A GREAT MOMENT

The always-worthwhile Cathy Young has an Op-Ed in the ‘Boston Globe’about the presidential race and its significance for women. (“A great moment for women”, Sept. 12, 2008, www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/09/12/a_great_moment_for_women).

I’d preface this by saying that when we use the word ‘women’ nowadays, we actually mean ‘feminists’, and quite possibly the feminists of the Second Wave (hereinafter: ‘2WF’). The 2WF and its assorted visions, agendas, and philosophies has been passing itself off as the voice of all ‘women’ (who themselves are citizens and members of The People).

I’m not sure that’s entirely true, about the 2WF. They got themselves anointed spokespersons for ‘women’ somewhere along the line back there, and not without the help of the vote-desperate Democrats and a media that was looking at demographics and telegenics. The story of all that has yet to be told, but it’s important because much of what is going on among Us now, and much that has happened to Us as The People, can be rather directly traced to what the 2WF told its suitors that it wanted to see happen.

And so it came to pass.

It’s a good thing that women are securing “more representation … across the spectrum of political beliefs”, as Young says, although I don’t agree with her that “feminism” is exercising as purely valuable a role as it would like to have Us believe.

But Young points out that there is a definite “hypocrisy” in “feminist liberals who deploy sexist weapons against [Sarah Palin]”. Apparently, being a “conservative” (and I’m not really agreeing with the whole liberal-conservative definition thing as it exists these days) can get you un-woman-ed, according to those who have appointed themselves mistresses of the union card. (Or: Chairs of the membership committee …?) How quickly We see that the sacrosanct ‘identity’ of ‘women’ is attacked with a carving knife by the Praesidium of the Supreme Feminine when a particular ‘woman’ demonstrates an independence that is not ‘politically correct’, that does not conform to the ‘line’.

Our long-gone Soviet brethren and sistern would recognize immediately what is happening. And as only Nixon could go to China, so too only ‘women’ could defrock Sarah Palin. We have yet to hear her described as ‘self-hating’, but that trusty slicer-dicer is no doubt standing by. If things really get desperate (i.e. if the election really gets close) We should not be surprised to see imprecations of an other-worldly nature hurled, replete with eye of newt and various nocturnal herbs and fungi about the time of a full moon.

This is not to make light of the actual concerns of actual American women. But it reflects my sense that the 2WF’s brand of feminism – which is still the dominant brand of feminism and has achieved its most notable legislative and policy successes – has for decades played a verrrrry shrewd and procedurally violent game, while artfully presenting itself as Goody-Two-Shoes bethump’t by baaad ‘men’.

And in an acute by-the-by, Young makes a few observations about Joe Biden, the proponent of the Violence Against Women Act (actually a part of the larger omnibus crime bill for 1994). She notes that the Act “authorized some good programs addressing rape and domestic violence”, and if she refers to the monies provided for information and education of law enforcement, professional helpers, and state programs to assist women, then I’d certainly agree.

But there were some rather toxic law-enforcement policies in it as well (and the Supreme Court later found parts of them unconstitutional). Not for nothing did Biden assert publicly that “It may be bad law but it sends a great message”; what We didn’t hear was the comment to which his bloviation was a defensive answer. And We saw an awful lot of bad law – baaaad law – that was justified as ‘sending a great message’ back in those days. And since. You can judge for yourself whether We have been helped by so much ‘messaging’, by having the ‘majesty’, perhaps even the legitimacy, of the civil and criminal law steered into the political mudflats for the sake of pandering to the 2WF.

And when their turn came to run the game, the Republicans happily passed laws to ‘send a message’ – the ‘right’ message – to their friends in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries, starting with the repeal of Glass-Steagall (although, alas, while that monstrosity had a Republican daddy in the execrable Phil Gramm, its godfather was Bill Clinton). The Republicans can claim that they were just doing what the Democrats had been doing for decades.

But Young has more to say. Biden’s support was merely “another form of pseudo-feminist sexism” and the bill itself represented “a toxic mix of gender-war feminism that treats such crimes [of rape and domestic violence] as acts of patriarchal oppression rather than individual wrong-doing and paternalism that sees women as deserving of special protection”. Biff-Pow-Zang, as the 1960s ‘Batman’ illustrators might have put it.

The 2WF is hugely to blame for the “gender-war feminism”. And while they perhaps now, if they’re really pushed, might try to claim like old Bolsheviks in the late 1980s that the times demanded such measures (not so far different from the Germans who were ‘only following orders’, really), the 2WF cadres and commissars are responsible for a huge amount of injury to Our common weal. By inducing the increasingly short-haired Democrats (and not a few of them are, on paper at least, lawyers) to see certain favored crimes as instances of some overarching genre of crime, then anyone found guilty (or, increasingly, merely accused) per se demonstrates himself as a member of an outlaw ‘class’ and therefore beyond the pale of specific judicial balancing of perspective, context, proportion and – ominously – Constitutional protections.

This is not the way that the American legal system was envisioned by the Founders. It was set up to provide the best possible chance for a fair adjudication of a particular individual’s case, with an ever-watchful eye on the awefull police power of the government. It does not work well – and certainly not with any integrity as the justicial arm of the Constitution – as a ‘party’ court designed to ‘send messages’ by its implacable convictings of what amounts in practice to a ‘kulak’ class.

And as Young astutely notes, the Act’s (successful) attempt to “discourage dual arrests in domestic assaults” was a baldfaced shoe-horning of the ideological presumptions of the Dems’ favored constituency into the incredibly complex and dangerous dynamics of ‘family trouble calls’, the bane of all police officers. Because, as she accurately goes on, it is a “false assumption that women in such cases are wrongly arrested for defending themselves”. Neither I nor she is saying that every single woman in a domestic violence call is the assailant or a co-assailant, but such a possibility is far too strong to legitimately impose a presumption of utter and pure victimhood upon every instance.

In short – and in a profoundly disturbing similarity to military justice – the Act puts Law into the posture of ‘the law at war’ (the JAGs and neocon apparatchiks of the present Administration refer to it jocularly and not without a cocky pride as ‘lawfare’); the only difference is that the Act of 1994 (and all its subsequent rippling throughout the federal and state law enforcement and judicial systems) subordinated the law to the service of what can only be called an ‘ideology’ or an ‘ideological agenda’, while the current Administration has subordinated Law – including the already treacherous military justice system – to an actual war (which can hardly be called an improvement on things).

None of this is good for Us, for the Constitution, for Our common weal as shaped by the Constitution.

But – in an irony so precise that no fiction-writer would dare deploy it – Young notes that Biden’s own justification for his support of the Act is “pseudo-sexist”. “Biden proudly reported that he and his brothers were forbidden to lay a hand on their sister even in self-defense, while she enjoyed ‘absolute impunity’ – and added, apparently not as a joke, that he had the bruises to prove it.” Tee hee, I guess.

This kind of stuns. That Biden – or any lawmaker, especially on the national level – would justify support for so hugely dubious a law on the basis of his own childhood experiences around the family breakfast table. And this also poses the problem in such a way that the sovereign power of the government (of which the Founders were duly and scrupulously careful, if not also suspicious) is put into the place of parent around the most intimate settings – the hearth, the table, even the bed – of the citizens’ lives. You will have to look long and hard to find any Founder suggesting that the government that they were creating would be a ‘parent’ to its citizens. Washington? Adams? Madison? Monroe? Franklin? Jefferson? Hamilton? Or – moving on – Lincoln, even in the depths of the Civil War during which he had to stretch the Constitution in the face of ‘civil insurrection’?

And this poses the citizens – The People – as squabbling children, in need of the adult supervision that only a government can provide. Again, you’re going to have the devil’s own time finding support for that in 1776 or 1788 or 1862. As We are not ‘civilians’ but rather ‘citizens’, so We are not ‘children’ but rather The People. (And living up to that role is not a bad trellis upon which to structure Our days.)

Young calls Biden’s position (though he’s probably not alone in holding it) as “chivalry masquerading as feminism”. So that was the best that the Dem party honchos could come up with when trying to ‘relate to’ women. ‘Shucks, boys, let’s give the little ladies a little more pertection – it’ll be alright; after all, we’re Congress. We cain’t screw things up and there ain’t nobody who wants to stay in the game who’ll say it if we did.’ Beltway wisdom.

But when you think that the Dems didn’t really have what it took to rise to the actual appreciation of women’s situation, you have to move on to the realization that they didn’t realize what the 2WF really had on its menu. Individual rights, privacy, the very concept of the individual as a subject independent of any ‘identity’ – none of these fundamental Constitutional and (why mince words?) American concepts was legitimate to the 2WF, since they were all deployed in the service of a masculinist domination. The ‘dream’ was to embrace and pressure the government in order to get it to de-establish those concepts.

Now just what would be left of the American form of government if those foundational concepts were quaint-ified, replaced with group-identity and a government that would enforce it … ? Is it too much to say that if the 2WF’s vision were even modestly realized, then Our politics and Our ethos would not be ‘radical democratic’ but rather something far different, and far worse?

And that to the extent that the 2WF vision has so far been implemented, thus far are We experiencing a queasy slippage of Constitutional government?

This is not a veiled or coded commercial for American women to return to Kids, Church, and Kitchen. Far more profoundly – and urgently – this is a call to consider just how dangerously far along the path of anti-Constitutional government this country and this People have been waltzed over the past few decades. The habit of calling "feminism" "liberal" is hugely inaccurate; feminism is at best "radical" and at worst - and many leading 2WF thinkers espouse this - it is anti-Liberal. Indeed, since the Republic and the Constitution were constructed by 'males' - and dead white ones at that - how could We expect that those marvelous constructions are safe under a 2WF ascendancy?

Lincoln said that “we cannot escape history”. Today We cannot even allow Ourselves to try.

CAWN’T THINK WHY

Over on Truthout (originally a New Republic piece) Jonathan Cohn has an article about Joe Biden (“The Strange Silence on Biden’s Signature Accomplishment”, http://www.truthout.org/article/the-strange-silence-bidens-signature-accomplishment).

We’ve been seeing a lot of this type of thing in regard to the Democratic Party itself and the Democrats’ doings over the past decades, and now We’re seeing it in re Biden. Something the Dems want verrrry much continues to elude their grasp and the writer (and the Dems) simply cawn’t think why. It must be some insidious force: racism, genderism, age-ism, ‘men’ – any one or a combination of those hoary and ancient foes of humanity.

In the present instance, ‘The New Republic’ is in on the act. The prudent reader will hold hem-herself at a certain distance from the emotional tug, so carefully shaped a charge. This is ‘The New Republic’, after all, and after its performance under the former boss Martin Peretz (“Marty’ to his many dear friends and colleagues inside the Beltway) no reader should approach the magazine with shields-down, as they say in Starfleet. It would be hard to say whether the mag is still faithful to its neocon allegiance, thus trying to stealth-deliver a boom-boom into the midst of the Democrats’ current urgent longings, or whether the mag is simply trying to reposition itself (sincerely or tactically) some distance away from its former ‘verities’ and pick up some creds with the resurgent if still fractious Democrats. It’s the Beltway, after all, and in Our modern American reality that’s the equivalent of saying “It’s Chinatown, Jake”.

Mr. Cohn points to the 1994 subset of that year’s crime bill that is colloquially known as the Violence Against Women Act – or VAWA, for short. This alone, he doth affide, is Biden’s “signature accomplishment in domestic policy”.

Well, I agree with Mr. Cohn. And I think that the signature should be most carefully examined.

Cohn runs through some of VAWA’s elements and the context behind them, all from the point of view that the whole thing was A Good Idea, nay A Great Idea. This despite the fact that after the thing was enacted and tossed ticking into the common weal, Biden blurted “It may not be a great law but it sends a great message”. And thereby the tale and therein the rub.

Cohn quotes a domestic violence program director. She says “At that time there were no victim rights and [somebody] had to witness an act of violence in order to prosecute it.” He leaves that snippet of hers out there, and then tosses in a second from her: “The criminal justice system lacked information and training on the dynamics of domestic violence and its effects on the family.”

Blessings and thanks to her. So much is there, hidden in plain sight. And let me preface my thoughts with the proviso – for such is Our modern American reality – that I do not hold any brief for assaults, chimpish or catty, nor for making light of the pain of others; not for nothing has this dimension been characterized as “a vale of tears”.

Somehow ‘victim rights’ is bethump't by a pesky obstruction known as the American and Western legal system (designed, as Correctness has it, by ‘men’, and ‘men’ who are both ‘dead’ and ‘white’). And while Correctness would at this point simply close its briefcase with a loud snap and demand What more do we need to know?, I’d like to carry things forward a bit further.

The particular pesky obstruction is that the American and indeed the West’s legal system had long required that a crime be witnessed, as part of the way to establish that the criminal act actually took place. It’s not a bad requirement, when you think about it. It prevents one person simply telling a court that another person ‘did’ something, in the hope that the court will then deploy the awefull majesty of the State against the accused with no further ado. It prevents fabrications whereby accusations can be made without evidence and hugely consequential State actions taken without evidence (can you say “Iraq”?). It prevents what was and still is a popular and actually essential legal practice of dictatorships, be they of the Left or the Right: denunciation.

Denouncing somebody meant that you could walk up to any officer of the law, claim that so-and-so just did this (or maybe did ‘this’ days, weeks, months, years ago) and the State would without further ado arrest that person. This legal gambit is immensely useful and valuable to a dictatorship: it saves the costs of a huge police force; it makes every citizen a potential informer and agent of the State against every other citizen (or, in advanced usage, against specific groups or classes declared as enemies of the State and of the People); it forces every citizen to continuously fear that State power is only as far away as the nearest person. A marvelous, ingenious little tool.

The problem as the Second Wave feminists (2WF) and assorted victimology advocates saw it was that their largest demographic (women ‘in relationships’, formalized or not) were so frequently in positions where ‘things’ could be done to them when there were – almost by definition – no witnesses around. They were right. And the legal system thus did respond to such he said-she said situations verrrrry slowly, if at all. They were right.

This, they loudly declaimed, was because ‘men’ put together the legal system in such a way as to ‘oppress’ women and give themselves consequence-free opportunities to vent their violence upon women in the oft-hidden intimacy of the sex act, and even more often in the ‘castle’ of the private home, wherein government dare not tread. It was mostly just a ‘male’ plot was what the Western system of justice was, and there could be no other explanation for why the system had not chosen to more forcefully involve itself in matters of intimacy, hearth, and castle for all these long centuries of painful ‘oppression’.

Again, as has so often happened in these ‘advocacy’ matters - We are beginning to find out – this was a hugely selective and self-serving explanation of the problem. Generally, Western justice had had the prudence – if not the humility – to realize that there was no way it could operate in the murky waters of adjudicating within the hugely personal and intimate spheres of relationships and sex. It would take ‘God’ or at least some entity with the skills and powers of a ‘god’ to find out what actually happened, and then to demonstrate through evidence to the parties and the public that its adjudication was grounded in sufficient fact so as to retain the vital public credibility that underlay the very judicial power of the State.

And in the American setting, the Founders were also anxiously obsessed with the myriad ways in which the sleepless police power of the government might – like a vampire trying to enter a house – reintroduce itself into the vital personal and intimate social spaces of the citizens, spaces from which it had only so recently been forcibly ejected and then hemmed in by the strictures of the Constitution and the careful praxis of Western jurisprudence.

This, to the mothers of the revolution, was far too much thinking. Action was required forthwith. If the blacks could be liberated from their few centuries of slavery and oppression, must not the huge female demographic be forthwith liberated from its millennia of ‘oppressions’?

This, We must assume, appeared a doable do to Joe Biden, and a good idea as well.

Revolutions don’t ‘do’ patience or complexity (neither do youth, come to think of it, and those are two of the Dems most significant demographics). ‘Women’ found themselves with a problem, ‘white males’ were a lost cause and certainly ‘white blue collar males’ were a dying breed anyway and soon to go the way of the dodo, so just as a political calculation something had to be done.

And so it was. As reason therefor, the ‘damage’ and the ‘pain’ and the outrageousness of the situation were pushed to the fore. That the police and justicial power of the government might not be able to do the job without deforming itself perhaps fatally, that awakening the power-lust of that power by inviting it into the hearth and heart of individual or personal life might bode large and ill consequences for the Republic and the Constitution, that such efforts would probably fail to pass Constitutional muster except by the most blatant legal fictions and maneuverings … none of these aspects stopped Mr. Biden, if he even considered them in the first place.

And within a very short time of that ‘golden moment’ in 1994, even as “battering” was now being expanded to include phone-call silences, the sex-offense mania got started. Neither has yet stopped.

And then along came Iraq: on the basis of an ‘emergency’, and an ‘outrageous’ one, war was undertaken without evidence or with manufactured evidence, no thought was given for consequences except to immaturely imagine that one’s best-case scenario would be the outcome, the military instrument deployed has been deformed to the point of irreparability even as it has failed in all the tasks assigned to it, huge suffering, injury, and death has been inflicted on vast swaths of foreign peoples, and the entire apparatus of the Branches has revealed itself as deeply corroded – even corrupted.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

But even if – per impossibile – the war in the East had no connection to the domestic corrosions that preceded it, the domestic corrosions themselves must be seen for what consequences they have generated.

And in that regard, even Cohn, at the end of his piece, is forced to circumspection: “Advocates have claimed that VAWA cut down on domestic violence by 25 percent. And while that figure seems suspiciously high – precise estimates are hard to come by – advocates seem to agree universally about VAWA’s importance and Biden’s role in it.”

Oy.

Only 25 percent? You mean to tell Us that after all the lethal consequences that have followed, even if only domestically – to the integrity and operations of the judicial system, to the legitimacy of the law, to the societal bonds of the ‘American’ identity that are essential to holding this Republic, and this People, together – this monstrosity of a law has only reduced the problem by 25 percent? And probably not even that, since Cohn – I’m going to imagine here – is pulling his punches so as to avoid the Incorrectness and ‘insensitivity’ of questioning the veracity of the “advocates” (though they themselves have already proudly admitted that in the service of their causes “facts don’t matter”). So much for advocacy-science and advocacy-journalism.

And the advocates had better stay agreed on VAWA’s importance. If the mania starts to wear off and questions start to be asked, they may find themselves in some of the same sweaty positions currently afflicting members of the Bushist Imperium – civilian and military – whose actions during their heydays may be dragged into the light of day. And if that day comes they too will claim bemusedly that they cawn’t think why things went wrong or why they are being held to account. Cawn’t think why – maybe it was the gods. Or ‘men’ – they’re always doing baaad things.

And will We ever get back to government ‘of the People, by the People, and for the People’ instead of government-by-advocate (which is itself really only another way of saying government-by-lobbyist)?

Cohn concludes that Biden, for his role in VAWA, “deserves a little more attention”. Well, who could deny it? VAWA and Biden both so deserve.

But such attention, like the Mona Lisa’s smile, could yield a lot more than an observer might wish.

Yet such attention is needed. VAWA and its sister the sex-offense mania are two major pillars holding up the structure of the National Nanny State, and that State is as dangerous to the Republic and to a democratic politics as the National Security State ever was.

What decent human being supports violence? But “the panicked, society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life” (as his fellow TNR writer Leon Wieseltier puts it in the same issue) – whether out of womens’ pain or their fear or their desire to control every contingency – is twisting the fundamental structures of this constitutional Republic even as its Grounding in a mature People is corroded into dust.

I hold no brief for Chimpery. But I am hugely partial to liberty, to this Republic, to this People’s maturity and common weal, and to “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”. And I don’t think We’re there yet. Not hardly.