Sheridan: Con-Law

PHILOSOPHICAL MUSINGS ON JUSTICE, LIFE, CONSERVATISM, LIBERALISM

What is it about Conservatives?  Liberals?  Radicals?  Revolutionaries?

What is is attitude.

Attitudes form.

And they persist.

Boy do they persist.

You have to try hard to change basic attitudes.

I know.

I've tried.

But I still remember some of the idiotic things I believed as a youth.

Or 'yoot,' as we pronounced it where I grew up in New Yawk, Staten Island, actually, Four Corners, to be precise.

There were no blacks, Aians, Muslims, or gays to be seen.  For these, you had to grow up and move away.  Exceptions were few and far between.

The conservative attitude is, "I've got mine, Jack," and "Not only that, I plan to keep it.  I earned it (or inherited it fair and square) and if you didn't, then that's your tough luck, you deserve your fate.  Pray harder next time, or pick better parents, or genes, or what have you."  "Yes, I'm lucky I was born here and now, and not in Africa or some other place where they're starving.  I'm not responsible for that and don't plan to do anything, much less much about it.  And that's the way I plan to stay."

The conservative attitude is, "You're responsible for your own fate.  Work and you will be rewarded.  No work, no eat.  Don't ask for handouts, for none will be forthcoming.

The conservative attitude is, "Something bad has befallen you?  What a shame.  What did you do to deserve that, I wonder?  Moral impurity is a terrible thing.  It accounts for what happened to you.  You must have done something wrong, otherwise God would have smiled on you.  You believe in God, right?  No?  Well, then, that's the explanation, isn't it."

The conservative attitude is, "If you were morally impure once, you are tainted forever, just as God ordained.  Somewhere, He must've ordained that, whatever 'ordained' means.  Ordered, I suppose, as in 'carved in stone.'

So, if you got drunk and drove into a schoolbus and killed a child, or some children, that stays with you all of your life.  Or dealt drugs, or used drugs, or shoplifted and got caught...  You get the picture.  We all have a rap sheet listing all of our infractions, misdemeanors, and felonies, the only problem being that our rap sheets are mostly private and not open to inspection, which is a good reason for not trusting anyone unless you know them really, really well.

Conservatives are slow to welcome change; indeed they often serve to retard change, as in retarded.  Change often means giving the other bloke a fair chance.  Why put someone on equal footing who didn't work to earn it, is the conservative ideal.  Blacks, in the days of Jim Crow, for example.  Did they work hard in business, banking, insurance, investment?  No?  Well, tough on them.  But did they have much chance to work in these economy spearheading industries?  No?  Well why not?  Was it because they were barred by prevailing attitudes crystalized into law and practice?  Well, what of it; they still didn't do the creating, therefore why should they be on equal footing with whites who did.

You can see where this led.  Not a happy place.  It's taken us, the country, generations to deal with.

The people leading the way to change are called radicals, for the newcomers on the block, and liberals for those who chime in after them.  Yes, this is a bit unfair, to have one set of people enslave another, they say.  Or to discriminate against them in jobs, housing, public accommodations, and in every other way possible known to the imagination of man.  But not the draft, of course.  Blacks got drafted along with whites to fight for the country that was keeping them down as much as humanly possible.

This began to chane slightly, after the war.  That would be WWII.  We used to put numbers on them.  Now we say Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and like that.

We lost 37,000 on D-Day, Normandy.  One landing.  One day, maybe two.  58,000 in Vietnam.  4,000 in Iraq.  Afghanistan.  650,000 in the Civil War, both sides.

The liberal attitude is more "Live and let live."

When I served as a prosecuting attorney (seven years, five in San Francisco, two in Contra Costa County across the San Francisco Bay, where I'd migrated years ago), my office-mate and I along used to discuss our fellow prosecutors.  Some avoided trial while some were ready for a good fight.  The more risk-averse found ways to give away the case by lowering the price of a disposition to one that could not be refused by the defense.  Then there were the 'search and destroy' types, the ones who stuck fast to those deserving of the full measure of prosecutorial zeal.

The more conservative you were, it semed, the more willing you were to search and destroy.

I suppose liberals could be the same way, only with a different class of targeted individual.

"Live and let live," vs. "Search and destroy," if you like simple labels, which we all do, of course.

Liberals believe that people can outgrow their sins. Juvenile court, where the state acts as the parent of wayward children in the hope of reforming them into becoming responsible citizens is a liberal ideal.  Juvenile court is the parent who hopes that despite all the mischief of today's child, he, or she, will turn into tomorrow's responsible adult.  Sometimes this happens. 

Liberals believe that one's rap sheet should remain hidden on privacy grounds, lest it turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which it no doubt would.  If everyone knew every idiotic thing we did as youngsters we'd never get anywhere, would we.  No, we would very likely not.

Conservatives neither like nor trust their very fallible fellow man.

Liberals embrace their very fallible fellow man, on the "But for the grace of God, there go I," theory.  They believe in the perfectability of their fellow man, while the conservative, being a bastard down deep, knows just what a bastard is his fellow man, down deep. 

I've known myself and too many other people to believe in the perfectability of myself, much less others.  Or to believe that we're all bastards all of the time.  Maybe we're good some days and bad on the rest, or vice versa, it's hard to say, isn't it.

Conservatives didn't want the women to vote.  They didn't want the blacks to vote either, but that's a whole 'nother category, isn't it. 

The thing about rights is that no one will give them to you.  You have to grab them and fight for them.  It's sort of a zero sum game.  Your lack of rights equates to someone else having more.  So if you want yours, you must seize them from someone who has them and doesn't readily want to relinquish them, for their capture of your rights means that they have political power and you don't.   This is the theory of the civil rights movement and of the abolition of slavery, for those interested.

The American revolution against the British monarchy and its corrupt parliament, affectionately known as the 'mother country,' as in hated stepmother; was this the product of liberal idealists?  Conservative?  Radicals?  Revolutionaries?

Revolutionaries seeking to secure what was by rights theirs.  By rights being a relative term as compared with the British who held them while we didn't.

Yesterdays idealists, liberals, radicals and revolutionaries become tomorrow's conservatives.

An example:  Today's conservatives want tax and spend government run by liberals to get off their back and out of the office what with forms, and regulations, all leading to more taxes.  And spending for people who didn't invest in their (the conservatives') successful business.

They prefer laissez-faire, meaning government hands-off.  Reagan deregulation. 

The idea goes back to beyond Pres. Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson, the hero of New Orleans in 1815.  The Tennessee volunteer was the first president out of the West, as opposed to Virginia and New England, where the country got started.  He was the first common man.  His election in 1828 represented the victory of the common man, epitomized with the storming of the White House by a lot of his fellow countrymen during the Inauguration Day festivities on March 5 of that year.  The date was later moved up to January 20 to shorten the lame-duck period between early the November election and the swearing-in of the victor where there was a change of tenant in the President's House.

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was the first tycoon (See T.J. Stiles excellent 2009 biography, (The First Tycoon, Alfred Knopf), was a sailboat captain on the New York Bay, running first out of Staten Island, then New Jersey, by steamboat, and then up and down the Hudson River, competing against the Livingston line's monopoly (N.Y. State granted franchise to be the only ferry operator on the river between Manhattan and Albany).

Vanderbilt was a cut-throat competitor, slashing rates, adding faster, more luxurious, steamboats, and generally making it cheaper and better to ride and shop on his line than the next guys.  The others hated him for it.  He outcompeted them.  He didn't mind if the states in which he operated enacted general laws applying to all ferry, and later rail, operators, but did mind it greatly when special-interest legislation was enacted, usually through bribery, favoring his competitor over him.  He much preferred government staying out of his business.  Laissez-faire.  In this sense he was a revolutionary, for the existing business culture into which he strode elbows flying was a culture of deference in which you had betters, or at least you should believe that's what the more successful before you were.  Vanderbilt didn't believe that.  He was as good as any man.  It took a long time before the man from StatNisland achieved a measure of respect, much less social acceptance by established Society.  In those pre-1830 days, the rich got richer by applying for and receiving government investment, contracts, bank charters, turnpike companies and river and bridge franchises (exclusive rights to operate, i.e. government sanctioned monopolies to mint money).  The rich invited government into their business, so long as government didn't regulate and tax that business.  The initial bribe to the legislators was an acceptable cost of developing the franchise, to be made back in fares and tolls. Government involvement was good, or at least a necessary condition, to making good, up to a point.  Our Constitution was drafted by representatives of the culture of deference seeking to uphold and maintain their privileged position in society. 

See Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Washington, all people who worked for a wage for no man.  Even Franklin, after unhappily working for his older brother, a Boston printer, lit out for Philadelphia, where he worked briefly until he was able to open his own print-shop and get a government contract to print stamps, money, etc. He became so wealth, so quickly, that he was able to devote his long life to science and politics.  He was among the very first to advocate breaking away once it became clear that the marriage to the mother country was on the rocks.

By the post-Civil War 1870s, however, Jacksonian laissez-faire, along with cutthroat competion, as exemplified by Commodore Vanderbilt, was no longer the mark of radicalism but of conservatism.  Today's conservatives owe their fundamental beliefs and attitudes to a set of values set by people like Jackson and his devotee, Vanderbilt, along with many others, who were suffused with the 'government-off-my-back' or laissez-faire attitude towards business and investment.  Naturally this idea, which idealized selfishness and exclusion of others from the benefits from taking risk, became something worth upholding, preserving, and conserving, hence conservatism.

What other ideas, once liberal or radical, have become conservative?

Today, the idea that Catholic priests should be free to marry seems radical, espoused by church liberals.  Yet when the ban on priest marriage began, it was to protect Church property from marrying priests who sometimes left church property to family members as though it was theirs to give.  Perhaps in those days the land-tenure system didn't allow for keeping clear what belonged to the church and what belonged to its agent, the priest.  Today, with out system of recording title to land and maintaining records of property transactions, this should no longer be a problem.  Other faiths permit their spiritual leaders to marry, indeed encourage it.  It saves a lot of problems over misguided expression of sexuality, for one thing.

Here's a great quote from the economist, John Maynard Keynes:

The Columbia World of Quotations.  1996.

NUMBER:	32525
QUOTATION:	The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
ATTRIBUTION:	John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, ch. 24 (1936). The economist James M. Buchanan commented, “Why does Camelot lie in ruins? Intellectual error of monumental proportion has been made, and not exclusively by the politicians. Error also lies squarely with the economists. The ‘academic scribbler’ who must bear substantial responsibility is Lord Keynes ...” (The Consequences of Keynes, written with Richard E. Wagner and John Burton, 1978).

Sometimes I wonder whether today's conservatives get their ideas, or whether they know where they get their ideas from.  Perhaps you don't need to know the origin of your ideas in order to hold them dearly. 

But it's neater when you do, don't you agree?

LOOKING THE OTHER WAY

A lawyer, they say, is a person who can hold two inconsistent ideas in mind while acting on one and ignoring the other.

John Banville has broadened the example to all of us, not just the elect, ahem, I mean lawyers.  He's talking about a scandal in Ireland of church abuse of children under care because their parents couldn't care adequately for them.  Beatings, sexual abuse, intimidation, the works.  No one knew!  Everyone knew but kept their mouths shut.

Why?

We didn't know!

You knew damn well, you just didn't give a damn.

With Ireland, the issue was children.

With us it was slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination.

What else are we doing that we can't see?

***

---

May 23, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

A Century of Looking the Other Way

By JOHN BANVILLE

Dublin

EVERYONE knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen?

Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew.

I grew up in the 1950s, in Wexford, a small town on the southeast coast of Ireland. It was not a bad place in which to be young, if you came from a “respectable” family — which mainly meant not being poor — and had parents who were responsible and loving, as I had. The schools I attended were run by the Christian Brothers and, later, by diocesan priests. It helped to be good at one’s lessons, for then one evaded the more severe punishments which teachers reserved for the “duffers” in the class.

I remember one such duffer in particular. I shall call him Duffy. We were, I suppose, 9 or 10 at the time, and most of us by then had learned to read and write. Not Duffy, who was isolated from the rest of us and put to sit at a desk by himself, where he labored hour after hour transcribing the alphabet and simple words into his copybook.

Now and then our teacher would lift up Duffy’s work by one corner and display it to the class, inviting us in a tone of amused irony to admire “Duffy’s blots.” I have never forgotten Duffy’s expression on these occasions, a mingling of shame, sorrow and inarticulate rage. Often on the way home from school Duffy would waylay me and punch me and knock me down. Why would he not? I was top of the class, he was bottom; I was teacher’s pet, he was teacher’s victim and plaything.

I did not tell my parents about Duffy, about the humiliations that were piled on him daily in class or how he regularly vented his anger on me afterward. In the same way, I did not tell them of the beatings we were all subjected to by some of our teachers, with leather strap, cane or even fists. One did not bring home tales out of school. If we had, they would probably not have been listened to. The times were harsh, money was scarce and had to be worked hard for, and our task as children was to bear up and keep our mouths shut.

In time there grew up between Duffy and me a kind of awful intimacy, a very pale version of that which is said frequently to develop between a torture victim and the torturer. I saw the logic of Duffy’s position: his daily torments at the hands of his teacher must be avenged somehow. W. H. Auden, that wise old owl, puts it perfectly, as so often:

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

Well, not evil, not really. That was being done elsewhere, in places like the one that Duffy ended up in, Letterfrack Industrial School in Connemara, a far-off and isolated place where, according to the commission’s report, “those people who chose to abuse boys physically and sexually were able to do so for longer periods of time, because they could escape detection and punishment” and where violence “was practically a means of communication.”

One wants to believe that the abusers were those to whom evil had been done, which would go some way to accounting for their deeds. But then, one wants to believe, and disbelieve, all sorts of things, and so did our parents.

When I read the newspaper accounts of the commission’s findings — the report itself is more than 2,000 pages long — I found myself thinking again of Duffy, and the sweaty pact of silence that developed between us. It was an echo of that silence which, like the snow in Joyce’s story “The Dead,” was general all over Ireland, in those days. Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.

John Banville is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Sea.”

THE WAY WE SEE...THROUGH A LENS DARKLY

On CNN with Wolf Blitzer last evening was Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations who has written a new book on our making war on Saddam's Iraq.  He makes this point:

When you operate on the basis of an assumption, he says, referring to the belief our government held that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical) when in fact he was being evasive to inspection and lying to inspectors to conceal the fact that he'd long since given up having WMD (to keep his enemies worried that he might be stronger than he was), you see everything through the lens of the false assumption.

Seeing the world through different lenses, each a different tint, is so common as to be little noticed, much as we disregard the air we walk through unless it it windy, dirty, or smelly, much as a fish, we surmise, doesn't see the water when he thinks it clear.

We see through the lenses of our religion, culture, belief, prejudice, preconception.  We cannot see what we cannot believe or accept..

This is how we fool ourselves into believing crazy, false things, such as that witches are causing our neighbors to cause mischief and harm.  Salem, 1692.

Or that Saddam had WMD.  Bush, 2003.

You read it here.

WHAT IS CONSTITUTIONAL LAW? MUST IT BE WRITTEN?

No, you don't need a written constitution to have a constitution.

How can that be?  I thought we had a written constitution called the U.S. Constitution.  Isn't that what Constitutional Law is?

It is, but Conlaw (for short) is way more than the written constitution.  Britain has no written constitution,yet you can study British constitutional law.

How can you study British constitutional law if they don't have a written constitution?  Are they behind the times?

No, it's just that we were ahead of the times.  We were the first nation, as far as can be determined, to have a written constitution.  Bully for us.  Sometimes we observe it. The rest of the time we wrestle with it.

How about China?  Does China have a constitution?  I think it does, someplace; you'll have to look it up.  The Soviet Union had a beautiful constitution but they obeyed theirs far less than we observe ours.  Pres. Obama wants to authorize preventive detention, which is not quite why we elected him, as I recall.  Our constitution doesn't seem to authorize preventive detention, not for any considerable length of time, at least, so it may have to be changed to turn the illegal into the legal, the criminal into the lawful.

The following article from the NY Times today suggests what China's real constitutional law consists of, regardless of what its written menu of rights reads like, as some entrees, like freedom of expression, are not currently available.

Here's the deal:  In China, can you speak publicly about the Tiananmen Square Massacre in June, 1989? 

What are you crazy?

Here's an excerpt from the Times article, below:

And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?

“People would think he was insane,” said one Peking University history major in a recent interview. “You know where the line is drawn. You can think, maybe talk, think about the events of 1989. You just cannot do something that will have any public influence. Everybody knows that.”

What everybody knows is insane is where constitutional law ends and craziness begins.  How does everybody in China know that it is nuts to talk about Tiananmen?  Because when the students assembled their to protest their grievances against the undemocratic Communist party with all of its corruption into every corner of society, the Party called in the tanks and the troops and committed a massacre against defenseless civilians who were not trying to overthrow the party but to demonstrate in order to urge it to live up to its promises of democracy and equality, which it could never do, not without relinquising control.  That would mean instability, they think, and nothing frightens Chinese leaders more than the thought of instability.  Instability in China means that the regime falls and a new dynasty must arise from the ashes.  It has happened many times in China, each new dynasty taking over from the corrupt previous dynasty after a couple hundred years until its own corruption became too much for the man on the bottom to stomach any longer, whereupon at the next earthquake, typhoon, or other natural calamity, drought, flood, the Mandate of Heaven was said to be lost, justifying the uprising which overthrows the regime.  All regimes in China are corrupt.  Why?  Because the superstructure of governance is from the top down, as in fascist states.  I hesitate to mention such as Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany, but then I think of Chairman Mao, who killed more Chinese than Hitler killed Jews, and for no better reason.  Both were maniacs with power that no one could challenge.

When everybody knows what it would be insane to say or do in a society, that is constitutional law.

A constitution, you see, is how a society is constituted.  You don't have a written constitution telling you how to live in your family, do you?  Yet your family remains constituted.  A card game is constituted.  A back alley crap game is constituted.  Any activity of anything, from a beehive to an ant colony is constituted.  Students of bees and ants note the queen bee and the worker bees who serve her.  In describing the bee colony, the student describes how it is constituted.  The constitutional law of a society is thus described.

In Britain, certain documents are said to constitute the society, from Magna Carta, 1215, promising due process of law to the acts of Henry VIII breaking from the Roman Catholic Church headquarted in Rome and led by the Pope, to the establishment of the Church of England headed by him.  A series of religious conspiracies, wars and plots followed, resulting in a settlement holding that only a Protestant may serve as monarch, no Catholics need apply.  A struggle between the king and parliament resulted in a civil war which recognized the supremacy of Parliament.  British sovereignty is said to reside with Parliament, no longer the king, who is not sovereign any more.  With us, we say that sovereignty resides with the people, i.e. the voters.  We've gradually expanded the pool of those allowed to vote to include all adult males with no regard to land owned or net worth, as was the case at the time of the revolution from Britain beginning 1776 through the founding, officially, in 1789, with the first capitol being in New York City down around the Wall Street area.  Later black males (15th Amendment, ratified 1868) and later still women were given the vote.  Blacks were disenfranchised despite the 15th Amendment for almost a century of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws in the South and plain discrimination elsewhere, such as the North.  Informal practices of segregation by race were the de facto constitutional law of America until the success of the civil rights movement bore fruit in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which banned discrimination in public accommodations and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which sought to eliminate the vestiges of the Black Codes and Jim Crow which banned or severely reduced Negro voter registration and voting especially in the South, but the North as well.

The fault lines that people know to exist are  part of the constitutional law of any society, from a church to a nation.

A scholar can study and describe a society and his resulting paper will be a description, not the law.

Our written constitution needed to be understood.  Was it a description or was it law?  John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison held it to be more than a description of some other law and was law itself, that had to be applied and obeyed.

In Britain, certain laws and practices are said to be so fundamental to the understanding of that polity, that society, that government, that they can be said to be constitutional.

With China, there's the written constitution and what people know to be true despite the nice words of their constitution.

People are the same all over, and we have little cause to gloat because we think our constitution is better or higher.  We suspend ours at the drop of a hat, meaning when we are afraid, such as after Pearl Harbor and after 9-11.  With  China, it's 9-11.  Sometimes I have trouble remembering that.  Pres. Obama, with his backtracking on Guantanamo, military tribunals, preventive detention, and some alleged middle ground that I'm having trouble seeing, between the criminal process and the POW status, has me perplexed.  An "enemy combatant" seems to be either a criminal or an enemy.   We prosecute criminals and we shoot enemies on the battlefield.  But what if the enemy is a terrorist and we capture him?  Do we hold a show trial and make him a martyr?  I don't think so.  Armies are not geared for scooping up evidence and witnesses to make criminal cases.  They kill enemy forces and capture the rest, holding them, traditionally, at least, in prisons as prisoners of war, protected by international guaranty since World War I, under the Geneva Convention protocols.  They're fed, visited by the Red Cross, not abused, and released when the war is ended.  But when is that where the enemy consists of terrorists who draw from a culture that keeps replenishing them?  This is the new conundrum which challenges our old conceptions of what is right for us to do and what is not.  Such as torture, preventive, indefinite detention, etc.

Here's the China story:

---

May 22, 2009

Tiananmen Now Seems Distant to China’s Students

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — On April 30, the cellphones of the 32,630 students at Peking University, a genteel institution widely regarded as one of China’s top universities, buzzed with a text message from the school administration. It warned students to “pay attention to your speech and behavior” on Youth Day because of a “particularly complex” situation.

Few students had to puzzle over the meaning. Youth Day, on May 4, commemorates a 1919 student protest against foreign imperialism and China’s weakness in resisting it. Seventy years later, in 1989, students from Peking University were again massing in the center of Beijing, demanding democracy. The student movement shook the ruling Communist Party to its core and ended with a military crackdown and hundreds of deaths.

And if a student today proposed a pro-democracy protest?

“People would think he was insane,” said one Peking University history major in a recent interview. “You know where the line is drawn. You can think, maybe talk, think about the events of 1989. You just cannot do something that will have any public influence. Everybody knows that.”

Most students also appear to accept it. For 20 years, China’s government has made it abundantly clear that students and professors should stick to the books and stay out of the streets. Students today describe 1989 as almost a historical blip, a moment too extreme and traumatic ever to repeat.

But whether democracy still inspires them is a more complex question.

Interviews with students and teachers at Peking University, as with experts on China here and abroad, draw a layered portrait of today’s students: disinclined to protest, but also lacking the economic grievances that helped ignite protests in 1989; proud of China’s achievements and flocking to the Communist Party, but seldom driven by ideology.

They are disturbed by government corruption and censorship and are eager to study in the West, especially the United States. And despite the government’s attempts to wipe the 1989 protests from Chinese history, some have learned what happened. All but one of eight Peking University students interviewed for this article, for instance, said they had managed to download an acclaimed — and banned — documentary on the Tiananmen protests and view it in their dorm rooms.

“There is a stereotypical view that students are not interested in democracy. I don’t buy it,” Cheng Li, research director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. “At the very least, they have a mixed opinion of the Communist Party.”

Xia Yeliang, a Peking University professor, said many students supported democracy in theory but did not want to risk their futures to fight for it. Students joke that they will get involved once pro-democracy forces gather steam, he said. “A rather high percentage of students are not interested in politics,” he said. “They say, ‘We know this is a good thing, but what relation does it have to us?’ They think about their personal affairs, how to get a job, how to go abroad.”

Even the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, People’s Daily, laments a general lack of idealism on campus. “Many university students are clearly very utilitarian in their thinking,” People’s Forum, a magazine published by People’s Daily, complained this month after a conducting a student survey. “Everything is based on ‘whether or not it is useful to me,’ ” the magazine said.

In fact, today’s students have more to lose than did protesters 20 years ago. Then, university students believed that their futures were endangered by a soaring inflation rate of 28 percent, rampant government corruption and shrinking job prospects, according to a 2001 book on the Tiananmen movement by Dingxin Zhao, a University of Chicago sociology professor. Many had lost hope in the government’s economic reforms.

Today, even students who criticize Communist rule are gratified by China’s great strides. “Sometimes we don’t like the policies of our government,” said Wang Yongli, a fourth-year physics major. “But on the other hand, nowadays we are proud of the country and the government because they have moved so many people to a better life.”

The Communist Party is careful to cultivate this image, while seeking to defuse longings for democracy by vowing to govern “democratically.”

Officials say they oppose Western-style multiparty democracy as wrong for China, but embrace the idea of consultation, public review and balloting under party rule. China will open up the political system, step by step, as the country becomes wealthier and more stable, officials promise.

Some China analysts suggest that student discontent could rise if the current economic crisis clouds their futures. China sends nine times as many students to institutions of higher education now as it did in 1989, and competition for good jobs is fierce. Nearly one in four graduates last year could not find work, Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported.

But since 1989, Communist Party leaders have realized that they ignore youth at their peril. The government is now trying to ease job anxieties with training programs and incentives for graduates to work in rural areas. “If you are worried, then I am more worried than you,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told one student group in December.

The party has also ratcheted up recruitment and political education, making college students the party’s fastest-growing segment, said Susan L. Shirk, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. More than 8 percent of all students were party members in 2007, compared with fewer than 1 percent in 1989. At elite institutions like Peking University, percentages are much higher.

Some of those students echo the party’s line that Western-style democracy does not suit China. “China has a large population, and education has a long way to go,” said Song Chao, a Peking University ecology major. “Considering that, we need to put some regulations on people. The major task for China now is development.”

Others hope to nudge the party toward reform. “Of course, if we could become a democratic society, we would like that,” said another history major and party aspirant. “But this is not something you can achieve by radical means. What if there is chaos?”

But a majority of students seek party membership not as an ideological statement but rather as a means to a better job, the survey published by People’s Forum concluded. At Peking University, many students say they nap through the university’s much mocked, though mandatory, political thought classes. “Even the teachers know they are teaching rubbish,” one senior said.

Most students will make such statements only anonymously because government control of campus speech remains tight. Professors say some students are assigned to report to administrators if they hear teachers adopting antigovernment lines. Most students interviewed for this article did not want to be identified, saying their comments might be negatively noted in their files.

Five years ago, the university shut down a computer bulletin board — a vibrant hub of information for 300,000 users — after the central government’s education minister complained that it did not always reflect “the right view.” Students say they are careful about what they write on the new, restricted and monitored board because their identities can be traced.

Surveys show that four of five university students still rely on China’s heavily censored media for their news. But in a digital age when nearly 70,000 Chinese students are studying in the United States and roughly 163,000 foreign students study at Chinese universities, walls against information are porous.

One senior recalled an excruciating roundtable discussion with foreign journalists who visited Peking University in 2007 and asked about the government crackdown on student demonstrators in 1989. “They always ask about this June 4 incident, and we just keep silent,” she said. “It is not because we don’t want to talk. It is because we have no idea what exactly happened!

“I felt a little bit humiliated because we don’t know our own history,” she said. “So I went to the library and I read about June 4. Basically, everything was written by foreign journalists.”

The curbs on public debate can reduce even political controversies on campus to the status of rumors. Two Peking University professors were among the first to sign Charter 08, an online pro-democracy manifesto released in December and backed by many intellectuals.

After signing, Professor Xia, the economist, said he was forced to resign from positions at two research institutes. His fellow signer, He Weifang, a celebrated law professor, was transferred to an obscure college in China’s far west. Professor He’s exile was news overseas. But much like the coming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, it drew little notice from students.

One student defended the professor with an anonymous post on the campus’s computer bulletin board. “The day will come,” he wrote, “when Professor He can go where he wants.”

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting. Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research.

JUSTICE & MERCY

A tragic double homicide.  Byclists are cruising along a road when over a hill comes a drifting automobile and crashes into them, killing them both.  The driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, having worked a twelve-hour shift at work the day before, and now was into his second twelve-hour swing.  The twenty-eight-year-old driver plead guilty to two counts of vehicular manslaughter, misdemeanors, and has been sentenced to four months in the county jail with eligibility for work furlough, meaning he reports to work during the day and sleeps at the sheriff's work furlough dormitory overnight.  He is required to perform 800 hours of community service.  His previous record is clean.  He's a normally law-abiding person.  In fact he is a deputy sheriff who was on patrol at the time he fell asleep at the wheel killing two people.

Is this justice?  Did he receive preferential treatment? There have been some protests.  One group has called on the sheriff's department to change its work rules to prevent deputies from having to work twelve-hour shifts back-to-back in the hope of preventing a similar tragedy.

The sister of one of the victims was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday, May 9, 2009 (sfgate.com) as saying "The sorrow that I imagine Deputy Council carries is the greatest punishment he will experience.  Justice and mercy are meaningless without each other. 

The incident occurred, according to the news report, on March 9, 2008 in Cupertino, California. The prosecutor who entered the plea deal called the sentence appropriate in light of all of the circumstances.  "This is a tragic case for everybody involved."

The deputy, who has been on paid administrative leave, will remain eligible to retain his law enforcement position.  Civil lawsuits remain.

Justice and mercy, words representing ideas, put together so closely, struck me and caused me to pause to think about them.

Justice, the unattainable ideal and goal of imperfect man and law.   Mercy, the attempt to ameliorate harsh justice with an element of human understanding, sorrow, and compassion.  There, but for the grace of God, go I.

The sister who made the remark strikes me as being an unusually wise and conscientious person, someone who could rise above the tragic circumstances of the loss of a brother and his friend due to a momentary lapse of another.  She's taught us all a good lesson about the meaning of justice, that it must be more than draconian.  It must contain an element of human understanding of the predicament in which we all find ourselves, realizing that the world is a complex assortment of systems interacting, sometimes with tragic results.  The sheriff's work schedule, needed to run a department with hundreds of deputies, the bicyclists, training for a race, the deputy, fatigued beyond his ability to stay awake a moment longer.  Yes, he should have realized.  That's why he plead guilty and accepted his responsibility, as we say.

Years ago, as a new prosecutor age 29-years-old, I was assigned a file in which the defendant, speeding along the road, ran into another car, killing the two occupants.  He plead guilty and was sentenced by the judge to a year in the county jail.  One year for two lives.  I'd thought that too light.  I've seen other cases over the years where through inadvertence one person caused the death of another, or more than another.

It is very difficult to make the punishment fit the crime in some circumstances.  Often all the court can do is to make the punishment fit the goal of constraining the accused to better fit into society in the future, leaving the rest to God, as some tragedies are beyond the earthly jurisdiction of the court.to repair.

Mercy and justice, one and forever, one and inseparable, with thanks to Daniel Webster in his reply to Senator Haynes in an address memorized by school-children in the 19th century, referring to the Union divided over slavery.