Civil obedience
by Lewis H Lapham
Harper's Magazine (September 2005)
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the
Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the
government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be
easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
- Bertolt Brecht
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the morning of July 1 announced her retirement from the Supreme Court, and within a matter of hours the several armies of the imperial right - conservative and neoconservative, libertarian and evangelical were on the move to what their general staff officers perceived as the field of Armageddon. Here at last was the final battle in America's thirty-year culture war, the heaven sent chance to restructure the Supreme Court as an office of the Holy Inquisition, to redeem the multitudes who had forfeited the confidence of Jerry Falwell and the credit card companies, to cleanse the country of its sins (among them the abomination of gay marriage and the blasphemy of legal abortion), to reinterpret the Constitution as an initial public offering or a program of religious instruction.
The newspapers over the Independence Day weekend reported a furious ringing of phones in the headquarters tents of the ideologically pure in heart determined to take from the American people as much of their independence as could be disposed of in the lime pits of judicial review. Different division commanders were intent upon different tactical maneuvers (guaranteeing the sanctity of property rights, assuring the display of the Ten Commandments in the nation's police stations and public schools, bringing the scales of justice into balance with the books of Deuteronomy and Ayn Rand), but the map arrows all pointed at the same strategic objective. Justice O'Connor's departure offered the first chance in eleven years for a new appointment to the Supreme Court, and if the vacancy was soon to be doubled by the ill health and probable retirement of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then now was the moment to win a great and glorious victory for God, mother, the free market, and the flag.
Operatives at The Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation bent to the task of searching the Internet for slander with which to discredit Democratic politicians too well acquainted with the works of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, promised the assistance of 20,000 churches pledged to the quest for a Supreme Court nominee loyal to the judicial philosophy of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The Committee for Justice, formed three years ago at the behest of Karl Rove and captained by C Boyden Gray, formerly White House counsel to the first President George Bush, undertook to raise the money for a high-definition advertising campaign promoting the appointment of a jurist capable of reading the Constitution as it was written by the framers - that is, by a man or woman miraculously preserved in the placenta of the late eighteenth century. In time for the Washington television talk shows on Sunday, July 3, the ranks of conservative seraphim and libertarian cherubim had been joined by the National Association of Manufacturers (which assigned a committee of corporation lawyers to review a nominee's business qualifications), by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, by Focus on the Family, whose president, Dr James C Dobson, anticipated "a watershed moment in American history" and looked forward to the confrontation coming with a vengeance.
All the allied factions foresaw a rancorous political argument extended through the rest of the summer into the confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early autumn, and they took heart from what they regarded, not unreasonably, as the weakness of the opposition. The caucuses of leftist and liberal opinion (pro-abortion and pro-labor, in favor of protecting the environment and the country's dwindling inventory of civil rights) also devoted the Fourth of July weekend to a mustering of forces - staffing phone banks, hiring lobbyists, buying television time, setting up defensive countermeasures, soliciting the support of George Soros and Sean Penn - but the email alerts didn't carry an equivalent weight of passionate intensity and rhetorical armament; nor did they attract as much notice in either the mainline press or the blogosphere. Captain C B Gray signed a contract with Fox News to provide commentary tinged with the romance of pious polemic; Ralph G Neas, president of People for the American Way and the chief organizer of the secular regiments, issued a statement distinguished by its banality - "No matter what side you're on, everything you've believed in, everything you've cared about, everything you've fought for is at stake". The prominent Democrats in Washington (among them Senators Edward M Kennedy, Harry Reid, and Barbara Boxer) were careful to avoid strong language infected with partisan fervor. They declared their willingness to raise no loud objections if the President contented himself with a "mainstream conservative" in whom they could see trace elements of a mind not totally submerged in an ideological swamp.
The condition appeared to have been met when Mr. Bush named as his Supreme Court appointee John G Roberts of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At a White House press conference on the evening of July 19, Judge Roberts was introduced as a non-dogmatic upholder of the Constitution who didn't confuse the moral with the civil law, and over the course of the next several days what could be learned of his record and character tended to confirm that supposition - fifty years old, born in Buffalo, New York, and educated at Harvard Law School, a devout Roman Catholic, by all accounts an amiable and remarkably intelligent man, conservative in his politics but by no means unreasonable in judgment or rabid in termperament. Because he had served on the Appellate bench for only two years, he hadn't had occasion to provide enough written opinions from which to draw inferences about his judicial philosophy. On the evidence of the judge's prior service as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush Administration, it could be assumed that he disapproved of abortion and favored the enlargement of the federal police power, but the lack of specific information temporarily disarmed his prospective enemies entrenched in the salients on the liberal left.
Nor were there any public expressions of disappointment from the cadres of the militant right. Off the record and not for attribution, the avenging angels of the spiritual counterreformation presumably continued to hope and plan for a permanent solution to the problem of a democracy too loose in its morals and too careless of its freedoms; on the record and when smiling for the cameras, they praised Judge Roberts as a man likely to interpret the Constitution as an instrument designed not to grant or create rights but to take them away, and they were glad to count him as an ally in the culture war that for the last thirty years has taken as its cause the "moral anarchy" sprung from the Pandora's box of the 1960s.
The nation's youth during that too noisy and fanciful a decade made a disgraceful spectacle of their poor conduct and unseemly deportment. Godless liberals poisoned the wells of learning at the Ivy League universities; feminists seized the radio station in Berkeley, California, and destroyed the Bing Crosby records; homosexuals infiltrated the US Navy and the Hollywood movie studios; black people stopped eating watermelon; pornography flourished; culture died. Everything that has since gone wrong for the country (the loss of the Vietnam War, the reversals of fortune in the stock market, the national addiction to expensive drugs and cheap food) follows not from any fault in the political or economic systems but from the flaws of individual character - entirely too many people unwilling to accept personal responsibility, drifting away from the old Norman Rockwell faith in marriage, thrift, hard work, chastity, ennobling self-sacrifice. The American people therefore stand to be corrected, weaned from the teat of mindless decadence put through the mill of a moral awakening.
The uplifting program of social hygiene fits the agenda of both the religious and the free-market right, and among all the company of public scolds (William Bennett, George Will, Alan Bloom, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, et cetera) none has been more strident or excessively praised over the last thirty years than Robert Bork, the federal appellate judge who in 1987 was denied appointment to the Supreme Court. Eighteen years later it comes as no surprise that Bork should appear, in the newspaper op-ed pages and on the Washington talk-show circuit, as the lead soloist in the chorus of voices demanding the complete and total annihilation of modern liberalism and all its works. Preaching his familiar sermon for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page on July 5, Bork raged against "homosexual marriage", "racial and gender discrimination at the expense of white males", the criminal justice system "tipping the balance in favor of criminals", the Supreme Court corrupted by its liberal members, by their "philosophical incompetence" and their "disdain for the historic Constitution ..." Interviewed in late June by the New York Times, which identified him as "a prolific lecturer and author who functions as a kind of shadow justice" (that is, America's conscience-in-exile), Bork directed his most caustic insults at Justice Anthony M Kennedy, the Supreme Court judge regarded by the anti-democratic right as an overly genial believer in tolerance and consensus, and therefore, in the words of Pastor Dobson, "the most dangerous man in America". Bork cited Kennedy's observation that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life", in order to hold it up to scorn and ridicule. "What the Hell does that mean?" he said.
Bork's mean-mouthed suspicions accord with the rightward shifts of American thought and opinion that since September 2001 have sustained the Bush Administration's backing of its self-serving war on terror with the currency of fear - in line with the proliferation of checkpoints and surveillance cameras, with the medieval wall (twelve feet high, ten miles in circumference, topped up with razor wire) that surrounds the American embassy in Baghdad, with the legislation now before the Congress intended to strengthen the USA Patriot Act with the power of the administrative subpoena. Approved by the President and endorsed by the more punitive Republicans in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the new and improved investigative technology allows the FBI to access at will any individual's financial, medical, and employment records without that person's knowledge, without the prior approval of a judge or a grand jury.
At will, as a disciplinary measure, intended (as per the suggestion in Bertolt Brecht's poem "The Solution") "to dissolve the people and elect another". Brecht wrote the poem in response to the disruptions in East Germany on June 17 1953, when 300,000 industrial workers in 272 towns and cities staged a general strike and by so doing showed themselves unworthy of the government's respect. East Germany at the time lacked the resources to act on Brecht's advice. The Albanians presumably were available as a substitute people, but the baggage handling presented insuperable logistical difficulties, and so the Communist authorities settled for the instructional apparatus of a police state.
The solution doesn't answer to our own postmodern circumstance; too many Americans have too much money (enough to buy their own virtual-reality editions of both Heaven and Hell), and if we took seriously the complaints about the flaunting of pernicious liberties, we might have to close down the gambling casinos as well as the New York fashion shows and the traffic in prescription drugs. Much better to teach the lessons of obedience with heartwarming examples of proper conduct and correct behavior, to gradually disappear people who don't come up to the factory standard of the model citizen. Certainly we've begun to take important steps in the right direction. The news and entertainment media don't spoil the decoration of their show windows with unsightly forms of physical or intellectual depravity (no left-wing university professors, no slumdwellers, few women or horses without good teeth); the Congress denies to the poorer grades of domestic help the indulgence of adequate health care and a decent education, thus ensuring their continued invisibility and maybe, with luck and another three or four foreign wars, their eventual extinction.
Let the Supreme Court fall safely into the hands of magistrates like those known to the Puritans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts as inspectors of souls, and within another ten or fifteen years we might manage to cultivate a new breed of true American citizens of tomorrow, proud of their deodorants and bathroom floors, quick to report a neighbor seen talking to an Arab or smoking a cigarette, so accustomed to the lack of privacy that they dare not read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, much less eat a peach. At this still early stage of metamorphosis it's probably too soon to hope for a population of deaf-mutes, but I can imagine every fully realized twenty-first-century American to be as innocent of politics as a sun-dried tomato or a quart of milk, grateful for the occasional permissions to make love to one's lawful spouse (careful to remember while doing so that Jesus is in one's heart), dreaming of a career in law enforcement.
Under the rules of procedure governing the Senate Judiciary Committee's autumn confirmation hearings, Judge Roberts will not be required to touch upon what the first President Bush was wont to call "the vision thing". When asked for his views on abortion, property rights, civil liberties, or the mating of stem cells, he can refuse to answer on the ground that the issue might one day come before the Court. Similar to the gifts of silence granted to criminals under the protection of the Fifth Amendment, the exercise of judicial privilege will guarantee the absence of either free or coherent speech. If the hearings fail to provoke an argument about the salvation of the nation's soul sufficiently venomous to merit the blessing of the Prophet Isaiah, the apostles of the radical and reactionary right can always relieve their frustrations by the staging of religious festivals on Capitol Hill - medieval jugglers throwing balls for the Virgin Mary, Christian morality plays and performing bears, excited women holding aloft the papier-mache head of the sainted Bork, crowns of thorns and flights of doves, Mel Gibson staggering up Pennsylvania Avenue under the weight of a blood-soaked cross.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
Harper's Magazine (September 2005)
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the
Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the
government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be
easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
- Bertolt Brecht
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the morning of July 1 announced her retirement from the Supreme Court, and within a matter of hours the several armies of the imperial right - conservative and neoconservative, libertarian and evangelical were on the move to what their general staff officers perceived as the field of Armageddon. Here at last was the final battle in America's thirty-year culture war, the heaven sent chance to restructure the Supreme Court as an office of the Holy Inquisition, to redeem the multitudes who had forfeited the confidence of Jerry Falwell and the credit card companies, to cleanse the country of its sins (among them the abomination of gay marriage and the blasphemy of legal abortion), to reinterpret the Constitution as an initial public offering or a program of religious instruction.
The newspapers over the Independence Day weekend reported a furious ringing of phones in the headquarters tents of the ideologically pure in heart determined to take from the American people as much of their independence as could be disposed of in the lime pits of judicial review. Different division commanders were intent upon different tactical maneuvers (guaranteeing the sanctity of property rights, assuring the display of the Ten Commandments in the nation's police stations and public schools, bringing the scales of justice into balance with the books of Deuteronomy and Ayn Rand), but the map arrows all pointed at the same strategic objective. Justice O'Connor's departure offered the first chance in eleven years for a new appointment to the Supreme Court, and if the vacancy was soon to be doubled by the ill health and probable retirement of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then now was the moment to win a great and glorious victory for God, mother, the free market, and the flag.
Operatives at The Federalist Society and The Heritage Foundation bent to the task of searching the Internet for slander with which to discredit Democratic politicians too well acquainted with the works of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, promised the assistance of 20,000 churches pledged to the quest for a Supreme Court nominee loyal to the judicial philosophy of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The Committee for Justice, formed three years ago at the behest of Karl Rove and captained by C Boyden Gray, formerly White House counsel to the first President George Bush, undertook to raise the money for a high-definition advertising campaign promoting the appointment of a jurist capable of reading the Constitution as it was written by the framers - that is, by a man or woman miraculously preserved in the placenta of the late eighteenth century. In time for the Washington television talk shows on Sunday, July 3, the ranks of conservative seraphim and libertarian cherubim had been joined by the National Association of Manufacturers (which assigned a committee of corporation lawyers to review a nominee's business qualifications), by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, by Focus on the Family, whose president, Dr James C Dobson, anticipated "a watershed moment in American history" and looked forward to the confrontation coming with a vengeance.
All the allied factions foresaw a rancorous political argument extended through the rest of the summer into the confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early autumn, and they took heart from what they regarded, not unreasonably, as the weakness of the opposition. The caucuses of leftist and liberal opinion (pro-abortion and pro-labor, in favor of protecting the environment and the country's dwindling inventory of civil rights) also devoted the Fourth of July weekend to a mustering of forces - staffing phone banks, hiring lobbyists, buying television time, setting up defensive countermeasures, soliciting the support of George Soros and Sean Penn - but the email alerts didn't carry an equivalent weight of passionate intensity and rhetorical armament; nor did they attract as much notice in either the mainline press or the blogosphere. Captain C B Gray signed a contract with Fox News to provide commentary tinged with the romance of pious polemic; Ralph G Neas, president of People for the American Way and the chief organizer of the secular regiments, issued a statement distinguished by its banality - "No matter what side you're on, everything you've believed in, everything you've cared about, everything you've fought for is at stake". The prominent Democrats in Washington (among them Senators Edward M Kennedy, Harry Reid, and Barbara Boxer) were careful to avoid strong language infected with partisan fervor. They declared their willingness to raise no loud objections if the President contented himself with a "mainstream conservative" in whom they could see trace elements of a mind not totally submerged in an ideological swamp.
The condition appeared to have been met when Mr. Bush named as his Supreme Court appointee John G Roberts of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. At a White House press conference on the evening of July 19, Judge Roberts was introduced as a non-dogmatic upholder of the Constitution who didn't confuse the moral with the civil law, and over the course of the next several days what could be learned of his record and character tended to confirm that supposition - fifty years old, born in Buffalo, New York, and educated at Harvard Law School, a devout Roman Catholic, by all accounts an amiable and remarkably intelligent man, conservative in his politics but by no means unreasonable in judgment or rabid in termperament. Because he had served on the Appellate bench for only two years, he hadn't had occasion to provide enough written opinions from which to draw inferences about his judicial philosophy. On the evidence of the judge's prior service as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush Administration, it could be assumed that he disapproved of abortion and favored the enlargement of the federal police power, but the lack of specific information temporarily disarmed his prospective enemies entrenched in the salients on the liberal left.
Nor were there any public expressions of disappointment from the cadres of the militant right. Off the record and not for attribution, the avenging angels of the spiritual counterreformation presumably continued to hope and plan for a permanent solution to the problem of a democracy too loose in its morals and too careless of its freedoms; on the record and when smiling for the cameras, they praised Judge Roberts as a man likely to interpret the Constitution as an instrument designed not to grant or create rights but to take them away, and they were glad to count him as an ally in the culture war that for the last thirty years has taken as its cause the "moral anarchy" sprung from the Pandora's box of the 1960s.
The nation's youth during that too noisy and fanciful a decade made a disgraceful spectacle of their poor conduct and unseemly deportment. Godless liberals poisoned the wells of learning at the Ivy League universities; feminists seized the radio station in Berkeley, California, and destroyed the Bing Crosby records; homosexuals infiltrated the US Navy and the Hollywood movie studios; black people stopped eating watermelon; pornography flourished; culture died. Everything that has since gone wrong for the country (the loss of the Vietnam War, the reversals of fortune in the stock market, the national addiction to expensive drugs and cheap food) follows not from any fault in the political or economic systems but from the flaws of individual character - entirely too many people unwilling to accept personal responsibility, drifting away from the old Norman Rockwell faith in marriage, thrift, hard work, chastity, ennobling self-sacrifice. The American people therefore stand to be corrected, weaned from the teat of mindless decadence put through the mill of a moral awakening.
The uplifting program of social hygiene fits the agenda of both the religious and the free-market right, and among all the company of public scolds (William Bennett, George Will, Alan Bloom, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, et cetera) none has been more strident or excessively praised over the last thirty years than Robert Bork, the federal appellate judge who in 1987 was denied appointment to the Supreme Court. Eighteen years later it comes as no surprise that Bork should appear, in the newspaper op-ed pages and on the Washington talk-show circuit, as the lead soloist in the chorus of voices demanding the complete and total annihilation of modern liberalism and all its works. Preaching his familiar sermon for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page on July 5, Bork raged against "homosexual marriage", "racial and gender discrimination at the expense of white males", the criminal justice system "tipping the balance in favor of criminals", the Supreme Court corrupted by its liberal members, by their "philosophical incompetence" and their "disdain for the historic Constitution ..." Interviewed in late June by the New York Times, which identified him as "a prolific lecturer and author who functions as a kind of shadow justice" (that is, America's conscience-in-exile), Bork directed his most caustic insults at Justice Anthony M Kennedy, the Supreme Court judge regarded by the anti-democratic right as an overly genial believer in tolerance and consensus, and therefore, in the words of Pastor Dobson, "the most dangerous man in America". Bork cited Kennedy's observation that "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life", in order to hold it up to scorn and ridicule. "What the Hell does that mean?" he said.
Bork's mean-mouthed suspicions accord with the rightward shifts of American thought and opinion that since September 2001 have sustained the Bush Administration's backing of its self-serving war on terror with the currency of fear - in line with the proliferation of checkpoints and surveillance cameras, with the medieval wall (twelve feet high, ten miles in circumference, topped up with razor wire) that surrounds the American embassy in Baghdad, with the legislation now before the Congress intended to strengthen the USA Patriot Act with the power of the administrative subpoena. Approved by the President and endorsed by the more punitive Republicans in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the new and improved investigative technology allows the FBI to access at will any individual's financial, medical, and employment records without that person's knowledge, without the prior approval of a judge or a grand jury.
At will, as a disciplinary measure, intended (as per the suggestion in Bertolt Brecht's poem "The Solution") "to dissolve the people and elect another". Brecht wrote the poem in response to the disruptions in East Germany on June 17 1953, when 300,000 industrial workers in 272 towns and cities staged a general strike and by so doing showed themselves unworthy of the government's respect. East Germany at the time lacked the resources to act on Brecht's advice. The Albanians presumably were available as a substitute people, but the baggage handling presented insuperable logistical difficulties, and so the Communist authorities settled for the instructional apparatus of a police state.
The solution doesn't answer to our own postmodern circumstance; too many Americans have too much money (enough to buy their own virtual-reality editions of both Heaven and Hell), and if we took seriously the complaints about the flaunting of pernicious liberties, we might have to close down the gambling casinos as well as the New York fashion shows and the traffic in prescription drugs. Much better to teach the lessons of obedience with heartwarming examples of proper conduct and correct behavior, to gradually disappear people who don't come up to the factory standard of the model citizen. Certainly we've begun to take important steps in the right direction. The news and entertainment media don't spoil the decoration of their show windows with unsightly forms of physical or intellectual depravity (no left-wing university professors, no slumdwellers, few women or horses without good teeth); the Congress denies to the poorer grades of domestic help the indulgence of adequate health care and a decent education, thus ensuring their continued invisibility and maybe, with luck and another three or four foreign wars, their eventual extinction.
Let the Supreme Court fall safely into the hands of magistrates like those known to the Puritans in seventeenth-century Massachusetts as inspectors of souls, and within another ten or fifteen years we might manage to cultivate a new breed of true American citizens of tomorrow, proud of their deodorants and bathroom floors, quick to report a neighbor seen talking to an Arab or smoking a cigarette, so accustomed to the lack of privacy that they dare not read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, much less eat a peach. At this still early stage of metamorphosis it's probably too soon to hope for a population of deaf-mutes, but I can imagine every fully realized twenty-first-century American to be as innocent of politics as a sun-dried tomato or a quart of milk, grateful for the occasional permissions to make love to one's lawful spouse (careful to remember while doing so that Jesus is in one's heart), dreaming of a career in law enforcement.
Under the rules of procedure governing the Senate Judiciary Committee's autumn confirmation hearings, Judge Roberts will not be required to touch upon what the first President Bush was wont to call "the vision thing". When asked for his views on abortion, property rights, civil liberties, or the mating of stem cells, he can refuse to answer on the ground that the issue might one day come before the Court. Similar to the gifts of silence granted to criminals under the protection of the Fifth Amendment, the exercise of judicial privilege will guarantee the absence of either free or coherent speech. If the hearings fail to provoke an argument about the salvation of the nation's soul sufficiently venomous to merit the blessing of the Prophet Isaiah, the apostles of the radical and reactionary right can always relieve their frustrations by the staging of religious festivals on Capitol Hill - medieval jugglers throwing balls for the Virgin Mary, Christian morality plays and performing bears, excited women holding aloft the papier-mache head of the sainted Bork, crowns of thorns and flights of doves, Mel Gibson staggering up Pennsylvania Avenue under the weight of a blood-soaked cross.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
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