Sheridan: Con-Law

KING GEORGE W: EVEN THE REPUBLICANS ARE UNHAPPY; ESPECIALLY THE REPUBLICANS

Carolyn Lochhead of the S.F. Chronicle has this good piece on the trouble with a President who seems to regard himself as Charles I of England regarded Himself.  Divine right of kings and all that.  Lost his head, I'm afraid.

The other day I heard our president state that those who have difficulty swallowing his lies on the wonderful prospects we have in the war on Iraq are "soft on Terrorists."

Perhaps we're just hard on the truth.

Perhaps we don't need a return to the right-wing rhetoric that I grew up with during the Cold War when anyone who didn't go out of his way to support every harebrained scheme in opposition to the Soviet Union was a Communist, usually expressed in the form of a label, where those who disagreed with the most right wing among us were called Commie, pinko, Red, or their Fellow Traveler.

Bush is the closest thing I hope you'll ever see to an American Tyrant.  A maximum power leader who enjoys not only the support of both houses of Congress, but is acting as though he really is the Commander-in-Chief of the largest, most dangerous, armed force the world has ever seen.  He waves his magic war wand and we invade Iraq, which hadn't invaded, or threatened to invade, us.  He does this on the basis of lies, non-existent weapons of mass destruction.  And we have no way to depose him.  His finger is on the nuclear button for the next two years and we have North Korea acting up, threatening to detonate nuclear weapons.

Why do I feel as though we're about to enter, if we haven't already, a Cuban Missile Crisis (1962, freshman law school for me), only this time with Kim Jong Il instead of John F. Kennedy going eyeball to eyeball with Nikita Khruschev, who famously blinked, allowing the world to climb down from its perilous perch.  I hope our president is as smart, and rational, as they proved to be.

Do you think our president is smart?  What do you think of his ability to reason?  Has he impressed you with his ability to outsmart anyone, and explain to you in persuasive words and reason why his way is better than, say, that of France or Germany?  Or anyone else?

Earlier in his presidency, George W. Bush merely frightened the bejeezus our of Europe.  Now he's doing it to me, and us, it appears.  The other day there was a march in San Francisco, part of a group of marches around the country.  In S.F. the demonstrators, peaceful, I should add, erected an effigy of the U.S. president behind bars, making him a war criminal for his policies favoring suspension of law for detainees by his fiat, and torturing them, also by his fiat.  This is why Charles and England went to war against one another.  Charles said "I need to do this," and that was his justification for suspending Magna Carta, habeas corpus.  Bush says "I need to do this," and he suspends the rule of law for people he declares to be "enemy combatants," whatever that is.  It's whatever he says it is.

At least England had a Parliament to oppose its king.  We don't.  We have a Congress which supports our king.  This is truly a dangerous business.  Congress last week passed an eavesdropping and detention and torture bill which allows the president to suspend habeas corpus and deprives the courts of power to hear the cases arising out of the president's acts in that regard.

The U.S. Supreme Court is the only body in our government which has told the president that he has no "blank check" (thank you Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired) when it comes to detentions and some form of due process to test the legality of detention.  This is Magna Carta.  See the excerpt from Magna Carta, Ch. 29, set forth in the top left column of this blog.

Magna Carta was 1215, Runnymede, England, the barons forcing King John at sword-point to promise in writing not to detain them absent proper proceedings according to "the law of the land," which we translate as "due process of law."

King John I of England, meet King George W of America.  You two are going to like each other, a lot.

Cheney, Rice & Rumsfeld.  Why do I fear that the republic has been taken over by trolls from under the bridge?

Today begins Fleet Week in San Francisco, with a parade of ships and the Blue Angels burning holes in the sky above the city and the Bay. For the first time I'm seeing it as a propaganda show for the Navy and a reminder of what our White House can do.  Fighting to bring democracy to Baghdad?  Did Baghdad ask us to invade under the banner of democracy?

What's happened to democracy at home?  The Supreme Court appointed Bush in 2000.  The Chief Justice, William H. Rehnquist, died.  His former clerk, John Roberts, was appointed in his place.  We're a self-perpetuating church with the priests appointing the bishops.  Sort of makes it a bit clearer why the Puritans hated bishops and split for the New World in 1620 (to Plymouth Rock aboard the Mayflower) and in 1635 (to Massachusetts Bay, up the coast a bit, aboard the Arbella, led by John Winthrop, who hoped to build a city on a hill but got Boston instead).

The article below observes that Bush's conservative base seems to be leaving him in droves, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

Only two more years.  If we had a parliamentary system like Britain, we'd propose a vote of no confidence and vote out a rogue leader.  But we don't, and have to keep our fingers crossed that over the next two years he doesn't make us even more hated than we are.  Yesterday it was a few terrorists, today it's the world.  We've turned Iraq into a factory for the mass production of terrorist, who flock from all over the hopeless, desperate, belittled, Muslim world, which included Germany and France.  Every Muslim youth with no future has become our enemy.  They flock in droves to join Osama Bin Lama's Al Qaeda derivatives.  They become suicide bombers in Baghdad, only because we won't let them on airplanes.  They killed 4,000 Iraqi policemen over the past two years, according to today's New York Times.

Aside from that, Bush is doing a heckuva job of making America more safe than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

And I, perhaps foolishly, supported him when he said we needed to stop a tyrant, Saddam Hussein, who was buying and building the equipment needed to make nuclear weapons.  Maybe I didn't believe him, but was willing to believe his boy, Colin Powell, who said, "I have looked at the evidence and it is good."  But it wasn't, as he now admits, to his deep chagrin.  He wanted to be on the team and remain important, so he allowed himself to be suckered.  If Colin Powell can be suckered, so can the rest of America. 

Being suckered is believing what you want to believe because you want to believe it.

That's us.

That's America, as it follows the Pied Piper.

PURGE THE LIBERALS, CONSERVATIVES, FUNDAMENTALISTS, TALIBAN & FASCISTS

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi
(2003)

Pres. Ahmedinejad of Iran responds to calls for students to demand the ouster of "liberal and secular" teachers in Iran universities by saying this effort is underway and needs to be stepped up.  Meanwhile liberal and secular teachers have been expelled from teaching.  See the NYT Article reprinted below.

In Iran, after the revolution which deposed the Shah in 1979, komitehs (committees) of religious police led by mullahs (religious leaders heading religious court-decision tribunals) cracked down on people who thought differently.  On behalf of a woman who fled to the U.S. because under the Shah she'd been outspoken in favor of women's rights in Tehran, I filed an asylum application in the Immigration Court and argued to the satisfaction of the immigration judge that she would suffer persecution for her political beliefs were she to be deported back to the land of the komitehs.

The Taliban is either alive and well or mounting a comeback.

The religious police in Saudi Arabia, our great and good friend and gas station, also go around harassing women with a lock of hair showing or wearing an item of western dress.  The women, of course, being women, wear western dress indoors.  They change clothing on the plane to and from Europe.  The desire for freedom in the face of repression produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, not to say hypocrisy, probably on both sides.

This is the problem with the conservative-liberal divide.  The attitudes are so fundamentally contrasting, in opposition, that they amount to a religious difference, a religious war.

In a religious war, the attitude is all-enveloping, such that every incident and activity is viewed in ultimate terms.  Members of the opposite camp must be purged lest they infect the minds of the innocent.  Liberal professors have to be driven out.  Sen. McCarthy and Sen. McCarran were our Ahmedinejads in 1950.

Fear drives the conservatives.

Fear of conservatives drives the liberals.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a document, a book, illustrating what happens under a conservative, some would say fundamentalist regime having power to oust professors whose attitude is not that of the taliban.

Lolita is the name of the book and underage female in Vladimir Nabokov's novel from the 1950s.  Humbert Humbert is the man who is enchanted with her.  Lolita, 12, is jail bait, and he, middle-aged, loves it.  Maybe she does, too, I don't recall.  It's been a long time since I've read Lolita, but it was big when I was in high school or college, especially for the juicy parts.

Lolita was a scandal in the U.S.  It's an even bigger scandal in Iran under the komitehs and the ayatollahs. 

So if a teacher wants the students to read this book because we're going to get something out of it that we're going to talk about in class, this teacher is in big trouble.  The students fear reading a book the possession of which alone is probably enough to get them arrested.  They do not wish to risk thinking differently from their parents and the authorities who will give them jobs in the future.  They're hostages already to a  mentality that prohibits thinking differently.  The old Soviet word for thinking differently, I've read, is "dissident," translated.  That's what a dissident is, a person who thinks differently.

Who is a person who thinks differently?

We all think differently.

If no one tells you what you must think you are stuck.  You must think for yourself.  This is why so many people join churches.  In a church they tell you what to think.  Political parties are churches.  You think you are going to get a job in the Bush Administration, or the Clinton, without proving your bona fides as a dyed in the wool conservative or liberal?  It's not going to happen.  You'll be purged before your first assignment if you don't hew to the party line, and never get another.

You can go it alone, thinking for yourself, but you'd better have an independent source of income.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is the story of an ousted teacher in Tehran who opens her apartment to students, women, in order to study works of literature, to open the doors to their mind.  This has to be done in secret and we learn the details of the women's daily lives as they deal with the regime.

During my lifetime, the secret police of the Soviet Union, the KGB, the Gestapo of Hitler-Germany, the Stasi of East Germany, the komitehs of Iran, the Taliban of Afghanistan, and, of course the McCarthy Era here have been the major markers of repression, the very thing our Constitution was established to prevent.  How did our Founding Fathers know?!

They knew be cause their grandfathers had live through it in England during the Civil War that followed Henry VIII's break with Rome and the Catholic-Protestant plotting that his daughter Elizabeth I was forced to deal with during her long reign.  The history of the English 17th century is the story of competing talibans, Christian style.  Charles I lost his head, literally.  Our Framers took out an insurance policy against a repeat, called our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  We've been trying to preserve it ever since.

The forces in opposition are formidable.  Check the articles below for a clue.

My view:  Conserve what is worth conserving, and one of the best things to conserve is freedom of mind.  It is what prompts an ousted teacher in Tehran to read Lolita with students in secret, risking betrayal and repercussion.  She's teaching in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, as of last report.  Excellent book on a number of levels.  If you follow the links here, you'll see some of the reviews.

Lest we forget, I should mention, as has been pointed out, that our Framers placed a bet on the future, meaning your life and mine, and the new grand-daughter.  That bet is one in which the odds are never off, and we're letting it ride.  It is the ultimate all-day bet.  I dealt craps at Harrah's as a yoot,' and so I learned about such things.

This bet-your-life bet is not on the hard eight or the big red six, nor the lucky seven coming out.  This bet is on an idea.  Stupid thing on which to bet, right, an idea?  Maybe.

 

The idea on which our lives are riding, against the odds, is that by allowing people to think for themselves they'll do better than if we or some group, such as a church, party, or nation, tells them what to believe.

Thus we have this thing which they don't have in Iran, or several other places during my lifetime, mentioned above.  We have written down as law in our fundamental document the Freedom of Mind Amendment.

It's what allows you to read what I say and me to say it, right, wrong, or indifferent. I say what I say because I think it's the best thing I can do with my time, experience, education, skill, brains, and judgment. 

I could sell cars, I suppose.  I've sold neckties, liquor, restocked shelves, and stood up bowling pins (at a nickel a line, and had my shins almost busted for not lifting my legs in time) in my time, before they had machines.

You can imagine that the last thing I want to see here are people telling me, or others, what to think. I want them to tell us TO think, not the right way.  The right way to think  is what's left over after you eliminate all the wrong ways to think. 

What might those be?

The wrong ways to think are the ways in which you believe you are thinking because you must be awake and it feels as though your head, as opposed to your heart or feet, seem to be engaged.

The other day there was a news report, probably in the Times, I didn't clip it, of a woman's school in one of the Islamic countries, perhaps it was Pakistan.  The women ran a school for girls to study what we would call religion.  They were learning the Koran.  Well, they thought they were learning the Koran, anyway.  What they were doing was memorizing the Koran.  Have you ever tried memorizing a whole book?  How about the Song of Hiawatha?  You couldn't do it.

They call that learning.  I call it memorizing.  To me there's a difference between memorizing and learning.

A friend of mine was taking the Bar Exam recently.  "I have to get home to work on the memory part," she said. 

"Memory part?" I asked of her bar preparation, "what's that?" 

I'd never heard of memorizing anything in law study.

She had this idea, she explained, that if she could memorize certain statements of law, such as 'issue presented,' or 'answers to issues' in which the relevant law was stated as a query and an answer, encompassing the relevant decided doctrine, she'd succeed.  There's no such thing, I suggested.  She failed the Bar Exam.  Decided she didn't want to be a lawyer after all.  Bright girl, but missed the point.

In law we deal with ideas, good ones, bad ones, and so-so ones.  If you see, or think about someone killing someone else without good cause, you think that's bad.  One you get that idea down you don't have to spend a lot of time or gray matter on the killing, but on the justification, or not.  You don't memorize diddly.  But for exam and real-life purposes you need to be able to explain in plain language that we make distinctions when it comes to killing people and when decided, those become law.  You don't remember words, you remember ideas, such as a robber killing, a cop killing the robber, the state-executioner, and the soldier in war.  You think in images, not words.  We're not trying to remember the order of colors in a rainbow using mnemonics like ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violate), but whether it's fair to condemn a soldier for doing what his country demands of him.  We see the differences.  We put those into words, some of us more carefully than others, but that's the difference between a good lawyer and a poor lawyer, the ability to see these differences and to put them into words.

So I don't like people telling me, or you how to think.  I think you should think for yourself and have a debate with your soul as to which of several choices you ought to make. Pres. Ahmedinejad doesn't want his people to do that.  Neither do our Republicans, forgive me Brother-in-law.

To me, it ain't fun if you're not telling me why you believe as you do.  If you get ticked at me because I suggest reasons why what you're proposing won't hold water, or is a step on the road to perdition, well then we can't have a discussion and neither of us learns anything new, do we?

I think it important to keep raking the bed of embers.  Others like the bed of embers just the way it is, as though it isn't burning down and soon going to need replenishment with new burning ideas.

It's the old bad ones that have me worried, the ones which have made it, deservedly to the slag-heap of history.  The Divine Right of Kings.  People actually pretended to believe in that.  They weren't in trouble until the king himself began to really believe in it (Charles I, head, missing, above).  Then it was seen as the fiction it was and the game had to change.  No more king.  Parliament.  And so on.

So, Ahmedinejad is betting his country on the idea that he can tell the Iranians how and what to think and believe.  Maybe he can, I don't know.

All I know is that when Pres. Bush calls him an Islamo-fascist, which I have no doubt he is, we're playing Ahmedinejad's game, not ours.

Where's the freedom in Iran under Ahmedinejad?  Bush should ask.  Bush is a liberal compared to Ahmedinejad, and should be selling his liberalism, not his conservatism.  Bush should be flogging liberal freedom in a part of the world where if it exists it has to exist behind locked doors.  If I were writing in Iran I'd expect a knock on the door.  I don't expect that here.  Why?  Because we have a tradition, backed by law.  In Tehran they don't.

Bush needs to conserve, sell, and otherwise flog our liberal values, here and abroad.  We don't need Rumsfeld sounding like an idiot (I don't think he is) by denouncing his critics as 'fascists.'  Fascist is one of those words like 'bad' that covers a multitude of sins.  Hitler and Mussolini were fascists.  The term is meant to connote a top-down form of government marked by repression of non-conformists and dissenters.  Rumsfeld's calling of critics 'fascists' says more about him than the critic.

I've gone on long enough.

Don't let anyone tell you how to think, and when someone does, ask him who made him God over you.

The last thing you've got left is your mind, as long as you don't give, or sell, it to anyone.  Mind will outlast country, and when that's gone, guess what, new minds will form new countries.  The best that our country can do is to encourage and protect freedom of the mind.  When we go, they'll have to reinvent us, to do exactly this.  We might as well work to preserve it while we've got it.