Midnight on the Forecastle

Honesty, Slavery and the Supreme Court

I’ve been reading Douglas A. Blackmon’s astonishing (and Pulitzer Prize winning) book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Although I haven’t finished it, I feel no reservations about recommending it. I recently came across the following passage, which I found to be both succinct and thought-provoking:

From the lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers, Americans had shared a consensus that the highest definition of a citizen was his veracity, that truth telling and fulfillment of a man’s commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a still new nation born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an utterly sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.

That allegiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had impelled the nation toward civil war during the antebellum decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic’s noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the prevailing view among all white Americans that blacks were in some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war upon itself at devastating cost, in a conflict ultimately justified as a struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in the South. The morally bewildering sacrifice of the war became a concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itself toward the “more perfect union” of the Declaration of Independence. The surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that vision. 

The Supreme Court’s endorsement in 1896 of the flagrantly duplicitous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a resignation of America’s white institutions to the conclusion that the emancipation of black slaves had been folly. Most agreed that the elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white Americans, the refusal of the southern states to fully free or enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white security.

There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S. politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans.

It occurred to me that contemporary American society is still grappling with the vestigial tensions of this seminal betrayal. Honesty is still regarded as a signifier of national character, of course, but mostly as a comforting myth; a handshake in lieu of a contract is tantamount to gross negligence and subject to liability (not to mention mocking scorn).

Plessy v. Ferguson was a kind of cultural capstone for the nascent petroleum and steel industries of America’s Second Industrial Revolution. The national character, such as it was, had been set on a new path – a path dedicated to the proposition that all industries be at unfettered liberty to acquire wealth. As Blackmon masterfully explains, after Plessy v. Ferguson a black American without money had zero protections against a post-reconstruction society bent upon consigning him or her to a life of unremitting slave labor as a criminal convict.

The new slave labor provided an ideal captive workforce: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize, and always available when free laborers refused to work. 

This description could apply to labor forces coming under the yoke of Gilded Age industrialists of all stripes throughout the country; child labor, the urban poor, anyone who couldn’t buy their way out of the emerging labor economy of the twentieth century. Power that had been seen as divinely ordained in antebellum America coroneted itself thereafter. Honesty became as “quaint” to the titans of capitalism as the Geneva Convention became to Alberto Gonzales. This is the cynicism that still defines our political life.

Anti-Intellectualism, Bears & Stupidity

The good people at Cosmic Variance have a post up about how McCain hates bears. Near the end is a quote from Lee Harris defending the merits of stupidity:

…stupidity has been and will always remain the best defense mechanism against the ordinary conman and the intellectual dreamer, just as Odysseus found that stuffing cotton in his ears was his best defense against beguiling but fatal song of the sirens.

Get that? The best defense. Oy.

A River in Egypt

If young children are too embarrassed by their poverty to accept nutritional meals from their schools, Michael Medved thinks that's an appropriate thing. It's better to be emotionally shamed than to be physically healthy. There are actually people who believe this.

In 2006 there were 12,827,000 Americans under the age of 18 living in poverty. To advocate that the government should play a negligible role in providing meals to the poor is to be part of a long tradition of conservative problem-solving. The principle here is simple: if something is bad, pretend like it's not happening.

Concerned about teen pregnancy? Preach abstinence. Concerned about divorce? Spend $1.5 billion on the "promotion of marriage." Angered by abortion? Slash economic support for reproductive health. If someone has an opinion on an ethical matter that differs from yours, convert them or kill them. But whatever you do, never… never acknowledge the changing nature of society or revise our institutions to be able to respond effectively to the actual needs of the populace.

Childhood in America

Last night I decided to disengage from coverage of the election returns and finish reading a book that's kept me happily occupied for about a month now, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz. A sweeping survey of American history as experienced by children, it bears a methodological similarity to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, insofar as it documents and examines the largely untold story of an ever-present sub-class of our citizenry. It's an eye-opener, to be sure. Childhood, as it turns out, is an almost entirely fictive construct of the adult world; and tends to be a mirror and repository of adult fears, hopes, expectations, prejudices and values. Personally, I found it revelatory that so many of my own views about childhood are products of protean assumptions, progressive era reforms, and baseless conjectures that have calcified into conventional wisdom. Oh, and fear.

Like any good work of history, Huck's Raft serves mostly to shatter misconceptions and reveal the deep complexity, paradoxes and ambivalent or contradictory legacies of its subject. As such, there is no single overarching lesson that can be learned here… excepting perhaps that everything we think we know is probably wrong. Or not. I don't know. What I do know is that I sighed deeply when I arrived at work this morning and read this:

When raising youngsters, most parents instinctively understand the importance of stressing values that [are] conservative: deferred gratification, following rules, honoring the importance of family. Few families want kids to reject authority, stress indulgence over success, or concentrate on philosophical exploration rather than hard work. In other words, most of us understand conservative values work better for kids. It stands to reason that that the conservative outlook that generates those values will work better for society as a whole.

Virtually every word of this is wrong. Flatly wrong. Historically inaccurate and blatantly stupid. However, it's also in totally harmony with how adults have regarding child-rearing and education throughout the ages: as cyphers for the perpetuation and preservation of their own worldviews.

UPDATE: One step closer to cultural eugenics.

On Human Garbage

About a year ago there was this "Dateline NBC"-induced suicide in Texas:

A prosecutor in this North Texas town killed himself Sunday as the police tried to arrest him on charges of soliciting sex over the Internet from a person he thought was a 13-year-old boy.

The prosecutor, Louis Conradt Jr., 56, had been caught in a sting operation set up by Dateline NBC, the television news magazine, and an Internet watchdog group called Perverted Justice. An NBC camera crew was outside the house to film the scene when the fatal shot was fired.

Last month there was this highly publicized arrest, followed by a briefly noted suicide in Florida:

[Assistant U.S. Attorney John D.R. Atchison], accused of flying to Michigan to have sex with a 5-year-old girl, committed suicide in prison by hanging himself from a shower head with a bed sheet.

And now we have this oddball story about self-mutiliation:

A convicted sex offender who told police he was feeling an urge to offend again took a fillet knife to his testicles in an attempt to castrate himself Sunday night.

The 59-year-old man, who lives in the 1600 block of Seven Pines Road, was bleeding profusely when police and paramedics arrived.

However, he was expected to survive. The man successfully removed one testicle and flushed it down the toilet; the other testicle was severely injured.

He then called a friend for help. Authorities were notified about 8:15 p.m. Sunday, and the man was rushed to the hospital.

According to a police report on the incident, the man, who was not identified, said he was feeling the urge to touch and hurt children. He was not trying to take his life, he reportedly said, but was trying to stem the urge.

It makes perfect sense. In America there has always been an emphasis on personal responsibility and punitive repercussions for criminal behavior, as opposed to other systems (characterized by a sense of community and shared responsibility) which focus on prevention and rehabilitation. Anyone who's watched television in the last ten years knows – without a shred of doubt – that the sexual predator of children is the most vilified figure in our culture. This status means one thing: if you're called out for it, you're toast. Kiss your life goodbye. Nobody will hire you. You won't be able to live near anyone. You'll be a target for all variety of ugliness. If you're lucky you might be able to live in The Palace Mobile Home Park or under an bridge. Killing yourself probably begins to look like a pretty good option; you'd only be beating someone else to the punch.

Essentially, the ostracizing power of society (with the aid of pervasive media) has effectively performed and end-run around the government and instituted a kind of de facto capital punishment program for criminal sexual deviants. What's sad about this isn't necessarily that it ignores the fact that "sex crimes against children have dropped dramatically in the last decade," or that treatment and relapse-prevention programs actually work. What's sad is that it has replaced the higher aspirations of our judicial system with a lynch-mob mentality which serves only to gratify its baser passions.

When someone loses all hope they become dangerous. In the cases referenced above, the danger is to the self. In most cases, however, it is directed outward. People who work in criminal justice recognize this; as do people in the military and other professions which specialize in conflict resolution and/or the application of force. Hope, it turns out, is essential.

Whenever I read about some deviant bastard pitching himself into the abyss or taking a fillet knife to his junk, I feel nothing but sadness. As amusing and gratifying has these stories are to some people, I can't help but see them as the last acts of tragic stories in which, ultimately, nobody won.

UPDATE: Here's this thing. Whatever.

Uncle Sam Wants You... for Christmas!

It's October. The finest, most glorious month of the year. Beer tastes better, trees are more beautiful, the air smells more delightful, and life is generally better in October. It's also the time to start thinking about the holidays just around the corner. As a nation at war, this has come to mean something new for Americans over the last few years. The old battlegrounds of our cultural landscape (civil rights, rock-'n-roll, multi-cultural lit-crit gender theory and the metaphysics of rape) have been commandeered to host the fresh and exciting God Wars of the 21st Century. Now that autumn is here, the whiff of gunpowder from the central front of these wars is wafting over time's horizon and calling us to arms once again. I'm speaking, of course, of the War on Christmas. The draft-dodgers, peaceniks, Neville Chamberlains, blame-America-firsters, Jesus-and-apple-pie-haters and surrender monkeys out there will surely dismiss the War on Christmas as a figment or fever dream of the warmongers' collective hive mind; happily and obliviously tending to their personal needs as war rages all around. Not me. I'll be enlisting this year. While Gods and Generals bask in the glow of klieg lights filtered through bastard amber gels on the nation's finest soundstages, I'll be slogging through the mud on patrol after endless patrol… ever the dutiful foot soldier in a war for civilization. All I ask is that on some future Christmas morning someone somewhere might remember my sacrifice.

The Hillary Enigma (Part 2)

In response to the post I wrote in which I speculated that the (seemingly) irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton is, perhaps, "garden-variety sexism," the question was put to me, "…is it sexist when the Hillary-Hater is female?" My initial impulse was to disavow any implication that my diagnosis was fit for any specific individual. Surely a woman could find any number of reasons to hate Hillary that had nothing to do with gender per se. Some people just hack us off. But, on reflection, it occurred to me that there are numerous examples of people who are in conflict with their own interests (see What's the Matter with Kansas?, Log Cabin Republicans, and (generally) cognitive dissonance, et al.). Moreover, there are certainly (to risk an epithet on a par with "self-hating Jew") some women who are so deeply invested in the view that theirs is the "weaker sex" that any serious challenge to this worldview will be met with hostility.

The legacy of any derogatory stereotype can be found in the victims themselves: the labels others give us have a nasty habit of becoming the labels we give ourselves. The work of labeling is done in macro and in miniature, and I'm far too dense to tease out the whys and wherefores of the matter - nevertheless, I found this article particularly enlightening. To wit:

Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.

[…] most people do not begin to see themselves in the midst of a tale with a beginning, middle and eventual end until they are teenagers. “Younger kids see themselves in terms of broad, stable traits: ‘I like baseball but not soccer,’ ” said Kate McLean, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. “This meaning-making capability — to talk about growth, to explain what something says about who I am — develops across adolescence.”

How we construct these narratives is in no small degree dependant upon the input and feedback of others. Indeed, when it comes to political persuasions, it's hard to imagine that we are creatures with "broad, stable traits" which are independent of our linearly understood personalities. Just so with all notions arrived at through rational thought and sentient decision-making. How else could stereotypes and pejorative cultural memes replicate through time if not through culture's dependence on narrative to define the self as well as the "other"?

It was Jesse Jackson who said Barack Obama is "acting like he's white." A dumb thing to say, surely, but another example of the ferocity with which we cling to the stories of who we are that were forged in an imperfect past. Are there women who hate Hillary because of sexism? I think there are. I would never, however, accuse someone of this. Not only would it be mean (and likely incorrect), but it's an accusation that permits no defense – and hence no meaningful dialogue. It would be nothing but a viscous ad hominem attack.

Marriage for Innies & Outies

San Diego's pink epiphany:

Mayor Jerry Sanders reversed his position on gay marriage Wednesday, supporting it in emotional remarks punctuated by pauses, shaking sips of water and his wife's hand resting one time reassuringly on his back.

Sanders' wife, Rana Sampson, stood next to him as he acknowledged publicly for the first time that his daughter, Lisa, is a lesbian.

"I've decided to lead with my heart, which is probably obvious right now, to do what I think is right and to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice,” Sanders said.

Sanders may very well be staying true to his heart. Or he could just be caving in to family pressure. Only he knows and it really doesn’t matter either way. Alan Keyes stuck by his guns and kicked his lesbian daughter to the curb (metaphorically speaking). Dick Cheney chose the courageous route of being awkwardly mute on the subject. "Pro Life" Senator John McCain said, "I will not draw my children into this discussion" after commenting that, in a hypothetical situation, the choice [to have an abortion] would be up to his daughter.

There's no argument that politicians in democracies should present their views to the public accurately, and that deviations from such views ought to be negligible or, at minimum, reasonably defensible. If you say you're going to vote for X if elected, you should vote for X if you're elected. Otherwise, generally speaking, you're a douchebag.

That said, the previous examples of familial/constituent tension are caused, I believe, by the flawed process by which voters and politicians alike formulate public values. This is from the Wikipedia entry for the Ethic of Reciprocity:

A key element of the ethic of reciprocity is that a person attempting to live by this rule treats all people, not just members of his or her in-group, with consideration.

"In-group," in its most basic manifestation, consist of one's genetic kin. Using this standard, a conscientious lawmaker would never pass any law unless he or she were willing to see it applied, uncontested, to their own family. Were this the case, there would still be plenty of people in prisons (there are transgressions aplenty that even the most loving of kin would not abide). On the whole, however, there would be fewer.

Most politicians don't worry too much about this stuff because there exists a kind of ethical loophole that permits them to finesse the issue. I'm speaking about the supposed difference between personal and/or public policy (or, in this case, morality). It's a line that is crisscrossed with abandon depending on whether doing so increases one's popularity. Liberal candidates profess to dislike abortion, but don't feel they ought to foist their moral judgment on others. Conservative candidates profess that to permit certain behaviors (i.e. abortion, sodomy, blasphemy) would be an unacceptable compromise of their own personal moral principles. Voters are just as fickle and perhaps more venal in their insistence that others conform to their standards, come what may.

But the problem with this isn't what any particular politician or voter believes. The problem is the degree of alienation that exists between certain "in-groups" and "out-groups." The Republicans are certainly free to formulate their political platform, as are the democrats. Huge lobbying organizations like AARP or the NRA are free to agitate for their causes. Over the years the NAACP and the AFL-CIO have exerted their influence. Nevertheless, the single most important indicator of whether the ethic of reciprocity wins the day is not to be found in which out-group influences the in-group most effectively, but rather which can wriggle their way into the in-group; and some have been left out in the cold for a long, long time.

Consequently, we have legislatures filled with straight people making decisions about the lives of homosexuals; men dictating what women can and cannot do; wealthy people setting the rules for the poor. This is not democracy. Until it is, If you say you're going to vote for X, you'd better be willing to vote for Y when your "in-group" won't let Y into the building. Otherwise, you're a douchebag.

Night Ranger Rulz

Following up on the previous post, the idea that Blackwater is institutionally adverse to mounting offensive operations against perceived enemies is laughable. As I pointed out, its grotesque objectives are hiding-in-plain-sight in its mission statement; just so with its pretensions of martial grandeur. The Nazi chic appearance that Blackwater projects is painfully obvious: from the black & red paw design of its logo to the Black-Ops fetishisms it steeps itself in (it's right there in the company's name for gods sake). The Blackwater website features an American flag and the well-known NASA composite photograph, Earth at Night. The message is as clear as a hammer to the head: it's a world enveloped by darkness and only those that are cloaked in darkness can protect the children. And the ponies. And Christmas. Black, in other words, is the new Black.

This is not simply a consequence or characteristic of the "militarization" of society. Although many Americans are ill-suited for a military life and therefore resent the expansion of military culture (and values) in times of war, by and large we respect the military not solely for what it accomplishes, but because it is – quite literally – us. It is far more transparent and inclusive in its operations than industry, and it consists of Americans of all political persuasions, races, ages, genders and so on and so forth. Private militias are a horse of a different color.

It's worth noting that the CIA began with a fairly benign charter. Like Blackwater's ostensible purpose of providing "security," the CIA was established to provide information: and nothing besides. Needless to say, it slipped the bonds of its charter. Straight away the CIA's Clandestine Service (currently under the umbrella of the NCS) was operating entirely beyond the laws of the United States as well as those of countries around the world. The results, as recently detailed by Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes, were consistently awful. And yet, there is a notion at the heart of the CIA's clandestine activities that has survived untarnished: the more secretive and extralegal an organization is, the more effective it will be. It's hard to think of any other idea that is so wrong and yet so cherished by so many (a peeping-tom godhead comes to mind). In any event, the climate that permits (and even encourages) the kind of warped legal opinions that would have American intelligence officers engaging in a worldwide orgy of torture and sabotage has metastasized into a cultural movement.

People with guns, it turns out, are every bit as stupid, fickle and simplistic as people without them. They're prone to the same delusions of grandeur; the same irrepressible need to feel cool, strong, and singularly "bad-ass." A covert, high-end, Black-Ops cadre of "elite" motherfuckers probably would be just the ticket for any number of people anxious for a taste of status and power; especially if they never had to produce results. Or, rather, weren't even permitted to produce results… because their work is secret. Confidential. Classified.

Why else would the Blackwater logo and fetching Mafioso swagger that so defines that organization look for all the world like a 14 year old kid's wet dream – unless that's precisely what it is?