from the complex to the simple?

In his commentaries Julius Caesar wrote " Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres...." Our modern Caesar would say something more like "All the world is divided into three parts: the US, our little brothers" (the rest of the rich), "and the wilderness" (probably 80% of the world's people). Often that wilderness might seem as close as the other side of the fence. In our own little piece of this world not too many of us would think of ourselves as rich, though statistical comparisons might say we are. And the really rich have conscripted us to go along on their forced march to tame that wilderness.

Part of that wilderness is terrorism. This is a fuzzy concept since one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The British have occupied Ireland, or part of it, for800 years, but the IRA are considered the terrorists. Apparently we are in an endless war with a tactic, a very sobering thought. The 9/11 disaster was a heinous crime, and it is not at all clear why it can't be dealt with as a crime. Why does it drive a country to an endless war, against whom? And what tactics are allowed in this war? Is a man a terrorist because of who he is, or the views he espouses, or the actions he performs?

In the Palestinian elections,the turnout was 77% of registered voters and Hamas won 57.5% of the seats. This would mean that 594,000 Palestinians supported terrorism and are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Is this how we should view the Palestinians? Just where would we lock up all those people?

For years there has been an ongoing problem in Gaza with weapons being smuggled across the Egyptian border through underground tunnels. In our own country, the tunneling seems to have a different purpose. The Palestinians want weapons to fight the Israelis; we want drugs so we can tune out our troubles.

Today's news shows both how confused yet divided we are. It's hard to change horses mid-stream but we can at least turn around when we find the water too deep. Or is it better to drown than correct mistakes? It's all so complex and confusing. Perhaps we need to return to fundamentals, stick to what helps or hurts us, decide what is right and wrong. Picture the Pakistani who came home from work to find his house destroyed because our government wanted to kill terrorists in the one next door. What if "our" government did that here in the US and you came home to find it was your house that was "collateral" damage. Some may be old enough to remember Philadelphia where a block was destroyed in a fight with militants. But that was before our war on terrorism, so none of those people suffered rendition to a country with a lax legal system.

Of course, our own legal system is getting lax to some. If I can't trust myself, I can't trust you. And if I do trust myself I certainly don't want you spying on me. Maybe it's time for us to grow up and act our age. If we want to be at war with most of the world most of the time then we'll choose one path. And if we want peace and tranquillity we'll choose another. But we need to choose and not let Caesar roll over us.

What is democracy?

The title should have included an oft-stated assumption: that "democracies" do not go to war with each other. This assumption seems almost intuitively obvious: most people almost all of the time want a peaceful existence and are not motivated to go to war or on any other kind of killing spree. This could mean, for example, that if a plebiscite had been held on Iraq "we" wouldn't be there now. While the "people" might want peace, a small subset of them might opt for war, and our "government" is a very small subset.

I suspect the same is true of Palestinians: they don't want to destroy Israel but many of their leaders do. Of course, I've read that current agreements don't allow the Palestinian authority to have any real power; that awaits the creation of an independent state. But what are we to make of yesterday's resounding victory of Hamas, an organization that "we" consider a terrorist organization? At least one observer is nervous about it.

I've also read that Hamas agreed to limit its election platform to exclude the "death to Israel" part. Perhaps, as in most countries, politicians tone down the rhetoric when power is in sight; they become pragmatic. Not in all cases, of course. In some countries politicians simply use good makeup and we only see their fangs once in power.

It seems that while the Palestinian Authority under years of Fatah control had grown corrupt and was seen that way by Palestinians in the street, Hamas has been constantly and consistently engaged in bringing social services to the masses. So, if the Palestinian "people" have their way and Hamas leads them to statehood will this advance the cause of peace or war? Do you suppose that after decades of impoverishment and disenfranchisement the Palestinians want more violence?

If democracies don't go to war then why are "we" concerned about Iran? Their leaders were elected. One might think that Saudi Arabia would be a greater danger to world peace. After all, most of the 9/11 bombers came from there. And now that I think about it, why was the Bin Laden family escorted out of the US immediately following 9/11? How did they avoid Guantanamo?

What will make us safe?

Safety is something we all crave. Of course, the prognosis for all of us is ultimately grim, but we want to put it off as long as possible. And if we pay attention to the news, we seem to be surrounded by danger, and the danger seems to be growing. Some people, including prominent politicians, are talking of military action against Iran over nukes. Just what we need for greater safety, another war in Asia?

In our own society, equal rights have been and continue to be a source of great turmoil. And in many places throughout the world we have been seeing new countries arise as national groups gain independence, such as the splitting up of Yugoslavia into separate, sovereign entities. Not a pretty process, but seemingly an historically inevitable one. Just as groups within society want recognition and equal rights, so too in the world community, sovereign states want recognition and equal rights.

Imagine our country as it has evolved in our understanding of rights and democracy, from the franchise awarded only to white men with real property, then to all white men, then non-whites and women. Ours has been a cacophonous journey. But we are the better for it, are we not? (Of course, life would be much better if I, alone were absolute dictator. Letting the "little people" participate makes things messy.) The historical truth is that democracy has increased not because someone in power has granted an excluded group their "rights" but because these "troublemakers" have fought for, demanded, and effectively seized their rights. Authoritarian powers have been forced to either capitulate or be destroyed.

I suspect the same is true in the community of nations. We have many thousands of nuclear weapons, more than enough to wipe out all of humanity. Why? Iran wants the bomb? Why? Will the Iranians getting the bomb make the world less safe? I believe so. So, should we do "whatever is necessary" to prevent their getting the bomb? I believe not. The days of imperial powers being able to control the "lesser breeds" are numbered. Unfortunately, egomaniacs with power don't give up easily. It's obvious that the way to diminish the nuclear threat is to get rid of the bombs. And if we aren't willing to seriously undertake, with the other "mad bombers" of the world, the steady dismantling of weapons systems with a clear eye on their eventual, total elimination, then other countries will try to get their own.

Israel has the bomb. So, the Muslim states in the region will do just about anything to get their own. And as with independence movements internationally and civil rights struggles within nations, it will be a losing, destructive, and very bloody battle to keep smaller countries under heel. Not a simple or short-term process, but it seems obvious that the only path to nuclear non-proliferation is nuclear disarmament. If you don't like the war in Iraq, you're really not going to be fond of the war in Iran.

Do You Parse*?

In regard to the fourth amendment, specifying the need for warrants in searches, some would say that the "fly in the ointment" is the word unreasonable. If a search can be construed as reasonable then perhaps a warrantless search is warranted, so to speak. I think this position is unwarranted. If you take the amendment as a whole, the implication seems clear that obtaining a warrant is what makes it reasonable: an officer of the law must convince a sitting judge of the necessity and legal standing of his proposed search/seizure and getting the judge to agree validates the search. It's not good enough that the searching party (cops, FBI, NSA,etc) claim to have the legal right vested in them by authority of the King (or President, or even a misconstrued law). All of us, most of the time, have reasons for our actions. These reasons, in themselves, don't make the actions reasonable. Picture the Red Coats breaking down your door and going through your things, yelling "In the name of George III, we...." This amendment, this constitutional protection, was not about a colonial ruler; it was meant to protect us against our own government. For, truth be told, our founders' concern was tyranny.

Yet, we are all familiar with warrantless searches. In the past year I've personally observed about 15 such "stop and frisk" incidents involving pedestrians and the local police. It's obvious that the courts have decided that a sworn officer of the law, observing what he believes to be illegal behaviour has sanctioned stopping, cuffing, searching and investigating (through a computer) otherwise innocent citizens. So, the courts have held that getting a warrant is not necessary to make a search reasonable. (Throughout history, there have been many "books" of law and religion, but not so many commentaries, and the ones that stand out - at least to a Westerner - are rabbinical commentaries on the Torah, classical scholars of Catholicism, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and the US Supreme Court. Perhaps I'm biased but I don't think the Supreme Court fares well in the comparison.)

Two things have troubled me about "stop and frisk" incidents. In the fifteen I watched, young black men were stopped (I inferred) because the cops thought they had illegal drugs and in every case and I mean every one of them the police let the young men go. Sooooo, the cops weren't doing their jobs and let crooks walk with only a warning? Or perhaps the cops misconstrued what they had seen? Or the cops were bigoted? Certainly, failing 15 out of 15 times made their searches ostensibly unreasonable.

And what troubled me here was the undermining of authority. Many people, Hannah Arendt comes to mind, have contrasted power and authority: power is imposed from above and at least threatens violence, while authority arises from below. None of us likes to get our comeuppance but we are trained from birth to accept guidance. Your kids don't like the rules you've set but they obey them: they accept your authority. They are angry and confused but they accept your authority as legitimate. If they don't and you're forced to use or threaten to use force, to that extent you've lost them. All well-functioning families, as well as societies, have this same experience. Decades ago, in the infamous trial of the Chicago Seven, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers did not recognize the legitimacy of the court or the judge (Julius Hoffman?) and wound up gagged and bound to his chair during his trial. And what of the young men I watched this year, stopped and harassed by the police for ostensibly doing nothing? I found myself hoping the cops would find drugs just to legitimize their behaviour. If people don't, or won't or can't, accept the legitimacy of the State and its enforcers then we are in deep trouble. Social cohesion depends on this.

The second thing that troubled me is the extension of the State's power over us. For those who have supported "conservative" causes or leaders such as Reagan, I would hope they are now lined up with the "liberal" ACLU. If "our" government is nowadays allowed to cast wide, indiscriminate nets looking for illegality, without cause of any kind, let alone probable cause, for investigating us, then tyranny is knocking at our doors. It would mean the secret police are looking for suspects instead of investigating known suspects. I don't remember the precise details but in England in a small town there was a heinous crime and the police required DNA samples from all male residents. In this country that would not be considered acceptable. But give it time. The way things are going such invasions of privacy can't be far off. The logic of "our" Administration's position could require all of us to have bar codes tattooed to our wrists or, more likely, RFID tags implanted under our skin.

Some of us oppose this trend. Even among Christians, I would hope there would be widespread opposition. Doesn't one need free will and choice to attain heaven? And aren't we all subject to temptation? Few of us are murderers but many more of us have thought about it. And even the President is human, isn't he? Is he purer than us? Or is he a "used car salesman?" I think the basic thrust of democracy through history and particularly with our country's founders is: if you can't trust yourselves how can you trust your leaders?

---

* Parse: To break (a sentence) down into its component parts of speech with an explanation of the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.
Parsing is what, decades ago, kids did in school diagramming sentences and is something linguists and computer scientists still do. It's argued here that this is what our Supreme Court also does and that we ourselves need to get good at if we really want self-government.

Would you trust me with your wallet?

It's been written, by historical cognoscenti, that Martin Luther was the father of modern political liberalism. In challenging the authority of the Papacy and helping to spawn the Protestant Reformation, his life was part of the long trend away from subjugation to kings and dogma and towards a belief in the individual's primacy which may be the underpinning of democracy. Sort of an "we're all equal before God; we don't need any popes or priests as intermediaries; we are equal to each other." (Almost syllogistic. I'll have to brush up on my Aristotle.) And this fight seems to form a dialectic: submission versus freedom. It's for someone much smarter than I to discover if this is a war which can be won or is an inescapable part of (our) nature.

One difficulty with having an individual be master of his own religious faith and practice it that he may reject religion itself. In the US we are all well-versed in the problems this causes. So we end up with situations where some religious folks, personally and through historical influence hostile to "Romanism" find themselves allied with Catholics over many issues, and many of these "Protestants" are more authoritarian than the Pope himself! But if you don't want to kneel before the "Vicar of Christ" why would you submit yourself to the power of "christian" coalitions or televangelists? Twenty years ago the Rev. Mr. Jimmy Swaggart called himself the greatest preacher of love in the world. I never did catch relevant comments of any young lady of his acquaintance, though he's currently on Spike TV. (Never been a goody two-shoes, but if God really loves sinners I've got a lot of catching up to do!)

So, are we lucky or doomed to have a "born-again" President who believes he's on a "mission from God?" I'm glad the man's found his place in this world, but not certain I want to attend his church. Whether by design (for the paranoid among us) or happenstance, we're daily assaulted by threats to our very lives and if we don't toe the line (meaning "do what I say") we'll die regretting it. Someone, somewhere, might do something bad to us? Snoop on everybody to identify them. Then what? Jail or torture or kill them? How do the feds go from fighting terrorism to spying on WTO protesters? If we do not face Washington three times a day and Hail, Caesar, are we giving aid and comfort to the enemy? Like the Pope speaking ex cathedra, is a somewhat democratically sort of elected (the Supreme Court as our College of Cardinals?) official the arbiter of political acceptability?

Life's tough. It's complex. And our leaders and overseers -the corporations- are only too ready to tell us just how complicated things are, how beyond our understanding or control. So we are "inundated by piffle" (to borrow a very felicitous phrase from the renowned Russell Baker).

Someone leaks that the President may have broken the law? Find that person and prosecute. Amphetamines destroying our youth? Ban the sale of over-the-counter cold remedies which contain "precursor" chemicals. Cancer from second-hand smoke? Ban smoking in public places. (I must comment that I've read we are 6 times more likely to get cancer from eating seafood than from second-hand smoke, and if smoke-free restaurants are "good" for business why didn't restaurants ban smoking decades ago?) Worried about anything? Outlaw it; destroy it. Tolerance getting you down? Become intolerant. Even better trust the authoritarian intolerance of our leaders.

And at the same time that our liberties are being restricted and our livelihoods outsourced (cui bono?) we're fed the daily prattle about being the freest people in the world. I'm not convinced; are you? Yesterday was fourth amendment. How about the ninth?

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

from the simple to the complex

Is everything connected to everything else, as with the proverbial butterfly's wings in Asia affecting the weather in North America? Even if true, are things often so complicated and the connections so tenuous that we must disregard them? And where do we draw those lines? It is possible to view events over the past thirty years in the Middle East as the struggle of those peoples to break free of Euro-American domination and take control of their own destiny. Today is the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's inauguration during the Iranian hostage crisis. The Iranians overthrew the Shah and its repressive, murderous regime. Their secret police had the acronym Savak. Since the US had supported (perhaps installed) that regime to the end, the Iranians did not view us fondly, and their revolution took an extreme and anti-American path. They still haven't "calmed" down. The US supported the Shah in pursuing nuclear energy; today they want the bomb.

When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

It seems doubtful that we can control the atttitudes and actions of other countries and their leaders. We seem to have more than we can handle just trying to influence our own leaders. Is it possible that foreigners view us as nothing other than the world's bully? And what are we to make of our government's spying on us? An article in today's New York Times states that even the Justice Department's legal rationale for this spying is mostly classified. The fourth amendment to our Constitution says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It seems pretty straightforward to me; it's basically a definition of privacy and security. Though even "strict constructionists" may falter in understanding this. As in Darwinists (enviornmentalists?) vs. Fundamentalists (exploitationists?) it can be hard to know where people's allegiances fall. But at a minimum, how are we to exercise democracy if we don't even know what's being done in our names and with our money? Shouldn't we have the same rights "we're" trying to export throughout the world? Being Mr. Star War's anniversary it's odd to recall that at the same time Reagan was supporting Solidarity in Poland (remember Lech Walesa and the shipyards in Gdansk?) he fired all the Air Traffic controllers here in the US for going on strike. Wouldn't it be nice if our government thought of us as citizens and not just consumers?

Conundrum

Idle speculation being easier than investigation, do the populations of concerned environmentalists and (believing) evolutionists have much overlap? Put another way, if one believes the universe is more than 10 billion years old and life forms on earth are more than 1 billion years old, and ever changing, evolving with new species arising and replacing older ones, are we fighting "city hall" in trying to save endangered species? Wouldn't conservation be more appealing to religious fundamentalists who view life as static? On the other hand, if Christians believe God gave Man dominion over the Earth, then it's our right to wipe out things, species, "lower life forms" which offend us. Am I stripping the bark off the wrong tree?

just wondering

What I keep wondering is, if the innocent have nothing

to hide and shouldn't fear being spied upon, then why
are the President and the
 Government so afraid to let us
in on their secrets?
 Maybe they're not so innocent themselves.

And some have said that we should get accustomed 
to invasions
of privacy and not waste our energies 
fighting them, as though
they were an inextricable part of 
the web of modern life. The
logic of this position implies we should also 
accept muggings
and car theft, among things so common we should 
"get used to it."

What would life be like if everyone knew 
everything about
everyone else?
Or will only our secret police know all?