I went to law school thinking I would learn how society is actually organized.  They would teach me the syntax of making a coherent case, analyzing and litigating an issue.  I’d learn to use language the way the masters have always done to maintain their many advantages.  My discursive instincts would be tamed, I thought dreamily, by the sleek logic of the law and I would learn to package and sell my ideas in the lingua franca of our world.  

The imaginative impulse I have always been prone to in telling a story might succumb, I believed, to the structured logic of the law.  This turned out to be mostly fantasy, as was the idea that the law’s sometimes merciless logic is not, in many cases, close to madness.  Much evil is, and has always been, justified and maintained by the law, after all.  

I imagined, for some reason, that the study of the law would help me dispense with frills and make a clear and convincing case for things I believe in.  It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the law, a man-made institution negotiated by men paid to make sure the law is malleable enough for their patron’s purposes, larded with obfuscating frills and no solution to many human woes.  The law famously regards many essential things as trifles, but this, apparently, should not unduly trouble a calm mind.  

It must be noted that most people study the law to obtain a license to practice a well-paying, or idealistic and less well-paying, career fighting either for or against justice, or for the highest bidder.  Few, if any, sensible law students dream of learning some mystery the law never promised to reveal in the first place.   I did learn some of the things I studied law for, in spite of myself.

In the law, if you have a cognizable injury the law has a remedy for, you state clearly what you want.   You pay your filing fee and ask the court to set a date and time when the court may hear the parties, to state your case, let your adversary show why an order should not be signed granting your party the relief it seeks.     

The exact nature of the evil complained of is set out in its most pertinent details and the relief sought is laid out precisely, supported by the appropriate laws.  The argument then proceeds to show the truth of every detail of the complaint, or of the defense.  It is an exercise in skillfully marshaling the facts, pertinent law, and court decisions; persuasively presenting them in the best possible light for your position.  The presentation ends by reminding the court of the justness, fairness and, respectfully submitted, Your Honor, necessity of granting the remedies sought.  

In the strongest legal argument every detail is clearly supported by the law, the facts line up obediently to carry the burden of proof.   Specific details of the law, the intent of the legislators, pertinent legal tradition and favorable Supreme Court cases are cited to make the case air-tight.  The easiest case to win is the proverbial slam dunk, every factor the court will use to decide the matter solidly on the side of your argument.

“Why would anyone bother to oppose you if you had a slam dunk case, supported by law, tradition and precedent?” I asked, early on in my career at law school.   Such was my idiotic innocence at the time.    The question was greeted as a deadpan joke on my part, as I was one of very few in law school given to any kind of overt irreverence in class.  Every first year in the lecture hall was smiling after my question.    

“Excellent question, Mr. So and So.  Does anyone have an answer to this?” asked the professor with a wry crocodilian expression.     

Mr. Flores answered brightly, “The only reason anyone would possibly oppose a slam dunk case is if there was a lot of money at stake.  Other than that, professor, it never happens.”   More smiles all around, the obvious point driven home.

An old friend of mine is a lawyer for the earth.   He has been burned in effigy by angry mobs, a straw man of him has been lynched by fishermen, the swinging scarecrow wearing a placard with his name on it has appeared in newspapers and on TV.   He argues in federal court for why the law requires a federal judge to force federal agencies to enforce environmental laws against powerful corporations to stop chemical poisoners and species murdering mercenaries.   These top businessmen and their legal counsel are paid lavishly so that poisoning, killing, plundering and pillaging can continue and spread nationally and worldwide as lucratively as possible.  For some odd reason, these characters rarely seem to be burned in effigy while they put the torch to my friend’s stand-in as often as they can.

“Dick Cheney’s son-in-law is actually a polite and superficially sociable guy,” my friend told me once, after litigating a case against him and his team of corporate mouthpieces.  Though he’s not the sort of person my friend would have lunch with, he has a modestly winning social persona and does not immediately come across as the kind of monster he represents.  One of Antonin Scalia’s sons makes an excellent living slashing at laws like McCain-Feingold, the old campaign finance law, and driving a fleet of Mac Trucks through the complicated, lobbyist vetted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  Another fabulously wealthy lawyer, probably much smarter than Cheney’s  son-in-law and no doubt wittier, although you might not necessarily like to have lunch with Counselor Scalia either.

In general, though there are exceptions that we get to applaud, the party with the most money, power and purchased free speech wins the day in American courtrooms.

                                                                  ii

But, I digress.   Here are some dots to connect, then.

We had a popular two-term president who, soon after taking the Oath of Office, broke the one union (PATCO) who supported him when he was running for president.  The Air Traffic Controllers  were not striking for better wages, they were striking for safer working conditions, less consecutive hours guzzling coffee to stay awake trying to prevent planes from crashing into each other.   The private sector is the solution for this sort of thing, announced the president, and unions are, well… unions make it inconvenient to do business for the job creators, they’re bad for competition, bad for America.   The private sector can do things better, goes this form of logic, while we cut the funds used to run public programs and shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.  

Forget about the many important things government does for people, has done over the years, things that only a government can do.  Forget that democratic government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people:  drown it.   Crowds turn up to hail the Chief, support our troops wherever they’re sent, for any reason or for no reason, chant “USA, USA!” and vote for people determined to drown democratic government in a bathtub.  The private sector, companies like Enron, Halliburton, Monsanto, Walmart, Goldman-Sachs and Exxon, are held out by these bold new patriots as the best guarantors of our freedom now.

When the Twin Towers crumbled we saw footage of jubilant crowds in Gaza and the West Bank cheering that the Great Satan had been so grievously wounded.  At least we were told that these mobs were doing that as they yipped and threw their arms up in the air with huge smiles on their faces, carried coffins with American flags on them, waved bloody American flags.  It was unthinkable that crowds could be cheering the murder of thousands of innocent Americans from all over the world, the blood-thirsty bastards.  The images of their celebration of murdered Americans fueled our anger and thirst for vengeance.

Fast forward a decade or so, crowds of Americans all over this land, celebrating like their team had won the Super Bowl, honking horns, screaming, delirious, pumping fists, chanting “USA! USA!” after Obama announced that he’d killed Osama.   Newscasters stumbled over the announcement, more than one said President Osama had killed Obama, but everyone, almost without exception, celebrated the execution of the charismatic millionaire terrorist, at least with a private fist pump.  This televised display of bloodlust was not supposed to have any effect among the populations who already hate our freedom.

“Totally different story,” you will say, “when the Palestinians celebrated the killings on 9/11 it was the deaths of innocents killed by terrorists that they were cheering.  Americans cheered the death of a monster who had orchestrated the killing of thousands.  Totally different, dude.”

Point taken.  But here are some dots to connect:  

Right after the 9/11 attacks Congress authorized the use of force to strike back at the terrorists.  The invasion of Afghanistan had hazy goals from the beginning, outside of killing or capturing bin Laden and other al Qu’eda leaders, who were allowed to escape at Tora Bora.  Once they were gone there was no clear reason to continue warring there and no chance of installing a stable western style democracy, yet war on we did, for little discernible purpose.   Many of the billions for that war were spent on private contractors hired to do things army grunts, working for a fraction of the contractors’ pay, usually did.  The contractors were paid many times what American military personnel were paid, for doing the same work, and the politically connected corporations employing the contractors made a killing, as the saying goes.

The war in Iraq, a preemptive strike advertised as a war to free a random tyrannized population from the clutches of a random Hitler-like dictator, was even more unreasonable.  Here too, a tremendous force of private ‘contractors’ earned many billions of dollars for the corporations who hired them.   Already wealthy people with the right political affiliation got immensely more wealthy servicing these long wars.  Part of the beauty of the set-up was that since these private contractors didn’t work directly for the government, their employees were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and could do questionable, sometimes unspeakable, things without the usual questions being asked, with little or no accountability up the chain of command, if accountability could travel upward in a corporate hierarchy.  

Both wars, seen by many, not unreasonably, as wars of aggression and wars of choice, ruthlessly conducted, made America more hated worldwide, drove the recruitment of jihadists, insurgents, foreign fighters, suicide bombers.   Both wars continued far longer than any others in U.S. history, far longer than World War II and the Civil War combined.  The actual conduct of both wars kept from the public more than any previous wars.  Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here, freedom on the march, the war on terror, killing those who ‘hate our freedom’, making the world safe for democracy, the war to end war.   Whatever.

The point is: we are a declining nation at permanent war against a shifting, constantly replenished world-wide enemy.  This entails some sacrifices in things like privacy and civil liberties, more government secrecy, less latitude for journalists who are not with the program, trials for espionage against journalists who try to push the boundaries of the muscular new government secrecy doctrine.   The attitude seems to be:  God bless America and God bless our men and women fighting for our flag, including those secret forces and private contractors working behind the scenes to hunt down and kill our enemies.    Damn those myopics who bitch about the curtailment of abstractions like privacy, complete freedom of the press, truth, justice and the so-called American way.

When they first started doing extrajudicial targeted assassinations of its enemies, Israel was widely castigated for it.  A car would be blown up in some middle eastern country, killing an infamous and elusive freedom fighter/terrorist, and the world would scream in protest of this murderous illegality.   Executions by governments, it has long been traditional, must be preceded, in virtually all cases, by a public trial in which proof of guilt for a capital crime is shown beyond a reasonable doubt.  Fast forward a decade or two and consider for a moment the massive and widespread American program of killing by drone strike whoever the president at the time deems worthy of death, with or without an accusation of a specific crime punishable by death.  Drone strikes are now the preferred method of American warfare and there is little discussion of its legality or propriety anywhere but among malcontents and nitpickers with nothing more important to do.

There has been, since the days of President Bush the First, a media ban on showing dead U.S. service men killed in combat.  There is no draft, we’ve had an all volunteer armed force for more than a generation now.  Nobody back home is asked to make any of the traditional civilian sacrifices for the ongoing wars, even taxes cannot be raised to pay for these amazingly expensive wars, we put them on the credit card.  The killing goes on largely by remote control, and since there are no American “boots on the ground” (very unpopular for our brave troops, and their much better paid mercenary comrades, to be killed or captured by freedom haters) nobody pays much attention to the actions of secretive groups like the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the elite units that carry out most of the killing of bad guys and innocents alike.  We justify or explain away torture now.  The president recently admitted that, after 9/11, unfortunately, and with the best of intentions, “we tortured some folks”, as well as conducting wars that are not defensive and killing by remote control in nations we are at peace with that may have enemies, even American citizen enemies, afoot in them.  

JSOC conducts secret killing operations in dozens of countries today.   The news does not report this, and the rare journalists who research and report on stories like this, like Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater, JSOC targeted kill list expanded to thousands of names) and Jane Mayer (Extraordinary Rendition and Enhanced Interrogation torture programs) … well, the most painstakingly researched articles, books, exposes, documentaries only have any effect on a tiny fringe of the population.  These hideous and troubling revelations are not mainstream in any significant way, don’t get much airplay, few get very upset about it, and even if they do, you know?   

The fact seems to be, killing by drone strike, “Signature strikes”(killing people who fit the profile of the ones we’re trying to kill, even though we can’t confirm their identities), works, is politically harmless (in U.S. politics, anyway) is good for business, and, therefore, good for America–even if an argument can be made that it’s not much different, when you shoot the wrong people and call in a Hellfire Missile strike on their house, killing groups of children and old people (collateral damage) than what guys like Hitler and Stalin used to do, and were rightly hated for.

The Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was the “go to” cleric after 9/11.  American born, reasonable, telegenic, abhorring the murder of civilians, calling for an end to violence, he appeared on the media many times in the years after that hellacious attack, until he began to recoil at America’s endless war against Muslims across the Middle East.  Openly critical of America’s war policies he left the country and returned to his family’s ancestral home in Yemen.  He began saying things on the internet inimical to America’s interests.  Yemen imprisoned him, he spent 17 months in solitary confinement and emerged as the most dangerous man since Osama bin Laden.  Radicalized, he called for jihad and death to American infidels.  His name was added to the kill list, targeted for assassination by Predator drone and he was duly executed by an air strike conducted by remote control.

Two weeks later al-Awlaki’s 16 year old American son, Abdulrahman, was eating lunch outdoors with friends when a Hellfire missile ended that meal in a splatter of meat.  No explanation necessary.

Connect the dots.  What have we become?