wholepeace

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OFFICIAL AXE: THE CONSTITUTION, THE RULE OF LAW, AND PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

In Politics on July 2, 2024 at 7:59 am

Most of what is terrible about the Supreme Court decision declaring that Presidents have immunity from prosecution will be discussed at length for months, especially as the 2024 Presidential election draws closer.  Let me suggest some important points to remember.

You will hear a lot about the rule of law, but there has never been a clear idea about what that means.  Lawyers have always gotten rich, and the rich have always found a way in the effort to twist and turn the law to mean what suits them, while those without sufficient means have been forced to make plea bargains even when there is simply a possibility that they might be convicted, regardless of their actual guilt.  Every law on the books has been written by flawed human beings, who have relied on language that is never absolute in its meaning.  The rule of law is a rule that says, “whatever the law says, guilt and punishment are a function of class, not of the law.” 

There will be much discussion, also, of the court’s “conservatives.”  Don’t be fooled by the word.  This decision is not a conservative one, it is a radical one, arrived at by justices who have expressed extreme right-wing views on a wide range of issues, and who have no interest in setting their views aside to adjudicate the Constitution, nor in recusing themselves when there are obvious conflicts of interest.  At least four of them were appointed to the court specifically so that they might wreak havoc with what had been established law and Constitutional rights.

It would be pointless, in fact, to look for the Constitutional underpinning of this decision, though many pundits may try.  The majority didn’t really even try to justify the ruling on Constitutional grounds.  The principal arguments for the ruing involve an imagined future in which Presidents will be afraid to make bold, decisive decisions and take necessary actions because they will fear prosecution when they leave office.  Yet, in more than 200 years, over the terms of 46 different Presidents, only one has ever felt the need for this kind of protection against legal accountability.  And he wants the Presidency back, with this new lack of constraints that will allow him to become a dictator.

But the most disturbing thing about this ruling is that its justification ignores a simple fundamental idea, that a bold and decisive action is not the same thing as a criminal one, and never should be.  The court has essentially argued not that Presidents need to be able to act boldly, but that they need to be able to act illegally, with abandon.  A President with immunity is a President who does not have to think carefully about their decisions, weighing not just the actions, but all of the larger implications and consequences.  Such a President need only decide that their actions suit them.

Apparently, the Court has given themselves the power to determine when a President’s actions are within the realm of their official responsibilities.  This means that any attempt to prosecute a President (in or out of office) would invariably hinge on proving that the actions were not official, and then having to argue that through the entire legal system until it eventually reaches the Supreme Court where it could simply be tossed out.  How many Attorneys General or prosecutors would be willing or able to spend that much time and tax-payer dollars on what would likely be a fruitless task?

The decision is not now absolute for all time, though it will not be easy to fix.  It is, however, more imperative now than ever that the 2024 election reject the right-wing extremists decisively.  We need to elect Democrats to keep the White House, keep control (and expand it) in the Senate, and retake the House of Representatives with a clear majority.  We also need to keep or take leadership and control of governments at the state level in a large enough majority of states to pass a Constitutional amendment, and that amendment needs to state as clearly and unequivocally as possible, that Presidential actions, regardless of their justifications, regardless of their official nature, may be prosecuted if they are perceived to be violations of the Constitution or the law.  Presidents shall never be above the law, but will have the rights and responsibilities as every other citizen, including the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and to defend themselves in a court of law – or ask for a plea bargain.

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THE STORIES WE ARE TOLD  — AND THE DANGER OF BELIEVING THEM

In Politics on June 28, 2024 at 6:39 am

In approximately the 1970s, the major networks decided that their news programs weren’t making enough money, so they turned over management of the news to their entertainment divisions.  This had several consequences.

First, it meant that the news had to become entertaining, in order to attract viewers and advertisers.  News, told simply and honestly, it turns out, isn’t entertaining.  The only people who watched it were people who actually wanted to know things, learn things.

As a result, we went from “news” to “news stories.”  It literally became necessary for news programs to wrap every fact, every event, in a story.  Those stories, in addition, had to be entertaining.  And they had to have a consistent, coherent narrative.  Such a narrative, of course, as every fiction writer knows, must have a controlling theme.  The problem with this is that most raw news is random and disconnected, so news “writers” had to create the controlling narrative, themselves.

 Also, the development of news as stories to attract viewers and advertising dollars meant that network news programs began to compete with each other, which now no longer meant having the most complete and honest reporting of the news, but meant, instead, having the most entertaining or compelling story.

(As an aside:  Newspapers had wrestled with this same problem earlier in the 19th and 20th centuries, but newspapers never had the ubiquity, or public impact that television and radio have.  They were simply to slow and cumbersome, and readers always had the ability to self-select what and how much of their content to consume.)

In contemporary news “coverage,” we can see that the media develop their story, and its controlling narrative early and are reluctant to change it.  They also have an incentive to make that narrative as compelling as possible.

Which brings me to modern politics and the Presidential election. 

Note that there is a tendency to call it a “race,” rather than an election.  An election is a story about a choice, in which it is important to know what is relevant to that choice.  A race is about who’s winning and losing.  As such, it is in the interest of the news to make the race as exciting as possible.  The really important parts of electing the President – such as the actual state of the economy and it’s effect on the country as a whole, or issues of race, gender, health care, and so on – are useful in elections, but aren’t particularly relevant to the question of who’s winning, unless they can be presented in dramatic tones, with less emphasis on the facts and more on how people feel about them, which is circular because people will feel about them according to how dramatically they’re reported and what the stories are.

The controlling narrative of this election was decided long ago, at least as long ago as 2016, when the choice was between Trump and Clinton.  Now, the news networks will try to tell you that the issue is competence, but that is, at best misleading, at worst a lie.  Competence requires a narrative definition, because the actual definition is simply the ability to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done.

So, instead, we talk about age, on the one hand, and bluster on the other.  When the news talks about Biden, it presents his age, not as a marker of his experience and his accomplishments, but as a question of his competence, despite the fact hat he is only 2 years older that Trump, whose age is never reported on.  When Biden is showing his age – his gait is slower, his voice is raspy and his stutter is ore apparent, for example – the questions are about his competence.  Or more accurately, about how the public should view his competence, because those who actually work with him all the time, both domestic and foreign, have no doubts about his ability to do the job.  When Trump blusters and lies and rambles his way through incomprehensible word salads, the reporting is not about his competence, it’s about his power over his party and his base.  We are told the lie that power is, itself, competence, without enough emphasis on the source of the power or its potential use and potential danger.

Trump is the more dramatic of the candidates, which means that he better suits the news networks need for dramatic story-telling.

We need, also, to understand that it is in the interest of the entertainment news to keep the race close.  The story of a runaway winner lacks drama in an election.

If this election were being reported simply and honestly on the most important issues, there is no reason for it to seem so close.  In terms of accomplishments with regard to economic issues, infrastructure issues, issues of individual rights and freedoms, issues of health care, issues of international relations, and the future of the American democratic republic, there should be no reason for it to be this close an election.

The question the news media want you to ask is “do you want the old guy or the obnoxious guy?”

What we should be asking is, “do we want the candidate whose record shows that he will at least try to advance policies that will benefit us as a nation, or the candidate whose promises nothing more than the power of gaslighting, narcissistic posturing, retribution against his perceived enemies and virtual dictatorship founded on his own ego and the allegiance of Christian nationalists and neo-fascists.

We need to start seriously tuning out the 24-hour news/opinion/punditry narrative and focus on the real issues.  Stop worrying about Biden’s age.  He’s only one part of the whole picture.  What do you want to accomplish over the next four years?  Which candidate is more likely to try to do those things?  No candidate is going to be able to do all of it.  Who are you electing to Congress?  Who are you electing locally or state-wide?  The U.S. government is a vast, interconnected system.  It is not supposed to be one man.  And it is especially not supposed to be an egotistic, irrational, power-obsessed, would-be dictator who seems to believe that it IS supposed to be one man and that man is himself.

The news-as-entertainment media are not going to easily abandon their chosen narrative.  We must change the narrative ourselves, and show them that their narrative is both wrong and irrelevant.

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Maybe Don’t Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself – Do Better Than That

In A God of Infinite Possibility, PeaceAble on February 2, 2024 at 9:56 am

“When you are told both to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemy, it is important not to conflate the two, lest you and your neighbor become your enemy and you treat each other accordingly.”

I just saw a meme that repeated the adage “Love they neighbor as thyself.”  So simple.  So profound.

Except.

The saying assumes (even requires) that you first love thyself.  And there-in lies the problem.  Far too many people don’t love themselves; or love themselves too little to make that love manifest in their treatment of others.  Or love themselves in toxic ways, which they think are love.  Neither humility nor narcissism is necessarily love.

We might even say that many of the problems of the world are caused by the fact that few of us genuinely love ourselves sufficiently to be able to consistently treat others as we wish we could treat ourselves.

See what I did there?  Slipped the old golden rule in.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

That’s because the two ideas – loving others as yourself, and treating others as you would like to be treated – are related.  And they are linked by the concept of “deserving.”  If I do not love myself, I cannot see that I deserve to be treated better, and if I project this on others, then I cannot love them enough to believe that they deserve better treatment from me.  To put it another way, we may do unto others as we believe we deserve to be treated, which is not necessarily how we wish we could be treated – if only we had earned it.

Our culture assaults us daily with messages of inadequacy, scarcity, and fear.  There is a new product being advertised, which tells us that underarm deodorant is no longer enough.  We’re told that we really need to deodorize our entire body. Pleasant, clean-looking young people sniff their elbows and legs, and react with disgust.  It’s not just our underarms that stink, we’re told.  Everything does.  How do we, the stinking mass of humanity, dare to go out into the world like this?  How could we not have noticed that everyone is offended, repulsed even, by our stink?  No wonder we aren’t more successful, more fulfilled, more popular, more loved.  We don’t deserve it.

(As an aside of sorts, the ad shows two young women.  Women in our culture are already bombarded with negative messages about their bodies.  Our culture tends to treat women’s bodies as fundamentally disgusting unless they are properly shaved, perfumed, deodorized, especially in intimate areas, covered in cosmetics to hide all the “flaws,” and covered in clothing except for the purpose of titillating men with their shaved, perfumed, cosmeticized bodies.)

Loving oneself – truly loving – means beginning with a baseline understanding of our fundamental humanness.  But human beings decided a long time ago that our fundamental natures need to be altered.  We decided that we are not enough just as we are.

Basic hygiene, of course, is not really about inadequacy or disgust at the fact that we are, first and foremost, animals.  Hygiene is also about humans having come to better understand disease.  Whether cleanliness is next to godliness may be debated, it is certainly next to healthiness.

A full-body deodorant is only one small example.  The basic message of oppression is that the oppressed are undeserving even of the little that their superior oppressors magnanimously allow them to have. 

And the mass of humanity is made into both the oppressed and the oppressors.  We are pitted against each other and ourselves.  We are told to ask why others should have more, rather than why we all have so little.  We are told, by explanation, that we are competing not only for resources, but also for our level of deserving.  We are competing for love: the love of our oppressors, the love of those we oppress.  We are even asked to compete for the love of whatever god we believe in.  How special can Heaven be, if everyone gets in by default?  If everyone deserves god’s love, then why do we have to try so hard to be deserving of it?

Consider the concept of human rights.  Our important social documents lay out our “inalienable, god-given” rights.  We know, of course, that none of those rights actually come from god, but are enumerated by governments of flawed humans.  None of them are, in fact, inalienable or absolute.  All our rights will regularly come into conflict with someone else’s rights.  But if we truly loved ourselves, and loved others equally, there would be no problem with that.  We could love each other enough to find a way to meet our needs, rather than assert the supremacy of one right over another.  But that would require us to love each other enough to see what is needed rather than what we think is deserved.

The world is changing rapidly around us.  If we are to survive – as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as a planet – we will need to relearn how to love each other, and ourselves.

Life takes us down paths of our own making, but the paths available to us are not all the same.  Regardless of how we are traveling our own path, or where it might lead us, we can learn to love it; and we can learn to love the paths of others, to see where we going in the same direction, or to honor the different direction each of us is taking.  We can look for where our paths might intersect or run parallel or diverge in interesting ways.

We can and must learn to love ourselves, then love others as ourselves; and learn how to do unto others as we all ought to be done, because that is the least we all deserve.

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