The Crime of the Millenium (Part II)

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.




This is the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States. What does it mean to you? What it means to most rational people, including the people who wrote it, is exactly what it says: the federal government would guarantee that no state could deprive an individual of his constitutionally-protected rights. This somewhat superfluous and manifestly obvious amendment was necessary to ensure that the southern states would not deny newly-freed blacks their rights.




If you know anything about the post-Civil War south, you know that the 14th amendment was worth less than the paper it was written on for millions of blacks for a century; it simply was not enforced, and local southern governments openly and systematically deprived blacks of their constitutional rights. The 14th amendment has been used, however for other designs. The first was a little-studied case with enormous ramifications for the country. The second was the culmination of the crime of the millennium.




The first landmark use of the 14th amendment was not to ensure that southern blacks were allowed to vote; it was to determine that a corporation enjoyed the same legal protection as individual citizens. Since no person could be "deprived of their property", the corporate lawyers argued, it was unconstitutional to limit the property of a group of persons coalesced as a corporation. Henceforth, it would be illegal to limit the size of corporations. The ramifications that this decision has had on our society is literally impossible to comprehend and frankly out of my league to even begin to articulate.




This footnote of history aside, the most recent abuse of the 14th amendment was its incorporation in the crime of the millennium, the coup d'etat of 2000. To prove that George W. Bush did not win the 2000 presidential election is so easy that the case suffers under the sheer weight of evidence. In this sense it is analogous to the O.J. Simpson murder case; any competent prosecutor could ignore 90% of the evidence and still convict.




In the case of the 2000 election, let's clear the table of the mountains of evidence that Bush did not win. Let's forget that he lost the popular vote nation-wide by hundreds of thousands of votes. Let's forget that thousands of blacks were not allowed to vote in Florida because they had names similar to convicted felons. Let's forget that the Florida election was certified by Bush's Florida campaign co-chair, who was employed by both Bush and his brother, the governor. Let's forget that Bush's legal strategy following the voting was focused on stopping recounts, which was, quite simply, an admission that he would be harmed by the truth.




Let's just focus on the Supreme Court's decision to stop the recount and anoint (there is no more appropriate word) Bush as president. What logic did the Supreme Court use in its coup? You guessed it: the 14th amendment. The amendment written to guarantee rights to newly-freed slaves was used by George W. Bush to argue that he was being deprived of equal protection under the law. This is the equivalent of Bill Gates citing anti-genocide statutes in arguing that the Microsoft monopoly should not be dismantled. Does it get any more cravenly cynical than this?




As the Florida recounts progressed, it began to become clear that Bush would lose. His strategy then was to halt the recount at any cost. The recount was not the initiative of Al Gore; it was mandated by Florida law. Bush needed to prevent Florida law from being carried out. But how?




George W. Bush filed suit in the United States Supreme Court claiming that the equal protection of Florida's citizens were being violated. This is a bizarre claim for two reasons. Firstly, the citizens of Florida never asserted that their rights were being violated; George W. Bush took it upon himself to speak for them, to essentially invent a grievance on their behalf. Secondly, the way in which Bush claimed that Floridians' rights were being violated led to an unsustainable conclusion.




Bush claimed that, since the counties of Florida used different types of ballots, any recount would violate equal protection due to different standards in different counties. So, the party of local government came to argue that local government was unconstitutional. Okay. But what was the inference of this argument? Well, the inference of this argument would be that the presidential election itself was unconstitutional, since the thousands of American counties each have their own particular ballots and standards.




This inference, however, was ignored; Bush argued that different standards were fine until the recounts began; once the recounts began, and his lead began to disappear, different standards became unconstitutional in his mind. The Supreme Court of the United States agreed with Bush; they ruled that it was indeed a violation of equal protection under the law to recount Florida's votes. It was unconstitutional, in other words, to objectively discern who won the presidency.




Bush's venal cynicism in bringing the case under the equal protection clause should not surprise us; the Supreme Court acquiescence to a coup d'etat that would make Pinochet blush should surprise us. Here's how blatant it was. In their written briefs, the justices were afforded the opportunity to explain their "reasoning". Antonin Scalia informed us that to continue the recount would do irreparable harm to Bush's "claim" to have won the election. So, Bush's "claim" to have won was so important to Scalia that it must be protected, even at the expense of the truth.




The Supreme Court sets precedence. Stare decisis, it is called. Once a precedent has been set, it takes a very high standard to overturn it. This is why legal segregation lasted so long. It is also why Roe v. Wade is nearly unassailable; it takes alot to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Knowing this, the Supreme Court justices who handed the presidency to Bush did something that the Supreme Court had never done in its history.




If Bush v. Gore had set precedence, as every single Supreme Court case over the prior two centuries had, what would that precedence have been? Well, it would have read something like this: "Any election with more than one standard for casting and counting votes is unconstitutional, and a candidate's claim to have won an election is sufficient cause to stop counting votes." If this ruling was allowed to become precedent, it would mean that every national election in the history of the country was unconstitutional and that America has never had a legitimate president, since America has never had a president elected by a universal standardized ballot. It would also mean that if, for example, Richard Nixon had claimed to have won the 1960 presidential election (which he probably did, by the way) he should have been granted the office.




Clearly, this could not be precedence, because to do so would literally de-legitimize every election in the nation's history. How did the Supreme Court square this circle? They decided that this case, unlike every single one of the thousands that had come before, would not establish precedence. They decided that their ruling applied to precisely one person in the world: George W. Bush. No future litigant could bring a case under this premise.




Back to the O.J. analogy; this is the equivalent of a judge saying that, since evidence is collected from murder scenes following different procedures in different jurisdictions, and since Simpson claimed to be innocent, any appraisal of the evidence by a jury would violate Simpson's equal protection. This is how Bush became president, by arguing that the truth was unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court agreed. We all know what the results of that decision have been. Could the crime of the millennium realistically have led to anything else?

J’Accusé

"If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing."

"There is more information is one thimble of reality than can be understood by a galaxy of human brains. It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations."

"The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance--the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We presume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that God--because he thinks the same way we do--must be more interested in our lives than in the rocks and trees and plants and animals."

Scott Adams, God's Debris

My God

There has been much debate recently revolving around the utility, the morality, and the role of religion in our postmodern dystopia. Like all too many debates in America these days, the initiative is claimed and jealously guarded by those who aim to dismantle a fundamental foundation of our society and those who deny that any remedy is needed at all. Both views are wrong, of course, and both have much to fear from the middle ground, because the middle ground represents common sense, the ultimate threat to the faithful, regardless of where their faith lies.

One side, led by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, excoriates literally everything about religion, since religion is based, by definition, on blind faith, which is wholly incompatible with a rational, globalized, and militarized world. For the atheists, religious faith, even in its more benevolent incarnations, is a relic of a bygone phase of history, which should have been cast aside along with human sacrifice, alchemy, witch trials, and all the superstitious flotsam of the pre-modern era.

The other side, led by Dinesh D'Souza and other far less articulate thinkers, argues that without religion, there would be no morality, no sense of dignity for the individual, no social cohesion, no incentive to restrain the darker impulses of human nature, no broad rejection of slavery, and no reason to love our fellow man. For the theists, religious faith, even in its more sinister incarnations, is the foundation of human life, the water to the fish, which is more relevant and necessary now than ever.

Both sides are absurd in their reductionism, and both have a vested interest in ignoring the third way, the way of the deists.

The atheists have an airtight case, up to a point. I agree with the premise that blind faith is not a virtue in itself, and it can often be a serious retardant to moral and material progress. While it often serves to comfort, it just as often serves as an excuse to ignore evidence of one's own error or sin. And blind faith, when it is blind enough, can make men do things that an open mind would preclude out of hand. Like fly a plane into a building. Or invade Iraq.

So while blind faith can uplift, it can also excuse inexcusable behavior. To argue that religion is the source of human morality is to adopt a dim and ultimately self-loathing view of mankind. It is to suggest that, if it were not for the Torah or the New Testament or the Koran, people would be savages. It suggests that, prior to these revelatory works, people recognized no reason to refrain from theft and murder.

But ask yourself this: can we really believe that the civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Greece or Republican Rome could have progressed as they did if their builders recognized no disincentive to murder and theft? Do we believe that the Jews survived forty years in the desert murdering and robbing each other before Moses was told that these acts were forbidden?

To suggest that morality comes from the Holy Books is to suggest that men did not write the Holy Books. To suggest that any book was written by God is, quite simply, ridiculous. Ridiculous. Morality comes from man himself. I do not believe in a theistic, personal God who is capable of either granting me eternal life or eternal damnation, but even so, I would never murder or rob. I know it's wrong without having to believe that the only reason I know this is that the creator of the universe revealed this secret to an illiterate nomad in the Sinai after allowing humanity to live a thousand centuries in barbarism.

To imply that humans would be incapable of morality, love, discretion, and just plain goodness without ceding their autonomy to a set of unbelievable, or at least unprovable, stories that differ from the Lord of the Rings only in the quality of writing (which is considerably poorer) is to take, as I said, a self-loathing view of humanity and to endorse of global cult of leader worship, where the high priests arrogate to themselves the right to tell us who the leader is and what he wants, since nobody has ever seen him or proven that he even exists. This is the crime of theism.

All this being said, I have seen the true Christianity of sacrifice and love personified in many, especially my father. This experience leads me to recognize the merits of Christianity which, in my opinion, completely outweigh whatever merits could be found in Judaism of Islam. If you have to pick a monotheism, Christianity is the clear choice, as it eschews Judaism's "chosen people" racism and Islam's glorification of violence (yes, jihad means killing).

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the brand of Christianity preached and practiced by my father is relatively new and relatively rare. For the balance of history, Christianity was dominated by the Catholic Church, which told children vicious and ugly lies for century upon century, teaching them to hate themselves and their bodies, that they were born into filth and depravity, that their very existence was proof of their sin, and that their only hope was to submit themselves to the worship of a long-dead Palestinian who was subjected to a brutal human sacrifice for their own good. A failure to give oneself to this message of "love" would be eternal torment. At least Judaism let the heretics go after death.

When my grandfather was my age, the Catholic Church was busying itself with accommodating Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jews of Europe, excommunicating exactly one member of the Nazi Party. That man was Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. His crime? Aggressive war? Genocide? Nope. Marrying a Protestant. Apparently, the church of Saint Peter knows when to put its foot down.

The sins of the theisms are not equal, and they are not relative, but they all spring from the same delusion, which is shared even by the most benevolent sects of Christianity. That delusion is theism itself, the insistence that not only is there a personal God, but that we know what he wants. That works out fine when he wants us to love our neighbors, but when he wants us to kill them, the flaw is evident.

And it is not intellectually honest to argue that the premise of theism is sound, if occasionally abused. As soon as you grant someone the right to speak on behalf of an invisible master, you have no right to criticize him if he misunderstands that master from your point of view. You must reject the premise of an invisible master out of hand. It's sort of like nuclear weapons; they are unacceptable in principle, their is no "correct" way to wield them, even if nobody is hurt for the time being.

All this being said, the atheists' arguments indulges in quite a bit of willful blindness, especially as pertaining to the influence of Christianity on history. To argue that Christianity has held back Western civilization is like arguing that Bob Dylan held back songwriting. You don't need to endorse or embrace the former to appreciate its enormous impact on the latter.

To say that Christianity was incidental to the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, the spread of democracy, the legal protection of minorities, and the legal recognition of the inherent dignity of every individual is simply to discredit oneself. Many of the foundations of Western Civilization are taken for granted by atheists and theists alike. The culture of Christianity is a crucial component of our progress, as inseparable from our progress as the leg to the stool.

The middle ground of deism incorporates the positive attributes of both Christian theism and atheism. Rationality and discernible evidence is given its proper dominance, but not at the expense of blind faith. This blind faith, however, is directed not at discerning what God wants you to do, be it blow up a bus, refrain from masturbating, donating to charity, or dressing a certain way. Rather, it focuses faith, which is necessarily blind, and which is necessarily necessary, since there will always be unknowables, toward the Creator God rather than the Personal God.

The Creator God gives man his need for faith and spirituality without depriving him of agency over his own life or granting him agency over the lives of others. The Creator God allows us to understand that we don't need a Personal God to tell us how to behave, that we intuitively know right from wrong, and that, since we owe everything to the Creator God, we are reminded of and reinforced in our need for God after all.

In other words, we need not a God of minutiae, not a dictator God, not a peeping Tom God, not a vindictive or jealous God, not a human God, but a Creator God who gave us what, in the final analysis, makes us human, and that is consciousness and free will. We should thank God every day for those blessings; we must not insult his creation by deluding ourselves into thinking that we speak for him. We speak for ourselves. And that is freedom. And freedom is the point of creation.

Some Thoughts on Fundamentalism

But then I sigh and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil;
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Shakespeare, Richard III

In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.
Eugene Linden, The Future in Plain Sight

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Both revelation and delusion are attempts at the solution of problems. Artists and scientists realize that no solution is ever final, but that each new creative step points the way to the next artistic or scientific problem. In contrast, those who embrace religious revelations and delusional systems tend to see them as unshakable and permanent...

Religious faith is an answer to the problem of life...The majority of mankind want or need some all-embracing belief system which purports to provide an answer to life's mysteries, and are not necessarily dismayed by the discovery that their belief system, which they proclaim as "the truth," is incompatible with the beliefs of other people. One man's faith is another man's delusion...

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.
Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay

The Prince and The Dunce

“For, in truth, there is no sure way of holding other than by destroying, and whoever becomes master of a City accustomed to live in freedom and does not destroy it, may reckon on being destroyed by it…Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be able by their discontinuation to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits” .

While it can hardly be argued that Iraq or its capital of Baghdad, which reflects the divisions of Iraq, was accustomed to “freedom” before the American invasion, it at least enjoyed freedom from foreign occupation. The above quote is relevant to the American experience in Iraq because, pursuant to the failure to destroy the enemy in the opening stages of the war, the American mission is in serious risk of being destroyed by that very enemy, years after taking nominal “control” over Iraq.

A failure to pacify restive Sunni centers such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul during or immediately after the initial invasion, a failure to “destroy” in Machiavelli’s parlance, left the American occupation armies among its enemies rather than victorious over them. This negligence, and the willingness to bypass centers of resistance on the drive to Baghdad rather than to subdue them, led directly to the next stage of failure, and the next piece of relevant advice from The Prince.

“If, however, the newly acquired City or Province has been accustomed to live under a Prince, and his line is extinguished, it will be impossible for the citizens, used, on the one hand, to obey, and deprived, on the other, of their old ruler, to agree to choose a leader from among themselves”.

The Prince in this scenario, of course, is Saddam Hussein; Hussein’s “line” was both biological, in the form of his sons Uday and Qusay, and political, in the form of the brutal and brilliantly organized Ba’ath Party. The United States willingly destroyed the heart, brain, and nerve center of the Iraqi state and came with no workable plan to replace them. It should hardly have come as any surprise, bearing all of this in mind, that the Iraqi people have been unable to come to any sort of consensus on what form their new government should take. The entire gamble of the Iraq War, from the perspective of the Bush administration, hinged on the hope that Machiavelli was wrong, the hope that citizens deprived of a powerful prince would be able to peaceably choose a new leader from among themselves.

A further failure of the American enterprise in Iraq has been the inability to instill a sense of loyalty for the new Iraqi government and army among a critical mass of the Iraqi people. Loyalty should not be taken to imply affection, but merely respect and deference. Employing historically brutal methods, Saddam Hussein garnered a certain sense of “loyalty” from the Iraqi people. The new Iraq government, however, is not recognized by most Iraqis as the legitimate or competent representation of the Iraqi state; instead, a slew of militias and insurgent groups command far more loyalty on the street than do the national institutions sponsored and supported by the United States.

The first rule of any government, democratic or not, is the rule of “one gun”. In other words, the state must be perceived to be the only legitimate employer of violence. That is most decidedly not the case in post-invasion Iraq. As Machiavelli wrote, “a wise Prince should devise means whereby his subjects may at all times, whether favourable or adverse, feel the need of the State and of him, and then they will always be faithful to him”.

The legitimacy and the staying power of the Iraqi government is the most important factor of the American mission in Iraq, since the emergence of an openly anti-American government would dissolve any theoretical benefit from the original invasion. The trouble is that a self-perpetuating cycle is at work; the Iraqi government likely cannot survive without American military protection, yet that very protection ensures that the Iraqi government will never be genuinely legitimate in the eyes of its citizens. “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are at once useless and dangerous, and he who holds his State by means of mercenary troops can never be solidly or securely seated”.

In a country as divided by clan and ethnicity and religious sect as Iraq is, an invading army must have a solid appraisal of what groups it must count as allies in order to effectively govern the country. Several of the decisions taken by the American proconsul, Jerry Bremer, imply that this appraisal was either never made or was horribly blundered.

Two such decisions come to mind. Firstly, the Iraqi army was disbanded and its soldiers and officers were sent home without any way of supporting their families but with their weapons. Secondly, the Ba’ath Party was dissolved, and a massive proportion of its members were excluded from meaningful participation in the new Iraq. Due to the nature of the Iraqi military, especially its officer corps, and the Ba’ath party, these decisions effectively made enemies of the Sunni minority in Iraq, which included the most militarily competent, technocratic, educated, secular, and Western-oriented elements of the society. The very Iraqis, in other words, who could bring either the greatest harm or the greatest aid to the American occupation. “As Princes cannot escape being hated by some, they should, in the first place, endeavor not to be hated by a class; failing in which, they must do all they can to escape the hatred of that class which is the stronger”.

After dismissing the Iraqi army, and thereby humiliating a large portion of the population, it became evident that the American occupation could never succeed without an Iraqi army, as there were not nearly enough American soldiers to pacify Iraq. The Americans therefore began training and arming a new Iraqi army, but the damage had been done. By dismissing the nearest thing to a truly “national” institution in Ba’athist Iraq, the Americans proved their distrust of the Iraqi people. It was therefore inevitable that the new, American-backed Iraqi army would be tainted as occupation collaborators by the population and occasionally as insurgent collaborators by the Americans.

Most experts now point to the decision to disband the Iraqi army without pay and with weapons was the single biggest blunder that the United States made in Iraq. This single decision instantly created a vast class of humiliated, impoverished, idle, and armed young men, which essentially guaranteed the emergence of an insurgency. “By disarming, you at once giver offence, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you”.

It seems unreal now, but it is important to note that there was no insurgency in the early months of the American occupation; it seems now that the Iraqi people were giving the Americans a chance to make clear their true motives and intentions. One wonders what may have happened had the Iraqi army been called upon by the American army to join together in rebuilding and securing Iraq, a goal that both groups shared. One wonders what may have happened had thousands of mid-level Ba’athist technocrats been allowed to keep their jobs, such as running electrical grids, hospitals, and water purification plants. One wonders indeed.

The above quotes and examples are all variations of one unifying theme; the American errors in Iraq have been driven by a failure to recognize its natural allies, to preempt the emergence of natural enemies, and to win the trust and loyalty of the local population. Each of these necessities was articulated in The Prince, and one wonders if George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld ever read the book.

The Crime of the Millenium (Part I)

The crime of the millennium was so insidious and somehow anodyne that not a drop of blood was directly shed during its commission, owing in large part to the fact that it was perpetrated by the types of cowards who kill through surrogates so as not to sully their self-righteousness. The types of cowards who would lock up a man for stealing a car but would not think twice about stealing the votes and voices of 50 million of their fellow citizens or the very dignity of their nation and its highest offices. You know, "white-collar" criminals. Like Woody Guthrie said, "ramblin' through this world / I seen lots of crazy men / some would rob you with a six-gun / and some with a fountain pen."

One of the mantras of the right-wing in America today is that the nation has fallen under that sway of "activist judges", who seek to impose their worldview via judicial rulings, rather than deferring to local and national legislatures as the only legitimate law-making bodies. There is some truth to this critique, as there is to most critiques, but keep this in mind: without "activist judges", de jure racial segregation would have continued indefinitely in the American south, since segregation "laws" were promulgated by legislatures, the elected representatives of the people.

In other words, "activist judges" reversed the greatest of American sins, and does anyone argue that their activism was wrong? Are those judges deemed tyrannical for "legislating from the bench"? The courts are the ultimate check on the tyranny of the majority. Absent the courts' activism in the 1950's and 1960's, segregation would have continued until southern legislatures took it upon themselves to integrate their communities. Would this eventually have happened? Would it have been acceptable to wait another twenty years or twenty minutes? The answers are, respectively, probably not and absolutely not.

So while we are correct to be suspicious of "judicial activism" which serves to overturn decisions taken by the elected representatives of the people, we must also bear in mind that the representatives of the people have taken several unconstitutional and indefensible actions, both locally and nationally. The crime of the millennium, which was carried out in two separate but intertwined decisions, was a case of "judicial activism" which would have made any genuine conservative apoplectic. At the culmination of the crime, the judicial activists did not simply overturn an action taken by the elected representatives of the people; they overturned the peoples' right to elect their own representatives in the first place.

It is a profoundly depressing commentary on our society that the way one feels about the Supreme Court's rulings in Clinton v. Jones and Gore v. Bush depend so heavily on one's political affiliation. To be a Republican who supports those decisions is to support one's political party over one's country, pure and simple. It is analogous to the O.J. Simpson verdict, in which black people were exponentially more likely than whites to assert Simpson's innocence. Those folks supported a member of their race over the self- evident truth and the integrity of the criminal justice system and the rights of the victims to live.

This loyalty to party, to race, to any sub-national group above the national interest, the rule of law, and the pursuit of disinterested justice is the very definition of anti-Americanism.

II

First, for Clinton v. Jones. Paula Jones brought a civil suit against Bill Clinton alleging that Clinton had sexually harassed her, and I would like to make two points pertaining to Clinton's conduct in this matter. Firstly, I have no doubt that Clinton is an adulterer. Secondly, I reject the argument that such behavior has no impact on his fitness to serve as president. Clinton is reckless and self-destructive and narcissistic. Such traits can not simply be compartmentalized and only directed toward sexual pursuits; this man proved that he lacked the judgement to be the most powerful man alive.

Those are only my opinions, however; the two most pertinent facts of the law, which seemed absent during the ruling and during the reaction to said ruling, are as follows: Firstly, any civil case must weigh the rights of the individual against the rights of the group. Secondly, military personnel are immune from all civil suits while they are in uniform.

The Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether President Clinton would have to answer to Paula Jones' civil suit while he was in office. In other words, did Paula Jones' right to a speedy trial take precedence over the right of 270 million Americans to have a full-time president? What type of logic could be employed to argue that this is even debatable?

How did this happen? Well, the red herring offered at the time was that the Supreme Court had to decide whether or not Clinton was "above the law". He was not above the law, of course, and he never argued that he was. He simply argued that, in the interest of the rights of the many (the entire nation), the rights of the one (Paula Jones) must be put on hold until the end of his term. Clinton never said he was above the law; he said that he should be allowed to subject himself to the law only when he was done running the country in two years. He was right, of course.

Here's an experiment: what if someone sued George W. Bush, alleging that he owed him money from an investment gone bad in Texas years ago? Does anyone seriously think that the president of the United States in such a situation should go down to Houston for a month, a week, an hour, to testify in such a case? Of course not. Why? Because the president is above the law? No, because the nation is above a civil suit brought by a single citizen. Said citizen would simply have to wait until the president was relieved of the awesome responsibilities of his office to answer the charges against him.

So, not only did the Supreme Court literally imply that Paula Jones was more important than anything else in the world, or at least in the country, it simultaneously ruled that, effectively, the president is not a member of the military. The commander-in-chief, in other words, is not afforded the same protections of a private first class. A private first class, as noted above, is immune from civil suits while in uniform, since his role in defending the nation supersedes a plaintiff's right to a speedy redress of his grievances. The court held that a private first class must be spared from distractions that the commander-in-chief must answer to as they arise. Again, what form of logic...

It is clear that there was no logic at work here; there was only self-interest. The majority of Supreme Court justices had an interest in seeing Clinton distracted, persecuted, and humiliated due to their political allegiances. And that, clearly, is all that was at work in Jones v. Clinton. How clear is it? Well, after it was decided that the president of the United States deserved less consideration than Paula Jones or an 18 year old sailor, it was further decided that Clinton could be asked, under oath, about Monica Lewinsky. Since the Paula Jones suit involved allegations of sexual harassment, and since nobody had ever, or has ever, implied that the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was anything but consensual, it had no relevance to the Paula Jones case. But, again, common sense and the law took a back seat here.

So it came to pass that a sitting President was asked, under oath testifying about a totally unconnected matter, whether he had done something that is not against the law (consensual sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky). And it came to pass that the President was impeached and tried for the crime of lying about an unrelated non-crime in the course of a civil suit which was deemed to be more important than the rest of the nation's business. More important than Al-Qaeda. More important than Middle East peace talks. More important than America's image. More important than everything was that Bill Clinton be forced to testify about a consensual sexual affair in the investigation of an alleged non-consensual sexual advance that had taken place years prior and simply could not wait another 2 years for redress.

We know how the impeachment farce, which must be understood as an attempted coup d'etat, nominally concluded. We also know, however, that without this absurd and despicably self-interested charade by the Republican party, George W. Bush would not have had a chance at the presidency. Or, to be more precise, the Supreme Court would not have had a chance to give the presidency to George W. Bush.

DC Inversions

The Two DCs

Drop a Paradigm

"The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. What we need is a shift in consciousness." ---Einstein

Visiting our nation's capital this week was a study in contradictions for me, as shame mixed with pride, and as hope did the same with despair. These polar opposites were not poles apart, however; they tended instead to occupy the same physical and temporal spaces. The recurring theme for me was the unassailable truth of the quote above, and the undeniable necessity of embracing it with sober hearts and open minds.

The photograph above is part of the World War II memorial in Washington. It's quite an impressive monument and it elicited a solemn and serious pride and respect from my own admittedly skeptical, though hopefully not cynical, heart and mind. More than anything, it illuminated the relevance of Einstein's quote.

The American narrative of World War II is that of a selfless act of liberation. There is some truth to this, of course, and I personally have never been more proud to be an American as I was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. This was a killing factory whose murderous machinery formed as efficient an abattoir as possible and made no distinction between man or woman, child or elder, soldier or doctor.

That killing was stopped by American soldiers. American soldiers died taking that camp, died to ensure that the killing would not continue for one more day. And despite what pacifists may say, the only way to stop that killing was to kill the killers. That, of course, is the tragedy and the moral inversion of war; to stop a killer, you become him.

There were a great many acts of liberation and selfless sacrifice by Americans during World War II. The problem is that the oversimplified and omission-riddled image of the American liberator was allowed to distract attention from the true cost of the war and then to serve as "rationale" for all manner of subsequent killing by Americans, facilitated by the fact that World War II had given Americans the permanent delusion that they killed only for freedom, that their bombs and bullets magically sought out only the enemy, and that anyone who would resist them was simply Hitler revisited.

This willful blindness began during the war, and it is present at the memorial. The above photograph is from the part of the memorial that lists all of the theatres in which American soldiers fought and died. "Air War in Europe" is quite the euphemism. It is actually much more sinister than that; there's not as much difference as we might wish to believe between calling what the United States did in Europe an "Air War" and calling the Holocaust a "Ground War".

The "Air War", which calls to mind images of dashing and roguish pilots locked in combat with enemy fliers high above foreign territory, resulted in millions of deaths in Europe. Millions. And it was policy. "Area bombing", it was sometimes called. A choice taken by American leadership to destroy the enemy's will rather than his capacity was actualized by a campaign of terrorism, pure and simple. Cologne. Dresden. Hamburg. Destroy those cities and everyone in them and perhaps the enemy will lose "his" will. Such was our policy.

Without erasing the acts of liberation or the evil of Hitler, we could change "Air War in Europe" to "Indiscriminate Terrorist Slaughter of German Civilians" without sacrificing any intellectual integrity. The point isn't to make us feel bad about ourselves; it's to ensure that war is always the last option in deed as well as in word. It is to guarantee that we have a realistic understanding of what we are forced to do when we are forced to war, rather than to portray the greatest slaughters of all time as redemptive violence.

Next I wandered over to the Vietnam Wall, another solemn and sorrowful exercise, this one even more tragic that World War II, since only the most blinkered and delusional ideologues can seriously argue that the Indo-China Wars, whether gagued by their origin, their conduct, or their conclusion, were worth 3 million lives.

As I glanced at thousands upon thousands of names, one number kept coming back to me: 19. The average age of those 58,000 American "men" that were lost in Vietnam was 19. Since there were no 12 year old soldiers dragging down this average, we know that virtually all of the Americans killed in Vietnam were 18, 19, or 20 years "old".

But how big would the Vietnam Wall be if everyone who died in the Vietnam War was on it, rather that just the Americans? Well, it would be 50 times the size it is. Because for every one of those American boys whose breathed his last breath screaming for his mother in the Mekong mud, there were 50 Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotians.

While in Washington, I attended a public health convention including a lecture on Veteran's Health. To my surpirse, one of the lecturers, a Vietnamese woman, focused on the Vietnamese veterans of the Vietnam War. Don't we tend to think of "veterans" as exclusively American? The doctor's presentation was on the effects of Agent Orange in her country.

Forty years after the fact, this woman delivers children with no heads, with three arms, with no arms, with no mouth, and so on. This is the real cost of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was not something that happened to the United States; the United States is something that happened to Vietnam. And, after saturating the country with chemical weapons and killing millions with conventional bombs and bullets, we left. No reparations, no war crimes trials, and no apology.

When the Iraq War memorial is built, will it make mention of the Iraqi dead, now numbering 1 million? Will it memorialize the millions of others who were driven from their homes? Will it be built to remember an entire nation which exists now in name only? Of course it won't; it will memorialize the few thousands American soldiers who died there.

And this is why we need Einstein's "shift in consciousness". World War II lulled us into a myth that wasn't even entirely true at the time, never mind in the sixty years since. Americans have not fought to liberate since World War II. They have fought to impose. They have always argued that if they failed to impose a certain system onto a certain country that country would succumb to a worse system. This has occasionally been true, but it does not erase the American impositions, the American aggressions.

When we are convinced that we fight to liberate, we end up doing things that we rightly hung Germans and Japanese for doing after World War II. Torture. Wars of aggression. Use of chemical weapons. War is not waged to liberate; it is waged to destroy. It is not a political debate; it is a killing contest. Once we started killing Vietnamese or Iraqis who could never have harmed us, the relative merits of our system as opposed to theirs became totally inconsequential.

Let's be honest about what World War II was. It was the low point of Western civilization. The United States had the good sense to stay out of it until it was dragged in. The "Greatest Generation" was called upon to kill for its country, and to kill on a scale previously unimaginable. And it did so. And in doing so, it guaranteed that no subsequent American generation would have to do what they did.

However, subsequent American generations have done these things, against progressively defenseless foes. What more direct way to disrespect a World War II veteran than to send his son and grandson to kill men in sandals because they are the "next Hitler"? What greater disservice to them than to glorify their killing rather than to memorialize them as the most evil necessity upon which our nation ever embarked?