Monthly Archives: November 2014

The ongoing snit over who had it worse

Once again, writing here is the last thing I should be doing at the moment, but with Kristallnacht commemorated so evocatively the other night by a priest, a cantor, a pianist and singer, two dancers, the mournful sob of a shofar, the lighting of candles, the breaking of glass, I find myself thinking again about the mass murders of the early 1940s, the slaughter of both sides of my family in those years, equally atrocious mass murder during World War I (the war to end all wars), the Khymer Rouge Killing Fields, so-called Ethnic Cleansing mass killings and the ongoing large scale slaughters in Africa, the Middle East and wherever else they break out, plus the killing of innocents in wars, declared and covert, that is going on as I type these words.  This roll call of organized mass murder, genocide, if you prefer, puts me in mind of the painfully counter-productive, idiotic debate about which mass killing was worse than which other one.  It is not hard to figure out that every one of them is the worst.

“The Holocaust was a novum,” said a professor of mine once, introducing a theory that was not his own.  He was a German Jew who had left the Fatherland as a young boy, escaping with his family right before the heavy fist came crashing down on the Jews of Europe.  A novum, he explained, was something never seen in the world before but explainable by science — and he ticked off the features that according to this theory made the Nazi killings a novum— the systematic, mechanized organization of it (never seen before), the singling out of Jews and others (but primarily Jews– unless you were one of the others, of course), the unprecedented hideous efficiency of the bureaucratized killing machine, the incredible numbers rounded up, deported and killed in such a short period of time.  

I recall the professor seeming a little perplexed that some Blacks were angry about the term “The Holocaust” and the feeling, among certain Blacks, that the Jews were trying to corner the market on suffering when the Middle Passage, which went on for centuries, was as brutal, and killed as many, as Auschwitz and the rest of the novum of the capital H holocaust.

“But,” say those who argue that the Holocaust was the worst and most horrible example of man’s inhumanity to man, not an unreasonable claim, although the quibble misses the larger point, “6,000,000 Jews systematically murdered in four years, plus a couple of million others, is worse than perhaps 4,000,000 Africans killed over the course of hundreds of years, I’m sorry to say.”

“4,000,000?  Are you serious?  The number is more like 20,000,000, Mr. Novum.”  

The number of Africans killed during the slave trade will never be known with any precision, the slave operation was conducted by several countries over hundreds of years and there was nobody keeping count, or interested in anything but maximizing the  profit to be derived by increasing the number of live slaves that arrived fit for sale. The lives of those millions of enslaved people who managed to survive?  Not much better, in many cases, than the life of a slave laborer from Auschwitz, though the American slave master had an economic, and sometimes Christian, incentive to keep his slave alive whereas the slave laborers from Auschwitz were in most cases disposable.

“The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of a million men is a statistic,” noted mass murdered Joseph Stalin is said to have opined.

It should be remembered that Hitler laughed off concerns that a mass killing program would be a public relations nightmare for his administration.  “After all, gentleman,” the famous psychopath is reported to have said, “who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”  

He made the comment only about twenty years after the last of the brutal killings of Armenians herded into the desert, toward what is now the Syrian border, and in Turkish villages and towns, drowned in rivers, marched to death, burnt, whipped to death, shot, starved.  By 1940 few indeed remembered it.

This organized murder of more than a million people happened during the catastrophic World War, which was followed by revolution, the wildly roaring twenties, the stock market crash, worldwide economic depression and the violent, fevered lead up to the next World War.  The world was busy, busy!!!!

The world is still busy, busy!!!  We cannot stop to consider all the terrors we and this poor world are hurtling headlong into.  If we reach any conclusion at all about it we shudder to think of the continual murderous horrors, some done in our name, that we are powerless to stop.  The murderer may be sometimes be a patriotic American, pursuing a complicated policy designed and advertised as protecting our freedom, but the outcome for the murdered child and the grieving grandparents is the same as it has ever been. 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?

 

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving

Of course, it’s natural to want to defend yourself when you are in the right. It’s particularly hard to resist making your case in our competitive society, where it is an applauded tic to lustily plead one’s cause in a no holds barred, zero-sum game of winner take all.   In fact, if you fail to make your case, you not only lose, you’re a loser.  If the game is zero-sum, as this one here is, losing is a big deal.  If you lose you do not survive, except as a grim cautionary tale.   Yet, consider:

…if you could remain quiet, even though reason was completely on your side, even though you had every right to be be angry and nobody with a heart could fault you for being mad as hell — if you could speak softly and not argue your case, imagine the different outcome, the good will and friendship that could possibly be preserved?    You’d still be seen as a loser, of course, but the quiet victory over the reflex to self-righteousness would be yours and no harm would be done by your justified venting.  Good might possibly result from your kind example, for it feels very good to be forgiven.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving means that you’ve gone past the need to prevail, be right, win, convince, justify or rationalize anything.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving is the work of a lifetime, it would appear. 

 

                                                                 ii

My mind leaps sideways, on this 76th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the proverbial gloves came off in Nazi Germany and Jews were finally starting to be killed outright, and the first 30,000 rounded up and sent to prison camps, in a night of national rioting against the Jews, to the outskirts of Vishnevetz, in the Ukraine, not far from Khmelnystkyi, on a particular August day in 1943.   Nazi motherfuckers, working with local Ukrainian red-neck motherfuckers, marched the Jews out of the hideous Vishnevetz ghetto in orderly fashion, to the banging of drums.  

The Jews of Vishnevetz and the surrounding areas had been rounded up into the ghetto only a few months earlier. The Jews had been required to finish this work of creating the ghetto boundaries and kissing their chains in three days or else my grandmother’s brother, (or possibly her uncle or father– there’s no one left to ask)  who was one of the two Jewish hostages being held by the Gestapo, would be executed.  My grandfather’s father’s house had been designated as the Eastern edge of the fenced ghetto, and so it became.  The work was done on time and my grandmother’s loved one presumably released, or maybe shot by the Germans just for laughs.   Many Jews had already died in Vishnevetz under Nazi occupation, several summarily shot, others starved to death or dead of disease, or, one suspects, suicide.  Most of the survivors, always hungry, and, if sick, soon dead, lived the half-lives of the living dead, expecting their murder at any moment.

To the edge of the ravine, then, the Ukrainians have been preparing it for you all day.  All rocks and roots removed, the dirt combed nicely back from the hillside.  A soft bed of dirt, freshly turned, with that fresh earth smell. Perfect.  OK, clothes in neat piles, please.  You can leave your underwear on, it’s OK.  First group of Jews, please.  Yes, right this way.  OK, face to the left, that’s right, excellent, now slide down a few feet, there are a few more people here on the side who could fit in.  Yes, that’s good, well-done.  OK, lie down, it will all be over in a second.  A line of Ukrainians steps forward and shoots each Jew once in the head.  They then scramble over the bodies, straightening limbs and covering the freshly killed bodies with a fresh layer of dirt.  The drumming continues, to cover the sounds of the shots, the screaming, the wailing.  It’s like a parade for the Ukrainian onlookers, already starting to gather up the clothes to sell.

OK, next group!  Thank you all for waiting, next group, this way please, come on, step up, please!  The Jews in their underwear stumble forward into the ravine, walking sideways in the narrow row to be lined up behind the barely buried layer of dead in front of them.  Thank you all for waiting. OK, here we go, lie down, please.  Make yourselves comfortable, and goodbye.  The Ukrainians step forward, pap-pap-PAP! and then they are nimbly dancing over the dead bodies, straightening limbs, neatening the stacks.  Their wives, meanwhile, have finished tying into huge bundles the first of the murdered Jews’ best clothes, which the Jews had been urged to wear for their relocation.  Relocation from life to death, OK, we lied just to get you to wear your good clothes and all remaining jewelry.  We’re fucking Nazis, what do you want?   Next group, please.

 

       iii

This is, obviously, not what I started out to write when I chose the title remain soft-spoken and forgiving.   The forgotten slaughter at Vishnevetz is nothing to remain soft-spoken and forgiving about– it is about the worst example I could find, although I did not find it so much as it found me, clearly.  It is only an example of something that burns the soul, presses hard against any vow to remain soft-spoken, forgiving, decent, human and kind.   It cries out loud for a different response.

When someone comes to kill you, if it is within your power, do not let them kill you. Nazis, although they take care to arrange things to make resistance as difficult as possible, must be resisted (not that the persecuted Jews of the Ukraine were in any position to resist).  Of course, this leads to the famous problem of specific cases, murderous laws like “Stand Your Ground” and things like that.  The clear right to avoid your own murder is an extreme case of having reason on your side, soft-speaking and gentility aside.

On the other hand, an in extremis situation like the grotesque events in that Vishnevetz ravine that August 1943 day is often used by philosophers to illustrate and test their points.   If a Vishevetz Jew could remain soft-spoken and forgiving… a far better universal moral principle than an unslakable thirst for vengeance.  The sickening slaughter does provide a good snapshot of how difficult it is not to rage sometimes, with reason screaming on your side.

I will try this post again with a better example, a smaller scale, more personal example having nothing to do with the mass murder of my family and many other families.  Right now, I’m still unaccountably lingering by the edge of that long-forgotten ravine full of the bones of my ancestors.

Facts: 0, Emotions: 1 (F) (Politics clipped from an e-mail)

It horrifies me that brilliant and courageous journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Jane Mayer and a few others, can make such airtight cases for their important and just causes, shine a clear light into unspeakably cruel darkness, and…. it changes nothing.  The detailed and coherent telling of the actual facts, even if they stir the emotions terribly, do not have any effect on organized human action (politics) next to the raw emotions alone, stirred violently with a buzzword or two and chanted over and over on the mass media.
 
Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, lays out the many horrifyingly criminal illegalities involved in the torture program, with dates, names, details, memos, who authorized and ordered what, how the laws were violated, the exact techniques routinely used, the destroyed tapes of torture interrogations, etc.  A few years later President Obama, either in an unfortunate ad lib or reading a dick fingered teleprompt, admits that “unfortunately… we tortured some folks.”  Tortured some folks.   Harry Shearer does a good Obama imitation and that week on Le Show he did a musical number (at 42:00) with the hook, in unison with the Obama sound bite, a nonchalantly harmonized “we tortured some folks.” 
 
Scahill, as he details in his book Dirty Wars (a NY Times best seller it seems the NY Times never reviewed), travels to a village near Gardez, outside the Green Zone in Afgahnistan, to investigate a rumored massacre of civilians. There had been a party in a village called Khataba early into the morning of February 10, 2010 to celebrate the birth of a child.  The locals all have videos of the party on their phones, smiling faces, men dancing.  Suddenly a  helicopter lands, guys in heavy boots jump out, walk on the roof.  
 
One of the men who had been dancing at the party goes out to see what’s up and gets pumped full of lead by American commandos.  Likewise the two pregnant women who run to him screaming, likewise a teenage girl and another man, also shot to death.  Only a couple die immediately, the cop and one of the women linger, groaning, for five hours after the Americans dig their bullets out of the bleeding bodies with their tactical knives.  It would have been embarrassing and incriminating if local authorities, or NATO investigators, found American bullets in the bodies of the deceased, after all.  The commandos stop the others from taking the two mortally wounded family members to the nearby hospital.  They handcuff the remaining men, march them to the helicopter and drop them somewhere miles from home to have a nice day.   
 
Scahill sees the videos and still photos of the victims, talks to the eye witnesses.  The brother of one of the murdered men, whose pregnant wife was also killed, tells Scahill that when he finally got back from where the Americans dropped him he was ready to put on a suicide vest and go kill Americans but his father wouldn’t let him.
 
Scahill follows other similar stories in various countries and eventually learns that these killings are all the work of JSOC (Joint Strategic Operations Command), the highly secretive, elite Special Forces killing units that work directly for the president.  “Do what you’ve got to do, boys,” says the president, presumably, and they eventually track down and kill Osama bin Laden, to the cheers of American hockey and football crowds.  Scahill, who had been slowly and painstakingly unearthing details about the secretive JSOC, was amazed to hear JSOC, a name that is rarely spoken and never seen in print, suddenly lauded on CNN, Fox and everywhere, embodied in heroic Seal Team Six.  
 
Scahill discovers that the kill list, once a few dozen names, now includes thousands of names.  The lists of those killed, and the civilians killed along with them are highly classified, naturally, although Scahill puts together a rough list of confirmed raids, drone strikes and confirmed kills that shows these happen multiple times daily, mostly by drone now, in literally 40 something countries the US is not at war with.  Every dead male of military age is considered a dead terrorist, like in the old body counts in Viet Nam where every dead civilian was counted as neutralized Viet Cong. It is unknown how many of the undisclosed numbers of killed children, older men and females of all ages are also terrorists, though it is also, probably, if we are justified in killing them, a substantial number, eh?  
 
Scahill, a guest on Bill Maher’s show, lays out some of the hellish details for the audience.   Fellow guest Jay Leno asks Scahill  “why haven’t they killed you yet?” and Scahill just gives him a grim look, says nothing. 
 
Fair question.  So much easier just to kill a troublesome motherfucker like that, you know?  Not that he offers any real threat to the tireless killing machine, the only thing the American people have endless funds for… but still, there is a principle here, one would think.

All The Time in the World

Beware, if you think you have all the time in the world.  You are afforded a very small slice of all the time in the world, and before you can blink they are shedding tears for your passing and heading toward the buffet table.

My grandmother, long gone, used to watch a soap opera called “The Days of Our Lives”.  I remember the name because the opening featured an hour glass with the sands rushing down it.   “Like sands through the hour glass,” intoned a sonorous actor’s voice, “so are the days of our lives.”  The miracle of the internet lets you click here and hear it for yourself.

The nostalgic sound of that clip can bring tears to a sentimental eye.  My mother, for example, would probably sob to hear it, reminded of her mother, newly retired and quickly hooked on the afternoon melodrama, reminded of being 37 herself when the show first aired.  She’d be thinking this seemingly ten minutes after being 37, suddenly 78, a 21 year battle with endometrial cancer behind her and not much happiness ahead.  “So are the days of our lives,” would have socked her in the kishkas, the music would have twisted the fist.

Since we do not have all the time in the world, how do we justify time wasted?   The days we accomplish little or nothing?   We can take some solace in the paycheck we’ve earned, if we’re working, or in a job well done, if we do a job well.   In the things we’ve created, a family, a nice home, a business, nice craft items.  In the progress we’ve made toward becoming kinder and smarter people, if we have made such progress.  

Or we can brood and set variations of our brooding into type, watch them march across a computer screen, tinker with the tipsy words, arranging them this way and that until we’ve made them coherent enough, post them on the internet for a guy in Eastern Europe to read.  Yes, we can also do that, I suppose. 

Scoring Political Points

A friend who sits far to the right of me on the political spectrum (as so many of our fellow Americans seem to) sent me an adorable short animation yesterday she thought I’d enjoy, even though it blames the poor for being lazy and greedy and shows how the hard-working wealthy are persecuted and exploited by the progressive tax system.  You can watch that delightful proof of the case here.

Although I have many things I need to get myself do today, every day, and am languishing at the moment, on many levels barely functioning, even though Sekhnet correctly growled when I mentioned it, I had to send this response to my friend.  Part of my effort to preserve our friendship and  to ward off future emails like the one she thought I’d like, the oversimplified and therefore irrefutable cartoon about the unfairness of a progressive tax system (or a progressive anything else, I suppose) in a magical world where everyone is born with the identical chance to prosper, if only they’ll stop being born in toxic slums and get a decent home to grow up in so they can embrace hard work and smart investment.

I wrote to my friend:

The problem with this kind of hypothetical is that it sets up an artificial, conveniently over-simplified example that can rarely be seen in real life to “prove” a proposition about the complicated real world.   If the set-up in this cartoon was the case in even one out of 100 cases it would be a lot.   
 
It sets up a straw man (the demanding lazy brother happy not to work, spending every penny and feeling righteously entitled to his rich brother’s forced charity) on an absolutely even playing field, excluding all inconvenient, complicating facts, to stand in for all the parasites, you know the ones– they are out screaming every time a policeman enforces the law and one of their illegitimate kids die, and those with guilty consciences who don’t believe the police always act with justification, even when the person they kill isn’t shown to have posed a lethal threat — and the wealthy, every one of whom, as we all know, got their money from their hard work and smart investing.  The wealthy who are persecuted and exploited by parasites and hated and envied for their every hard-earned advantage.
 
It always surprises me when, because you agree with the conclusion of some political piece, you send it thinking I will find it convincing.   I try to remain mild, and Sekhnet curses me for spending any time at all responding to these things whenever I mention it to her, but I really do find it amazing that you can’t see these things for the preaching to the choir they are.  And that they are also provocative (the kid in Missouri bashed the cop/racing car driver’s face in before the cop shot him to death, Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, etc.) especially when they turn out to not be true.
 
And, not to belabor the point, but you agreed not to send me these political things.  
 
Love,
[name withheld by request]

Getting On With It, Somehow

The bed is warm, the room is cold.  There is no particular thing to be done outside the bed on any given day, except everything undone that has been that way for months or years.   It is a luxury and a sentence, staying under the covers where it’s warm since I am not running late, no matter what the clock says.  

Think, man, while you stay warm, there must be something you haven’t thought of that you can do out there.  The dream you’ve worked on for the last few years, and proved again and again is hearty enough to walk in the world, bring happiness and engagement to everyone it touches… well, if you don’t figure something out soon you’ll have to nail it into its tiny coffin.

When three queries are unanswered, and then five, when pitches fall silently into silence, your best shot at a short promo is deemed “almost good enough” by the people with the most media savvy, when the City and State agencies designed to help small businesses have no concrete help to give, don’t even return calls and emails, when the friend of a friend at a large nonprofit declines to forward your pitch to her educational director, as she promised, when the mentor you spoke to once shies away, overwhelmed by the immensity of the challenges your stalled, perfectly working program faces, you start to get a certain picture of your chances.   It is possible that a real winner would not be deterred by the cumulative weight of this, I suppose.  

Bad luck has played its part, the early death by cancer of one of the few people who really got the potential of the program, overpaid for it,  put it in three schools.   Our fees for the sessions at the last school, months after her death, never paid, her business went under, angry parents also ripped off when they brought their kids for the first day of summer camp and found the program gone.  No current workshop to sustain my spirits, the program’s viability.

Making a convincing, winning pitch, closing deals like a successful salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, seems to be the only way this thing can be sustained.  Read a good book on the subject by a guy who set up a consulting agency to help people get it right the first time.  He teaches them to speak well, to the point, convincingly, and close the deal.  They do indeed have a discounted rate for non-profits, I learned yesterday when I finally called them at a friend’s urging.  One four hour session, the recommended dose, special price for not for profits:  $3,000.  

“What’s your budget?” the breezy receptionist asks when I seem to balk at the number.  “Maybe we can work with you.”  She later recommended that perhaps the budget two hour session would be helpful, only $1,500 at the discounted rate, and probably more than half as valuable as the full session.

There must be some kind of way out of here, as the song goes.  Working on a soundtrack the other night I pictured the five way headphone splitter, four kids and I sitting around the laptop with garageband open.   I’m getting them started.  Listening to the beat with a bass track open, I’d show them how to lay down a simple bass line, let one of the kids play it.  Add a piano track, pick one note in that key (we’d use A minor, the white keys), lay it in on or off the beat in a spare pattern over the bass, see how music is starting to suggest itself?  The next kid adds a touch, the fourth kid adds a drum, kid number one adds a sound effect.  Showing them the importance of really listening to the other parts, playing sparely and leaving space in the mix for other things to be heard.   There are many music making apps that let you create music tracks intuitively, no knowledge of music necessary, but showing them how to lay parts against each other, using actual notes, seems the better way to go.  A kid or two will discover she is a musician and begin to pursue it.  

I am day dreaming again, clearly, to keep from screaming at the frustration of the situation I have gently placed myself in by not knowing the first thing about business and marketing, and knowing much too much about fucking creativity for its own sake.  Meantime, it’s cold in here, I have to get into the shower and into a shirt and pants.

 

Connect the Dots (law school digression notwithstanding)

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?