The Great Writ

As Barack Obama continues his efforts to codify what he has described as the Bush administration's ad hoc responses to terrorism, one particular category of people proves especially nettlesome: "those we cannot try or release." In other words the presumed guilty. In other verbal mood and tense, those who, if we were to try them, we would have to release. By and large, it would seem that the evidence against this class of prisoners is so scanty and, where it does exist, so questionably obtained, that it wouldn't even be possible to obtain an indictment.

In the past week, Dick Cheney, our erstwhile Nosferatuan Vice President, has taken to the airwaves to denounce Barack Obama for . . . continuing the policies put into place by Dick Cheney. Liberals are of course outraged, and the manufacturing of consent rolls right along. Cheney's omnipresence gives Obama's prevarication an air of valedictory thoughtfulness, and it certainly appears to be working, as even many of the President's critics on the left seem to believe that he is trying to figure out what to do rather than figure out how to sell what he is already doing. Cheney is meanwhile accused of constructing strawmen, which of course he is, but at the same time we should credit him with more honesty than the endlessly circumlocuting Obama. Cheney repeatedly makes the same point: that we must forgo legality in pursuit of security. It's a bad argument, but it is not disingenuous on its central point. The so-called existential danger that motivates the argument doesn't exist--it should be needless to say. But Cheney is nonetheless straightforward in his advocacy of a military exemption to the laws and statutes of the United States.

Obama on the other hand is arguing that we must forgo legality in pursuit of security while giving the convincing appearance that we are not doing precisely that. We should abandon the legal structures that have governed the trial and prosecution of wrongdoing for over half a thousand years now, but we must do so while making glorious noise about American principles and what America stands for and all that. George W. Bush, in the latter years of his presidency, also moved his rhetoric in that direction, which is why so many opinionists now identify a certain . . . continuum between these two regimes. Cheney has remained resolutely on the dark side, as he once infelicitously put it, and if he is a moral monster, he is at least honest in baring his fangs. Cheney says that we must do terrible and vicious but necessary things. Obama says, look over there, the Constitution! And while your back is turned, he drops the keys to the dungeon down a storm drain and snags a few wallets.

Look at Them Yo-Yos

Newt Gingrich has always struck me as the Outside Sales man in American politics, the fellow who shows up at your office mid-week with no appointment, wearing a golf shirt and khakis, toting a worn case from which he extracts not a notebook computer but a honest-to-god glossy catalogue of paper products and cleaning supplies, whose virtues he then reviews in exhaustive detail even as you pretend to update your appointments on Outlook, check your voicemail, update your blog . . . He is the sort who, if you bump into him on the street the next week, grabs your shoulder and buttonholes you for another interminable half of an hour as he reviews these same irrelevancies, and you find that you can't escape, because as horrible a bore as he is, he has mastered that one skill that all successful salesmen master. I've suffered so many sales and product reps in my working life. Not one of them has been likable. Most have been as barely tolerable as the sound of a dentist's rotating brush. But every good one, those to whom I eventually acquiesce and buy something just to get rid of them for another week or month, has mastered the extraordinary art of allowing no graceful exit from a conversation, of predicting every "Well, it was nice to see you, Joe" with the inerrant accuracy of a prophet, a conversational clairvoyance that steers you ever back into a glad-handing loop, until yes, yes, you would love to do a test run on the 45% recycled toilet tissue, anything, Oh Lord, anything, just please let me get back to work.

Which is to say that Gingrich's brief moment in the full footlights of the American political stage resulted not from his having made himself popular, but from his having made himself inevitable. Every good salesman does it, and then hurries to off-load as much shit as he can before the equally inevitable turn a few months in, when his most current quarry stops trying to find a graceful and polite way to extricate himself from the unending sales pitch and accepts that for sanity's sake he's going to have to be callous and rude. The inimitable Joan Didion:

To complain that Mr. Gingrich's thinking is "schematic," as some have, seems not exactly to describe the problem, which is that the "scheme," as revealed in his writing and in his lectures, remains so largely occult. The videotaped "Renewing American Civilization" lecture in which Mr. Gingrich discusses "The Historic Lessons of American Civilization," which is Pillar One of The Five Pillars of American Civilization, offers, for example, clips from several television movies and documentaries about the Civil War, but not much clue about why the lessons of American civilization might be "historic," and no clue at all why the remaining four Pillars of American Civilization ("Personal Strength," "Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise," "The Spirit of Invention and Discovery," and "Quality as Defined by Deming") might not be more clearly seen as subsections of Pillar One, or lessons of civilization. Similarly, the attempt to track from one to five through Mr. Gingrich's "Five Reasons for Studying American History" ("One: History is a collective memory"; "Two: American history is the history of our civilization"; "Three: There is an American exceptionalism that can best be understood through history"; "Four: History is a resource to be learned from and used"; and "Five: There are techniques that can help you learn problem-solving from historic experience") leaves the tracker fretful, uneasy, uncertain just whose synapses are misfiring.

What has lent Mr. Gingrich's written and spoken work, or, as he calls it, his "teaching," the casual semblance of being based on some plain-spoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says has reached us in outline form, with topic points capitalized (the capitalization has been restrained in the more conventionally edited To Renew America) and systematically, if inappositely, numbered. There were "Seven key aspects" and "Nine vision-level principles" of "Personal Strength" (Pillar Two of American Civilization), there were "Five core principles" of "Quality as Defined by Deming" (Pillar Five), there were "Three Big Concepts" of "Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise" (Pillar Three). There were also, still under Pillar Three, "Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise" ("Bureaucracy," "Credentialing," "Taxation," "Litigation," and "Regulation"), which would have been identical to Pillar Four's "Seven welfare state cripplers of progress" had the latter not folded in "Centralization," "Anti-progress Cultural Attitude," and "Ignorance."

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that "the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts," and offered "five simple steps to a bold future." On the health-care question, Mr. Gingrich posited "eight areas of necessary change." On the issue of arms control, he saw "seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons." Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to "two initiatives," then to "three broad strategic options for the next generation," and finally, within the scan of the eye, to "six realistic goals which would increase our children's chances of living in a world without nuclear war."

Gingrich achieved a fair height of political power and promptly talked to government into a shutdown. No one knew precisely what it meant that the government had shut down, but it sounded vague and ominous, as if electricity might be cut off to the jails, water released from the reservoirs, toll booths abandoned, schools shuttered, borders open to attack. It all had to do with a thoroughly incomprehensible impasse in crafting a federal budget, and while Gingrich yapped, Bill Clinton shrugged congenially and aw-shucksed the country into believing that the hyperverbal dork heading the GOP was destroying America in a fit of nerdy, boyish pique. Thus ended the Republican Revolution.

Gingrich has now returned with a new product line, as salesmen invariably do, and it seems suspiciously similar to his last line of superior cleaning supplies, as it unavoidably is. He has now seized upon the dismal state of California to prove . . . it is again hard to tell. Unions and their lobbyists control the government, we are told, but The People, whomever they may be, are incensed by the elites. Meanwhile, the Machine of Government . . . machinates. Who really controls whom is never made entirely clear. Gingrich is certain that the popular defeat of various revenue and spending proposals via ballot measure indicates that a "62 percent-plus majority in California [is] in favor of smaller government and lower taxes." This is not exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that a majority of Californians do not understand that revenue must be sufficient to cover expenditure, and that their failure to accede to the tax structures necessary to fund the services that they themselves demand of their state government is less a matter of "rebellion" than it is mere incomprehension. Discerning principles from ballot measures, especially when those principles bear uncanny resemblance to the pre-existing slogans of major political parties, is a fool's game. Watch the popularity of the California governor and legislature as they begin cutting police and fire, pension plans and school years. The people of California don't want smaller government; they want bigger and better government, but on a better payment plan. Interest only, that sort of thing. Money for nothing, chicks for free.

The Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc.

MAUDE: Tell me a little about yourself, Jeffrey.

DUDE: Well, uh. . . Not much to tell.

A match is dragged across a headboard; the Dude is lighting himself a joint. He shakes the match out to restore blackness except for the glowing tip of the joint.

DUDE: I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement--the original Port Huron Statement.

MAUDE: Uh-huh.

DUDE: Not the compromised second draft. And then I, uh. . . Ever hear of the Seattle Seven?

You may recall that in the waning years of the Bush régime, a gang of UFO-enthusiast, nunchuck-carrying yahoos in Miami, affectionately christened the Liberty City Six, were entrapped by the FBI, who recruited these young morons to "al Qaeda" through a subterfuge involving guns, explosives, and a ready-made plan to blow up the Sears Tower. Five were eventually convicted of "providing material support" to terrorists, whatever that means precisely, as well as a grab-bag of other support and conspiracy charges--this after two successive mistrials, with even the ultimate convictions cast in a sickly light by the clear consensus that none of these men could have so much as blown up a frog with a firecracker were it not for the timely intervention of those scions of the Priory of Jedgar, the FBI. You may wish to check the dateline on the linked story. By eventually, I mean last Tuesday!

Now the FBI has moved on to smaller and lesser things, tricking a gang of even more pathetic losers into agreeing to the receipt of stinger missiles and C-4, with which to blow up synagogues and Air National Guard planes, because of Afghanistan. If it seems that offering disaffected losers the opportunity to live out their Fallout fantasies will result in their seizing the opportunity, then perhaps that's because it will. The usually moderately reasonable Matthew Yglesias manages to miss this point entirely, even as he says some other things that make sense:

It appears that this home grown terrorist cell in New York City was never particularly close to seeing their plans come to fruition since they were well-surveilled by law enforcement for quite some time. Which is how it should be. It’s good work by the FBI and the NYPD.

Among other things, I think this is a reminder that while international issues should of course be of some concern to the U.S. government, it’s very difficult to draw a straight line between events in Afghanistan and America’s vulnerability to terrorism. The reason this plot was a danger at all was that the plotters were in the United States of America and the reason it was never that big a danger was that law enforcement was doing a good job and had the situation under control. It’s hard to see how the existence or non-existence of a “safe haven” of some kind on another continent could have made a difference.

I appreciate that Yglesias consistently ridicules the patently absurd notion that terrorists require some overseas headquarters country from which to plot their offensives, like Roman legions wintering in Gaul while plotting assaults on the Rhine, but at the same time find him as depressingly prone as most liberals to accede to the imagined necessity of proposing a countervailing threat, i.e. so-called homegrown terrorism, in order to prove their bona fides . . . in what I can't quite imagine. The truth is that America's "vulnerability to terrorism" is functionally imaginary; there is no more systemic danger of domestically originated attacks than of spectacular attacks originating overseas. Insofar as either foreigners or American nationals might seek to blow up buildings and kill people within the United States, I note only that there are already laws making murder and the destruction of property illegal, and severely punishable.

Terrorism has long been the charge that repressive governments have wielded firstly against their political enemies and secondly against all sorts of criminals and malcontents in order to maintain an atmosphere of perpetual crisis and danger, which invariable renders the governed more malleable to social control and amenable to further restrictions on their freedoms and privileges. Despite the rhetorical flourishes that brand supposed terrorists as evil, nihilistic, and malevolent, it's broadly understood that the distinction between acts of terrorism and other acts of criminal violence is not nihilism at all, but rather political motivation, which the terrorist has and the common criminal lacks. That we brand violence with political intent as categorically worse than other forms of violence says a great deal about our attitudes toward legitimacy and authority, namely that we are especially enthralled by the latter.

Just as I am uncomfortable with the idea of hate crimes, because they depend not only on ascertaining culpability, premeditation, and demonstrable intent, but also on divining, for lack of better terminology, the content of the soul of the accused, a very slippery proposition no matter how many eagles are tattooed across his chest, so too am I deeply suspicious of the very idea of terrorism as a legal category, because it presumes to define criminal thoughts as well as acts. What happens when we begin to make the contemplation of violence illegal? There can be, to be sure, a fine line between fantasy and conspiracy, but what does it say when our government works so assiduously to cajole mere fantasists into plots (however half-cocked) by sending secret agents to offer them the means?

The entrapment and prosecution of "homegrown terrorists" are part of a broad, persistent, and frankly effective effort to create a supine and frightened citizenry through the maintenance of a steady buzz of mild hysteria, dulling any potential objections to the government's ongoing program to arrogate to itself the right to dispose of individual lives however, whenever, and to whatever ends it determines, regardless of whether or not one has committed, or is even capable of committing, a crime.

While You Were Out

While I am gone, and in response to a request in comments downblog, here is a site that makes fun of hipsters that I am thoroughly enjoying. A vous, mes amis.