What I Grew Up On, Part III

What I Grew Up On, Part II

What I Grew Up On, Part I

Papers, Please

One of the divine blessings of the American system of government is the principle of divided sovereignty. The United States of America was the first modern nation to practice this principle.

Sovereignty is a fancy word for authority. The United States have divided sovereignty in the sense that each state has a unique and separate authority.

Before the American Revolution, there was no such thing as divided sovereignty in Western Civilization. In each nation, sovereignty was unitary and indivisible, vested more often than not in a single human being, called the king, or the kaiser, or the czar, etc.

But in the United States, the sovereignty was divided. There was no one single head of a snake to cut off. The federal government had power, but so did each and every state. This is still true, although the balance of power has slid dramatically towards the federals at the expense of the states.

But still, each state has its own sovereignty, its own prerogative to experiment with different approaches towards governance. For example, Massachusetts chose to impose a health insurance mandate.

The genius of the American system is that when Massachusetts decided to do this, the principle of divided sovereignty, or states' rights, allowed it to carry out its own experiment.

The other states were therefore free to observe. If it worked, other states were free to copy. If it failed terribly, that failure was contained to one state.

This is all well and good. But what about when states use their sovereignty to desecrate the creed of the nation? Arizona this week passed the most immoral and unGodly and unAmerican measure I have witnessed in my short and salty life.

The governor of Arizona signed a bill passed by the legislature of that state that mandates that police officers must stop any person who looks like an illegal immigrant and demand proof of their status.

It goes without saying that the target of this moral dysentery is not Canadian immigrants; we all know who the "suspects" are in this equation. The Mexicans. They will be punished for living in the land that the United States took by war of aggression against Mexico 150 years ago.

How many ways is this wrong? Morally. Ethically. Economically. Common Sense-ically. Biblically. Legally. Constitutionally.

Here's an example of what society would look like if this law were actually manifested: Every single time a person who "looked like an illegal immigrant" was robbed, raped, or murdered, victims and witnesses would not call the police, because they would be asked for their papers when reporting the crime.

So, notice to all serial criminals in the U.S.: Go to Arizona, and prey on Mexicanish people; they're fair game.

Also, notice to all international drug cartels: there are now millions of unprotected people in the U.S., so feel free to extort them, to kidnap their children, to rape their wives. Go ahead, because they can't call the cops, can they?

Likewise, any "illegal" who witnessed a crime would not testify in court, because after he gave his testimony, he would be arrested for being illegal.

This is a law that willfully places millions of people outside the law. They are criminals by virtue of their appearance. Not even during the deepest dregs of racism did we ever pass laws demanding that black people show their papers.

Of course most cops in the country (NOT just the South) have treated black folks as automatic suspects from day one. But they never had the audacity to make it public, to make it policy, to pass their bigotry into law.

But the people of Arizona have shamed democracy. They have turned the rule of the people into the tyranny of the mob. The 70% do not have the right to vote to deprive the 30% of their God-given liberties and dignities.

Think about the practical application of this law one more time. We know that the people affected by this law are of a certain hue. They're not white. Unless there's some debilitating influx of Norwegians into Phoenix. They're brown.

So, who do you know that would be stopped under this law for simply walking down the street anywhere in Arizona? Who do you know that fits the suspicious color, that looks vaguely "illegal"?

We all know of one such person. And he is our President. Picture Barack walking down an alleyway in Phoenix, leaving work in a hoodie and timberland boots. Papers, please.

The Other Confederacy

If you identify a point of disagreement between any two demographic groups or geographical regions of this country, it is probable that its origins are in the Civil War. Our Civil War still divides us as no other thing, and it is perhaps the most profoundly misunderstood chapter of our history.

The problem is that slavery sucks all the air out of any honest assessment of the war. The issue of slavery makes northerners insufferably self-righteous, and it makes southerners despicably evasive.

But to have any honest appraisal of what happened here, we have to first study it without slavery as part of the equation. Let's look at the facts of the Civil War without mentioning slavery, which was actually quite a popular approach while these events were actually transpiring, and which involves no real factual or intellectual sacrifices, as well shall see.

In 1776, thirteen separate colonies declared that they were each independent states. Each separate colony declared itself to be an independent state. These newly-independent states (we should rather think of them as small nations like Holland, for example) then formed a wartime alliance against the British. A few years after the victory of the American states, they decided to codify a more integrated and detailed alliance. The Constitution was the result of that decision.

Here's the key: the independent states existed before the Union, as created in the Constitution. The states created the Union; the Union did NOT create the states. The states are not children of the Union. They are the parents of the Union. A monumentally important distinction, and one which is studiously ignored in the North.

When the states willingly formed and joined the Union, many of them, including my home state of Rhode Island, insisted upon making explicit the voluntary nature of the Union. The Union was formed by men who had recently revolted because they felt that they lacked adequate representation in their own government. It was founded by men who had already made clear that they were willing to separate from their rulers if they felt mistreated.

So what happened after the election of Lincoln? From the dominant point of view in my neck of the woods, the Southern states reacted like whiny little bitches after the due and legal election of a man they did not like. They then committed treason by seceding from and then waging war upon the United States.

But here's another way of looking at it: in 1860, there was a 2nd American Revolution. The Southern states felt that they were not adequately represented by their government. They then decided to declare independence from that government.

Let's not worry about why the South wanted to leave. That's not the point. The point is that each state that seceded did so according to decisions made by their elected representatives. They voted to declare independence.

They did what the 13 colonies had done 85 years earlier. No more, no less. Actually, the Revolution of 1861 was far more democratic than the Revolution of 1776 if our metric is what proportion of the population was actually consulted before declaring independence.

Defenders of the North may cry "but the government in 1860 was legal and democratic!" Well, rest assured, defenders of King George III said the same thing to the ingrate colonists of 1776.

So the southern states chose to declare their independence. They did so peacefully. The Confederates asked for no favors, no welfare. They offered to pay for federal property in the south. They offered to assume their proportion of the federal debt. They made absolutely no political or territorial demands on states that did not wish to join them.

This was a peaceful, democratic (by the standards of the time) decision. An amicable divorce, if you will. And what did Lincoln decide to do by way of response? Lincoln told the states (the parents of the federal government) that they had no right to defy their child.

Perhaps it would be better for the purposes of analogy to think of the North and South as a married couple. Neither one is perfect. They've had ups and downs. They're so close, but so different. Finally, the South decides it wants a divorce. An amicable divorce, in which property and debts are exchanged responsibly, and each partner simply walks away and wishes the other the best.

What if the other spouse responded to this offer by saying "You do not have the right to divorce me. You have no identity separate from our marriage. You do not have the right to live outside of it. I will beat and rape you without end or mercy until you agree to remain married to me".

That is what Lincoln did. That is what we celebrate him for. All the South wanted was to go its own way. And I, for one, think we should have let them.

But what about slavery? Slavery is supposed to absolve the North for burning and raping the South. This absurd charade depends on a few assumptions.

Firstly, it assumes that the war was fought to end slavery. It was not. The war was about one thing: do states have the right to choose to leave? Lincoln said no. Simple as that.

How do we know that slavery had nothing to do with the war? Because there was slavery in the North. During the entire war. When Lincoln was assassinated, their was still slavery in the Union.

So if there were slaves in the North at the beginning and the end of the Civil War, then the Civil War was not about the North's moral crusade to abolish slavery.

The North was no less racist than the South. Slavery was horrible, of course. But weren't there "freemen" in the North? Yes, there were. But here's an example of how "free" blacks were treated in Lincoln's Union.

Illinois passed a state law forbidding blacks from voting, owning property, testifying in court, sitting on a jury, or living in the state for more than 30 days. Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, voted for this law. Lincoln only hated slavery because American slavery involved having black people in America.

Of course, after the war was over, and after it was clear how utterly terrible it had been for the nation(s) as a whole, the Union attempted to justify it retroactively as a moral crusade. And, to be fair, slavery was made illegal after the war ended.

But women were also given the right to vote after World War I. Does that mean that we entered that war to secure the right for our women to vote?

Slavery had to end. But the facts of the Civil War are really entirely tangential to that fact. The North had slaves, too. Northern whites were just as racist as southern whites, but because far fewer northerners lived in proximity to blacks than did their southern brethren, they indulged themselves in an obnoxious self-righteousness that served as their retroactive excuse to crush a movement so similar to the movement of 1776 that we can be sure Jefferson would have been a Confederate.

This is the danger of the dominant paradigm: slavery had to end. We didn't do it. North and South alike failed to do the right thing. But then, after the worst and most widespread acts of violence ever committed by Americans, our leaders tell us that slaughtering 600,000 of ourselves was a righteous cause.

What would've been far more righteous for the Union would have been for us to let the South go its own way and critique them by, oh, I don't know.....abolishing slavery in our own country, perhaps.

The myth of the redemptive violence of the Civil War, and of the anguishing greatness of Lincoln, led us directly into the morass of other, even more absurd and even more violent wars. Each time, of course, we were fighting to "end slavery" or to "save democracy". After all, if total war could civilize the south, why not Europe? Why not Europe again? Why not Korea? Why not Vietnam? Why not Afghanistan? Why not Iraq?

Americans have long been ignoring their own flaws by attacking others in the interest of "saving" them from the own self-evident sins. But it wasn't George W. Bush who invented this insidious charade. It was Abraham Lincoln.

The Only Bad Nazi

I got no unseemly joy out of writing my last blog about the pope's complicity in child rape. I take no joy in attacking the Catholic Church. My mother is a Catholic, as are many of my acquaintances and most of my neighborhood. I'm no atheist. And as an historian I am in awe of the Church.

Since I know and love so many Catholics, and since the Catholic Church is the oldest institution of Western Civilization, I could hardly be "anti-Catholic". But that does not mean that one should indulge in a blind denial of the church's sins, just as criticizing the government of Israel does not make one a Jew-hater.

Speaking of Jew-Haters, the Catholic Church's leadership this last weekend somehow managed to show themselves to be even more vile and despicable than I had realized.

The Pope's personal minister (a rather odd station, since one would presume that an infallible man is hardly in need of being ministered to) spoke publicly about the "gossip" of last week. You know, the "gossip" about how Catholic priests raped thousands and thousands and thousands of children?

So first this man tells the world that raising an eyebrow at thousands of child rapes is nothing more than frivolous chatter, akin to teenage girls dishing about new outfits or cute guys. And then....he compared the "persecution" of the Church to the Holocaust.

And there, in an impossibly neat and concise little utterance was the starkest evidence imaginable that evil exists in this world and that it has a franchise in the One True Church.

There are two factors here: the first is the rationality of the metaphor. The second is the Church's conduct during the actual Holocaust, which makes one marvel at the audacity of the Church even bringing it up.

First, the metaphor. Priests rape children. When victims speak out against this most outrageous and debasing of crimes, their pain, their shattered lives, their wrecked identities, are all dismissed as "gossip". Gossip.

And we are supposed to feel sorry for the Church. But see, "gossip" implies hearsay. It implies the possibility, if not the probability, that the subject matter is without merit. It could be outright false, and even if it were true, there's no real evidence. That is precisely the opposite of what is happening here.

The accusations of child rape are no more "gossip" than the accusation that Mohammed Atta flew a plane into the World Trade Center is "gossip" or than the accusation that the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 is "gossip". Or, for that matter, that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews is "gossip".

So the Church is not suffering from undue "gossip"; it is reaping a pitiful fraction of the bottomless well of righteous wrath that must obtain from such unpardonable sin. The Church suffers not from "gossip", but from truth. Yes, truth, that historical Joker to the Church's Batman.

The Pope's pastor tells us that the Church is suffering from the equivalent of the Holocaust. So, commit the worst of sins, and when people call you out on it, it's as if they're throwing you in the oven.

Firstly, no Catholic priests have been thrown in any ovens. (Which is not to say that Catholic priests have not thrown inumerable others into ovens) Secondly, no Jews, who literally were thrown into ovens, had committed the crimes of the priests.

So for the Vatican to claim that it is suffering such persecution is sort of like if a serial killer is given 2 months probation for him crimes and then claims that his punishment is "worse than 9/11".

And what of the Vatican's conduct during the actual Holocaust? I can claim no expertise in this field other than to acknowledge that the general historians' consensus is that the Church made an extremely disinterested effort to mitigate the crimes of the Nazis.

Now, I do not for a minute claim that the Vatican was in any position to stop the Nazi atrocities. One of Stalin's top 3 quotes has him rhetorically asking, when someone wonders how the Vatican might react to the destruction of churches in the USSR, "how many tanks does the Pope have"?

The Church did not commit the Holocaust, and it could not have stopped it. But it could have done way more than it did.

An example? Excommunication. A penalty that may not strike fear in the heart of most people, but the Church's ultimate punishment (now that they're no longer allowed to burn people alive). For someone who was baptized into the Church to be excommunicated is the ultimate rebuke the Church can give. And how many top Nazis do you suppose the Church has excommunicated?

One.

Joseph Goebells. Minister of Propaganda. A man who, were he not so evil, would be remembered as the father of modern print media and motion pictures. Perhaps the truest of the true believers. The man who committed suicide with Hitler, but only after his wife had killed their 6 children, lest they grow up in a world controlled by Jews.

Joseph Goebells was the only Nazi excommunicated by the Catholic Church. 6 million Jews murdered. 50 million dead worldwide. And the Church throws out 1 guy. And here's the best (or worst) part: the crime for which he was expelled.

What was his crime? Was it the extermination of the Jews, the gays, the Gypsies, the clergy? No. If those were sufficient crimes, many more Nazis would've been kicked out of the Church. No, Goebells' crime, his unpardonable sin, his one and only action which cost him salvation was....avert your eyes, children.....marrying a Protestant.

The only way that represents any sort of moral compass is if you're standing directly on the North Pole, in which case your needle is just spinning nonsensically.

One wonders what comparable sin a priest would have to commit to warrant excommunication from the Church today. Killing the Jews won't do it. Raping kids won't do it. No, it would take something much more profane. Like sex with a consenting adult, perhaps.