Current Invective

I got an email today asking for money to spread the word about sudden climate change. I didn’t have anything to contribute, but I’m glad that people are pooling their money to influence public opinion and, maybe, public policy in this area. I consider us lucky to have a law protecting our right to do that.

It’s the First Amendment to the Constitution, and it says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. Keeping in mind that it’s just words on paper, we understand that those words have awesome power. They’re not phrased to create a right but rather to impose a prohibition. There’s no ambiguity about them. All manner of speech is protected from government censorship, regardless of the source. It’s given us a remarkable range of opinion on every conceivable issue.

There’s a movement to carve out exceptions to this critical prohibition. Concerned about the ability of money to influence elections, the amenders want to exclude corporations from the protections of the First Amendment. It’s not clear why corporations are singled out for exclusion, except that they’re a convenient form of shared ownership in today’s world. If they become inconvenient, rich people will find other ways of pooling their assets to control us.

The amenders have nothing to say about  whether people who can’t resist political advertising should be trusted to amend their charter. Nothing to say about these same people’s plenary power, under the Constitution as it stands, to separate rich people from some of their assets for the good of the country. Nothing to say about the possible consequences of government regulation of a category of speech or about the ineluctable pressure to expand such regulation and curtail mass expressions of opinion.

Try writing an amendment that abridges the right of Bank of America or the National Rifle Association to criticize a candidate or policy without also abridging the right of your club or interest group to do the same thing. It’s an impossible task, and the people who are concerned about the influence of money over politics could spend their time more profitably devising ways to separate the 1 percent from some of their holdings and inventing a school curriculum to teach kids to resist advertising and understand politics.

Lawyers like to come up with trial strategies for people they don’t represent. Best practice in this sort of exercise is to write your closing statement first. Here are a few of the high points of my hypothetical closing statement on behalf of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

My client may have told you he was following a higher law than the one we live under when he undertook this attack, but the fact is he was bound by no law at all. He has done nothing contrary to any obligatory law, and he has done nothing that you jurors haven’t implicitly endorsed.

It is an acknowledged fact and a part of the record in this case that officials of our government claim a license to kill those they deem enemies. There is no legal proceeding, no appeal, no escape for the enemies of these officials. Not only do these officials claim a right to kill enemies, they claim a right to use means so lethal that they kill innocents who happen to be close by.

Even though there is no law authorizing any public official to kill anyone, none of these officials has been held accountable for any of these killings, and none ever will be. Our president–who is charged with the execution of the laws and who is one of the officials who claim a license to kill–has pledged not to hold himself or anyone else accountable for killing of this kind. Logic dictates that if there is no obligatory law prohibiting those killings, there is no law prohibiting the killings at the Boston Marathon.

It’s not just laws that have been abandoned in the new order we have chosen for ourselves. Values have had to yield along with formal laws. We citizens have had ample opportunity to reject all this killing, and we haven’t done it. Morally, acceptance of murder makes us all accomplices. Our baby-killings are no secret. Our forces have bombed weddings, religious observances, funerals, rescues, and hospitals, all documented in bloody detail.

These acts amount to murder under any civilized code of values, and when the president of a republic like ours forbears to hold murderers accountable and engages in murder himself, and we do nothing, we abandon our values and make ourselves partners in crime. And so I challenge each of you jurors to ask, in conscience, how the killing of innocents at the Marathon differs from the killings of innocents we sponsor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere? Can you condemn my client without also condemning yourselves?

My client is not unrepentant. He repents as a soldier repents for the wounds he’s inflicted. He mourns the dead and he commiserates with the injured, but he maintains that their sacrifice and his were in a good cause. You may have heard the expression, bringing the war home. Soldiers talk about it. If only people could see what killing is like, they wouldn’t do it. My client brought the war home. If you want to know what’s it’s like to live under the conditions we impose in parts of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen, remember Boston on Patriots’ Day 2013. Suddenly, without warning, there’s an explosion and people are dead, blood and body parts scattered far and wide. Happens every day in some parts of the world, and you jurors and the rest of us provide the explosives. If this atrocity brings us any closer to ending our own atrocious misconduct, the price in lives lost and ruined in Boston will be modest.

You jurors may want to ask, when you consider retribution on behalf of the three people martyred for this cause, you may want ask yourselves how many more could have died in this attack. The bombs were placed where they would get attention but where they would cause the least injury. How bad was this crime, really? Three dead; two hundred hurt. People’s fun was spoiled. In the book of atrocities, this one ranks as relatively humane, and my client is as much responsible for restraint as for bloodshed.

My client’s acts were meant to send a message to us about us. He says his acts were the quintessential expression of our national character, and who on this jury can rebut him? He was made a citizen only a few short months before he committed these acts, and he committed them as a citizen, for his country, as he has said. Lives were lost, but that may be the price of change in times like ours. Waking our nation from our violence-induced stupor is a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.

“I am convinced” declared Dr. Martin Luther King on an April day 46 years ago in a compelling critique of the war in Viet Nam, “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”

Over the intervening years, we did undergo a revolution of values, but not of the sort King envisioned. Repudiating his plea for a “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,” we made greed a sacrament and allowed corruption to infect every aspect of life. When King made the speech, America could have been on the threshold of an age of peace and enlightenment, but we didn’t step through the entryway. Instead, we assented to a radical transformation of values that casts the national character of the 1960’s in an almost virtuous light.

It’s not that values were debased. Much worse, they were abandoned wholesale. We opted for a feral existence, with predation by the brutal upon the rest. We still pay lip service to such values as tolerance, honor, peacefulness, thrift, and charity, but they no longer play a part in the life of our nation.

The motives and processes behind the revolution were altogether commercial. Nothing sells like the gratification of basic, instinctive drives. The natural compulsions to eat, stay warm, have sex, and avoid pain have vast commercial potential, as every merchant knows. Values, being the lubricant that makes social interaction possible, always involve the postponement of gratification, and so they interfere with commerce.

Luckily for gratification-mongers, there’s television. The lions of commerce own all the broadcasting systems, and so they use television almost exclusively to sell stuff. The advertising usually highlights personal gratification, achieved by products ranging from perfume to paper towels, while the non-advertising “content” almost always portrays life as a quest for personal gratification, punctuated by conflicts and frustrations. The lives of real people usually center on the care and protection of others, with little to spare for personal gratification. But narratives in which sacrifice is rewarded tend to reinforce values that undermine sales, and so they can’t be told. This leaves us viewers with self-serving characters who would be rapidly consumed by real life but who emerge strong and happy in TV fiction. We imitate them as if their fictitious “value” system were real, and this forces us to abandon the values that have allowed us to function in groups.

The valueless life is now a social imperative. When your boss says, “Tell him I’m not here,” you damn well do it, and maybe you grind your teeth a little. When your pastor says, “God needs you to put more in the basket,” you cough up, and maybe you emit a sigh. And when your fourth-grader asks whether the glaciers really will disappear in her lifetime or whether it’s fair to kill people by remote control, you tell her everything will be fine, and you don’t regret it for a second. Conscience turned out to be a burden too heavy for life in the third millenium.

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,” King argued in that speech, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” The 21st Century sees his bleak prophesy fulfilled.

The slaughter of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown should be seen as the quintessential expression of our national character. We feed ourselves and our children a diet of violence that ought to nauseate us, and we allow our leaders to push the rest of the world around with lethal force, and we’re surprised when this happens?

I don’t believe anybody is surprised. Life is so cheap for us now that our newsmongers discuss remote-controlled warfare and government assassinations as issues of public policy. To mark the birth of Jesus, countless teenagers will soon receive games that simulate almost unimaginable violence and bloodshed, and we see no irony there. All this mock sympathy for the latest round of mayhem might be a little hard for some of us to stomach.

My experience of the weekend, festive as December weekends are, was that people were able to put out of consciousness the vision of children being killed one-by-one in front of each other and party on. Baby-killing wasn’t discussed at any gathering I attended. Nothing surprising there.

What surprises me is the amount of dissonance people are able to tolerate. The news coverage–including so-called progressive news outlets–has so far censored out all discussion of the social forces that make this sort of atrocity inevitable, even as images of video-game-blooshed and dead Arab babies popped into our news-deprived heads.

Newsmen aren’t asking how Newtown’s dead babies are different from the ones our ordnance kills every day in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip, but we seem to be OK with that. Most of us seem able (with the help of the right drugs) to square a deep commitment to bombs and bullets with disapproval of violent crime. Seems as if logic and history should compel us to admit we’re a nation of vicious bullies who should expect this sort of thing from time to time.

I don’t need a police investigation to tell me what Adam Lanza’s motive was. It’s always revenge in cases like this. This killer wanted to exact retribution from everyone for whatever bullying he was subjected to. Bullying that he blamed on everyone, maybe with some justification. He did the worst thing he could think of, and we were all punished. He probably thought he was doing his victims a favor, as baby-killers often do, sparing them the suffering he had to go through, but he mainly wanted to ruin the lives of their survivors, his enemies. We can only guess what went through his mind, but we do know vengeance has become a sacrament of American culture. Couple that with a national craving for violence, and you’re going to suffer atrocities every so often.

Don’t hold your breath for a public discussion of the role of America’s malevolent streak in the crime that killed so many kids. People seem to be shaken by this event, but not stirred to abandon their love of violence.

The fact that can’t be mentioned in discussions of the rampage in Newtown, Connecticut, yesterday is its similarity to events in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Gaza, where children are killed in violent attacks with some regularity. The big difference is that the Newtown murders shock us, while the murders in distant lands are hardly noticed. There are no vigils for the babies incinerated by American bombs and bullets. On the contrary, voters and the embedded mass media gave systematic slaughter a ringing endorsement only a few weeks ago.

Nobody seems to have noticed that the violence we embrace so heartily when it kills little brown children far away–what we so coldly label “collateral damage”–is no less bloody than what happened in Newtown. When life is cheap, as it is in today’s Judeo-Christian ethic, events of this kind are inevitable.

If you’re sickened by the thought of dead babies strewn about, you should be livid with rage when your president and baby-killer-in-chief mouths words of sympathy for the survivors. He and his supporters have transformed all of us into monsters, and we have a hell of a nerve pretending that these murders are any different or more upsetting than what we do as a matter of national policy. It’s not gun control that’s needed here, but the restoration of moral values, beginning with the condemnation and punishment of our murderous leaders.

The commander-in-chief of the armed forces could be removed from office and prosecuted for the torture of his subordinate Private Bradley Manning. Manning’s testimony at a pretrial hearing yesterday disclosed circumstantial evidence of a conspiracy to subject him to inhuman conditions of imprisonment over the course of many months, including close confinement, sleep interruption, extended exposure to cold, solitary confinement, threats, forced nudity, constant surveillance, and other conditions amounting to torture. Manning is accused of snatching the video of a US Army helicopter crew slaughtering a group of people on a Baghdad street and making it public, along with thousands of other documents his job gave him access to.

All indications are that he was singled out for abuse and that his maltreatment was systematically inflicted as punishment, as well as to force him to testify against others. His case is unprecedented, and there is little question that his maltreatment could not have continued except on orders from the highest level. That would be Barack Obama, commander-in-chief of the armed forces throughout Manning’s captivity.

The conditions Manning described are not simply instances of prosecutorial misconduct or harsh military discipline but serious crimes. A judge hearing such charges is obliged by her oath to initiate an inquiry and ensure that the people responsible are brought to justice. Same with the Army lawyers prosecuting the case against Manning. The judge and prosecutors could be subject to disciplinary measures if they fail to act on Manning’s testimony. The wheels of justice must grind in this case, and the law doesn’t care what offices the culpable people might hold.

I don’t usually celebrate Veterans’ Day–my cold-war service in Europe while my age-mates were getting shredded in South Asia was never a big source of pride for me–but this year was an exception: it’s not every November 11 that a commanding general and his entourage of military parasites are brought to account. As every common soldier knows, malfeasance of command is seldom exposed and almost never punished, and so this was an occasion for reflection.

David Petraeus, universally recognized as a great leader among war buffs in government and the press, was consumed by a futile mission: to win wars solely by force of arms. In the process, he and his superiors incinerated children, dehumanized populations, turned the USA into a nation of terrorists and dishonored their own army of psychopaths and misfits. Certainly, that’s grounds for removal from the chain of command, but nobody removed him. He quit, citing acts of marital infidelity as his rationale.

It wasn’t his success with girls that brought Petraeus down but his failure in warfare. His fault wasn’t that he fought ineffectively or without resolve, but that he agreed to fight at all. He let his young recruits be used for political ends and advanced his career by this means, and now it’s all over. He’ll have to settle for employment as a law professor or arms-monger and pass into obscurity.

He deserves much worse. Between him and his paramour, a neojournalist and war profiteer, he has to be rated the bigger whore. The damage he and his outfit have done to this nation–if it is still a nation–is incalculable. The war debt alone will cripple the economy for a generation to come. Our moral bankruptcy is now felt as a sense of impending doom. That’s going to get worse. Petraeus knew he was risking all this, and he sold his troops and his command anyway. To get laid.

If 9/11 was a good excuse to wage war in foreign lands, Hurricane Sandy is an equally good excuse to quit. Obama and Congress don’t need any other justification to repudiate their lethal and expensive foreign policy, and they’ll never have a better one. Urgent business with Mother Nature must take precedence. The world will understand.

We have known for at least 30 years that this day was coming. Computer models were predicting with some confidence that warming would begin to change the coastlines beginning about now and starting with low-lying areas like the tip of Manhattan Island, the Mississippi Delta, and the New Jersey shore. A combination of violent weather and rising sea levels was predicted to cause more and more frequent flooding until these land masses were finally submerged permanently, sometime after most of us are dead and gone.

New Yorkers didn’t have to wait quite so long for the future to arrive. Coastal residents are asking whether there is any effective flood control strategy for low-lying areas of Greater New York City or whether it may be time to start thinking about relocation to higher ground. Either way, the costs will be staggering. And it’s not just New York that needs attention, but cities from Bar Harbor to Galveston, from San Diego to Port Angeles. It’s ironic that candidates for office should be concerned about jobs when damaged and endangered roads, buildings, and utilities need immediate attention and could keep every idle person busy for decades.

The big question is who will finance the effort. The rich people who usually advance the funds for this sort of thing have been squirreling away their gold for the past six years, concerned about what they used to call the full faith and credit of the USA. There’s no reason to think a hurricane will shake anything loose. More likely, a disaster this big–because it competes for money with debt service–could make it more difficult for us to borrow. Forget about taxation. Rich people won’t allow themselves to be taxed, and the rest of us simply can’t pay enough to finance projects of this magnitude.

If we can’t borrow the money or raise taxes for necessary removals, repairs and precautions, we’ll have to get it elsewhere, and so we’re forced to reconsider the wasteful military adventures we’ve been conducting thousands of miles from home. Without exception, the campaigns have been lost causes, and they cost us billions. What if we declared a world-wide truce and used the money saved to finance this effort? Armed forces of the USA could cease all hostile action everywhere, in preparation for deployment home, where the soldiers could put on civilian clothes and take government jobs preparing for the next storm or cleaning up the debris from the last one. If people weren’t ready for this before Sandy, they’re as ready now as they’ll ever be.

Call it disaster socialism. A critical mass of people–people of all political persuasions and all but the highest income levels–abruptly finds itself in desperate need of assistance. Suddenly and without warning, socialism sets in. Masses in trouble find out nobody’s there to help but the rest of us, acting in concert, with public services, public employees and public resources. Mobilized for rescue and relief and, maybe, with sufficient resources, to accomplish climate adaptation and infrastructure transformation projects, the sort of thing that can’t be left to private enterprise. Public projects carried out with public money we all stopped spending on war, not because we don’t care what happens in foreign lands, but because our resources are better applied to urgent matters here.

One thing about people being stupid: They’re not. If they turn in a certain direction and see things, they can’t help learning from them. Maybe that’s why the coverage of 9/11/2012 was long on memorials and short on the event itself. You didn’t see much film of it this year, but all three building collapses were recorded from every angle, and more and more people every day are seeing recordings of the event and catching on.

What they’re seeing is the first two instances ever of buildings being deliberately demolished with people inside. Mass murder before their eyes. They can see the telltale puffs from explosions on the lower floors, to make room for the pulverized material bearing down from above. They can see the mushroom cloud of debris, expanding with explosive power. They can see the incredible speed and symmetry of the destruction, impossible with natural forces. No comment is needed to recognize what was done.

Simultaneous with the censorship of all discussion of the collapse of the three World Trade Center buildings, a new book came out for the anniversary saying the Bush administration had several specific warnings over the summer of 2001 and before and didn’t connect the dots. The book-tour spin is that the White House was incompetent, but it seems just as likely that our leaders allowed the World Trade Center to be rigged to go off, just in case. People inside? Fuhgeddabowdit. A sacrifice to empire, and well worth it.

A good question might be how nearly universal censorship could have been accomplished for all these years. With only two or three exceptions, the mass media and the self-described independent, alternative media this year suppressed all discussion of unanswered questions surrounding the events of 9/11/2001. Case closed, they shouted soundlessly in unison. This can’t be explained except as mass hysteria. A conversion symptom. The power of suggestion. Maybe just the fear of losing an audience.

Neojournalistic delusion, as this might be called, seems to work for awhile, but the truth–and in this case Newton’s laws of physics–will out. One public television station in Denver, Colorado, allowed the science of the building collapses to be discussed this year, and events are taking their expected course. People are looking, and people are seeing. It’s not a pleasant prospect, and this would be news if anybody were disposed to report it.

We used to think of a war party as a squad of fighters. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that the term has evolved. A political party that endorses war is also a war party, minus any hint of bravery or valor.

It’s pretty well understood in partisan politics that to succeed in a national election, a party must endorse warfare and promise bloodshed in the cause of national interest. Elections are won by war parties in our hypernationalist system. I couldn’t watch, but I heard that Democrats and Republicans lately demonstrated their commitment as war parties on national TV, chanting “USA” at the drop of a grisly anecdote.

I’m holding it against every Democrat and Republican I know that they cheered for death. I’ve studied the issue as a lawyer, and these so-called wars we have going on are all illegal. Illegal war is murder, and our military adventures mark a descent into perdition for which the entire adult population of the USA should and will eventually be held accountable. When they applaud mass murder with the world watching, they’re begging for retribution.

They didn’t just cheer, either. They celebrated. They ate, they drank, and they made merry on the the tab of predators in finance and industry, war profiteers each and every one. They were so happy to be at war, so full of celebratory spirit that they may have created a new meaning of “war party.” They embraced baby-killing, assassination, and remote-controlled destruction of life and property with such gusto, it was almost obscene. It was war party after war party for the celebrants, all sponsored by the two war parties and their benefactors in the war industry.

Our free press was there to record it all. It was win/win for them. Not only did they get news without working for it–political speeches are news now, in case you hadn’t noticed–they got to browse at the buffet tables along with the other merry-makers. They seem to have a preference for the Republican gala, which was better financed and a bit more up-scale. I guess an abundance of shrimp doesn’t cut it any more. Today’s neojournalist has a craving for fine wine that was once rare among crusty political reporters.

The question today for news-mongers and consumers is which is the true war party. I can’t tell a Democrat from a Republican, but NPR tells me that voters, now secure–or insecure–in the knowledge that Osama Bin Laden has been fed to the sharks, will support what they judge to be the true war party.

NPR could be right, but it could be that what we’re seeing is not enthusiasm but hysteria and mass delusion. Somebody needs a slap in the face, but who’s going to deliver it? A few hundred or even a few thousand peaceniks in the streets won’t suffice. It has to be a repudiation that can’t be ignored. What if everybody who believes the system no longer works in the public interest were to stay home on election day? Turnout of 10 percent or less might signal to ourselves and to the world that support for rogue government is withdrawn. It could weaken the hold of the murderers in Congress and the executive branch who compel us to kill.