Hard to believe I’m reading this Washington Post editorial. Harder to believe I agree with every word. No wonder Americans are pondering the endtimes.
WHAT CIVIL RIGHTS NOW MEAN: My jaw dropped reading this piece on Saturday from the Boston Globe. The Boston Police Department has for a while now been administering random drug tests to their officers. They use a sensitive state-of-the-art test using hair. The tests have follow-ups and the threshhold for detection is high. The Globe quotes a police department attorney thus: “The way our hair testing is done, there is an amount of cocaine that has to be present, and it has to be over a certain level.” To reach that level requires “repeated use of cocaine over a period of time. You cannot consume enough cocaine in one sitting to test positive. You would die of a heart attack first.” The problem is that black cops have a higher rate of testing positive than white cops. There are some quibbles about whether black hair absorbs more drug than blond hair (only experiments on rats bear this out), but the threshhold is so high there can be little questions that the positives are not false ones. Nevertheless, the NAACP sees bias. Here’s my quote of the week from the head of Boston’s NAACP: “It just does not make sense that black people have more of a drug problem than white people.” Notice that he doesn’t point out that 96 percent of minority cops passed the test; and notice that the mere existence of any imbalance inevitably means prejudice. This is what the civil rights movement now means in large part: if minority success exists, ignore it; if minority failure exists, blame it on someone else.
WHAT CIVIL RIGHTS SHOULD MEAN: Score one for Bob Reich. He’s one of the first national politicians to say what needs to be said about equal marriage rights: this is a classic civil rights issue and it’s time to stop the mealy-mouthed talk about civil unions as some sort of option for homosexual citizens. There are things on which I disagree with Reich, but not this one. Notice that marriage rights cost no-one anything; they urge responsibility from a minority group; they come in a completely separate category from many of the other “special treatment” laws that the current civil rights debate focuses on. For this reason alone, it seems to me voters in Massachusetts should vote for Reich. And it’s telling that it was a 20 year-old openly gay football player who talked him into it. This is an issue which the younger generation sees as a no-brainer. Good for Reich for seeing this too.
PRE-COG AMERICA: I wonder what historians will one day say about the American mood in the summer of 2002. It’s a weird, strained, emotionally unstable time. The war is not over, but it seems in a lull. Americans have victories but no victory. Al Qaeda lives. Saddam’s race for weapons of mass destruction continues. The shock of September 11 has become a kind of intermittent anxiety rather than emotional catharsis. And it hasn’t been supplanted in the public consciousness by anything else… Continued here.
HOW EMBARRASSING IS BOB HERBERT? He’s now made a whole column out of Timothy Egan’s tendentious story last week about rising temperatures in Alaska. Guess what? Herbert’s against global warming! Something must be done. And can we please stop racism as well while we’re at it? Why oh why doesn’t the Bush administration do something about these things? Meanwhile the following uncharitable thought flickers unbidden into consciousness. When was the last time Herbert actually encountered an opposing argument and reasoned against it?
PADILLA AND HABEAS CORPUS: “It is not being stressed enough that Padilla not only has the right to a habeas review, he should also have the right to speak freely to a (possibly court-specified) attorney. No American citizen, even an alleged enemy combatant, ought to be held incommunicado, but I have heard reports that Padilla is being so held. If he cannot talk to his lawyer to provide appropriate information, any habeas petition will be fatally handicapped. Finally, when does this “war” end? What is to stop a President from detaining someone he doesn’t like indefinitely? Nixon might have used the kind of power Bush and Ashcroft are asserting to lock up anti-Vietnam-War political dissidents who had visited communist countries, by declaring them enemy combatants and not having to prove it. In the case of Vietnam they would have been released by 1974 or 1975, but today, Padilla’s attorney could NEVER make a case that “the war is over” so he is left to rot forever. I am very wary of giving a power to Bush, who won’t abuse it, that will accrue to a successor who might. Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton would have had few scruples about abusing this kind of power.” This, the case against “Islamikazes,” the gay left and Al Sharpton, all on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam.
ISLAMIKAZES AND VIRTUE: Following up from Susan Sontag, Matthew Parris has an article in Saturday’s Times of London that gives you a sense of where even mainstream conservative commentary now is in Europe. His column is about sacrifice, and he argues that the suicide bombers in Israel and the West Bank are the inheritors of Samson, Vietnamese Buddhist monks and other mythological types willing to endure death for the sake of their cause. He concedes that murdering others changes the moral balance somewhat; but he basically sides with Cherie Blair in believing that all Israelis are somehow legitimate targets because of their country’s occupation of the West Bank:
I do not think that in his heart an Israeli would deny that, if your enemy has taken land that is rightfully yours and occupied it, then not just your enems army but his wife and son and daughter and servants and all who, under his protection, come to live and make their living on the stolen land, are aggressors. By their presence they aid and abet the occupation.
As with most European discussions of this issue, there is no historical analysis of how the West Bank came to be occupied, no account of the attempts of the Israelis to come to some sort of peace under Rabin and Barak, in fact, no historical understanding at all of how we come to be where we are. In fact, there’s almost an equation of non-violent acts of passive resistance with the murderous fanatics of 9/11 and a subtle implication that Israel itself is actually land that is “rightfully theirs.” Parris even evokes Christ in his litany of precedents for the Islamikazes! That’s how far we’ve come from the days of last September, when moral clarity about terrorism was sharpest. It seems to me that his argument has only a shred of credibility if it is assumed that the Palestinian people have had no opportunities to win large amounts of territory through negotiation, if their suicides are not in fact primarily means to murder disproportionate numbers of civilians, and if their purpose was to express desperation rather than to affirm a death-cult imbued with Nazi-like anti-Semitism. But you won’t hear these caveats in Western Europe – or indeed throughout much of the rest of the world. There seems to me little doubt that Israel and, by implication, America is losing this battle of ideas. Since it is the most important battle since the Cold War, we need to think far more ambitiously about how to wage it.
BJORN COMES THROUGH: After several weeks of bugging him, Bjorn Lomborg has finally responded to the final questions posed to him by Book Club members. The questions and answers can be found on the Book Club Page. Here’s a sample from one of them:
Question: Lomborg puts his main emphasis on human prosperity and human well-being and seems to share with Julian Simon the view that humans are a resource rather than a burden. He explains why, and much of his argumentation throughout the book is built upon this principle. But many environmentalists do not share that perspective (which no doubt they would call “humanocentric”). How does he respond to those who reject the premise upon which he built much of his case?
Lomborg: I actually deal with this in the first chapter. Basically, I am focusing on the needs and desires of humankind. This does not mean that plants and animals do not also have rights but that the focus will always be on the human evaluation. This describes both my ethical conception of the world – and on that account the reader can naturally disagree with me – but also a realistic conception of the world: people debate and participate in decision-making processes, whereas penguins and pine trees do not. So the extent to which penguins and pine trees are considered depends in the final instance on some (in democracies more than half of all) individuals being prepared to act on their behalf. When we are to evaluate a project, therefore, it depends on the assessment by people. And while some of these people will definitely choose to value animals and plants very highly, these plants and animals cannot to any great extent be given particular rights.
This is naturally an approach that is basically selfish on the part of human beings. But in addition to being the most realistic description of the present form of decision-making it seems to me to be the only defensible one. Because what alternative do we have? Should penguins have the right to vote? If not, who should be allowed to speak on their behalf? (And how should these representatives be selected?)
Check out the remaining dialogue here. Because of this last entry from the last book, we’ll kick off your emails about “My Dog Tulip” next week. Send in your reflections, dog stories, whatever.
GAY RIGHTS AND CAPITALISM: For Richard Goldstein and other lingering Marxists, homosexuality is indelibly associated with leftist bohemianism, communism, and socialism. Like many American leftists, he ignores the hideous Soviet and Cuban policies toward gays; and the suppression of free speech in socialist countries that penalized gays as much as anyone. With that in mind, a friend forwards me an email from someone in Russia today, about a recent cultural event. His correspondent writes:
The Russian musical duet “Guests from the Future” is now a classical duet of a gay man and a lesbian, a so-called family that represents “capitalistic tomorrow”, where man loves men, woman loves women and both live happily together as a family. Eva, the woman who sings solo in the group, appears alone or with girlfriends in movies. The audience likes it very much.
Quite. Capitalism, as the economic system most conducive to actual liberty, is intrinsically connected to gay liberation. Russians get this. Why can’t tired old Western socialists?
MEMORIAL DAY: A letter responds to my recent post on my HIV anniversary:
Straight, 2 kids, happy and remembering. My great friend David was diagnosed four years, more or less to the day, earlier than you. He’s been gone, no longer holding down a chair at the corner of a bar waiting to talk about the little theatre company we had somehow begun. A year or two later he might have been celebrating his own anniversary. We do go on. But we are diminished, sometimes lost, always bereft.
The Dish 