the sad red earth

Be Drunk

Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Louis Simpson

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

*Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry,” Reasons for Moving, 1968

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 9:44 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar.

Soon after posting Mind Games 1 and promising anon a climactic II (yes, treasured readers, I felt your pent up need), I came to think that the period commonly referred to as “the holidays” might actually be suggestive of something. Rather than continue in my increasing detachment from those recurring, totemic calendar events around which we all dance, it occurred that I might actually, myself – how do you say? – holiday. I had been posting at lengthy, fevered pitch, and all at once some attention to real life, and the application of the writing gene to something that might possibly make a buck, seemed to be in timely order. So I’ve scaled it back these xmasy, new-yearsy days.

You had noticed, yes?

Shall I weep?

I’ve put up some small posty delights just to say – it is that time of year – I love you, and will continue to do so until I return in full fighting trim the first week of the new year. Somehow, though, the world, and my compulsion to comment upon it, has not withered on the fir.

Somehow, in addition to the wretched wealthy of the earth attempting to cure their loneliness by igniting their undies (and you and me with them) the subject of Israel and the Jew has remained, millennially, current.

Of course, it might be what I read.

My goyisha Jewel has asked on more than one occasion why it is that Jews talk so much about their – not to put too fine a point on it – Jewishness. Ah, sweet naïf.

One would like to say that the answer is that, quite obviously,

1. because they’re Jews – and that really, when you think about it, should be all of the answer right there.

But it is an answer that would basically please Jews and nobody else.

A partial and more serious answer is that very distinctive minority populations, in order both to protect and preserve identity, are forced to, and then actively themselves, embrace their otherness. That is why, for instance, African-Americans – even as they struggled so long to be fully enfranchised as, simply, Americans – so relish and assert their cultural distinction. And they can, and do, you know, play their own version of Jew-Not a Jew.

In the midst, then, of all the good holiday cheer, we have the “Gaza freedom march,” fit exemplar for Mind Games II, but, oh, no, I will not be tricked into doing any real writing (heaven forefend thinking) on my holiday. This is in the manner of a very casual essay. Don’t get slick with me.

Yaacov Lozowick – he of the Ruminations – has, with his usual droll sobriety, been pointing out the idiocy of this abortive effort at fun house mirror, human rights righteousness, while I await the Sudan, Congo, Chechnya, Turkish Kurd, and Burmese “freedom marches,” should you want, in that last instance, the case of a true national concentration camp. Or the Egyptian freedom march, hell, as long as they’re there.

Yaacov’s focus on the march of the misguided has been largely through his occasional appraisals of Mondoweiss, that hate fest masquerading as handmaiden to the coming of one love, one world. Yaacov has a stronger stomach than I, and, I must say, more compassion than do I for the blog’s Weiss, Phillip, it’s dull, tortured fool for utopia. When I descended into the depths of the self-debasing turmoil of Weiss’s consuming anti-Semitism long enough to produce The Malice of Mondoweiss, it was, for me, a culminating event. I turned away, bathed and dressed, and set off into the daylight.

Yaacov, however, has it as his mission to monitor the web and other activities of Israel’s foes: he reads regularly the Guardian’s virulently anti-Semitic Comment Is Free, of which Mondoweiss might be judged the customary Jewish corollary. Discomfort with Jews, let alone Jewish empowerment, lacks a certain frisson if there aren’t some Jews themselves to actually share it.

One of Yaacov’s recent posts focused on a Mondoweiss dispatch from Emily Ratner, a romantically charged paean to Gazan nobility in the face of Israeli wickedness:

We remember the more than 1,400 that were murdered. We remember the hundreds more who have died as a result of this horrific siege. We remember the tens of thousands who are still homeless, one full year later. And we remember our sisters and brothers on the other side of the Rafah border who have breathed life into this historic march every day for months, who have guided our feet to Cairo, and who light the shadowy path to Gaza. Most of all we remember that they will still be caged in Israel’s massive open-air prison long after we’ve safely returned home.

You can see Ratner to the right, wearing her Palestinian scarf no doubt as merely a simple gesture of solidarity with the oppressed, which Israeli Jews ceased to be somewhere around the fourth time they managed to beat back the surrounding Arab democrats and human rights advocates who sought – and in many cases still seek – to annihilate them. It is to be understood that one does not reason with the empathic otherness-romance of a Ratner, the embrace of her own aspirant holy self in the victimized form of world-historical oppression: a baby and the bomb. What madness! she cries.

Something, instead, like deprogramming. Or the grace of a richer life, more broadly visioned. Or moving on to the next person.

If I seem awfully hard on Weiss and these other well-meaning souls (and perhaps I don’t – you may be tougher and meaner than I), it is only, really, because they deserve it. You can ask Mrs. Conroy, my third grade teacher: I was a nice boy.

It is, simply, that of all the bad actors in the world, middle-aged men of conflicted ethnic identity who seek to alter the course of world events, to delegitimize nations and thwart the millennial-long aspirations of whole peoples, whose actions effectively promote war rather than the peace for which they cry out like a tic, and who do so because they have frequently and prominently discussed issues with their mother are a very bad thing. Better sit down and negotiate with a tyrant who knows what he wants than a man whose political pathology is openly steeped in mother-anger, because the former’s demands conceivably can be satisfied.

But I regress.

What I newly note about the Mondoweiss site is that it prominently displays the declaration that it is “A Project of The Nation Institute.”

The Nation is many other topics for many other days, but as any effort might continue that is aimed at preserving a liberalism of ideological balance and sanity, it is worth recalling the left’s many unconscionable affiliations and rationalizations of yore and today. The magazine offers many stingingly accurate and worthwhile critiques of the right, but its current-era shamefulness extends to its weak-willed and morally flabby response to 9/11. Now it underwrites a blog enterprise that credits only one side in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, deeming Israel a racist, criminal, war-mongering state and explicitly espousing a one-state solution, i.e. that calls for an end to the state of Israel, and concerns itself with the nature of Jewish power and influence in the U.S.

If these are not the positions and concerns of The Nation and The Nation Institute, what are they doing with Mondoweiss as a “project”? If they are, then the stain of irredeemable extremism is there to be seen.

But more on all such in 2010. Now I prepare to be drunk.

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 2:56 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

From Trudy Rubin at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a new series @ the sad red earth (H/T Normblog):

“Just as every country honors its unknown fallen soldiers, we should honor those who died in solitude and pain for upholding universal principles of human rights.”

In this Christmas season, I want to pay tribute to two unsung heroes who stood up to repressive regimes – and paid with their lives.

One was Iranian, one Russian, and I doubt you’ve heard of either. Yet they represent many other lonely heroes around the globe who have held on to their values in the face of government repression, even though they knew it might cost them their freedom – or their very existence. Just as every country honors its unknown fallen soldiers, we should honor those who died in solitude and pain for upholding universal principles of human rights.

One such hero was Ramin Pourandarjani, a 26-year-old doctor who was working at Iran’s infamous Kahrizak detention facility as part of his military service. Kahrizak held many of the 4,000 demonstrators arrested for protesting Iran’s rigged June presidential elections. The prison became so notorious for beatings, torture, rapes, and killings of detainees that the regime had to close it, while continuing to deny the crimes that were committed there.

Those who spoke out about the torture at Kahrizak were themselves threatened. The truth embarrassed an Iranian regime whose leaders present themselves as arbiters of global “justice.”

Pourandarjani had seen the badly beaten son of a prominent conservative political figure, and, when the youth died, was forced to list the cause of death as “meningitis.” The young doctor chose to expose the situation by speaking about what he’d seen to an Iranian parliamentary committee. But he rightly feared for his safety.

When the doctor’s body was found on Nov. 10 at Kahrizak, Iranian officials first claimed that he’d been in a car crash, then said he’d had a heart attack, and then insisted he’d killed himself. Now there are reports that he was poisoned.

Pourandarjani knew that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had turned the country into a virtual military state and were killing those who opposed their behavior. Yet he bore witness to the horrors he’d seen.

Another such hero was a 37-year-old Russian tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. He’d been in prison for nearly a year before he died, awaiting trial on trumped-up tax-evasion charges. His real offense, it appears, was helping to uncover evidence that implicated Interior Ministry officials in the embezzlement of more than $230 million from the state.

When Magnitsky became deathly ill and was in excruciating pain, prison officials denied him treatment and kept making conditions worse for him in an effort to force him to incriminate a client. In the weeks before his death, Magnitsky kept pages of meticulous notes about hellish prison conditions. But he never gave in to his jailers’ demands.

After Magnitsky’s death, his notes reached the Russian media and caused a stir – perhaps because they provided evidence that the practices of the Soviet gulag continue. But this young lawyer died alone and in pain, as have many murdered Russian journalists and human-rights workers whose killers remain uncaught by an indifferent or complicit government. Magnitsky, like the others, died for doing work he believed in.

Pourandarjani and Magnitsky belong to a long line of individuals who struggle for justice privately and against great odds in countries such as Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and North Korea, and in much of the Middle East.

In his Nobel Prize speech, President Obama – who has sometimes seemed conflicted about espousing human rights – made an important point: “For some countries,” he said, “the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation’s development.” Obama rejected that distinction as false.

The president cited “aspirations that are universal,” such as the right to speak freely, worship as one pleases, assemble without fear, and choose one’s own leaders. I would add to that the human right that Pourandarjani and Magnitsky died for: the right to speak out against injustices perpetrated by unjust rulers. This is a universal right that cuts across cultures and religions, and it is recognized within Iran and Russia(even if their governments deny it). That is why these two men are heroes for us all.

*John Donne, Meditation 17

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

We get absorbed in our own lives. We overlook. We forget. All of the struggle is only so that each of us can sit in the sun, play with a child, watch a ball fly, hear a tune crooned, create.

But for others the struggles go on. There is a very great one transpiring, continuing since June, a courageous Iranian people standing up daily, unarmed, undiminished, to tyranny. They are in the streets now, knowing they could die, dying, yet unbowed. We should not forget them.

You can follow reports and incoming video at Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, which has been a leader in coverage since June, and at The New York Times news blog The Lede.

AJA

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 9:59 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 12:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar.

From The New York Times

Report Finds Acorn Broke No Laws

By JANIE LORBER

The controversial community organizing group Acorn has not broken any laws in the last five years, according to a Congrssional Research Service report released Tuesday evening.

The report, requested by Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, said that federal agencies, mainly the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development, have awarded money to the group 48 times since 2005. But, in none of those instances did Acorn violate the terms of their funding, the report said.

Since the 2008 elections, the group, which works primarily to expand voter registration and affordable housing, has become a key Republican target. A series of scandals brought to light by conservative activists led to multiple Congressional hearings and repeated attempts to deny it taxpayer funding.

Acorn has been the subject of scores of investigations—a total of 46 inquiries by federal, state, and local agencies, including the FBI and the Treasury Department, and five by Congress as of October 2009, according to the report.

The report found no evidence that voters attempting to cast ballots at the polls had been improperly registered by Acorn, a chief Republican accusation.

The report also said that a sting-style effort to publicize the group’s allegedly illegal activities, may have broken state laws. Two conservative activists set off a firestorm in September when they posed as a pimp and a prostitute seeking financial advice and secretly videotaped Acorn employees offering advice on how the couple could hide their illicit activities and avoid paying taxes.

Also on Tuesday, a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, rejected the administration’s request to reconsider its ruling that a House resolution barring the group from receiving federal funding was unconstitutional. Earlier this month a judge ruled that the law constituted a “bill of attainder,” legislation intended to punish specific people or groups.

In November the Justice Department also concluded that the Obama administration can legally pay the group.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 7:44 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

Sometimes the world is turned upside down.

Don’t believe that for a moment. It’s about half the time. We’re all walking around with our heads passing in the middle, trying to figure out who is on solid ground and who is hanging the wrong way and bound to land on his noggin. Often, remarkably, the upsidedownerss manage to remain suspended that way. They live their lives. They pass on into inverted balloon heaven, their string bodies, like a comet tail on a path away from the sun, preceding them, tugging them toward the beyond.

Or were they right side up?

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the mass of people are conceived of as cave dwellers shackled by unreason, condemned to watching a parade of shadows on the wall and confusing it for reality. An individual who breaks free of his shackles and escapes the cave is at first blinded by the sun of reality, but then sees the light.

But a lot of people see the light, in a lot of different ways not necessarily to be trusted. Plato’s was reason, but he was an idealist, and ideas can be a little like balloons. Aristotle chose to be more empirical, to take those ideas and tie them to a stake in the ground, or as the poet William Carlos Williams wrote more than two thousand years later, “No ideas but in things.”

A couple of weeks ago, a twitter friend and reader of this blog sent me a link to a video of John Lennon, at his post Beatles height, singing the anti-politically minded “Mind Games” as he cavorted and walked among adoring fans in New York’s Central Park. This was part of his response to my postings on Afghanistan.

How John Lennon loved Central Park. How I do. The week after he was murdered a memorial was held for him at the band shell in the park, where he dances in the video. With one of my oldest friends, I joined hundreds of thousands in the park. I got there very early – I adored John Lennon – and was close to the shell. By then, 1980, I was a businessman, and when the time came at the end for some minutes of silence, while all else stood still around me, I removed from a bag the Mexican vest I had worn all through my teens, so many days and nights of a difficult hippie youth, donned it one last time, and sat cross-legged on the ground.

Photograph by Jula Dean

I have the vest still, stored in a box in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles right now, with other memories of those days. I imagine I’ll take it out and look at it at least one more time before I die.

There are the people who believe that the CIA conspired to import cocaine into the United States with the specific purpose of producing a scourge in the African-American community. There are those who claim HIV is human made, devised to destroy the African population. Some people believe the moon landings were faked. Others – of some remarkable reputation – claim that the Cambodian Killing Fields are exaggerated in magnitude. They likewise argue that the massacre at Srebrenica is a hoax – some of them, too, that the Rwandan genocide did not occur. There are 9/11 Truthers, and Obama Birthers, and, of course, there are Holocaust deniers.

The truth can be like a Möbius mirror, with the faces of many Mad Hatters staring out.

One of the ideological developments of the twentieth century’s second half is sometimes referred to as perspectivism. It is, for us now, a simple idea: everything in the world, in life, is seen, or perceived, from a perspective. I can only stand in one place at a time, and I can only see things from where I stand.  Perspective is fundamental to the development of Western art; Cubism was an explosion of the limitations of perspective in art. Perspectivism has particular meaning, too, in the realms of philosophy, cognitive science, and political or any kind of theory. There is, with consideration, some very clear truth to the perspectivist idea. If one is a close adherent to perspectivism in all things, then one is a relativist: everything is relative (to one’s perspective), there is no such thing as “the truth,” and objectivity is a fraud – sort of the like the massacre at Srebrenica, even though DNA analysis (what one might call an Aristotelian stake in the ground) has identified the remains of over 6100 people.

Perspectivism has another level of complexity. As I’ve discussed it so far, you might call it – to steal a term from physics, which, in fact, influences all this thinking – classical. So far the presupposition is that there is a completely observable – knowable – object of reality, and that each of us, in a variety of ways, is limited in how much of that object we can perceive from our perspective. It is a whole object, but I’m standing at a ninety degree angle off its right front, so that’s the perspective I get. If I move to another position, or if I can’t, but someone else, who can do so, stands in that other position, then we can get another perspective on this thing that is really there, independent of either one of us. Ultimately, we could add up and synthesize all the perspectives, all the sides of this object of reality, and arrive at something like the truth of it.

Let us say, though, that there is a phenomenon called – as it is in physics – the observer effect. In physics, with the observer effect, the instruments of observation alter in some way the state of what they observe: they impinge upon it, touch it, change it. What is observed is not completely independent of the act of observation. Rather than an absolute truth of the object, we get the object in the process of observation. On a simple level, we might say we see what we want to see, like that infatuated lover who, heating up the cooler vision of Shakespeare’s sonneteer, declares, “My mistress’s eyes are everything like the sun.”

It isn’t always that simple, though. Often we know that our love clouds our vision, that we see a level of beauty in the object of our love not seen by others. But what if we can’t step outside ourselves? What if we aren’t able to think, privately, “Lord, I love her crooked nose – but it is a crooked nose.” What we have then, to alter physicist Walter Heisenberg to my purpose, is a system (an object of perception or thought) that is described only in terms of an observer’s ability to know the system. If there are ten dimensions, but I am cognitively and sensorially outfitted only to perceive three, that is all I am going to see. If I am a man conditioned by upbringing and culture to view women as subservient and forbidden objects of desire only, that way of knowing may influence all of my perceptions of women. If I am a woman who has been the victim of sexual battery, and I have an overlay of sexually political ideology to accompany that history, I may not be able to see a man’s behavior toward me outside of that system.

Notice that I have moved from a real object that can only be perceived from a perspective, to an object the reality of which is influenced by the perspective, to an object that is once again, potentially, real outside of perspective, but the perception of which, for the observer, is shaped by the observer’s way of perceiving.

Add to this, finally, a way of perceiving – a philosophy, an ideology, a theoretical framework – that in its own tenets asserts the limitations and influences of perspective, and that claims to analyze phenomena, the world, political circumstance and events out of  that system.

Does such a system stand outside of itself in the act of analysis? How could it? If it does not, then what significance do we find in its claims of ideological influence made from an ideological stance that does? or does not? acknowledge and take into account its own ideological influence?

Or as physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it,

There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

Tomorrow: some real world political application

AJA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 12:03 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

I ended yesterday by noting that the effective “usurpation” by the federal government of the states’ power to tax, which was at least a pretended concern of some eighteenth-century constitutionalists, turned out to be unfounded. Reader Neil wrote in again to comment,

Unfunded federal mandates which eat up state budgets, to the detriment of local concerns?  States forced by “tax revolts” to lower the property or income taxes which pay for local infrastructure, at least in part because of the ever-growing federal share of tax revenue?  The incipient federal bail-out of the coastal blue states?

You are simply averting your eyes from the States’ loss of power.  It is legitimate to argue that State power should be minimized, in favor of a uniform Federal law for the entire country–but how can you ignore this dynamic?

I am not averting my eyes. None of it, simply, is relevant – or not in the way Neil thinks. Unfunded mandates, which I oppose, are not taxation. Potential federal bail-outs of states are a whole other economic ball of wax, and tax revolts or revulsion goes back to the arguments in which Alexander Hamilton, my sage of the week, was involved. None of it changes the reality that even with a federal authority to tax, 222 years after the Constitution’s adoption, many states and even cities are able, even substantially, to tax their residents. The number of years counts when predicting national descent into the abyss. We know that on Wall Street the bears always consider themselves confirmed; they’re just sometimes a little off on the specific date of the downturn – by years. I haven’t had a chance yet this week to release my pronouncement on the time parameters that will be required for an outcome to be designated official confirmation of predictions of national collapse, but it is definitely going to be less than two centuries.

What is relevant, however, is precisely the failure of the dire predictions against which Hamilton argued to be confirmed. Ascent to evolutions in the development of the national character and federal law, or still assert that enforcement of child labor law provisions places undue economic hardship on businesses, it is undeniable that the nation did not go to hell in a hand basket consequent to the federal power to tax, but instead climbed to greater heights.

Now tea-partiers, conservatives, and libertarians are once again bewailing the runaway locomotive to BIG GOVERNMENT totalitarianism, socialism (at 3 o’clock), fascism (at 4), or both (What hour is Beck on?) and the general loss of our liberty. I recall that brilliant analyst of the bygone summer entreating, at one town hall – was it of Arlen Specter? – “I want my country back, according to the Constitution.” Which country (according to the Constitution) was it, do you think, she wanted back? Certainly not the post-Great-Society U.S., which began our decline into moral turpitude, probably not even post FDR, from whom Social Security, and the FDIC, and the National Labor Relations Board and the whole proto-socialist farrago originated. Was it perhaps the America of separate but equal, in which Jim Crow reigned? The America before women and Native Americans could vote or the latter were even considered citizens? The America without those child labor laws, or even basic employee protections like a regulated work week, or without the EPA or OSHA? Maybe the America when slavery was still legal? When exactly was this golden age, and when and how did we stop abiding by the Constitution? Was it when the Supreme Court handed down landmark decisions that changed the face of country – perhaps literally – of which conservatives did not approve, that they thought terribly, terribly wrong? That wouldn’t, then, be Bush v. Gore in 2000.

However, now a Democrat serves in the White House, after a very convincing vote of approval by the American electorate, and the Democrats hold the House and Senate, after persuasive levels of electoral victory – according, as far as I know, to constitutional processes – and these Democrats are pursuing policies that Democrats are well known to support, and have supported for decades, and which, in fact, Obama, for instance ran on. And conservatives are very unhappy, which I perfectly understand. I feel them, if you know I mean. Been there.

But that’s that country, according to the Constitution. And it’s one thing to argue that these are policies – nationally regulated healthcare legislation, for instance – that one does not like, but it is an entirely different argument to make that these policies are unconstitutional, or un-American, or socialist, or fascist, or that they portend, quoting Neil, in his worry yesterday, a “degree of governmental power beyond which freedom is irretrievable.”

What, I wonder, would it even mean to retrieve power from the government of a twenty-first century Western industrial nation, the most powerful, in fact, of them all? Those Second-Amendment militias I mentioned yesterday wouldn’t do it, not with handguns and hunting rifles and some assault weapons, and, no doubt, some RPGs and shoulder-fired missiles, too, hidden away somewhere. Not against the U.S. military. So we would have to presume that the nation would fracture in some unfathomable way – far beyond anything that occurred in the 1960s, the most fractured period since the Civil War – and the military become divided in its loyalties: a disintegration or cataclysm beyond realistic imagination.

What this means is that to the extent that one might consider the U.S. government already, now, or threateningly soon, unresponsive to our constitutional freedoms, that freedom would already, truth be told and realistically speaking, be irretrievable.

However, even the most disgruntled tea-partiers do not believe this. They were out at town halls, they attended parties and demonstrations, and they have organized all because they know that their liberties have not been taken from them, and their freedom is not in danger, even from a revised healthcare system or huge loans to multi-national banks. The tea-partiers have the same opportunity to contend in the political process as everyone else – which is no guarantee, of course, as it never is, of prevailing. The loss of an election and an alienation from the political spirit of the time, even a bigger government than you want, are unhappy experiences, but they are not a tumble under the boot of incipient totalitarianism, or even a stumble in that direction from which a country may right itself. The wrong policies and the size of government affect our lives to be sure, but they are not what might rob us of our freedom. What might rob us of our liberty is the government’s clear contravention of the Constitution, its willful, however rationalized, violation of the laws that enunciate and protect our freedoms. Our failure to hold the government and its members accountable when they might do so.

Hamilton argued in Federalist 31 against those who entertain all manner of fears about the loss of freedom on the basis of hypothetically bad outcomes:

Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers; and by indulging an excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute scepticism and irresolution.

The protection against tyranny is not, ultimately, in any specific power of government or limitation on it. Other democracies depart from our practices in all sorts of ways. However fear mongers may try to make it seem as if democracy resides in this practice or that, but not its variant, democracy and freedom are established at a higher level. It is, for Americans, as we always say, in our Constitution and its processes themselves.

I repeat here what I have observed in substance in another place, that all observations founded upon the danger of usurpation ought to be referred to the composition and structure of the government, not to the nature or extent of its powers. … If the proposed construction of the federal government be found, upon an impartial examination of it, to be such as to afford, to a proper extent… security, all apprehensions on the score of usurpation ought to be discarded.

AJA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 12:46 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

As a major hurdle has been taken on the way to health reform legislation, with the Senate vote to close debate, some further consideration of BIG GOVERNMENT seems in order. I’ve been having a pleasingly civil back and forth with reader Neil (so little space for satisfaction in sarcasm, so much more in sense), which, after I claimed a degree of reflexivity in charges of BG, prompted this reply from him:

“Big Government” is shorthand for a more complicated notion, intuitively understood by many citizens.  Think of it as “BigGER Government beyond what can be effectively kept within bounds by the citizenry”.  Or “Big-ENOUGH Government to establish an uncomfortable level of control over the details of our lives”.  After all, we seemingly agree that there is some degree of governmental power beyond which freedom is irretrievable.

This is a response rich with ideas to explore. First, I’m not sure how complicated the notion is. It reaches back to the nation’s founding and is at the heart of every consideration, whenever and however it occurs, of a nation’s organization and its government’s maintenance: how to balance the requisite measure of governmental power to fulfill the tasks assigned to it by its constituents with the freedom of the constituents to remain, in satisfactory measure, independent of that governmental power. In a democracy, we, the people, grant you (I’ll return to that “you”), the government, the power to govern us, but we require that we retain control over that grant of power.

What complicates the politics, if not the notion, are differing conceptions of “the requisite measure of governmental power” and “the tasks assigned to it.” The healthcare debate stirs up fears with the focus on governmental power, but it begins, for opponents of reform, with dispute over what tasks are properly assigned to government. One tack opponents have taken – within the general economic and budgetary situation – is that of cost, and ultimately cost returns us to taxation, and to what degree, if at all, taxation itself is a power properly assigned to government to fulfill any of its tasks. As I say, as we know, these debates go back to our beginning. Among the topics of debate in the writing of the United States Constitution was that of the power to tax. In defense of this power Alexander Hamilton, as Publius, wrote in Federalist No. 31,

A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.

If the people gave the government responsibilities to fulfill, they needed to provide the government access to the funds necessary for the completion of those tasks: that access could only sensibly come via taxation.

I was properly Hamiltonian when I wrote in number 22 of my Principia that

Government is neither good nor bad. It is necessary. Neither is its size good or bad. It should be the size necessary to fulfill the responsibilities judged to be appropriate to it.

And as I wrote to another commenter, the conservative Nightelf,

As a liberal, of course, I have a more expansive understanding of “the general welfare” than do you, and thus assign more responsibilities to government than do you.

The debate over healthcare, then, outside the disagreement about specific structures and provisions, is a debate over BG, and the debate over BG has several parts:

1. the concern over fiscal propriety, which contains elements of the taxation divide, responsible budgeting, and pure BG (the amount of citizen money taken and controlled by government feeds its size);
2. the concern over efficiency, which maintains that government by its bureaucratic nature and as a function of increased size is, inadequate, in comparison to private enterprise, to a wide range of tasks
3. the concern over the amount of power government has over its citizens, or, as Neil put it, an “uncomfortable level of control over the details of our lives,” a “degree of governmental power beyond which freedom is irretrievable.

It is this last I wish to explore a little bit now. The role of firearms in American society, outstanding among other Western democracies, also has several parts. There is the hunting culture. Related to it is the foundational character, in American history, of armed, self-sufficient wilderness conquering and settlement. And a third element is that to which the Second Amendment to the Constitution refers and historically suggests, including the right to bear arms in order to deter undemocratic government. Contemporary extremist “militia” groups conceive of their right prominently through this perspective.

However, this raises the question of what it means – as a matter of citizen and organized action – in a twenty-first century America, to speak of a “degree of governmental power beyond which freedom is irretrievable.” How can freedom come to be so lost that it would require retrieval, and what would it mean – what would be entailed – to retrieve it?

As it happens, Hamilton had some related insights on this issue in that same Federalist 31. He was addressing the fear of State’s right opponents that an unchecked power of the federal government to tax would deprive the States of the means to tax, and thus accrue excess power to the federal government. This was Hamilton’s response:

This mode of reasoning appears sometimes to turn upon the supposition of usurpation in the national government…. The moment we launch into conjectures about the usurpations of the federal government, we get into an unfathomable abyss, and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning. Imagination may range at pleasure till it gets bewildered amidst the labyrinths of an enchanted castle, and knows not on which side to turn to extricate itself from the perplexities into which it has so rashly adventured. Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers; and by indulging an excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute scepticism and irresolution.

I’ll continue my consideration of the loss of freedom and the retrieval of it tomorrow, including what more Hamilton had to say on the issue, but it’s worth pointing out, as so many Americans know, that the fear of the loss of power by States – in fact, even constitutionally unaccounted for cities – to tax, proved unwarranted.

AJA

This entry was posted on Monday, December 21st, 2009 at 11:25 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed under The Political Animal.

William Carlos Williams

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

*Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry,” Reasons for Moving, 1968

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 8:03 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed under A Blue Guitar.