along, as many of the neighbors on the street knew and acknowledged as well to a local reporter at the time, that the perpetrator was a potentially dangerous individual, thus undercutting the claim that a Registry would have ‘prevented’ this shocking act).
That even now politicians for a host of secondary and ulterior purposes are continually seeking to expand this highly dubious and historically ominous trend.

And as I have said often, that the run-up to the present monstrous war in Iraq (and perhaps a coming one with Iran) matched with disturbing precision the scripted phases of ‘stampede’ that first fueled and still fuels the sex-offense mania, which thus red-flags an awesomely profound corruption of The People’s capacities to think maturely and thereby discharge Its task as the very ground of the Branches that were raised up to execute and implement The People’s will according to the vision of the Constitution.

Today, July 17th, in the ‘Boston Globe’, although there is no news story (and thereby hangs a tale, no doubt), an Op-Ed by the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, Carol Rose, (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/07/17/they_could_be_eavesdropping?mode=PF) reveals that after all the current brouhaha about Executive and Congressional acquiescence in torture, in the aggressive, invasive and pre-emptive waging of foreign wars, and the long, long list of erosions of Our civil liberties … Ms. Rose reveals that a bill has been introduced in the Legislature of the Commonwealth – that Great and General Court that only too late stepped back from the witch trials of 17th-century Salem – which would enable prosecutors to obtain information about any citizen, without a warrant or court supervision, merely by quietly issuing a state-level equivalent of the baneful FBI ‘national security letter’ to any Internet or telecom provider. And, as a shrewd sop to such anxieties as telecommunications providers may still harbor after the recent FISA cave-in on Capitol Hill, the bill grants ‘immunity’ to any providers so served.

And as evidence of just how shrewdly the sex-offense ‘wave’ is being surfed by the agents of a dangerously engorged police power, the pretext for such a profoundly un-American grant of discretionary power to the police agents of the government is … to ‘protect the children’. Although the actual text of the provisions apparently exercises no such specific discretion, and leaves any citizen for whatsoever reason, open to such intrusions as the Attorney General or the District Attorneys may wish to deploy. Apparently, that D.A. in Durham, North Carolina in the case of that gang-rape-that-wasn’t, was just a ‘bad apple’, and anyway, if the Attorney-General in Washington can get away with things, why not give this a shot? Congress seems to be OK with it.

(We will recall that Janet Reno claimed – long after the fact and after the bodies or what was left of them had been recovered and quietly buried – that the Waco attack was launched because there was concern that ‘the children’ in the compound were possibly being ‘abused’; and that in the recent Texas raid on a Mormon community the same state-government accusations have started to collapse as we speak, as numerous of the ‘children’ are discovered to be adults, or to be not-abused but indeed to be suffering greatly from having been forcibly removed from their parents’ care by the police power of the state. And let us pass over for the moment in painful and prayerful silence that Madeleine Albright opined publicly that the deaths of a couple-three hundred thousand Iraqi children was an acceptable price to pay for imposing draconian sanctions – children, of course, being far too tender to be asked if they would mind being starved or bombed. Are We all mad in this country? Will We be able to defend Ourselves in history’s dock, in God’s, any better than the Germans of 1945?)

And, stealthily, the relevant provisions are buried in this law, which is actually entitled “An Act To Further Protect Children” or – as is the contemporary usage for popular consumption – “Jessica’s Law”, named after another unfortunate child victim (upon whom be great peace). Shrewd, devilishly so. And it seems to me a sign that the two monstrous fires are now burning together: as the Iraq war mania roared easily down pathways already forged by the sex-offense mania, so now the sex-offense mania seeks to insinuate itself into the states using as its template the Patriot Act and all the other unholy Beltway spew of the past 7 years.

Any legislator who doubts the wisdom of gutting the very foundations of democratic society will run the risk of being brassily labeled ‘anti-child’ or pro-child-rape by a now-well-practiced advocacy machine. Any legislator who simply seeks to look good or to keep his or her head down, can simply say that he or she did it ‘for the children’. And any legislator – and We can no longer imagine that there are few, if any, on any level of government – so treacherously stupid as to think that such engorgement is a good idea will be in on the creation of the de-creation of the very core of the American heritage. Franklin had said, in response to citizens’ inquiries: You have a democracy, “if you can keep it”.

“The next logical step” … that soporific assurance that is proffered to The People by the police power like a candy-bar is proffered to a 4 year-old by the archetypal ‘stranger-sex maniac’, the age-old yet so recently (1945; 1989) exposed soporific dangled before the German people and the Russian people, to their great discomfiture and moral debasement … that step is now being dangled before Us.

Or not. Decades of sex-offender mania and its spawn, 9-11 mania, have given such aid and comfort to the government police power that it now feels confident simply sneaking it in, using a child for a shield in best sex-maniac fashion.

Or not. Perhaps the government police power realizes that it’s still too soon to trot out its new program, to be seen in public in its crisp new uniforms, to call what it is doing or what it wants to do by a clear and accurate name, placing it before Us in the clear light, awaiting Our decision.
Perhaps so. The citizens of Massachusetts have historically demonstrated a sturdy concern for liberties. Not a perfect concern – the hanged and the crushed of Salem and Sacco and Vanzetti were only the most well-known of those who were sent into the void before The People stirred, hearkening to voices that called forth the best of the democratic spirit.

So it comes. The greasy, darkling, fuming cloud that has long hung over ‘the Beltway’ has begun to move into the states.

I have often wondered, looking at those old newsreels, what the French people were thinking, on that Bastille Day – July 14th – of 1939. Did they seek to escape their anxieties looking at the massed camel corps and the divisions of infantry and horse-cavalry surging down the avenue, the great Arc, symbol of France’s heritage and dedication to Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, looming behind them as if it were a mystical gate that sent all those troops forth as if from a more pure and powerful world, to ‘save’ France? Did they imagine that whatever Hitler would do, the world as they knew it would survive such whacks as he might be able to strike upon it without their having to bestir themselves? Were they pre-occupied with their personal concerns, not really hearing or seeing as it all went by and disappeared in the clouds of dust? But it was the last Bastille Day of the Third Republic, and ahead lay years of supine occupation, for when push came to shove, few really Resisted.

No ‘America’ will come ‘over here’ to save Us. Nor, I think, legions of angels – especially in these benighted and obtuse precincts where the fuming God of the Apocalypse is not often given credence.

No, We will have to do this Ourselves.

I will post further when I have found out what I can. In the meantime, the site of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the Legislature’s own website might be the very places for enterprising engagement to begin.

Allons enfants de la Patrie … while there is still time.

HOMELESS CANARIES

Up in Boston the erstwhile ‘liberal’ paper, the ‘Boston Globe’, has an article in its July 11 edition, that serves, I think, as one of those warnings often attributed to ‘heroic’ (to use the word as it is so often misapplied these days) canaries who famously sacrifice themselves by keeling over when the atmosphere in a mine is getting lethally unhealthy.
(http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2208/07/11/killing_of_homeless_man_leaves_questions/)
There are probably more of Us now who might be thinking the uncomfortable thought that this country is becoming more and more like a ‘mine’, serpentine, dark, mysterious and capable of suddenly becoming lethal to anyone who happens to be in it. And who can blame some one for such thoughts nowadays? But that’s not where this Post is going just now.

The ‘Globe’, albeit with not so much instant, just-add-ink ‘outrage’ as has been its wont over the past few decades, reports – if we may say – that on July 4th (of all days) a homeless man was killed in broad daylight in the heart of famed Boston’s visitor’s mecca – the Fanueil Hall and Old State House area – by another homeless man. And that numerous passers-by saw the fracas, but kept on walking. This, the paper observes, “leaves questions”. Ya think? Ya frakkin’ think?
Many people – visitor and resident alike – simply looked the other way or – far worse – didn’t ‘notice’. As one interviewee said, it looked to be just another everyday fight among the raggedy formations of homeless who congregate for drinking, pan-handling and – what the hell? – for laffs just south of the (soberly profound) Holocaust memorial and just north of the actual Faneuil Hall marketplace, across the street on one side from the historic chowder house from whose upper windows the roomer who would become Louis Phillippe of France once looked down, and on the other side of the steet the weird, concrete fortress of ‘new’ City Hall – courtesy 40-plus years ago of an untested young architect very much favored by the Kennedy family – and, more specifically, the mayor’s office with its high, wide, though apparently shallow, view of the historic heart of the city.

It might seem odd that the homeless can make their way to these family-friendly, historic precincts; counterintuitive, even. The city’s historic facility for those formerly known as ‘bums’ was located a longish way to the south, at the Pine Street Inn, close to Dover Street, in a South End neighborhood that by the middle years of the last century had become well-established as Boston’s equivalent of Old New York’s Bowery. The Inn was well-placed to provide convenient haven for its ‘client population’ as it might be called today. Pan-handling, loitering, disturbing the peace and public drunkeness were all illegal, the ‘clients’ were uanable or unwilling to carry on a more-or-less ‘decent’ civil life: exercising the self-restraint yet courteous surface civility that enables large urban citizenries to get on with life and each other year in and year out.

But for reasons that probably had more to do with ‘appearances’ than with common sense, the late, working-man’s pol, Congressman Joe Moakley – who after years of public service in “the fleshpots of Washington City” (General Sherman’s phrase) had morphed into the portly, well-coiffed, expensively suited and shod Representative J. Joseph Moakley, undertook a little project. At some point a decade and more ago, he stretched forth his brawny if nicely cuff-linked arm and wrassled a former bank building for the use of ‘homeless’ folks. Said building, squat and solid, recalling a banking system that by then no longer existed, was in the heart of the Government Center, just the other side of that City Hall that overlooked the July 4th killing scene.

The reader might be tempted to exclaim the exclamation uttered in consternation by that Southern matron so vividly imprinted into American popular lore by that advanced institution of Art for the sake of Art, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: “In Atlanta?!! How’d they evah git heah?!!” How indeed, and thereby hangs a tale that may be of more than notional use to Us in this Year of Grace the 2008th and of the independence of the United States the 232nd.

As the 1970s progressed, and that society of well-intentioned sorcerer’s apprentices entitled the Democratic Party was trying to let even more millions of flowers bloom in order to register the said flowers forthwith on the voting rolls, it was proposed by assorted medical and psychiatric experts and social workers, supported by myriads of well-intentioned and determined Identity-types who figured that any massive social and cultural change is a massive social and cultural liberation – and ruat coelum … it was proposed that the many folks residing voluntarily or otherwise in state mental institutions were actually not crazy, were even perhaps saner than most of the citizenry at large (chained to the gray-flannel suit drudgery of family responsibility, job responsibility, and generally to a certain repulsively unimaginative and uncreative and conformist adulthood), and could in any event be ‘managed’ by new-to-the-market wonder-pills dispensed by much less monstrous (and much less expensive, the pols quickly and shrewdly noted) ‘community mental health centers’.

At the time it seemed like it might be the thing to do: grown-ups had gotten the country into Vietnam and then lied about it, decent responsible citizens were lied to and betrayed by the very government in which they had reposed their trust and confidence, the adult citizenry thus played for fools in front of the kids who felt they had shown everybody in ’68 that their way of doing things was more effective and a hell of a lot more fun, and – after all – weren’t ‘decency’ and ‘responsibility’ empty words used by oppressors to oppress the oppressed and – even worse – the oppressors were, not to put too fine a point on it, ‘men’ ? … which was the crowning indictment of the day. All of which by the mid-1970s enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, only a few of whose apprentice sorcerers had started to wonder if by that time the tail weren’t starting to wag the dog.

The professionals and ‘experts’ assured the never-robust minds and hearts of the pols that ‘this could work’, that they would be greeted as liberators, that vast hordes of presently debilitated folk (it was already considered declasse to refer to humans a ’souls’, let alone as generic ‘men’) could be released forthwith, into the broad sunlit uplands of sanity and freedom, required only to maintain voluntarily a careful regimen of medication acquired by getting oneself to the afore-dreamed community mental health centers. And the walls came tumbling down, as in any good fairy tale.

Of course, the hardly un-obvious thought that persons who for decades or for a lifetime had been unable to organize their interior life and sustain even a modicum of a societal life … that observation was raised, but it was a time of many flowers blooming, and – far more ominously – of the increasing inability of state governments to pay their bills. And the professions and paraprofessions were finding themselves increasingly called upon with urgent and official deference in this new and more sensitive America. What was not to like?

People behaving oddly started to be seen on city streets. Worse, it became quietly clear to many citizens that the police were no longer doing much about it. Public laws that most people took for granted were wiped away almost overnight; and had to be, if these unstable folk were not to be apprehended a dozen times a week.

And it also became clear that the papers were either ignoring this new development or – increasingly – were ‘hailing’ it as an excellent example of sensitivity and liberation in action. To look askance, to worry, to ask to kick the tires … that was to be considered a backlasher, a racist about something that had nothing to do with race (the advanced vocabulary of Advocacy and Sensitivity had not yet been developed, its dictionary – carrying the weight of semi-law – not yet compiled).

Somewhere in there, somehow, a fellow named Snyder hit upon the idea of surfing the wave of glitz-and-greed madness unleashed by the new Reagan Administration’s chirpy embrace of wealth and confident, robust selfishness. Snyder would do it, in a fine feat combining the best insights of advertising and deconstructionism, by focusing on the symptom rather than the cause of the problem: people weren’t crazy and incapable of keeping themselves on medication; they were just ‘homeless’.

And somehow, for God only knows what combination of reasons and ulterior motives, the alcoholics were brought into the tent. No, these folks weren’t addicted so deeply to a substance that most of them might indeed never be able to carry on even the most basic responsibilities of societal participation; these folks weren’t so deeply enmeshed in still-unknown complex inner physical and mental and characterological dynamics that it would be only in the very very best of ‘cases’ that an individual among them could be cured, rehabilitated, or what-have-you. No, these folks were simply ‘homeless’.

Now you might observe that the folks were homeless precisely because they were unable or even unwilling to keep a roof over their heads. And that there was no small probability that these folks might – if given a roof and its attendant responsiblities – reject the whole proposition and go back to the bottle. But naysayers don’t last long once a revolution has hit critical mass, once a ‘wave’ is going; not even John Wayne on his best day ever stood in front of a stampeding herd with a six-gun and figure that he could stop it with just some common sense, a little authority, and the punctuational effect of a six-shooter judiciously discharged.

Truth and common sense don’t fare well in revolutions or in wars. And maybe that’s why now both the Democrats – ‘Liberals’ – and the Republicans – ‘Conservatives’ – don’t really care for the stuff; and why ‘wars’ in the service of revolutions (no matter how well-intentioned) or in the service of national security (ditto) both lead to the same abyssal twilight world. The road to Total Sensitivity and to Total Security is paved with good intentions.

And with the necessary repeal of whatever shreds of public-behavior laws were still left on the books, hordes of drink-addled ‘homeless’ now took to the streets along with the mentally-addled, and in not a small number of cases, the individuals were dually-addled.

Not that all this was presented to Us as such. While the streets became the stage for dozens and then hundreds of incidents that a few years before would never have been allowed to happen or to develop, the citizenry were expected to focus only on the chosen pretext for the changes: that there were, it was ‘reported’, countless families who where ‘homeless’ .. because of Reagan’s cheap and stingy economics.

There may indeed have been some (and now that his ‘heirs’ have had the keys to the cashbox for so long, there may indeed be a whole lot more). But back then you never saw a ‘homeless’ family walking down the street, staggering, shouting, looking for change. Wherever those families were, they were keeping themselves invisible, and doing a far better job of it than the accumulated generations of legions of Soviet spies reputedly patrolling the Main Streets of America.

This new-model bunch, the ‘homeless’, weren’t the Depression-era ‘bums’: the people who had sustained a responsible and modestly successful work and family life, until suddenly undercut and indeed betrayed by the venality of the Wall Street biggies and the pols who loved them. What was now loose was a large population of folks who had never been able to achieve social or often even personal maturity and efficacy. What had changed was that now they were ‘liberated’, free to carry on in the streets, just another aspect of the ‘rich’ (that monstrously duplicitious code-word) diversity (ditto) of modern American life in all its cutting-edge, sensitive success. They didn’t really ‘produce’ anything, but – though the point was not clear at the time – neither was America, any longer. Reagan’s gooey frosting was only that – there was nothing under it. Not that most people would get to enjoy it, anyway … only the ones who got to the groaning but gated table of Ronnie’s ongoing birthday party.

What could the average citizen do? Confronted increasingly by unpleasant when not actually dangerous behavior on the streets, unable to summon the police, unable to risk mentioning it for fear of being labelled as ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’ or half a dozen other epithets from the armamentarium of Political Correctness, people – in the manner of Soviet citizens – simply learned not to see. As was increasingly becoming the case with your own home phone, which was no longer automatically answered after the one-too-many times that the party at the other end was a telemarketer who damned well knew you were trying to eat dinner; you no longer ‘listened’ – as citizens of functional societies listen – as you walked down the street, no longer ‘paid quiet attention’ for a voice that might be in need and that had a right to your attention and concern in this particular rare emergency that had intruded upon an otherwise relatively functional life.

Too many times you had walked down a public street and looked up in response to a ‘good morning’ or a ruder ‘hey’, only to find some ‘homeless’ character, looking for cash. The ‘emergencies’ of the homeless were not the occasional ones of people who are able to more or less manage the tasks of living, but rather the ongoing emergency of someone who creates one emergency to solve a prior one, and who now – after decades of sensitivity and richness – expects that citizens will – have to, even – do what the pols no longer wish to do.

Nor are we talking about a few individuals and their emergencies, however ongoing. We are talking hundreds, even thousands, in any city of size. Like the bunch that hung out at the far end of every schoolyard, smokin’ and laughin’ at the dopes that went and did their homework last night; school days, school days … so old-fashioned.

And the tendency of these individuals to congregate in areas that promise an audience and a target-rich concentration of potential cash sources means that some of the most heavily traveled and most societally significant public spaces are now shadowed by packs of these folk, and only traversed by citizens who have taught themselves not to ‘see’. Not to see anything. Or hear anything. Not to respond. Just to get where they have to go. Like modest but determined quarterbacks whose plan is precisely not to have any encounters on the field enroute to the goalposts.

This state of affairs is no way to conduct a society. I often wonder how parents can shepherd their kids or school-teachers shepherd their class-outing platoons through these congregated packs, but perhaps the kids too now have learned not to see and not to hear.

Can it be any coincidence, I wonder, that citizens who cannot see and cannot hear and will not allow themselves to get ‘involved’ in the dubious and seedy soap-operas of a half-dozen ‘homeless’ in the space of each city block … that these citizens didn’t ‘see’ and didn’t ‘hear’ anything as their government led them into an aggressive foreign war, on the most dubious and fraudulent of pretexts. And as their government – still seeking to keep Ronnie’s party going – regressed the very foundations of the country’s economy – against the hard-won wisdom of the Depression era generations – to benefit the few rich upon whom the pandering pols can reliably count for cash and dinner invites and junkets and post-retirement sinecures.

If as individuals – and not without reason – so very many of us have trained ourselves to go into a certain type of ‘interior exile’ (that’s what the Germans called it, when you were faced with a public affairs that was going to hell and you couldn’t stop it) then what is the danger that such an ‘exile’ will – so to speak – spread to Us as members of The People? That the ‘self’ adopted to wade unreceptively through shoals of hopelessly ‘homeless’ will contaminate the self that is expected to discharge the duties of a People? And that this will be passed on to Our kids – the upcoming generations of The People – through example and the subtle but implacable osmosis of children watching their elders for clues as to how to live, hearing what we so often don’t say, seeing what we so often don’t want them to see – in us.

So, as so often, I am driving at this: this type of ‘Identity’ problem poses a dual challenge: it must be addressed as a matter of public policy, and not simply through the revolutionary and anti-democratic agitprop manipulations of a now hyper-developed ‘Advocacy’. But it also must be considered as one more corrosive development eating away at Our very capacity to exercise the demands of ‘strenuous Liberty’ and to discharge faithfully and competently the awesome responsibilities of a People, of The People in the American Constitutional vision.

Do folks think that at this particular point in the electoral cycle it’s too touchy a subject, even if it’s not downright ‘insensitive’ to mention the problem? Well, it’s gone on too long to put it off. And worse, it seems clear that since both Parties are now besotted – to put it charitably – then no matter who wins in November and no matter which Party is in the White House and/or controls Congress, this whole Miasm will continue to blind and choke Us. Jack Balkin, an attorney who blogs rather astutely, says on his site that the National Security State has been replaced now with a National Surveillance State. And that both Parties are committed to enhancing that and to increasing government’s control over our lives and Our life.

Myself, I think that the National Surveillance State is just a beefed-up version of the National Security State. But the National Nanny State, begun by the Democrats though costumed as ‘sensitivity’ and ‘liberation’, is as willfully and necessarily inimical to civil liberties and the fundamental role of The People as any more clearly totalitarian scheme. The government came after the ‘men’ and the ‘sex offenders’ in a stupendously brazen violation of scientific accuracy, judicial impartiality, and plain truth. Whom will it come after next? Will the Democrats repeal the bad laws, do you think? Or – ‘for the children’ or as ‘just the next logical step’ – read emails to find out who is thinking bad thoughts, whatever the current definition of ‘bad’ happens to be? And if those ‘bad thoughts’ include disagreement with the government’s agenda … then the Nanny State and the Security State will have formed the beast with two backs; something that not even Hitler or Stalin imagined in their most lurid professional dampdreams. And as those two forest fires come together, there will be a firestorm so hellishly hot that nothing short of a very very hard rain will be able to put out.

Getting back to Boston, the shrewdly chosen cover selected for the Government Center placement of numerous ‘homeless’ was that it was a shelter for ‘veterans’. It looked great, and to a nation unfamiliar any longer with military life, then it seemed a good thing. But as any noncom will tell you, there are your good enough soldiers – even if they aren’t really good shots, and then there are your ‘shitbirds’. These latter are the ones who came in unripe and were unable or unwilling to accept whatever structure that military life and mission can offer. Out they go – often with the clear relief of the military – and can later lay claim to being ‘veterans’. So there are ‘veterans’ and there are ‘veterans’. The man killed in broad daylight was a ‘veteran’, although with a no-doubt ‘troubled’ past. It may well be that his killer is also such a ‘veteran’. Another such ‘veteran’ was just arrested south of Boston on Cape Cod for reporting a great white shark sighting, on Cape Cod, in the beach season; he claimed an address at a shelter and employment on a non-existent fishing boat operated by one “John Kennedy”. (Come to think of it, another ‘veteran’ played a decisive role in the life of a certain ‘John Kennedy’, once upon a time.) We canot allow Ourselves to dwell on the level of appearances, as the ‘sensitive’ heart would demand.

But I’ll share something. On the 4th of July this year, on the same day as the killing downtown, I was on a project that had me in the Boston Metro area. Trundling along on mass transit – almost empty on this holiday morning – I looked up to see a young man in his early 20s take a seat. He was wearing a baseball cap, bill to the side; he was wearing camouflage pants, in the Air Force coloring of grays and blues; he was on crutches. His backpack was military-looking, and sported a sewed-on black strip with “U.S. Army” in gold letters. His back was to me as he engaged in animated and intense but not unfriendly conversation with a young woman sitting just up from him.

At my stop he too was getting off. He was certainly injured somehow. I stopped to let him off first; ‘You first’ he indicated with a glittering smile. I got off, and within a step or two he was alongside me, and without further ado said to me: Didja see me talkin’ up that babe? Typical stuff; I looked at him: not bad-looking, bright-eyed, and with a particularly fresh-looking welt under one eye. It could as easily have come from a bar fight or a drunken motor-vehicle accident.

Is he a vet, I wondered? Not one of the I-was-with-Custer stories you hear on the bricks of the Government Center, but a returnee from this monstrous conflagration that We have allowed so many of his generation to wade into. The welt under his eye was too fresh to be from Iraq; it would have taken too long for him to be sent back here; the leg injury – if there was one under the crutches – didn’t seem to be the type of thing that would free a soldier from the Eastern Front’s unslakable thirst for ‘boots on the ground’.

Am I going to just let what may be a real ‘life’ fresh from the cauldron of this war go on its way, with no offer of help, or even of just some conversation? He looked like he could talk a while, and tell quite a story. But who could tell? The uniform bits could have been purchased; the crutches, even.

I smiled and told him I had heard him talking-up. And then I increased speed with a gentle nod and moved on. His path took him up a different street.

Was he a vet? Was he in need? I don’t know. And I’ve seen too many ‘veterans’ in the Government Center to simply figure a vet is a vet.

But many of his generation are coming back (and if stop-loss could be revoked there would be even more). What can We offer them? The problem of ‘identity’ – ironically – raises up its head here. The military’s treatment of unmistakably authentic veterans is such as to give any citizen cause for abiding anger. The question of how to deal with not-quite-so-authentic veterans is a distinct question, although also a very real one.

All the while, We face a culture ‘war’ on many fronts, domestic as well as foreign. The culture under sustained attack here is a culture of maturity and decency, shaped by ideals America has held dear (however much it has failed to fulfill them in practice), governed ultimately by a People ready, able, and willing to exercise the powerful if weighty responsibilities prescribed by the Founders.

This is the fundamental American identity. In the erosion and clouding of it over the past decades lies the central cause of all the other problems that now beset Us in Our increasingly erratic and eccentric gyrations in national affairs domestic and – equally ominously – foreign.
Lincoln was profoundly right to exhort Us “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and for his orphan”. But We can never forget that Lincoln addressed those words to a People, to that People upon whose shoulders – by right of citizenship – rested the awesome responsibilities the exercise of which was indispensable in order to ground and guide a democracy and a Republic and its Legislative and its Executive and its Judicial.

To care for the veteran We must, and gratefully so; to prevent the soldier from being needlessly deployed in dubious adventures incompetently entered upon is also Our responsibility.To govern Ourselves so that We can decently interact with others is a prerequisite in any case. Otherwise there shall never be a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves or with any other nation.

PUT UP YOUR DUKES AGAIN

The Duke rape case has been tossed. I Posted previously on this and I’m going to reprint most of the Post I wrote when it first came up. Then I’ll add my current comments after that.

(1st Post: Put Up Your Dukes)

Michael Donnelly outlines the Duke lacrosse (non-)rape case in “Injustice in Black and White” (www.counterpunch.com/donnelly12302006.html). What he describes is a classic example of very bad things, done in a very worthwhile cause, solidifying into a Standard Operating Procedure, and indeed erected into a Plan. And thus taking us into the dark territory (yes, Mr. Cheney’s “dark side”) of things Soviet, which decent folks figured had been buried in 1991 along with the Soviet state itself. And this is the key reason why it’s commented upon here: we’re dealing with something very clearly representing Soviet praxis, and – as noted elsewhere on this site – it was present at the creation of the Iraq invasion (a mission, the White House asserts, whose success has simply not yet actualized).

The DA in the case had said to the newspapers early on “One would wonder why one needs an attorney if one was not charged and had not done anything wrong”. The answer of course, is that by the Year of Grace 2006 it had become clear to any number of defense-attorneys that any male even distantly associated with a ‘sex-offense’ already had one extremity in the sausage machine that has become sex-offense ‘justice’. No defense-attorney in his or her right mind, even before formally being retained and simply asked for advice, could advise any one in such a position to just go down to the station and have a chat with the folks down there.

Nor – as Donnelly accurately notes – were the defendants mediagenically ‘sympathetic’; indeed they were rather unlovely in a 1930s sort of way: macho frat-boys, many from well-heeled families, attending a powerhouse school with no small connection to the gummint and as close to an Ivy as one is going to find in the Carolinas.

The DA himself was up for election in a heavily black ‘town’, and going after such ‘gowns’ was a shrewd re-election gambit. That such political consideration would of itself be largely incompatible with the careful administration of criminal justice is so contrary to historic political praxis as to seem, like adherence to the authentic vision of Christ (or Gandhi), both ‘quaint’ and hopelessly ‘idealistic’.

But among the fuels for this fire the unholy mix of politics and criminal justiciaring was merely wood compared to the magnesium effect of the sex-offense phenomenon as it has now metastasized under the nurturance of advanced-level Advocacies and a media that has – to its own great profit – turned pretty much ‘yellow’. And the whole concoction has been distilled to the point where it has become a Script: it has its own roles, its own plot, and – worst of all – its own set of reactions and opinions which are to be assumed by the public, to be delivered on cue. Any deviation from whole-hearted support for the approved opinions bids fair to land the opiner in some modern-day, ‘democratic’ form of gulag.

There were few trees not flattened so as to smooth and clear the path for the winds that were generated to fan the flames; firestorms like the one that blitzed London on December 29, 1940 are now a common development. Courts and legislatures, media, even the free and full expression of the voice of the citizenry were all flattened, watertight-doors jammed open to make it easier for ‘justice’ against these ‘monsters’ to be efficiently wreaked.

The professionalism of our modern (and militarized) police and investigators – so brightly, brassily, and proudly limned in numerous current and recent TV series – was clearly compromised, the only real question being: was that professionalism eroded by the effects of this thing or was that professionalism itself purposely skewed to become part of the problem before the fact? The philosophy of Muldoon of the Strong Arm Squad seems not to have really been buried, and it is quite possible that beneath the SWAT chic and learned discourse on the varieties of hi-tech weaponry by starry-shouldered, crew-cut paragons, the rough peasant justice of the 1890s has been brought back from its grave.

Muldoon's philosophy of 'justice' and police work, from William Marshall's novel "New York City Detective", was that a good copper in need of a guilty party for a crime that had to be solved, merely went out and collared somebody he knew in his gut to be guilty of something and framed that bum for the crime, secure in the knowledge that justce was being done all around: this crime would be solved, his superiors would be satisfied, the framed would get what was comign to him, and someday somewhere some other decent copper in need of a guilty party would most likely come across the actual perpetrator, frame your actual perpetrator for his own unsolved crime, and that bum too would go away. Why waste a good copper's time thinking about things any more deeply than that?

A Duke law professor noted that the self-proclaimed victim was helpfully prodded by police in a line-up, to the point that they removed any speed-bumps – embedded in lawful procedure precisely for the purpose of discerning truth – that might deflect her from identifying, or at least choosing, a couple-three defendants. The rough peasant Southern justice of the 1950s has been brought back from its grave, if indeed it was ever truly staked through its heart in the first place.

Duke’s role is tortured. It pretends to the aura of the Ivy, but is actually deeply connected to the aforementioned gummint (and, at the risk of repeating myself, particularly to the JAG racket). Yet an echt Ivy nowadays must be ‘sensitive’ and ‘responsive’ (nor are those concepts in themselves at all undesirable). So the Duke honchos had to keep the ‘town’ happy, and not appear to be out of step with the Script, while at the same time not giving their alumni the impression that their fair-haired bhoys would be exposed to the crassery of criminal prosecution for frat-boy pranks from which great preparation for high-ranking or deep-connected government and business careers is irreplaceably derived. The battles of Democracy are won on the playing-fields and in the frat-houses, and we shall never surrender, and all that. Like a military now very Southron and evangelical – when not blatantly Fundamentalist and Dominionist – Duke wants to draw increased devotion from the quick-burning fuels of self-assurance and undisputed authority, leading to a clarity based not on deep, patient, sometimes tortured, always serious thought but rather based on having pushed all the troublesome pieces off the board. And yet simultaneously it wants to be seen as a major University in … some … sense. And, given our modern American reality, it most likely qualifies.

Prosecutor Nifong pulled some moves that could be called ‘sailing close to the wind’ but which are now securely ensconced within the Script: giving out inflammatory and skewed comments to the media, selectively releasing such facts as he chose, the thinness of the case cloaked by the lubricating miasm of ‘outrage’ and ‘sensitivity’ so that the public might not be given the uneasy impression that it was jumping the gun in concluding that the defendants were true ‘perps’, deserving of all the honors thereto appertaining in our prison-happy, perfect-security society. But then he went and outright lied to the court that there was no DNA evidence one way or the other, when indeed he had two sets of it that not only did not implicate the three selectees, but also did not implicate the other 40-plus members of the lacrosse team, and actually did indicate the ‘contributions’ (ah, the ever tasteful CSI!) of 7 other unidentified males.

This invites serious reflection on the effect that long-term (the Tawana Brawley episode took place about 20 years ago now) Emergency-ism and Outrage-ism is having on our domestic, civilian law enforcement personnel. Their sense of immunity to prosecution seems to be climbing toward that enjoyed by the JAGs and their investigative ‘organs’, who carry on that thing they do shielded and fortified by concentric rings of defenses: national security, special military concerns that ‘civilians’ wouldn’t understand, the gauzy, muzzy golden aura of the military as the embodiment of all things good and true as resurrected by the Reagan era, and now the even more useful waves of Advocacy-stoked ‘outrage’ that forgive without investigating any of their mis- or mal-feasances that inconveniently do manage to blunder out onto the stage. And all of this insurance on top of the foursquare organizational dogma that JAGs and military investigators are almost as free from Original Sin as generals and admirals. In the Southron theology, virginity seems to be enjoyed not only ,by the Mother of God, but also by the authority figures of the gummint (the aforementioned frat-boy forays and perhaps preacherly prayer-trips into gay sex and crystal meth not excepted).

A reflexive public response according to a Script – any Script – is hugely toxic to law enforcement and to society. Once a public response loses the vitality and unpredictability of serious sifting for the truth and becomes an almost completely predictable element, then the sad effects of Original Sin – especially when working within a so powerful and privileged an entity as a law enforcement organization – can figure a way around, just as water – however polluted – will still find its way in through any opening afforded to it through inadvertence or design. The hard job of Peopling means having to demand careful sifting for Truth, so that Our authority is not deployed in the service of un-Truth.

Nor let us be sidetracked by the pious bray that Nifong was ‘an isolated instance’, a ‘rogue’ individual: he had the bad karma to get caught doing the dirty, but he’s a full-fledged member of the fraternity. This very powerful fraternity.

Surely we’re seeing the problem in the Iraq war now. Other turkeys may be roosting over here already. Something other than concrete and steel structures has been seriously hit in this country, and not by furriners. This calls not for a tool as simple as the musket over the fireplace but rather for the inhabiting of those superior aspects of ourselves upon which the Framers and the beleagured (yet ever cagey) Lincoln pinned their deepest hope.

Nor can the role of the media in all of this be discounted. If it weren’t for the media re-embracing a form of ‘yellow journalism’, even when claiming that it was only the old Progressive ‘muckraking’ in a fresh Good Cause, then the scope and duration of the sex-offense mania – with all its truly dangerous consequences – could not have thrived as long as has been the case. And perhaps the entire run-up to the Iraq war might have been baffled, had the media hewed to Truth first, rather than down-playing slowly-brewed and expensive Truth for the cheap, fast red-white-blue lightnin’ of reflexive Outrage and patrioteering.

Now dozens of thousands of Our young remain obedient to Our word in the bloody wrack of the Eastern front, thousands of them are dead, and they have caused – willy or nilly – the deaths of further multiple thousands. We have much to do.

In his excellent little book “Postscript to Yesterday: American Life and Thought 1896-1946”, published in 1947, the eminently readable and insightful Lloyd Morris devotes a chapter, “The Uses of News”, to the development of the news-gathering trade in those eventful 50 years. Joseph Pulitzer determined that the best way to uncover wrongdoing was “to create by destroying, to affirm by attacking” [the quotations are from Morris], insisting always upon the truth of his facts but never failing to deploy them in the most sensational fashion possible, until it was finally observed back then that “trial by newspaper was becoming an increasing threat to judicial processes; the invasion of private rights was often without redress for the injured”.

William Randolph Hearst competed with Pulitzer for pre-eminence. He “was known far and wide for his opinions, not his standards” and “his editorial world was a world of sharp focus, lacking the light and shadow of profound moral conviction”. There is a texture to existence; it – like much of the desert – is not simply flat, lifeless, and predictable (as the Italian armored columns chasing Omar Muktar found out to their great damage and discomfiture). An inaccurate ‘clarity’, based not on a strenuously formulated awareness but rather on a juvenile ignoring of any complications, is bound to set one up for a world of hurt. And take maybe a lot of others into the blood and mire along with one. In the Cause of enhancing “democracy" Hearst poured gallons of garishly colored ink down the throats of the public, insisting that his hyped-up stories would make it easier for folks to grasp them, which as citizens they needed to do. About which the great Progressive muckraker Lincoln Steffens observed: “to give us a better government he would make us a worse people”. The thought cannot be avoided that some of our modern day ‘media’ honchos are channeling Mr. Hearst far more effectively than anyone in the White House used to draw upon astrological charts.

To the “New York Times” came Joseph Ochs, back in the 1890s. As he went on, observing the operating styles and philosophies of Pulitzer and Hearst, he decided that his newspaper would carry only “all the news that’s fit to print”. In other words, as against Hearst and even the truth-respecting but sensational Pulitzer, he would treat the intelligent American citizen to a wide and full and accurate record of all the important developments in all the relevant issues of the day, carefully presented. A ray of light, a light-house that – we would have to admit – has not been as well-tended of late; nor can the ship of the Republic any longer rely on it solely.

In an ever-spiraling cycle, the news media seem to be drawn down to frothy sensationalism rather than upward to serious deliberation. That it is in a good Cause – and toward increased profits – cannot justify it: Truth is being sacrificed. And if the rejoinder comes in the question “And what is Truth?” then a fundamental mistake has been made that, at the very least, should be clear to any who profess a working familiarity with the Old or the New Testament.

Whether Our own decreasing sensitivity to Truth and our own failing capabilities to determine it, and to demand It in our society – is a cause or an effect, is one of those questions that can indeed go on forever. The task immediately before Us is to take a more sober and serious road than heretofore, and thus to face full-on the massive and now monstrous issues that beset us and – through us – the world and its peoples. Whether the American thumb remains heavy enough to hold the world in place is a question of secondary concern; whether the American soul is still capable of being a Beacon and a Modell to the world’s peoples is the question of the day. How We answer it “shall mark us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

The New Year waits with eager groaning the revelation of the children of the Republic. What say We?

(Current Comments)

The first thing that stuck me was discovering that April was Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Of course, in its eagerness to keep everybody ‘happy’, the government has been dedicating assorted days, weeks, and months to this or that Good Cause or Fine Thought for quite a while. But it certainly struck me as a coincidence that the decision in Duke and the Imus dust-up all took place as Sexual Assault Awareness Month was just kicking off. If I were a PR firm for this Advocacy I would be considering re-affirming the existence of a benevolent God. No doubt, the PR forces assigned to capitalize on this Month were already assembled and on deck when Duke was decided; the Imus thing might be a bit more of a manufactured product than a coincidence, but in these things you never know for sure. Synergies abound.

The psychologist Carol Norris wrote an article on April 3 over on Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.com/norris04032007.html). It’s essentially a rah-rah exhortation to the troops to kick off the Month. But there are some worthwhile points to note. First, she points out what is probably one of the strongest points in the conceptual foundation of sex-assault awareness: it’s about “respecting boundaries”. And ‘respecting boundaries’ is one of the most essential skills for communal living and citizenship. It presumes that each person knows his/her own identity, in order to perform the maturational task of defining what is me/mine and what is not-me/not-mine. And it provides the field upon which each individual might struggle with the ancient and crucial challenge of respecting that Self sufficiently to refrain from degrading It or degrading somebody else’s Self. In the ever-fluid shimmy of erotic arousal and attraction, young individuals need all the communal and cultural and societal support that We can muster to assist them in taking on and conducting that challenge.

Norris also notes that “2/3s of sexual assaults are committed by someone the survivor knows”. This certainly calls attention to the fact that the stranger-danger variant of the ‘sex offender’ mania – the most telegenic of the variants – is, perversely (if I may), the least likely. Still, it is a sad but essential duty these days to view with some skepticism any advocacy claims as to the number of ‘sexual assaults’: not only are numbers unreliable and not truly ‘scientifically’ obtained, but the definition of ‘sexual assault’ is so elastic that much more clarity must be ascertained before coming to any conclusions. (And yet we have made monstrous changes to law and public policy already, based on the dubious numbers and the dubious ‘science’.)

Equally so, it is utterly unjustified to automatically endow any claimant with the title of “survivor” as Norris does. First of all, the validity of the claims and charges and assertions have not been proven in whatever’s left of the criminal justice process. Second, it’s more than a little presumptuous and also manipulative to endow the subjects of one’s own advocacy with the title usually reserved for persons who have emerged from a situation that held the possibility of physical death. (And no – you can’t use ‘death’ metaphorically in this case; especially if you’re going to involve the criminal law.)

And this, it has to be said, is a direct result of the fundamental logical conundrum at the heart of this Advocacy: mobilized ostensibly to re-establish (or establish in the first place) a “respect for boundaries”, yet in order to quickly make its place in the sun the Advocacy has had to overrun the boundaries of Reason and Truth, Law and Justice, and has had to dis-respect the capacities of the public for crucial deliberation and discourse. Thus, as I noted in the earlier Post, Prosecutor Nifong was not a ‘rogue’ who ‘went too far’, but rather had the bad luck and poor judgment to get caught red-handed doing what had become the standard procedure in the stampede-inducing Woman-Assaulted Script and Scenario.

And it is this deeply-embedded disrespect for boundaries in the sex-assault/sex-offense Advocacy that corrupted and debauched law and public consciousness so much that when the quintessential unboundaried frat-boy Administration of the Unitariat took the country out of its centuries-old aversion to pre-emptive and invasive war, nary a media or public outcry was raised. It was, I think, seen as just another ‘revolutionary’ change made necessary and justified by the Goodness and Urgency of the Cause. The ‘creative destruction’ wrought in the service of liberating the world from Patriarchy paved the way for the ‘creative destruction’ that would liberate the world from ‘Islamofascist terrorism’.

But who can deny that it would be a good thing to have less frat-boy, boyo, macho, weapon and machinery-happy Rambos or gunslingers out there or up there on our behalf? The Duke case blended the assaultive and unboundaried unripeness of the frat-boy with the arrogance of youth and with the arrogance of privilege and a sense of one’s ‘right’ to be ‘alpha’ by forcing one’s will … so even if the rape didn’t exactly take place, issues of power and – helllloooo Democrats! – of Class and entrenched Power were clearly illuminated.

But rape didn’t take place, and THAT has to be understood for the hugely significant and alarming message it bears. There was indeed a ‘rush to justice’ (although I’d not dignify this thing with the word ‘justice’). The Scenario and the Script now as entrenched as Socialist Realism in this country nowadays was precisely designed to move everyone beyond ‘facts’ to the symbolic results that were ‘demanded’ by the general evil of Men and Sexual Assault; whether this particular set of ‘Men’ (again, not the word I’d use for this bunch of frat-boys) actually did this particular rape is not the primary consideration for the symbolism of the Cause.

Well, that’s as may be. But whether this rape was committed in this instance by this/these Defendant(s) IS INDEED a primary consideration for the criminal law, for those instances when the awesome and frankly awefull power of the State is deployed in a criminal case against an individual. While symbolic events are allowed their own latitude, criminal prosecutions are hugely boundaried by letter and the spirit of the Constitution precisely to ensure that the State’s terrible power is deployed – not symbolically but – accurately. And THIS, surely, is the confusion (hardly unintentional) that has debauched and corrupted Law and Justice and the People’s very conception of Law and Justice to the point where We find ourselves now, not only in domestic affairs but in foreign affairs.

Kathleen Bergin posts most revealingly to Alternet; the article first appeared in ‘Feminist Law Professors’ … which should give all of them pause (www.alternet.org/module/printversion/50442/?type=blog). She refers to the “disconnect between legal culpability and social responsibility”.

A news commentator, Howard Kurz on CNN, had enumerated the evidence that would be introduced by the defense if the case went to trial, evidence that strongly indicated the untruthfulness of the accuser’s charges. It would seem, opined the commentator, that what happened here was a ‘seduction’ whereby reporters took charges at face value, fitting them into a “familiar historical narrative” and distracted themselves with no further questions or investigation or – we can assume – serious thought. That’s about as succinct while still job-preservingly tactful statement of the situation as one is likely to find in the media these days.

But it is gall and wormwood to Bergin (a Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law … and what is it that’s familiar about Texas these days … ????). She characterizes Kurz’s painfully careful and delicate attempts to limn the truth as “demonizing” the “victim”. This is itself a classic advocacy ploy: if you question me, then you are totally against me (and we wonder where Republican and Fox-Newsian and right-wing-bloggian illogic comes from?). And of course, it hasn’t at been established that the accuser was indeed a “victim” .

But Bergin is going to play the entire Advocacy coda: to question the claimant/accuser is not only to “demonize the victim” but “through her, all Black women” (the capitalization is Bergin’s). Once again, in its need to bring as much fuel to its revolutionary fire as possible (the quicker to burn out the toxic infection of Patriarchy, of course), the Advocacy’s Script seeks to raise up as many ‘instances’ of ‘outrage’ as it possibly can. It’s not only that the stakes of the Cause are high, but that the stakes in every incident must be as high as possible in order to intensify the heat. Somehow Kurtz’s careful and painfully precise commentary on the particular case has been transmogrified into a demonic assault on all Black women (and after the audience has burned through its attention span trying to digest that monstrousness, they probably won’t have any energy left to chew through that assertion itself).

She then goes on to quote some actual facts: the accused and other frat-boys made some revoltingly immature and callow but violent remarks. The remarks were indeed that. And this country has a long damned way to go toward societal maturity. But the remarks, Professor Bergin does not care to emphasize, were precisely that: remarks. Granted that they were reprehensible, granted that she correctly concludes that the remarks “highlight the sick and wretched depravity of this racialized episode”, yet they were still only remarks and do not rise to the level of criminal prosecution (for sexual assault, at least).

This of course is just where the Advocacy has gone over the line and helped debauch the country and the People. Something so repugnant to the Advocacy’s programme and vision of how life should be, something so grossly unpleasant … well if it isn’t criminal it should be. And on the basis of that impatient and presumptuous presumption the Advocacy, including lawyers and law professors as well as prosecutors and law enforcement personnel and politicians, have rampantly overflowed the boundaries set by Western and Constitutional jurispraxis precisely to prevent the lascivious deployment of the State’s criminal prosecutorial power against the citizenry. With the impatience of the revolutionary and the ‘young’, the Advocacy has ‘creatively destroyed’ the framework and bulwarks patiently and wisely wrought by all those Dead White European Males; as a replacement it has ‘created’ the “familiar historical narrative” that Kurtz took such pains to describe. Such a deal.

In the ‘Boston Herald’ for April 12, duty feminist-advocate Margery Egan passes quickly over the disreputable focus on ‘facts’ in order to declare that “suspicions still linger against the Duke team” – although she shrewdly doesn’t get into describing what those suspicions might be, or who “still” holds these suspicions. And, in a comradely effort at bailing out another comrade’s bacon, she quotes “victims rights attorney” Wendy Murpy who had supported the accuser all along: “She either lied and should be prosecuted (Murphy must know there’s a squat chance of that ever happening) or she was paid off, presumably by the rich Duke families.” Neat. Even if the accuser accepted a payoff, then that just shows that on top of being a victim of sexual assault, she was also victimized by being a poor Black female who was bethumped by the greatest insult of all: being offered – and accepting – a payoff.

It’s a scentfully sinister scenario and saves much bacon. Except that it was the State, not the accuser, that backed off the case. But what’s a few facts among comrades? Only the Cause is important. As the dying Emperor Septimius Severus said to his sons: Pay the troops – the rest don’t matter. “The rest” comprised the citizens of Rome and the empire. To the revolutionaries of this Advocacy, We are that “rest”, and our Republic and Constitution and polity and culture don’t matter, next to The Cause.

The next day the ‘Boston Globe’ tries to have it all ways. The paper has been at the forefront of all things sex-offensual, and indeed initiated the massive “creative destruction” called the priest-sex-offenses scandal, although while it is keeping the Pulitzer it would rather not recall. In an editorial (entitled “Short Fuse’, and only 3 sentences long) it declares that the Duke players were “louts” (who can deny it?) but that “all the evidence suggests that they were not rapists”.

“The three came from affluent families that hired skilled lawyers.” But the State backed off the case not because of the efforts of those purported high-priced attorneys but because the accuser and the prosecutor were unsupportable and had tried to surf a “rush to condemn”, as the State’s Attorney General put it. Maybe the Globe is just pissed that these boyos and their affluent parents had the temerity to oppose the Script of the Revolution at all; and perhaps, as class criminals, they should have accepted their conviction as the righteous judgment of History on their class, if not on any acts they may or may not have committed on the night in question, which question is from the point of view of History of piddling inconsequence anyway.

“The case took 13 months to unfold, but the students have the resources to get on with their lives.” Oh, so that makes it OK then. Sorta like we invaded Iraq but they had the resources to become a democracy anyway so it’s OK. Our recent history is becoming a hall of mirrors as well as a house of horrors.

“The three were able to contest a stereotype: that Duke lacrosse players are capable of raping the stripper they had hired for a night of drunken excess.” The sentence makes no sense, but then again, the Globe is trying to save some bacon – its own – here, not trying to make sense. There is no ‘stereotype’ that Duke lacrosse players are capable of raping; when one mentioned Duke lacrosse (at least before this case) there was no immediate connection to ‘rape’; yes, when one mentioned ‘men’ any time in the past few decades there is an immediate connection to ‘rape’, but that’s the work of the Advocacy itself. And tossing in the stripper and the drunken excess is accurate, but kinda sleazy here.

But the conclusion confounds: “Prosecutors need to be wary of other stereotypes – about race and poverty – in cases where suspects lack wealth or connections.” But wealth and connections didn’t have anything to do with their exoneration; it was the Advocacy’s own evil fruits that did contributed to that. And what “stereotypes about race and poverty” did the prosecutor (or future imagined prosecutors) draw upon? That a woman is most likely telling the truth when she claims to be raped? That a Black woman is telling the truth when she claims she was raped by White boys? That poverty will forgive any efforts to extort money from rich people? I don’t know – I can’t make heads or tails of the conclusion. But then again, maybe that’s the best the ‘Globe’ and the Advocacy can hope for.

But on a brighter side, Jo-Ann Armao in the ‘Washington Post’ (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041301873_p.html) considers the whole matter of publishing ‘”victim’s names”. But of course, it should be “accuser’s” or “claimant’s” name; one isn’t a “victim” or a ‘survivor’ until after the decision of the court, and to use the term before that point is to unfairly if implicitly characterize both of the parties, one too positively and one too negatively.

The most interesting point in the article is one that is tossed off: it’s been “16 years” and “rape is still in that dark corner” (i.e., where the public doesn’t want to … do whatever it is that the Advocacy wants it to do about the whle thing). If after this long a period of time, and given the huge chunks of law and jurispraxis ripped out in order to allow ‘emergency’ access to ‘justice’, and given the massive knee-jerk support given by the media and the unseen support of politicians, the initial problem is still there … well, shouldn’t We be asking if the whole thing needs to be rethought? Or are we going to do this the Iraq way and just keep surgin’? Or is the Iraq surge debacle a foreign-policy deployment of the domestic anti-rape strategy?

And are We considered by the Advocates as no better than Iraqis? We have been offered the liberation of enlightenment and have chosen to remain mired in our dark and bloody humanity and try to cling to our antiquated (constitutional) modes of handling things. Are We any more worthy of this particular gift of feminism than the Iraqis purportedly are of America’s beneficent offer of Democracy?

Well, as with Iraq so too with the Advocacy: there is the distraction of other emergencies (Imus comes to mind), and the insistence that what has failed until now will work if we just do more of it, and doubt is treason, and up is down and down is up and … We have Us a job of work to do, at home as well as abroad.