Questions

What is the point of the Supreme Court? Is it to push political ideology down people’s throats? Or to interpret and uphold the Constitution?

Recently the Court struck down DC’s ban on handguns. All of the press coverage on this centered around the question of whether this decision was morally reprehensible — which is not the right question to ask.

Is it a good idea to have a special law against handguns in the murder capital of the nation, my hometown? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “Yes.” (Feel free to disagree.) Does the supreme court have the right to erase that law from the books if they find it to be unconstitutional? Also, “Yes.” Will that have negative effects? That’s not really an appropriate question for this particular judicial apparatus to be asking! (Think: “Did you have sex with that woman?”)

Recently Justice Scalia wrote (falsely, as it turns out) that Guantanamo detainees tend to end up back on the battlefield if they get released, hence it is a bad idea to grant them habeus corpus. That’s not the point! The question is not whether more Americans will die as a result of the decision. The question is whether denying habeus corpus to suspected terrorists is constitutional.

Today the NYTimes came out with an editorial that starts off like this:

“Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year — on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly with its wrongheaded and dangerous ruling striking down key parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law.”

Again, that’s not the point. Neither side is addressing the issues in a straightforward way. I suppose that when crazy judges do stupid crap, the press is bound to react in a stupid way…but this only serves to feed the endless cycle of political bullshit.

I have as much loathing for the arch-conservative and famously failed Reagan SC appointee Robert Bork as the next liberal type — but in his book The Tempting of America (which I was forced to read in high school) Bork comes out against judicial activism and I wholeheartedly agree. Judges shouldn’t push their political agenda. That’s what Congress is for. When abortion activists march in front of the courts rather than rallying their local legislative assembly, something is definitely askew.

Obama is a former Constitutional Law professor and his book The Audacity of Hope addresses these issues pretty clearly. I’m not saying that I want to have Obama’s babies or anything (he’s nowhere near progressive enough for that kind of adoration…) But I can’t help it! In all my cynicism I’m holding out a tiny, timid ounce of hope that maybe having a reasonable person in the White House will increase the likelihood that sensible judges will be appointed to the highest court in the land.

This in turn might give the NYTimes editorial board less incentive to spew their brand of ultimately distracting middle class polemic quite so often and we’d all be slightly happier! 🙂

Politics and Rashomon

By now you all probably know that Obama pulled out of public campaign financing:

Stories are enormously important and so far I’ve heard two stories about this.

Story 1: Obama, seeing a strategic opportunity to humiliate his opponent and raise unparalleled dollar$, which he claims he will need to survive the blistering attacks which destroyed Gore and Kerry, renounces public funding.

Story 2: Obama, seeing a way to break with politics as usual and enliven his populist grassroots support, renounces public financing.

I say there are elements of the truth, of what “really happened”, in both stories. Obama has thus far proved to be extremely good at managing his image, and he’s done well with this potentially volatile campaign finance thing. NYTimes columnist David Brooks wrote very astutely that the Obama video, “made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Theresa’s final steps to sainthood.”

Now the role of the political press, no less than the candidates themselves, is to fit complex issues into easily digestible narratives. The genre of these narratives usually varies along with the medium — compare talk radio political analysis with op-ed pages and you’ll see vastly different storytelling strategies at work. But the goal is always the same: tell a story that people will understand and believe.

Brooks likens BHO to a split personality sociopath, which is much more common as a Hollywood trope than as a real psychological condition. It was immortalized in Robert Louis Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and later found many more incarnations in Hollywood film.

Now this whole good/evil split personality thing may be a good way to tell a gripping story, but it is way too simplistic to encapsulate this kind of politics. If, like Brooks, I wanted to use what is essentially a cinematic metaphor to explain the situation, I’d turn to Rashomon, the classic Kurosawa film in which a murder is retold from different perspectives and nobody can figure out what really happened.

Both Story 1 and Story 2, if repeated enough times, will become the truth. As the Commoner points out in Rashomon, “we all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It’s easier that way.”

I’m no Kurosawa scholar, but I can point to a few facts: Japanese movies of the 1950’s tended to attack more difficult topics, using more puzzling and engrossing storytelling techniques than their Hollywood contemporaries. Plus Japan in 1950 was still reeling from the insanity of WWII. Appropriately, then, most all of Kurosawa’s films from this period blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, dwelling instead on how it’s really impossible to get to the root of things, on how human existence is ultimately futile.

Rashomon is set in 12th century feudal Japan, the classic Samurai movie setting, a time when the island was divided into many warlord states with complex inter-related power relationships. You can’t trust anyone, samurai have all sworn loyalty to their masters and yet everyone has a price, real power is largely hidden. Today’s political landscape is a lot like this!

Obama calls the public financing system “broken”, which the NYtimes editorial says is “only half true.” He calls his system of getting funding “public” even though its made up of private donations. But the “public” system which is in place allows for donations from corporate interests and so-called 527 “shadow groups,” so how can it be considered “public”? Who knows what the “real” story is?

The Brooks article definitely called my attention to the fact that by refusing to play by the rules, Obama has outed himself as a political trickster. But then that’s a good thing! (especially if you’re trying to survive in feudal Japan.) Like I said, he has shown an amazing capacity for managing his image so far. So it’s encouraging that unlike Gore or Kerry, Obama may be able to weave a compelling counter-narrative for himself when the general election rolls around and the smear ads really start to fly.

I always hated…

Joe Lieberman!

Bastard!

Obama/Roth ’08

Obama kicked ass at today’s commencement ceremony, as you might imagine. But the new Wes prez Michael Roth ambled into the limelight by making what I consider to be a pretty awesome speech as well. (You can watch it, along with Obama’s speech, here.)

Roth said, among other things, this:

“If you engage in serious politics of change, if you participate in the struggle for social justice and sustainable economic growth, I believe we *can* change course…This year’s graduates, like Wesleyan alumni before you, will contribute to shaping our culture in the future — because otherwise it will be shaped by people for whom creativity and change, freedom and equality, diversity and tolerance are much too threatening. We are counting on you to help shape our culture so it will not be shaped by forces of oppression and violence.

[…] Wesleyan University resists that violence. You will hear people tell you that the greatest protection against violence is surveillance, that greater security is to build higher fences to keep out the foreigners and that we must project violence on distant shores to keep our homes safe. DO NOT BELIEVE THESE MESSAGES.

Please remember that your education stands in opposition to nonsense and cruelty. Please recall your capacity to create when others around you call for destruction…When you persist in expanding your knowledge, when you continue to find new ways to create positive change, then you will feel the power and the promise of your education.”

Fuck yeah. Go Wes!

I experienced (as you can see) a nostalgic surge of school spirit as an alumnus coming back to campus for the first time — essentially, my friend Kimberly pointed out, this was nationalist fervor. During much of my time as a Wes student I was stressed out, lethargic and/or absorbed in personal drama. I was too busy for school spirit. But today I must admit that I got fired up! A school whose president promotes non-violence and encourages you “to reject the status quo, to build a politics of hope and community rather than fear and divisiveness…to become productive idealists” is pretty freaking awesome.

Obamarama

Perhaps it is folly to blog about this prematurely…but yeah.

This is happening. I am (hopefully) leaving work early tomorrow to hop a ride up to fair Middletown!

I haven’t been back to campus in a full two years now, which makes this the perfect time. Wes is still fresh in my mind but not too eerily familiar as to be totally bizarre. I’m very sorry to miss Dhaan’s party…but I’ve been meaning to get this Wes revisited thing out the way for a long time. An “unbeatable” opportunity.

Oh if any Wesleyan types out there have a place for me to stay for a couple nights…I shall buy you many beers!