Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, pt. 2

Just as the islands of evil at the hearts of the Confederacy and Nazi Germany drowned out their valid grievances, so did those sins drown out the evil acts of their enemies, the United States in both cases.

Let us consider the methods Abraham Lincoln employed. Lincoln's government conscripted literally tens of thousands of immigrants, often literally stepping off the ship, to go kill people whose families had lived in America for centuries.

Lincoln's government suspended Habeus Corpus. Habeus Corpus is not the appendix of justice. It is not the pancreas or the pinky toe or even the right arm of justice. Habeus Corpus is the HEART of justice. Lincoln's government cut that heart out in order to win the war.

Lincoln did NOT abolish slavery in any territory of the United States during the war, and when he was assassinated, there were still slaves in the North.

Lincoln, however, withstands most critique because of the original sin of his enemy. As a matter of fact, more books have been written in English about Abraham Lincoln than about any other person who's ever lived other than Yeshua Ha-Nostri, aka Jesus Christ.

And what of Roosevelt?

Roosevelt's government turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees even as it claimed to wage war against Hitler for brutalizing the Jews.

Roosevelt's government ordered American armies to indiscriminately bomb German and Japanese cities. When Roosevelt died, 3 million German and Japanese CIVILIANS had died beneath American bombs.

Roosevelt's government dispossessed and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of American citizens for the sin of Japanese ancestry.

This is the true toll of Confederate and Nazi evil. When pure evil manifests itself, the only thing that can kill it is a force willing to embrace evil methods. In those wars, there are no winners.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

One of the first things we (hopefully) learn about the nature of evil is that it rarely comes in pure form. It's less a shot than a mixed drink most of the time. We also learn that people never think of themselves as evil. So as easy as it may be to call Hitler an evil man, for example, we should remember that even Hitler thought he was doing the right thing.

We ALSO learn that, while things are rarely pure evil, pure evil does exist, and the eggheads and artists and elitist snobs who can never bring themselves to call evil for what it is represent a particular danger all their own.

I've become fascinated recently with how the elusive nature of evil applies to two of what my culture considers the most evil causes in Western history. First, we have the Confederacy. Then, we have the Nazis.

Robert E. Lee and Adolf Hitler have come to symbolize the Confederates and the Nazis respectively. And it is staggering how, revolving around a nexus of some of the purest evil you'll ever find, each man had quite a bit of legitimacy to his cause.

Let's consider the cause of the Confederacy. The South felt that the North had attained an unacceptable level of dominance in the federal government and that the federal government was becoming unacceptably powerful as related to the traditionally more influential state and local governments. The felt, in short, that they were underrepresented at the national level and that they were essentially becoming colonies of the Northern industrial states. And they were right.

The Confederates had an airtight case in arguing that their states and their institutions would be far better represented if they broke from Washington D.C. The problem, of course, is that none of this matters. Why? Slavery.

Slavery as an institution is one of the few things that all civilized people must call evil. Not "evil but...." No, slavery is simply evil. Period. Like genocide, slavery is an exception to the rule that very few things or people are purely evil.

So all the limited-government, local autonomy arguments that the Confederates made were rendered irrelevant by virtue of this evil at the center of their system. Ultimately, the Confederates' definition of "states' rights" included that "states" should have the "right" to deprive 40% of their population of all legal, civil, and human rights. And that, of course, is bullshit.

It's also a tragedy, of course, because that island of evil at the heart of the Confederacy cancelled out whatever just elements their cause may have had and it prevented a more open and honest debate about the proper role of the federal government. Instead, a very American idea (divided sovereignty and local autonomy whenever possible) was tied to the rock of slavery and thrown overboard.

It's unfortunate, of course, that the Confederates mixed legitimate grievances with the diehard defense of a completely illegitimate institution, and the end result was that those legitimate grievances were rendered utterly irrelevant.

We see a similar dynamic in Germany.

The Nazis had some very legitimate grievances of their own. Their country had NOT lost the Great War on the battlefield, nor had it been solely responsible for the start of that war by any stretch of the imagination.

Germany HAD been willfully subjected to mass starvation as a terrorist tactic intended to induce surrender in 1918 (it worked). Germany HAD been stripped of huge swathes of territory and property and citizens and subjected to punitive debts that were literally impossible to ever pay off.

Those things DID happen, and when you realize that Hitler never invaded any non-German territory before Great Britain declared war on Germany, it casts that war in a much different light.......but...

We all know what that "but" is. Although the Holocaust was not a cause for the war, as it began only after the war was well under way, it was used as an excuse to entirely ignore the just aspects of Germany's cause.

As soon as the Nazi state started running murder factories which killed thousands of women and children daily, the Nazi "cause" ceased to have any relevance. All that was relevant was that they were engaged in PURE evil, and that this behavior deprived them of any defense, any context, any buts.

Again, the tragedy is that the island of evil at the center of the enterprise overshadows the rest of the story and we lose out on an opportunity to really struggle with why World War II happened. Instead the victors use the Nazis' wartime atrocities as retroactive justification for that war.

I can't argue with this tendency, especially as applied to what our children are taught in school. Slavery and genocide are so purely evil that we cannot afford to explain the background, the nuance, the context, because to do so may imply extenuation or justification. And due to this, we lose most of the story and are left only with the evil.

Joints and the Joint

There are many shameful and sordid facts about our country that we should reflect on regularly. This reflection need not be driven by self-pity or shame, but rather by a commitment to constant improvement.

Unfortunately, in a country whose wealth is only maintained by force or very real threats of force, self-reflection is an extremely touchy enterprise, as it often brings us face to face with our petty and evil sides.

Some of these facts? The United States is the only country in the world other than Somalia (which can only liberally be called a "country") that has not ratified a ban on landmines. The United States is one of three countries in the world to refuse to ratify the Children's Bill of Rights. The United States is the only country to use atomic weapons. The United States has more than 10 times the per capita wealth as Cuba, but far lower literacy rates and far higher infant mortality rates. And so on. And so forth.

But the issue that I'd love to see our President address personally, and challenge US to address, is the prison system. Land of the Free. Leader of the Free World. Right? But we have a higher percentage of our fellow citizens in prison than any country in the world.

So let's break this down. We don't just have the highest numbers of prisoners, we have the highest percentage as well, so it is true in every way to say that nowhere else in the world is one more likely to be in a cage than in our United States.

Now, let's consider why this might be. Well, it could be that our legal system is far more efficient than in any other country in the world, where presumably most criminals roam about unpunished, thereby artificially lowering every other country's incarceration rate. Maybe.

It could also be that every other country in the world lives in a state of near-barbarism, where so few crimes are legally defined as "crimes" that there is barely anyone is prison. In these countries, basically everything is "legal", so nobody's in jail. Maybe.

It could also be that Americans are more predisposed to criminal behavior, more predatory and sinful at heart, than the citizens of every other country on the Earth. Therefore, we're in prison more than all of those other countries, which presumably are teeming with pacifists and communards. Maybe.

Or, could it be (and of course, it IS) that we are a pettily tyrannical people who claim to be free even as we lock each other up more than any other society for reasons of purely private behavior that is judged unsavory by a moralizing minority.

The reason we lock each other up more than anyone else is drugs. Let's consider the rationale for drug laws. They are purely moralistic in their intent and their enforcement. In other words, drug "crimes" need not involve and violation of another's safety, liberty, or property. Instead, one is deemed a "criminal" for ingesting chemicals that the state has deemed taboo.

What could possibly be more personal, more private, more 4th ammendment-protected, than what you or I decide to put into our bodies in the privacy of our homes? Is the logic for the state criminalizing marijuana any less absurd than the criminalization of twinkies, breakfast tea, or...drumroll......tobacco? Alcohol?

We are legally protected in drinking and smoking ourselves to death, which we do in prodigious numbers. We should neither idealize nor trivialize, much less glamorize, this behavior, but neither should we deal with our vices by throwing each other in prison.

Federal drug laws are blatantly unconstitutional, as they violate both the 4th amendment (unreasonable search and seizure of person or personal effects) and the 10th amendment (all power not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution is left to the states).

Criminalizing the use of marijuana does not increase anybody's liberty or freedom. Criminalizing drunk driving, in contrast, is a legitimate exercise in negative liberty, where the state deprives a person of his liberty to drive drunk, because that liberty represents an unacceptable risk to other citizens' right to survive their commutes.

Criminalizing the private and personal use of marijuana, however, has no beneficiary. Nobody is made more free or more secure. Instead, some are deprived of everything and we all suffer the cumulative effects of existing in a tyrannical society where citizens are stripped of their freedom for the most intellectually and morally and legally and economically vapid of reasons.

To fully articulate the absurdity and tyranny of drug laws would take several more blogs, but this issue must be the centerpiece of an honest self-introspection by this nation. If we are honest with ourselves, what will we find?

The good news is that we are not predisposed to be more "criminal" than all other people in the world. The bad news is that, apparently, we get off on being jailers.

DaschBag

I'm often given to unnecessarily flowery prose, ignoring Ben Franklin's admonition to "eschew surplus verbiage" like it was my job. But let me be very concise about this: Tom Daschle is a piece of shit.

When Tom Daschle was in the Senate, he was the guy in charge of writing the tax code. This being income tax season, this story is especially relevant. If you're like me, you wonder who it is exactly that decides that a quarter of my earned income should belong to them and that the remaining 75% of my income will be subjected to further taxation when spent, saved, or invested.

Well, for a while, that person was Tom Daschle. If you don't remember the election in which Tom Daschle ran for Extortionist General or Supreme Allied Tax Imposer, that's because he was never elected to be the tax chief.

To Daschle's credit, he was elected as Senator from South Dakota. But I don't live in South Dakota. And neither do 99% of my fellow citizens. Nonetheless, in our "democracy", Tom Daschle was granted the authority to decide how much of my property would be better of in his hands to disperse as he saw fit.

THAT is power. That's more power than all the guns or bombs in the world, because you can't tax dead folks' incomes. So, Tom Daschle had a level of power whose breadth and scope would've made any "absolute" monarch from the Europe of old cream his pants.

He got to decide how much money to siphon from the richest society in the history of the world.All that being said, we learned this week that Tom Daschle failed to pay 150,000 dollars in income tax over a three year period when he was in the Senate.

There are only two possible explanations.

The first possibility is that the tax code is so complex and arcane that even its very authors don't understand it. The second possibility is that Tom Daschle is a piece of shit.

I've seen video of Tom Daschle sanctimoniously pontificating about how tax evaders should be punished to "the full extent of the law". Well, Tom? We're all waiting. Bend over and give us two good coughs.

Tom Daschle willingly and knowingly withheld 150,000 dollars in income tax over three years. What would lead him to do that? Why would he think he'd get away with it? Well, this is a prototypical example of the worst strain of "Progressive" politicians, who use the salt of the earth as salt for the wounds imposed by their own narcissism.

Tom Daschle will decide how much tax you and I pay, but he will not follow the rules he wrote for us. Because, you see, he's separate from us. He's one of the "experts", one of the "best and the brightest". He's not "expendable", unlike the rest of us. He operates on another plane, from which he can see what's best for all of us, even if we can't see it for ourselves.

It reminds me of the Boston busing controversy in the 1970's. Liberal lions like Teddy Kennedy just couldn't sleep at night knowing that public schools weren't integrated to their liking, so they mandated that children be bussed all over Boston to accord with the liberals' desires.

So, Kennedy and others decided that Irish kids in Southie had to wake up at 5 in the morning to be bussed to predominantly black schools in Roxbury, where they would get their asses kicked as a matter of course. Kids in Roxbury, of course, were shipped sleepy-eyed into Southie, where they were met with bricks and spit.

Now, you might think this is the best idea in the world, but does any one of us think for a second that a Kennedy kid ever set foot in any public school in Boston or anywhere else? Of course not. Don't be vulgar.

That same mentality apparently is at play with Daschle. And I'm very disappointed in Obama's nomination of the DaschBag. Even before the tax "issue" (or the "no tax" issue), this was a terrible choice. What happened to "no lobbyists"?

After Tom Daschle left the Senate, he gave speeches to health insurance companies. He was paid hundred of thousands of dollars for these speeches. Now, given the fact that Tom Daschle is the boringest person on this continent, we can assume that "speeches" was short for "access and open ears".

There something so infuriating about this man, something so profoundly despicable, that it undermines my faith in the theoretical soundness of our system more than one might suspect.

It feels like the last decade has been a never-ending charade where the rule-writers are exposed as incalcitrant rule-breakers, which raises the question: "why should ANY of us follow the rules?" What greater disservice could "leaders" ever perform?