The Torture Debate

1. People who torture, or who order others to torture, are criminals under US and international law.

2. People who admit to having ordered torture are confessed criminals.

3. Confessed criminals should be prosecuted for their crimes.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THERE TO DEBATE?

November 22

The anniversary of the murder of Jack Kennedy usually sets me thinking about that long-ago day. But this year I was yanked back to it in particularly brutal fashion. Yesterday, I had a meeting at a law office in the 3300 block of Elm Street in Dallas, in the now hip, formerly industrial neighborhood of Deep Ellum. At the end of the meeting, two of the participants, both baby boomers, walked me to my car. "What's the best way," I asked, "to get onto Interstate 35?"

"Oh," one of them replied, "just follow Elm Street all the way through downtown, like you were in the Kennedy motorcade."

November 22, 1963, was a bright, beautiful fall day in suburban Philadelphia, where I was an eighth-grader. Shortly after we began our Latin class, the principal came on the PA system to announce that our president hat been shot in Texas--a few minutes later he came on to say that President Kennedy was dead. The teacher tried to continue with the lesson, but without much luck. I sat in my seat sobbing. The following Wednesday my family stood in a long line at Arlington National Cemetery, waiting for hours for the privilege of filing past his fresh grave.

I loved John Kennedy in a way that I have never loved any public figure since. He was for me, and millions of my generation, much more that a politician. He was young and beautiful and full of possibility. He was the promise of what we could grow up to be in a post-war America that was the greatest country that had ever been. The announcement over the junior high school public address system yanked the veil of innocence from my eyes; it never returned. For me, part of the attraction of the Obama campaign was the suggestion, the hint, that, if we could manage to elect this man, perhaps we could return to the world as it was on November 21, 1963, before we saw what was behind the facade.

Culture Wars

Sarah Palin's nomination is being widely interpreted as another attempt by the Republican Party to exploit the public's resentment of the cultural liberalization that began in the 1960s. I agree. An interesting thing about this iteration of the "culture wars" is the extent to which Sarah Palin herself demonstrates the fact that, while the right may have won elections with cultural issues, the cultural left consistently wins the culture war itself.

Most of the "culture war" issues relate to the perception that our culture has abandoned the strict sexual mores which prevailed in earlier times. Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, sex education, and sexually explicit entertainment all rests on a sense that society now tolerates, or even embraces, extra-marital sexual behavior which was once taboo and on a desire to restore these old strict standards.

This call for a return to old fashioned morality has worked well as an electoral political issue, but, strangely enough, no matter how many Republican culture warriors are elected to office, the culture continues to move away from the sexual shaming that is necessary to enforce sexually repressive cultural codes. Americans, no matter what their religious/political stance, now accept the fact that it is normal for people to engage in heterosexual activity before marriage. The tiny minority who "save themselves" for marriage are, depending on your outlook, either virtuous heroes or self-denying prudes, but nobody thinks that they are not statistically anomalous. Consequentially, pre-marital sex no longer carries the stigma that it did in the 50s and unwed motherhood no longer excludes a young woman from "respectability" as it did then. As proof of that, when was the last time that you heard of a pregnant teenager "going to visit relatives" so that she could give birth and put her child up for adoption. The trend toward accepting pre-marital sex as "normal" was clearly manifested by the welcome given Bristol Palin and her fiance by the hordes of fundamentalist delegates at the Republican National Convention who treated Bristol as a hero because she had decided not to have an abortion.

Of course, proclaiming this young, single mother an admirable hero instead an object of contempt, the religious right is essentially declaring its defeat in the culture wars. Whereas it once fought legal abortion because the ability to quietly end a pregnancy freed "promiscuous" women from the stigma that was their rightful punishment for violating sexual codes, they now lionize a young woman solely because she decided to keep her baby, seemingly ignoring the issue of what she did to get it. These folks have, over the last several decades, thrown out the baby and kept the bath water!

Similarly, cultural traditionalists opposed the movement of women into the workforce because it undercut God-given gender roles. Now they are supporting a married mother of young children as a potential chief executive of the United States without the slightest concern for how that might effect the "proper" division of authority within her marriage or what kind of example it might set for young women, AND they accuse anyone who opposes Gov. Palin's candidacy of engaging in improper sex discrimination, invoking a principle whose legitimacy they rejected until a few years ago! Of course, if they openly favored sex discrimination, they would be seen as outside the mainstream culture.

Inerrant

The nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate of a party whose presidential nominee is a 72-year-old cancer patient raises the possibility that, in the near future, the President of the United States could be a fundamentalist Protestant who actually believes that the King James Bible is the inerrant word of God. This would represent a cataclysmic change in American politics, a fact that is recognized by the fundamentalists of the religious right, but not so much by the mainstream media or the Democratic Party. Indeed, the possibility of revolutionary change that John McCain has presented to his party's theocratic base by nominating Palin is the reason that it is now willing to overlook its multiple disagreements with McCain and enthusiastically support the GOP ticket.

Palin was baptized as a Roman Catholic but began attending the pentecostal Assemblies of God church as a young girl. She was baptized in that faith at age 12. Recently, she changed her church affiliation from the A of G to a non-denominational "bible church," perhaps to advance her political career by escaping the stigma attached to "holy roller" pentecostal sects, who practice speaking in tongues and other extreme forms of worship. While her new church may not worship in as flamboyant a style as her old one, both groups share a belief in the infallibility of the Bible. As one of her Alaska neighbors told the New York Times, “The churches that Sarah has attended all believe in a literal translation of the Bible." There is significant evidence that Palin sees her political career as a mission from God and that she understands the world primarily through the lens of her religion. As a former pastor said, ""I believe Sarah would not live in a fragmented world. The idea that Sarah would take this huge influence of the worldview that really only the Bible and the relationship with Jesus opens up ... and suddenly marginalize it and put it over on the shelf somewhere and live apart from it—that would be entirely inconsistent." As President, we could recently expect Palin to look to the Bible for specific instructions. In this she would differ from almost all of her predecessors in the Oval Office, who have generally tended to adhere to a conventional sort of public Protestantism, but have not sought much more than general inspiration from the Bible.

Recent Republican presidents have relied on support from religious fundamentalists, but have not been one of them. Nixon was a non-practicing Quaker. Reagan was notoriously lax in his church attendance. Bush Senior is a country club Episcopalian. Even "Dubya," who sometimes appears to believe that that the Lord has chosen him as president, is a mainstream Methodist whose religious life before becoming president seems to consist primarily of the belief that Jesus helped him give up Demon Rum.

Unlike her GOP predecessors who simply exploited the votes of biblical literalists, a president Palin (who ran for for her public office with the slogan that it was time for "our first Christian mayor,") might very well seek the advice of a pentecostal preacher on her Middle East policy or pore over the Book of Genesis for clues as to Jehovah's views on global warming. Let's hope she doesn't get the chance to put the doctrine of inerrancy to the test!

John Edwards

Once again, the pundits chew over the question of the relevance of a politician's private life to his public career. I am not a prude, nor do I think that I am naive about human beings' capacity for duplicity. But I do think, in this case at least, John Edwards's behavior in his private life does have something to say to us about his politics.

When this year's Democratic presidential contest was first taking shape, Edwards positioned himself to appeal to people like me: left-liberals concerned about economic inequality and the plight of the poor. Despite the attractiveness of his message, I was skeptical of Edwards's candidacy, primarily because it didn't jibe with his record as a senator and vice-presidential candidate, where he had positioned himself as Southern moderate. However, the issue which ultimately convinced me not to support Edwards was his decision to continue his campaign in the face of his wife Elizabeth's diagnosis with terminal metastatic breast cancer.

My decision was not based, however, on a belief that Edwards was selfish or evil; rather it derived from my history as the spouse of woman who died of breast cancer. Based on my own experience, I thought that John Edwards needed to be with his wife and children during the next few years whether the Edwardses knew it or not. In other words, I opposed John Edwards's candidacy for his own good and that of his family.

In light of the latest revelations (and the fact that I believe that Edwards has still not come completely clean), I see John and Elizabeth in a different light. John's cheating on his cancer patient wife is reprehensible, no matter what his role in life. But the fact that he and, apparently, Elizabeth were willing to subject their children, their party, and their country to the risk that his affair with Rielle Hunter would become public during his presidential campaign strikes me as evidence of a self-centered ambition seldom seen in American politics. It's not really surprising that a bigtime plaintiff's lawyer would be comfortable risking other people's welfare to advance his own interests, but it is still sort of shocking to me that he would risk putting a Republican in the White House to satisfy his own desires. I now see John and Elizabeth as hillbilly MacBeths: as ambitious as the Clintons, but not as principled!

Obama and the Death Penalty

On June 25 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the imposition of a death sentence for the crime of rape of a child is cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. The opinion (pdf), written by Justice Kennedy on behalf of himself and 4 of his colleagues, is well-reasoned. As an opponent of the death penalty, I believe that the Court's decision is correct.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama immediately announced that he opposed the decision, saying, "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable that that does not violate our Constitution." He has thus put himself in the position of attacking the ultra-conservative Supreme Court from the right on the issue of capital punishment.

Those of us who believe that capital punishment is a moral and legal nightmare are, unfortunately, used to watching liberal politicians pander to the public's pro-death penalty sentiments, especially if we live in Texas. All of the Democratic candidates for Texas governor in my memory have supported executions, including the sainted Ann Richards. Bill Clinton notoriously took a break from campaigning for president in 1992 so that he could go home to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged death row inmate. Nevertheless, given the facts that public support for the death penalty seems to be declining and Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, might be expected to have a more sophisticated view of the subject than most politicians, I had hoped for better from this candidate.

1972-2008

Although Barack Obama likes to say that his campaign represents a break from the boomers' obsessive re-fighting of the battles of the Sixties, the McCain-Obama race represents the most clear-cut contrast of Vietnam era symbols since the last Vietnam era Presidential race, Nixon-McGovern in 1972.

The most obvious similarity between the two campaigns is that, like McGovern, Obama, a longtime opponent of the Iraq War, is running as a peace candidate, while McCain, like Nixon, is a war supporter who wants to fight to "victory" in Iraq. But there are other ways in which McCain and Obama remind us of the Age of Aquarius.

McCain is, of course, a Vietnam vet, a Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW for 5 years. This aspect of his life is fraught with meaning to Americans who lived through the Vietnam disaster. To those of us who opposed the war, bomber pilots represented the most personally culpable of the American warriors fighting what we knew was an "immoral" war. They were volunteers, officers, "lifers" -- true believers in the American war who rained anonymous death on the Vietnamese peasants below them. (My ex-wife's freshman roommate, whose father was an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, came back to their room crying after a fellow student told her that her father was a "murderer." The girl sobbed that she knew that most of her fellow students didn't agree with this assessment. My ex-wife tried to explain to her gently that, in fact, they did.)

From the standpoint of those Americans who supported the war, McCain's status as a POW plays into one of their major archetypes of the war, that of the American serviceman who, having given his all to win the war, was abandoned by the backstabbing anti-war movement on the home front. This right wing tendency operated for decades under the black POW-MIA flag, and, McCain, subliminally at least, evokes that trope.

Obama was a middle schooler when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, so he doesn't have the kind of personal history in the events of the era that McCain does. However, his life story clearly puts him on the counter-cultural side of the Sixties divide. First of all, of course, he's black, and whether it wants to remember it or not, the defining issue of the Sixties-era right was opposition to black liberation. Second, he's the son of an African, suggesting the Pan-African elements of the Black Nationalist movements of the era, as does the Black Liberation theology of his now infamous pastor, Jeremiah Wright. As an adult, Obama chose to work as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer, both jobs that were essentially invented during the Sixties. No matter how mainstream his politics are, he reminds people of the old issues.

So how does this play out in this year's election? It's hard to tell. McCain's status as a Vietnam vet explains a good deal of the deference given him by boomer reporters who didn't serve and it also makes it more difficult for Obama to attack him personally. Obama's evocation of Sixties symbols explains, I think, much of the reason why he attracted the support of white educated upper-income Democrats, many of whom were part of the anti-war counter-culture and the opposition of working class white primary voters who were on the other side of that divide. But 2008 is not 1972. The end of the Cold War and the disastrous Iraq War have reduced the appeal of the bellicose right. And, of course, millions of Americans who will vote in this election were not yet born when the last American helicopter left the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.

Hard Working White Americans

Hillary Clinton's recent remark that she has the support of "hard working Americans, white Americans," is probably the first time since May 15, 1972 that a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination explicitly claimed to be running on behalf of white people.

Of course, Clinton would deny that her campaign has any similarity to George Wallace's. Her remark, she claims, was simply an attempt to point out to her fellow Democrats (and more particularly the party's "super delegates") a gap in Barack Obama's electoral coalition and to argue that she is more "electable."

Whatever her reasons, I can't help but see Clinton's remark as a step backward for the party and the country. After all, Lyndon Johnson, the most accomplished political realist ever to hold the office of president, willingly gave up the Southern white vote that had long been part of the Democrats' coalition in order to pass the civil rights acts of the 1960s. He did it because it was the right thing to do. To raise the flag of white resentment in 2008 in a mainstream political campaign only points out how much our political discourse has deteriorated in recent decades.

Apostasy

On Monday the New York Times published a really slimy op-ed by Edward Luttwak, a military historian, in which he argues that, under Islamic law, Barack Obama, as the son of a father who left Islam, is himself regarded as an apostate and is, therefore, a pariah in the Muslim world. His ostensible purpose in discussing this matter is to counter the argument made by many Obama supporters (including the TBC) that Obama's status as the son of a Kenyan immigrant would help him repair the Bush-inflicted damage on the United States' reputation in the Islamic world and the Third World generally. Its real purpose is to reinforce, under a legitimate guise, the whispering campaign that Obama is a Muslim.

Luttwak's argument reminded me of the arguments made against a Catholic president back when Kennedy was running: "The papal bull of 1876 says that Catholics must do whatever the pope says, therefore Senator Kennedy as President would transfer the gold in Fort Knox to the Vatican," ignoring the fact that Kennedy was a pragmatic American politician who simply did not take his religion all that seriously. Similarly, Luttwak seems to assume that, because some Muslim religious text urges the punishment of apostates unto the last generation, the world's Muslims, faced with President Obama, will, instead of thanking Allah that the Americans have come their senses and elected a president who is not a trigger-happy fool, launch a fatwa against him because his grandfather, whom he never met, may have practiced Islam. Does that make any sense in the real world?

True Love

Much has been made recently of Barack Obama's patriotism or lack thereof. The flag pin issue is the one most obviously about patriotism, but many of the other "electability" attacks are, at bottom, a suggestion that Obama doesn't really love America. After all, he's got a funny name, his preacher asks God to "damn America," he went to school at a "madrassa" in Indonesia, and he doesn't put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. Seems to be a common thread here!

At first glance, it takes a lot of gall for anyone who has ever supported George W. Bush or Bill Clinton to attack anyones patriotism. After all, by the classical measure of patriotism--the willingness to die in battle for ones country--our last 2 presidents, who actively avoided combat while young, are certifiably unpatriotic. However, the folks worrying about Obama's patriotism seem oblivious to this irony.

So is the Obama patriotism issue just a cynical maneuver by opposing political campaigns? While it's certainly true that the political operatives are using this issue, in order to work, the issue has to resonate with real voters. So why is Obama vulnerable to this attack?

At the risk of being accused of "playing the race card," I'd say that the basic source of concerns about Obama's patriotism is white guilt. White people know, whether they acknowledge it or not, that African Americans have a long list of legitimate historical grievances against white America. They find it hard to believe, therefore, that blacks can love America in the same sense that whites do, notwithstanding the fact that blacks have lived in this land for 400 years and died in her service since before the United States was born. In other words, some whites feel like, "if somebody had treated me like we've treated them, I wouldn't love them."

I suspect that the patriotism issue will not go away during the general election campaign. The Obama campaign is addressing it by, essentially, affirming his patriotism, which is probably the only way to go in that context. But individual Obama supporters can and should, I think, confront friends and family members with the source of this concern in America's racial history.

College Education

Since we didn't have a popular uprising after the judicial coup of 2000, the least we could have done would have been to abolish the electoral college, that bizarre remnant of the 18th century which gave Florida's hanging chads their determinative power in the first place and ultimately allowed the Gang of Five to award the White House to the guy who lost the election to Al Gore.

The framers of the Constitution believed that the best protection against tyranny was the separation of powers, the division of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government. However, the executives with whom the framers were familiar were hereditary monarchs, chosen by their pedigree; the problem of selecting an executive by non-genetic mechanisms was a perplexing one. The suggestion that the President be chosen by national popular vote was rejected. In a society in which the vote in local elections was restricted to white men of property, this was deemed way too democratic. Instead, they invented the electoral college.

The formal structure of the EC is impressively complex. Each state legislature selects a slate of electors in a number equal to the total number of representatives and senators that the state sends to the U.S. Congress. The college elects the president and vice president, with a majority vote required for election. As originally designed, the person who came in second in the electoral college vote became vice-president. Although these days the college is described as giving an advantage to small states (because of the additional 2 votes that each state gets regardless of population), the important (and intended) consequence of the system in 1787 was that it gave disproportionate power to slave states because it incorporated into the presidential election the three-fifths rule which counted 60% of non-voting slaves in calculating the number of representives in Congress each state was entitled to. Similarly, it protected those states in which white men's right to vote was more restricted by property qualifications.

Apparently, the members of the Constitutional Convention imagined that the EC would be a quadrennial convocation of the country's natural aristocracy (i.e., rich white guys like them) who would choose one of their number to serve as a temporary king, with their second favorite to become the vice-president, the heir apparent. They did not contemplate political parties, presidential campaigns, multi-million-dollar campaign chests, primary elections, or poll-guided pandering, all the hallmarks of our modern presidential selection "system." The framers' fantasy lasted for the two presidential elections in which George Washington was elected unanimously. By 1796, when it was time to select Washington's successor, there were two political parties and the dream of the college as a republican version of the Privy Council was over.

For most of the last 200 years, the EC has functioned like it does now. Two major parties compete for popular votes in the states, each of whose electors are awarded, winner-take-all, to the candidate who wins the popular vote of the state. It is the winner-take-all aspect of this system which creates the biggest possibility for electing a president who loses the popular vote, a situation which has actually occurred at least 4 times in American history, most recently in 2000.

In the 21st century, when the democratic principle of popular sovereignty is universally accepted as the fundamental basis for political legitimacy, it is hard to imagine how anyone can defend an election system that allows the loser of the national popular vote to take office as president. After all, when every other office in the country is filled by the candidate who gets the most votes, why should the highest office in the land be subject to a system which sometimes allows the person with the smaller number of votes to win? The usual defense of the college is that it protects small states from being trampled by their bigger sisters, (This argument is made in particularly impenetrable fashion in this 2000 N.Y. Times editorial. The Times has since changed its mind.), but this argument is idiotic. It may be consistent with democratic principles to protect minorities by allowing them to block small majorities from taking certain actions, i.e., amending the constitution or overriding a presidential veto, but it how in hell can anyone justify "protecting" the minority by allowing it to elect the president? What about the majority's rights?

Anyway, small states do not really receive much benefit from the EC as currently constituted. The states that benefit from the system these days are the swing states. Small states like Idaho and Vermont, adjudged safely in the camp of one party, are ignored, while large swing states like Pennsylvania are courted assiduously and pandered to shamelessly. In a national popular election, without the distorting of the effect of the electoral college, every vote would be equally valuable and equally sought after by a rational candidate, no matter how deeply embedded it was among "red" or "blue" neighbors.

Of course, the problems with our presidential election system are recognized whenever it manages to defeat the popular will or comes close to doing so. It hasn't been changed because amending the constitution is extremely difficult; there are enough players who are advantaged by the current system to block an amendment. Recently, however, some smart folks have figured out a way to effectively abolish the EC by individual state legislative action. It's called "National Popular Vote" and it will go into effect once its been enacted by states having a majority of the electoral votes (270). So far 4 states (with 50 electoral votes) have enacted the law. (Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed it in California.) So, tell your state representatives to support the National Popular Vote in your state. Tell them its time that the United States caught up with democratic countries like South Africa when it comes to "One (Hu)man, One Vote!"