The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates is a quintessentially American phenomenon: a chance to have a serious debate about a serious issue which instantly devolves into the equivalent of enraged chimps hurling their own feces at one another.
I have thought about each side of this story, a simple step that most commentators clearly have not taken, and I'm left with one overarching conclusion: the huge majority of white people are fundamentally ignorant about police.
From many corners, though mostly from conservatives, comes this bewildering query: why would anyone in that situation feel angry at or threatened by the police? These people have no idea what it feels like to encounter police in similar circumstances.
These are also the types of people who fetishize the military, the CIA, the cops, basically anyone with a gun, as being beyond reproach or threat of criticism. Yes, for these people, the government can't do shit right, but any government employee with a gun is automatically ethical and trustworthy. It's really a rather interesting dynamic.
I can't speak as a black man, but I have been stopped and searched either on foot or while driving by police about 10 times in my life. I've never been arrested. Through these encounters, I have learned things about police, things which Gates' haters can't seem to comprehend.
Firstly, at 30 years of age I still find it absurd that anyone younger than myself can be a police. Young men make fine soldiers but terrible police. Young men are not capable of understanding the fundamental job of a police officer. Protect and serve. That's all.
I know one police personally, a few years younger than me. I asked him when he finished training whether there had been any instruction in law or the Constitution, especially as regards probable cause when searching suspects. The chilling yet unsurprising answer? None.
So for people who think police are perfect, here's what happens during an encounter with any police: they decide whether or not you are suspicious. If they decide you are suspicious, you are at their mercy. They will stop you. They will search you. They will arrest you if they want to.
Once a police decides you are suspicious, that is the "probable cause" with which to treat you as a hostile. "You don't mind if I look through your car, do you?" If I say "Yes, I do mind", the police will use my assertion of my rights as evidence that I am guilty of something, and therefore "probable cause" to search without my consent. So you have rights, but if you invoke them, that is evidence of your guilt.
The only way people could not understand this is if no police has ever thought they were suspicious. And good for them. That must be really nice. But most young men, and nearly ALL black men of all ages, have been classified as inherently suspicious by a police at some point in their lives.
Once a police decides you are suspicious, you have to surrender to his will or consign yourself to arrest. Why? Because these interactions are all about them. About the police. About them making sure that you know who is in charge. And that's what happened here.
Gates was arrested for not kissing the ass of the police, essentially. He dared challenge their authority. And he was right, but most police are not capable of looking at that side of things. Gates was arrested to soothe the ego of the police he sassed, no more and no less.
Who, I might ask, was being protected and served by arresting this 58 year-old cane-aided man in his own home? Nobody and nothing was protected or served, save the ego of the arresting officer.
Now, in terms of the police's point of view, I heartily and readily acknowledge that they have a difficult job to do. Of course. And in responding to a citizen's call about a possible burglary, the police were simply doing their job by responding and attempting to discern the identity of the man in the house in question. And I'm sure that Gates treated the police with contempt and scorn that he probably did not deserve or directly provoke.
The interesting thing is that Gates was not arrested because he was black; his (surely old, white) neighbor called the cops because Gates was black, setting this whole charade in motion, but Gates' arrest was not due to his color. It was due to his condescension.
Gates pulled the race card, yes, but he also pulled the Harvard card. And if I was that police, that would have pissed me off something fierce. Gates pulled the old "do you know who I am?" card. The old "I play poker with your boss" card. The old "I teach at HARVARD, so I'm obviously much smarter than you" card. And if I had to guess, that was what got him arrested.
The larger point is this, though: the police should have walked away. If you get to carry a Glock around in my name, you'd better have thicker skin than was shown here. And middle-aged white men need get their shit together and acknowledge: the guys with guns are the very ones who should not be assumed to always be in the right.
The Supreme Court looms in my consciousness like the entire Western Hemisphere outside of the United States; it is a large and important edifice about which I know next to nothing. But the recent Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings got me to thinking, which got me to reading, which got me to being astounded at how powerful the Court really is.
By far the most obscure branch of the federal government, it may actually be the most powerful over the long arc of the nation's affairs, and it is certainly the least democratic. Nine unelected citizens who have the authority to veto the will of the people if they feel that said will conflicts with the Constitution.
Hypothetical: say every single citizen in America wanted thing A. They demanded thing A. They called their congressmen and, in the theoretical tradition of a democratic republic, thing A was articulated into a bill, which is passed by the peoples' representatives into a law, which is signed by the president.
BUT. If the Supreme Court decides that thing A contradicts its interpretation of the Constitution, thing A is thrown out. So theoretically, 300 million of us could want something, all 535 members of Congress could vote for it, the president could sign it, but 5 out of 9 judges sitting on the court could outweigh those 300,000, 540 other people.
There are two ways of looking at this. One could say that this is a profoundly anti-democratic notion. And it is. We could call it an elitist island of tyranny and leave it at that. That would be the pessimistic view of the court.
The optimistic view is worth considering, however. There are two pillars of democracy. One is majority rule. The second, far more difficult to actualize, is the protection of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. In other words, just because the majority wants something in a democracy, that does not mean that they should get it.
To guarantee this second pillar, a Supreme Court is the ideal institution, and in the finest tradition of the Greeks: an unelected, and therefore (theoretically) non-political, body of life-tenured jurists which can act to protect the minority from the passions and prejudices of the majority should they violate the law. But how well has our Supreme Court discharged that role?
The clearest example of the tyranny of the majority is slavery. The majority (whites) democratically decides that the minority (blacks) should have no rights. Here is where the Supreme Court should ideally have stepped in and denied the majority its democratic prerogative because its treatment of the minority violated their rights under the Constitution.
This did not happen, of course. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of holding native-born human beings in bondage. This sacrosanct "precedent" having been set, it took decades and the bloodiest war in American history to overturn this tyranny of the majority, which was only overturned when Confederate states were forced to adhere to Emancipation as the (far too low) price for readmission to the Union.
The Supreme Court then allowed the tyranny of the majority to persist in the form of segregation. Not until 1955 did the court say "we don't care what the majority wants in Mississippi; their wants clearly violate the Constitutional rights of the minority". That took 170 years. Only politicians could have taken longer.
I was also fascinated to learn that the Supreme Court did not overturn its original ruling that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states until 1925. Let us pause and consider this: For the first 140 years of our Constitution, the Supreme Court held that individual states had the right to pass laws violating the Bill of Rights, because they only applied to the federal government.
So, "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech", for example, only applied to the federal government. So, for example, if Alabama wanted to pass a law saying "Negroes may not own printing presses or firearms or land", that was perfectly Constitutional as far as the Supreme Court was concerned. Until well into the 20th century.
So the Supreme Court is very powerful, and it has often let us down, being on the wrong side of history, or at least decades behind it. This leads us to Sonia Sotomayor.
Most of the opposition is centered on the idea that she can not be objective because she is a Latina woman. Let's think about the Dred Scott case, in which 9 white male justices ruled that blacks were property. Were they objective? Did their whiteness have absolutely NO impact on their finding that blacks were not people? To ask is to answer.
The unspoken coda of the argument against Sotomayor is that only the majority (white males) is capable of being objective. Let's imagine that a black person had been nominated to the Court when Dred Scott was on the docket. I have the sneaking suspicion that white Senators would have maintained that a black judge could not possibly be objective in such a case. White judges, of course, are swayed only by the facts.
The depth of white dominance and condescension was clear from the left and the right. All these (white, male) Senators stroking the shaft of the nation's collective narcissism with the ceaselessly repeated trope that "only in America" could Sonia Sotomayor be elevated to such a level. It was repulsive watching these condescending reptiles congratulating themselves for their magnanimity.
And how magnanimous they are. We've had 110 Supreme Court justices in our history, and 106 of them have been white men. We've had 2 black Senators since Reconstruction, and one of them was named Barack Obama.
Indeed, one might say, "Only in America can we congratulate ourselves for inclusion when our Senate is currently 1% black, and that's the highest percentage of black people the Senate has EVER had".
How two thread the two themes of this blog? Well, the Supreme Court is a theoretically salvatory, profoundly non-democratic institution that, unfortunately, has more often than not sanctioned the tyranny of the majority in this nation.
Sonia Sotomayor represents perhaps the only remedy: make the Court look more like the country. To do that, we'd need a few more women. And half of the justices would have to be obese.
For those who think we've already left the dark days when the Supreme Court made terribly short-sighted decisions that flew in the face of the simplest pleas of logic and civic duty, remember Bush v. Gore? Only in America indeed.
The recent (and utterly unsurprising) revelation that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not inform Congress of certain covert programs is, or should be, an edifying lesson on the perils of unaccountable executive power.
It must be understood and acknowledged that the very existence of the CIA is a threat to democratic principles. It is the only department of the federal bureaucracy whose operations and budget are not public.
The CIA is, by definition, a criminal international enterprise. CIA agents go to other countries and break the laws of those countries in the interest of soliciting information, or undermining or promoting governments, that will enhance America's position in the world.
This is what spy agencies do, and assuming we all agree on the need for such an agency, the issue then becomes ensuring that our spies are letting the peoples' representatives know what's being done in the peoples' name and with the peoples' money.
What if the CIA didn't need to tell anyone what it was doing? Well, it might try to kill Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. And Fidel Castro might summon Soviet nuclear protection because of these very real threats. And the whole world might be pushed to the precipice of extinction without ANYBODY knowing, quite frankly, what the fuck was going on. Oh wait, that DID happen.
So there, in a nutshell, is why we can't have secret American armies running around the world doing God knows what in our name with our guns and our money.
Enter Dick Cheney who, after 9/11, was recognized as some sort of legitimate arbiter of the sweeping historical forces of the 21st century. This claim may have been burnished, in my opinion, had Cheney ever given an inkling of a shadow of a clue that he had any idea who Osama bin Laden even was before 9/11, but let's just assume that Cheney knew what he was doing.
The story, as being reported now, has is that Cheney ordered the CIA not to inform Congress about a certain program. Three problems.
Problem the first: Cheney was not the president. The Vice-President has constitutional authority to do absolutely nothing other than break tie votes in the Senate. But let's just assume that Bush somehow transferred his authority to Cheney.
Problem the second: Even the president can't break the law. So even if Cheney was acting on Bush's authority, not even the President's authority transcends the law, which explicitly requires Congress to be informed of all covert programs. But let's just assume it wasn't a "real" program and therefore required no notification.
Problem the third: The claim is that the program in question was an effort to capture or assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders, even in countries friendly to America. I have no moral or legal objection to that in principle; if an American had a clean shot at bin Laden in Paris, I wouldn't think twice, and neither should anyone else.
But here's the problem with assuming that that's all this program was: We're already doing that. That's what the war on terror is. So the idea that this aim to capture and kill was a secret does not pass the smell test or any other olfactory standards.
So what was it? I don't know. But I know that if only Cheney knew about it, then it was a) utterly illegal and b) probably pretty bad.
There are things that we know about the Bush / Cheney years. We know about the invidious and insidious arrogance. How Bush walked as if he were on horseback. How Cheney smirked away virtue in between claims of patriotism, and came as close as I'd ever care to see to restoring monarchy on this continent.
We know (sort of) about 9/11, about Iraq, about Katrina. But what this latest story alerts us to is how much we don't know. We don't know how much we don't know, to paraphrase Don Juan Rumsfeld.
"Blowback" is the term used in academic circles. This is when secret actions lead to public retaliations. When American hostages were taken in Iran in 1979 and charged as spies, most Americans felt victims of irrational hatred.
But this was blowback. Americans did not know that "their" government had overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953. "Our" government, of course, was in no rush to admit this after it had fallen prey to the "blowback" in Iran, thereby perpetuating the idea that the action of the enemy was unprovoked and undertaken purely out of hatred for freedom and Jesus and kittens.
The next time something terrible happens to our country, will we KNOW that it was not the response to some horribly misguided and short-sighted skulduggery carried our by "our" government without "us" ever knowing about it? No, we won't.
When most Americans are asked about the founding fathers, they ask, "what does that mean?" Among the nerdy minority who can speak to the question, most mention Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. And all are due praise, but John Adams was the closest the American Revolution could ever come to being distilled in a single person.
Adams, a Massachusetts man, served as the defense for the British soldiers charged with the "Boston Massacre". He got them acquited by placing facts and reason in their rightful place above passion and prejudice and, in doing so, lent inestimable credit and esteem to the Revolution, even if it did not yet exist.
At the Continental Congress, Adams more than anyone else pressed for a Continental Army and a Declaration of Independence. Massachusetts was the only state bleeding or paying for the nascent Revolution, so Adams had a certain self-interest in pressing these points.
But HOW did he press them? By proposing that Virginians lead the Army (Washington) and write the Declaration (Jefferson). Adams totally disarmed and won over those who assumed that he was like any other great man, after nothing other than personal and local aggrandizement.
Adams spent the Revolution in Europe, pressing the French and Dutch governments for financial and military assistance. He did this for years as a renegade, a terrorist, utterly exposed to the whims of British spies and assassins. And ultimately, French ships and Dutch loans broke the back of the British. Because of John Adams.
When Adams returned home, he "retired" and wrote the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which today is the oldest continual law on Earth. It was the first Constitution to charge the government with "providing for the education" of ALL people, so as to ensure an educated population, which Adams called the "safest guard against tyranny".
John Adams was elected Vice-President under George Washington. In those days, the Vice-President was the candidate who came in second in the election. Adams finished behind Washington only after Washington's doppelganger, Alexander Hamilton, bribed several electors to inflate the margins.
Adams was elected president in 1796. As president his ultimate accomplishment was avoiding war with Napoleon while Congress and the media were pressing for such a course. Adams was the first man in the history of history to leave office willingly and peacefully in favor of a political enemy and on schedule in 1801, when he left the White House to Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a great mind, but Adams was a great man. Adams never went into debt. He never refused assignments. He built his own barns. He harvested his own crops. Jefferson never worked a day in his life. He owned hundreds of slaves and was coddled to the point where he literally didn't even dress himself. His slaves dressed him. And, presumably, they undressed him before he impregnated them.
Because of Jefferson's spoiled dilettante existence, his great mind was addled and compromised by his lack of real-world experience.
Jefferson, the owner and rapist of dozens of human beings, fancied himself more "revolutionary" than Adams, unreservedly supported the French Revolution, and thrilled in the torrent of blood the way well-off leftists are perpetually prone to.
Adams, nearly alone among great thinkers of his day, predicted dictatorship as the inevitable consequence of the French Revolution.
Adams had a perfect mix of faith and reason, of romance and reality. He was a lover of words, of reading, of writing. He spoke and read fluently in Greek, Latin, French, and Dutch. He wrote millions of words with his own hand long before white-out, never mind computers. Since all men speak best of and for themselves, let me close with two of my favorite quotes from Mr. Adams:
"I damn nobody. I am an atom of intellect with millions of solar systems over my head, under my feet, on my right hand, on my left, before me, and my adoration of the intelligence that contrived and the power that rules the stupendous fabric is too profound to believe them capable of anything unjust or cruel."
"Do justice. Love mercy. That is enough."
John Adams
That is greatness.
The most charitable thing I can say about George W. Bush is that I find him absolutely fascinating. I have honestly sharpened my analytical prowess by studying this man, who is infinitely more complicated and interesting than Bill Clinton, for example.
The most fascinating thing about this man is his belief. When Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", he was full of shit. HE knew he was full of shit. And WE knew he was full of shit. It's just that none of us realized there was a stain to prove what we all knew.
In contrast, when George W. Bush said, in his first post-presidency speech last month, "My legacy is that I kept America safe", he also was full of shit. WE knew he was full of shit. The facts indicated the prodigious extent of his immersion in shit. But, unlike Clinton, Bush sincerely believed HE was telling the truth.
Let's dissect Bush's appraisal of his own legacy. "I kept America safe". Firstly we must stipulate that he means "safe from terrorist attack".
We should take note that Bush does not reference his management of the economy or diplomacy or war or disaster management or social welfare. No, he has a legacy of ashes in all of those fields, so he goes straight for 9/11.
Would any other president characterize their legacy in this way? Why are Franklin Pierce and William McKinley and Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush not credited with "keeping America safe"? After all, there were no 9/11's during their tenures.
They are not praised for preventing 9/11's even though no 9/11's occurred. George W. Bush, in contrast, aims to be praised for preventing a 9/11 even though he is the only president who was in office when the actual 9/11 happened.
The worst thing to happen to this country in a long time happened with this man in charge. That doesn't mean it was his fault. But he WAS in charge. And it happened. And this man wilfully chooses as the highlight of his presidency the fact that the worst shit ever only happened ONCE when he was in charge, as opposed to several times.
Think about that. The man who oversaw this tragedy uses that tragedy as evidence not of unavoidable tragedy, but of his manifest competence. I wonder, did the mayor of Nagasaki run for re-election in 1946 with the slogan "I prevented the 2nd atomic bombing of our city"? I doubt it.
Again, he CHOOSES this association. This man did not mention al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden in public before 9/11, which should serve as indication of the priority this threat held in his mind. Even if we assume that 9/11 would have happened regardless, we can be sure that Mr. Bush did nothing to mitigate the attack.
His response to the attack was to start two wars. Neither war has been won. Both have lasted longer than any war in our history other than Vietnam. They have cost 5000 Americans killed, 50000 wounded, and the loss of Afghans and Iraqi civilians.....priceless.
But Mr. Bush would have us believe that the greatest thing he ever did was preventing the 2nd 9/11. Being asked to prove a negative is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it's a dead end in terms of ethics or morals or practicality.
What if Bill Clinton had said, in his farewell address, "My greatest legacy is that I prevented thousands of Americans from being massacred by Arab terrorists in our country"? He would have been ridiculed. Not because it wasn't true, but because it would have been rightly castigated as a cheap stunt, a rhetorical wormhole.
When Bush does it, it flies in certain circles. Despite the fact that it HAPPENED on his watch. So there were no massacres under Clinton, there was one massacre under Bush, and Bush is the one that prevented massacres. Interesting.
A computer might look at that equation and conclude that Bush CAUSED the massacre. I absolutely do not claim that sentiment, but it serves as a reminder of how ridiculous is W's claim. If he claims to have prevented the 2nd 9/11, that means Bill Clinton gets credit for preventing the 1st. Or that W. gets blame for allowing it.
The danger of Bush and Cheney's pontification of their "legacy" is 3-fold: they are constructing a scenario whereby: 1) 9/11 could not have been prevented 2) there was not another massacre because of their policies such as invading Iraq and torturing detainees 3) if there is another massacre it will be because Barack Obama did not invade Iran or torture detainees
So we see how this rhetorical wormhole can pave the way for all sorts of damage to our psyche and our judgement. Bush's appraisal of his legacy is like Lee Harvey Oswald begging us to remember him for the fact that he didn't shoot the Vice-President as well.
When I gave the eulogy at my grandmother's funeral, I urged everyone to remember her as she lived and as she would want to be remembered, rather than to associate her with her most vulnerable or decrepit state and thereby associate her entire life with a negative portent. Let's do the same for Mike.
Michael Jackson's death has had a pathological effect on me. I mean pathological in terms of the Greek word "pathos", meaning "A quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow."
Perhaps all that needs to be said is that within ten minutes of the announcement, I got calls from friends from Maine to California. It meant something; we all knew that somehow. But it wasn't as if we'd listened to his music in the last decade. But that didn't matter. Because when he died, we remembered...
I am a 30 year old American, and I know no one of my generation who did not think that Michael Jackson was the coolest person alive when he or she was 5 years old. For my generation, Michael Jackson is a pillar of our common infrastructure. There is not a single person in my generation that does not know Thriller.
Think about that. An entire generation, tens of millions of people, who will never meet, but who all know the words to the songs on the same album. I honestly don't think it's hyperbolic to ask, "what parallel exists in our culture other than the Bible?" If there is a single cultural artifact that the most Americans have in their homes, it is probably the New Testament. And second is Thriller.
The man brought people together. Before he became a joke, he was globalization personalized. He compressed races and languages and nations into a rhythm that transcended everything else. And he did all of this before the internet. Or cable.
By the time this man was 10 years old, he was understood to be an eerily transcendent talent. When he put out Thriller at age 25, it became the best-selling album of all time. Every single song became a number 1 single. He won 7 Grammies for a single album. He reinvented dance. He reinvented bass-lines. He reinvented music videos, though we all know it would be more accurate to just say that he invented them.
He did all these things before any other person had done them, and he did them as a black man. Michael Jackson played a role that traditional white liberals are slow or loathe to acknowledge due to their investment in the narrative of victimization and the inherent corruption of wealth.
Michael Jackson set a precedent that was followed by Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, and Barack Obama. It used to be that phenomenally talented black folks would aspire for a decent salary, but actual control or ownership of the means of production was a fantasy. Micheal Jackson didn't settle for proceeds from ticket sales; he took charge and reaped his just rewards, even if he subsequently spent it all on feather boas and painkillers.
Because of what Michael Jackson did, Michael Jordan bought the team he played for. And Jay-Z bought the record label he rapped for. And Barack Obama leads the country he believed in.
It may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but people need to sing and dance together before they trust each other. And Michael Jackson created a world where EVERYBODY had something in common. And that something was Michael Jackson.
The only musical artists who can compare to Michael Jackson in terms of impact on society are Elvis Presley (with the huge asterisk that comes from simply singing black music with a white face), Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Michael's reach may not have been as deep as Dylan's, but it was far broader than all others on this list. Michael Jackson sold tickets to people who didn't speak a word of English. Millions of tickets.
He did all these things despite the fact that he was in the end, if not for the entire second half of his life, a self-loathing freak if not a serial child rapist. But do any of us imagine that he was not abused as a child? And do any of us deny that 99 out of every 100 people that ever met Michael Jackson didn't care about anything other than what they could get from him?
All the pathos aside, in a strictly clinical sense, Michael Jackson's voice has been heard by more people that any other voice that has ever been spoken. He sold 750 million albums to 3 generations of people on every in every civilized corner of the Earth. We praise thugs and tyrants that have achieved infinitely less.
