Land O' Goshen

So here we are in another election year with the country as riven as always into its Blue/Red dichotomy, with both candidates forced to pitch their "platforms" to some nonexistent middle supposedly representing the political consensus.  Every four years it gets weirder.  The modern process can be dated to Nixon's Southern Strategy, that regressive pandering to the Dixiecrats of the Old South, those former segregationists who used to vote Democratic but found themselves abandoned in their prejudices by the liberal likes of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

We wind up with a system where the compromises become more and more loathsome to both ends of the political spectrum.  We hear more often about how the progressives are "held back" by the theocratically inclined, but I have little doubt that it's just as troubling for the Evangelicals and social conservatives to find themselves immersed in a Godless, secular America over which they feel they have no control.  Despite the largely ineffectual sops thrown by the Republicans to the religious, the country keeps getting more and more socially liberal.  As a trivial example, on an episode of "Two And A Half Men" the other Monday night, a lap dance performed by a former kindergarten teacher figured prominently in the plot line. The dance was pretty explicit, too.  In prime time, on network TV.  Moving the other way, Barack Obama promises to continue the dubious practice, at least under one reading of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, of faith-based initiatives using federal tax money.

Sarah Palin's meteoric rise to celebrity is symptomatic of the fundamental divide in the United States.  She doesn't believe in mankind's contribution to global warming (which, as a corollary, means she doesn't believe that the lowered pH of ocean water, which is a scientific fact, is actually a scientific fact).  She thinks that intelligent design or Creationism should be taught in public schools.  She believes that abortion should be illegal, under all circumstances, as a species of murder.  Sarah Palin attends the Assembly of God and believes in the inerrancy of the Bible.  I think it's fair to say that she is far more popular among the Evangelical base of the Republican Party than the interloper John McCain.  McCain's big problem, indeed, is that he has nothing much going for him other than the Republican brand.  He's an old boring guy with watered-down views and little passion for religious fervor.

When you look at a Red/Blue map of the U.S. , it's pretty obvious where the Republican base is located: the Deep South, other than South Florida which because of its large Jewish population tends to be liberal (as if the Israelites have once again effected a parting of the Red Sea); the Mountain States, with their large Mormon populations (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, etc.). And the Grain Belt middle of the country, Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas.

I sometimes wonder (to say the least) whether the United States wouldn't do better as some sort of federation rather than this increasingly unsatisfactory arrangement as one nation all subject to the same laws handed down through Constitutional interpretations.  Maybe it would be better, for example, if Kansas could teach Creationism in their schools, and hold prayer sessions in public class rooms, and outlaw all stem cell research.  Maybe Georgia should be allowed to make abortion illegal once and for all.  Maybe same sex marriage should be banned in Utah in exchange for the Mormon promise that they'll leave California alone (as I think they might: the Mormon funding of the Yes On Prop 8 drive no doubt is based on their fear that freedom might spread across the whole country if it takes root in California).

It would not be as difficult to accomplish these things as you might think.  Here's the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: 

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

And what did Thomas Jefferson have to say about that?  "The States should be left to do whatever they can do as well as the federal government."  The mischief really began with the Ninth Amendment's liberal interpretation by a liberal Supreme Court.  And what does the Ninth Amendment say?  

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

That's it.  The entire edifice of "privacy rights," such as the freedom of married couples to do whatever they want in the privacy of their bedrooms (Griswold vs. Connecticut), is built on this amorphous "reservation."  Roe vs. Wade was premised on this amendment.  Was abortion a right retained by the people in 1789?  Who knows?  If Justice Harry Blackmun says so, then I guess it was.  

Now, I concede freely that the abortion debate is really a theological question dressed up as a secular/legal argument.  It is that investiture of a soul at the moment of conception that lies behind the controversy.  Same with stem cell research: George W. Bush bravely stood up for all those frozen cell clumps in embryo banks around the country, all those "snowflakes," because they are souls-in-waiting who must not be murdered.  The homophobia of the religious is based on their concept that homosexuality is a "choice," a decision made with free will to live in sin. The fact that a gay person might otherwise be an exemplar of moral behavior, perhaps in many cases far morally superior to a heterosexual detractor, does not explain away this failing. 

Do I think these ideas are nuts?  Sure, of course I do.  The problem for me is that so much of our national politics and legal process have become hostages to these theological questions.  For a Supreme Court nominee, one question and one question only: would you overturn Roe vs. Wade?  It distorts everything else.  How does a judge stand on issues such as the President's right to declare war without the consent of Congress?  In our country, unfortunately, the theocratically inclined judges who would overturn Roe vs. Wade will probably also believe in an authoritarian political system and the "Unitary Executive," thus abrogating the role of the people in deciding to go to war.

Maybe what will happen over time is that a distinct "Land O' Goshen" will be carved out of the middle of the United States where the Tenth Amendment is restored to its former glory and the states individually are allowed to decide all these questions for themselves.  A theocracy not so different from Iran or the developing Iraq where the entire litany of religious ideas are allowed full sway.  A pregnant teenager in Utah, raped by her father or brother, say, could still get a visa to drive to California to take care of things.  A search for cures for Parkinson's Disease using stem cells could still go on in Massachusetts.  In Kansas, however, everyone could hunker down and learn about the beginning of the Universe six thousand years ago, in a land where everyone is straight, mostly white, and definitely religious.  To say the least, Land O' Goshen would elect its own President, or whatever they would call their leader.  Whatever Sarah Palin wants to be called, I guess.  We'll need one more Constitutional Amendment, of course; eveyone who doesn't want to live in a theocracy will be given three years to get the hell out of the Land O' Goshen.

Changed Conditions Ahead

It was a road sign near my house: "Changed Conditions Ahead." I guessed it referred to a new set of stop lights at a previously uncontrolled intersection, but the lights had been there for at least a year. Surely we'd all gotten used to those changed conditions by now. I live in a county so renowned for its hippy-dippyness that the sign might be taken more as a randomly placed philosophical statement, although it looked like a regular road sign.

As Thoreau told us, we stand always at the frontier of two conjoined eternities, the past and the future; we "toe that line." Modern quantum theory might create a few wiggles in the sharpness of that border, a few results preceding a few causes, but that's nevertheless where we live in macro-reality. The future doesn't really exist; it is simply the order reality takes as that wave of time moves forward from now into the next moment, so that if we say we can't predict the future, what we're really saying is that we don't understand what's happening around us in the present.

I think a lot about this country we live in, write this blog about it, and particularly about the strange journey we've traveled during the last eight years or so. In the present political campaign, I sense that there is a widespread assumption that election of more Congressional Democrats and a new Democratic President will result in major "reform" of the worst political excesses of the Bush years, and will also bring on an amelioration of the tremendous economic difficulties the country now faces as the result of about 30 years of completely ignoring our problems in favor of a policy of never "changing our conditions." When the future arrives, I don't think the order of reality comprising the Now of that future will resemble a still image of a movie run in reverse to some American Golden Age.

Over the last couple of weeks, Scott McClellan and the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee on the use of pre-war information by the Bush Administration have confirmed what most Americans already knew: the Iraq War was set in motion through deliberate, calculated propaganda. In the effect, if not in exactly the style, the push to war was reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels's efforts in the summer of 1938 to supply the motive force for the German invasion of the Sudetenland. Both the Iraq War and the Third Reich's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia were completely "unnecessary" and sold to their respective audiences on the basis of specious "humanitarian" impulses (in the case of the Sudetenland, the alleviation of the "suffering" of the ethnic German minority in Czechoslovakia) and historical manifest destiny. It's ironic that Bush has borrowed the "appeasement" language of 1938; it's as if he doesn't understand which side of history he's on. He isn't a "peacemaker," he's a propagandist who in coldly calculated terms, and for reasons more personal than national, sold the United States on a disastrous and violent course of action that may prove our undoing.

The crushing expense of the war, the complete neglect of other pressing national problems, the torture and Gulag sideshows of the companion "war on terror," are only one part of this devolution. The problem is more basic than that. The Third Reich, as masterfully portrayed by Richard J. Evans in the second volume (The Third Reich in Power) of his three-part history, obviously had transmogrified itself into something unrecognizable before the rape of Czechoslovakia; but once the Wehrmacht rolled into the Sudetenland, the die was cast. Germany did not "reform" itself back to the society of civilized nations. Events simply took their course and Germany's fate was decided for it.

Momentous changes, within the context of modern international politics and economics, will happen here as well. The war and its aftermath will not simply blow over. There is a reason that this seemingly irrelevant misadventure in one, fairly small Middle Eastern country, whose fate is tied neither to our security nor to our prosperity, should preoccupy us, take up such a central place in American fortunes for over five years. Remarkably, as irrational as nearly everyone recognizes this war to be, how unaffordable it is in lives and treasure, in international goodwill, we can't find the political will to stop it. It's a form of national insanity. If we could figure out how we could have arrived in a state of such historical entropy, we could understand the broad outlines of the changed conditions ahead.

Memo to AG Sheldon Whitehouse on Law Revision Commission

To: Sheldon Whitehouse, Attorney General
From: Henry D. Waldenswimmer, Esq.
Date: January 22, 2009
Subject: Law Revision Commission for United States Code Annotated

Dear Shel:

You've asked my ideas on restoring the U.S. Code to some semblance of order after the havoc worked on it during the Bush Presidency/Republican Congress years. I could not agree more that major work needs to be done. Here are some of my ideas on how to proceed after the Commission completes its initial survey of the principal areas of damage:

1. Repeal any and all post facto exonerations: What a mess those clowns made of the criminal code with their paranoid escape hatches for various war crimes and violations of the Federal Anti-Torture Statute. If they all need to flee to Paraguay like their role models from another era, then let them, but don't disgrace the country with excuses for violating Geneva. Look mainly at the Detainee Treatment Act and the incorporated provision in the Military Commissions Act, with that baloney about torture being okay if done "with the advice of counsel." Now that we know all that "advice" was requested specifically so the Bushies and the Pentagon could ignore federal law and international standards of humane treatment, it isn't worth a plug nickel. (Nota bene: if an act, like waterboarding, was a crime when the act was committed, then repeal of the exoneration clause should restore it to a prosecutable offense without violating the ex post facto clause of the Constitution. You're going to be busy.) And restore habeas corpus for anyone arrested or detained by the United States other than in a declared war.

2. Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: What next, are we going to call America "Vaterland?" Teach the "Horst Wessel" song in our grade schools? Restore FEMA, the Immigration & Naturalization Service and the Coast Guard to their previous places in the table of operations. Believe it or not, a bloated bureaucracy with new titles is not always the way to improve things. And never refer to this country as the "Homeland" again. It's the United States of America. If that was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it's good enough for us.

3. Repeal the Patriot Act: Allow the CIA and FBI to share information on domestic surveillance concerning foreign operatives and terrorist plots, as they did not before 9/11. The attacks weren't caused because Americans enjoy civil liberties or check books out of the library; they happened because the Bush Administration was disorganized, negligent and obsessed with attacking Iraq.

4. Repeal the Bankruptcy Code revision: Just put Title 11 back where it was before the Republicans hired banking and credit card lobbyists to rewrite it.

5. Repeal No Child Left Behind: I mean, do I need to say more?

Some things are self-executing, such as allowing all of Bush's tax cuts to expire under their own terms. I guess Tom DeLay and Bush outsmarted themselves after all, passing tax cuts which they could call "permanent" when they wanted to look like champions of small government and "temporary" when they wanted favorable forecasts of future deficits. Who's got the last laugh now, with a Democratic majority of 350-85 in the House and 65-35 in the Senate? All these things are a start, anyway. Tons of deferred maintenance in restoring good governance. It's like moving back into a house and discovering that crack addicts have been using it as a shooting gallery for the last eight years.

Oh, and if you want to lighten your own docket, why doesn't the United States just sign on with International Criminal Court in the Hague? Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when they get news of that?