Metaphor of the Week

On July 23 veteran conservative columnist Robert Novak was cited by Washington D.C. police after hitting a 66-year-old pedestrian with his Corvette convertible.
According to a cyclist who witnessed the accident and called 911, the victim was crossing the street on a "Walk" signal when Novak drove into him and then, apparently ignoring the figure "splayed" on his windshield, made a right turn, at which point the victim rolled off.
Novak might have driven away had the witness not blocked his path with his bicycle. Informed that he had just struck a pedestrian, Novak said, "I didn't see him there."

On July 28, Novak announced that he has a brain tumor and will be beginning treatment at Boston's Women's and Brigham Hospital. He hopes to return to his journalistic work before long.

It will be interesting to see whether in the future brain tumors will be invoked to explain the invasion of Iraq, the massacre of civilians by military contractors, the collusion between government and Big Oil, or the rigging and collapse of America's housing market . . .

. . . any instance in which someone inexplicably plowed into victims who seemed to be in plain sight.

He didn't see them there.

Serves You Right to Suffer

The federal government is in the process of shoring up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bloated, tottering colossi that between them guaranteed approximately half the nation's mortgages. This salvage operation may cost taxpayers as much as 5 trillion dollars. Try saying that figure to yourself: Five trillion. Or writing it, a five followed by 12 zeroes.
Beside that, the government's $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns in March is like the candied cherry on a cupcake.

The question is who gets the cupcake?

In 2007 Freddie Mac's Chairman earned 18,289,575. Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd made only $13.4 million, but take into account that his company had lost $2.1 billion and its shares had fallen 33%.
Between 1993 and 2006 Bear Stearns' CEO is said to have made $236 million.
As of this writing, neither of the first two executives appears likely to suffer the indignity of a pay cut. The only reason that can't be said of Bear Stearns's James Cayne is because he managed to get out before the company went belly-up.

In the July 21 Newsweek, Stuart Taylor argues against a criminal investigation of administration officials involved in torture. It's not that Taylor approves of torture, he just feels that a trial of torturers would be too long and divisive: too partisan.
And so he recommends that President Bush "pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution." This presumably would include former Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, and David Addington, formerly counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and, since 2005, his Chief of Staff.
Taylor also that it would be "unseemly" for Bush to pardon either Cheney or himself, but assures us that "the next president wouldn't allow them to be prosecuted anyway."

What these events have in common is the theme of impunity, from the Latin root punire, to punish. It's the idea that certain people are exempt from the punishments ordinarily meted out by criminal or civil law, or even the law of the marketplace, which usually dictates that the executives of a failiing company should be forced to resign in disgrace, or at least take very large pay cuts.

Impunity was a characteristic of ancient and medieval societies, and it still characterizes ones in Africa and the Middle East. In those countries it's taken for granted that the dictator's son can order that young women who catch his fancy can be snatched off the street and delivered to him to be raped.
That the Leader's ministers can plunder state companies to the floorboards.
That the State can do what it wishes to those it designates as its enemies.

We don't like to think of these things happening in the U.S.

The attorney Donald Goodrich has acquainted me with the ideas of the early 20th-century law professor Wesley Hohfeld, who illustrated the internal relationships among different fundamental legal rights by drawing up tables of jural opposites and correlatives:

JURAL OPPOSITES
Right Privilege Power Immunity
No-Right Duty Disability Liability

A privilege is the opposite of a duty; a no-right is the opposite of a right. A disability is the opposite of a power; an immunity is the opposite of a liability

JURAL CORRELATIVES

Right Privilege Power Immunity
Duty No-Right Liability Disability



"A close relatives of the term 'impunity,' Goodrich writes, "are 'immunity' and 'privilege.' Every grant of 'immunity,' whose opposite is 'liability,' creates a 'disability' - the opposite of 'power.' In the context of the government bail-out of failed/failing corporations, the jural opposites and correlatives of 'privilege' take one to the relationships between rights and duties: One has no rights vis-à-vis the privileged and they owe no duties."

Of course, going by Hohfeld's table of opposites, under this state of affairs, the rest of us are disabled.

Boo hoo

On the same day that the Dow plunged 2 percent and the Nasdaq 2.6 and gas shot close to $150 a barrel, Phil Gramm, one of John McCain's economic advisors, had a message for Americans: The recession that so many of us were worried about was only a "mental recession" and Americans had become"a nation of whiners."

Gramm is a former Republican Senator and a vice-chairman of the Swiss bank UBS. In his former position, he sponsored legislation that melted through the traditional firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firms, creating the conditions that led to the current mortgage crisis.

As an executive at one of the world's largest investment banks, he is better paid than all but a handful of the people he calls whiners, this even though UBS took a severe hit for its investments in subprime mortgages-- investments that Gramm, in his previous capacity, had made possible. (One of the ways in which the bank may have recouped was by selling tax-evasion services to wealthy clients. It is now the subject of a federal investigation.

Gramm, at least, is consistent in his opinions. Witness the rhetorical question he is supposed to have posed during his first Senate campaign: Has anyone ever noticed that we live in the only country in the world where all the poor people are fat?

Now it may be true that America has become a nation of whiners. I'd say it's whining when insurance salesmen feel entitled to drive vehicles designed for the use of the military or the forestry service, and are put out when it becomes too expensive for them to continue doing so. And it's probably whining to rail against illegal aliens while expecting to buy your produce on the cheap and pay less than minimum wage for landscaping. "I want my MTV!" is a whine. So is, "I want my DVR!" or "I want my Blu-Ray!"

You can use the same rule of thumb you use with children. A child who grouses because the Pizza Hut doesn't have the stuffed-crust option is in fact whining, and if the habit is not discouraged he will likely grow up to be an unpleasant human being.

A child who cries out of hunger, or cold or sickness, or because he is being beaten, is not whining.

Simone Weil writes that every time someone cries out in the depth of his being "Why am I being hurt?" we are in the presence of injustice.

By this reckoning, the cry, "I want to keep my home!" is not whining.

Whining is one of the slanders commonly leveled against suffering people by those who on investigation often turn out to be the authors of that suffering. At the very least, they are its apologists.

In Belfast in August 1971, at a time of heightened unrest in Northern Ireland, British soldiers and military police, acting on instructions emanating from the highest levels of government, rounded up a group of Catholics on suspicion of terrorism. They were held without charges and subjected to practioes that were not yet being called "coercive interrogation techniques." At the time they were known as the Five Techniques.

They were handcuffed and hooded.
Noise-- surviving prisoners describe it as sounding like a hissing pipe or a roaring engine or the whirr of helicopter blades-- was pumped into their cells unabatingly, so that it was impossible for them to sleep.
They were deprived of food and water.
They were made to stand for hours with their hands braced against a wall, a position that over time became a torment; if they lowered their hands, they were beaten.

Years after their release many of the prisoners were still traumatized.
One had become hypersensitive to the least sound, for example, that of a comb being set down on a bathroom shelf. Another was tortured by fears of illness and had to be checked into a psychiatric hospital. Physical exams found nothing wrong with him, but 4 months later he died of a heart attack at the age of 45.

When the London Sunday Times reported on these abuses, the British government denounced it for printing "the fantasies of terrorists."

And when General Harry Tuzo, the commander of the army in Northern Ireland, was interviewed about the case in 1982, he remarked that the victims had not been tortured but only suffered "acute discomfort and humiliation" and had been "very well compensated and looked after."

He concluded, "I personally would have thought that they had got over it by now."

In other words, the victims had been whining.

Correction

In my previous post I suggested that the late Senator Jesse Helms is now in hell. That was incorrect, or may be. As my friend and teacher James McCourt once told me, there is no way of knowing who is in hell, or bound for it. This at least is true in Catholicism, which I think has the final word on hell. Going by another tradition, only the Buddha and a very small number of arhats or bodhisattvas are said to know the contents of their past lives, which presumably would include some lives spent in hell. I for one do not, and so I can make no assumptions as to where the personality that was Jesse Helms has gone, if it still exists.

The danger of bloging is that it encourages the author to start thinking of himself as the editorial committee of his or her favorite newspaper, The Daily Me, which, as we all know, is infallible.

But even the Times screwed up on Iraq.

He hit my fist with his face

I've been following coverage of the death of the late and mostly unlamented Jesse Helms. I can't say I rejoice in his death. He was a poisonous old reptile, but age and retirement had defanged him and I doubt he posed a danger to anybody any more. Let him go to his reward (pictured at right) as we will to ours.

What's left to have an opinion about is the murmur of bystanders outside the funeral home. Think of the section in "A Christmas Carol" where Scrooge hears old aquaintances mildly discussing his death.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel: "A great public servant and true patriot today.”
Republican Presidential candidate John McCain: "A life dedicated to serving this nation.”
Billy Graham: He had the “courage to faithfully serve God and country based on principle, not popularity or politics."

The Times' Caucus blog features the voices of humbler mourners-- most of whom are better characterized as celebrants. Some unattributed samples:
"A bigot who never did a decent thing in his long career as a Senator except fan the flames of racial hated and intolerence for the roles of minorities, women and gays."
"He was a repulsive embarrassment for our country for an appallingly long time."
And, my personal favorite, “'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten [his] little hand.'”

Amid the general outflowing of bitter revelry, you find the occasional protest, e.g. "This thread reveals more about the lack of humanity among the “tolerant” left than it does about Helms."

In other words, people who condemn a man who made a career out of intolerance are guilty of. . . intolerance.
Never mind that the posters' intolerance has the power to hurt no one, while Helms' hurt a great many people, from African-Americans whom he kept out of the polling booth to the uncounted men and women who died miserably of AIDS because he refused to free up research funding for a disease of the sexually immoral.

This kind of moral inversion is typical of-- I'm not going to say rightists, you see it on the left as well-- perpetrators. It's the strategy by which perpetrators take on the protective coloration of victims and the powerful masquerade as the powerless they trample.

Some other examples are white bigots who complain about African-American racism (Check out the political posts on AOL, especially anything in response to a story about Obama.)
The Rwandan genocidaire who regrets having massacred his neighbors, but a moment later insists, "Either you took part in the massacre or else you were massacred yourself. So I took weapons and I defended the members of my tribe against the Tutsi."

The highest-- or lowest-- instance of this inversion is the "secret speech" that Heinrich Himmler gave to an audience of S.S. Gruppenfuhrers on October 4, 1943.
"Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000," Himmler says. "And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned."
It's the equivalent of a porn movie's money shot.

Hannah Arendt writes that for the Nazis, ’The problem was how to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity to which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used by Himmler—who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself—was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self.

So that instead of saying:‘What horrible things I did to people!,’ the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!’

Okay, Jesse Helms's champions aren't SS-men. And Jesse Helms wasn't Himmler, though in his wet dreams he may have enjoyed some of Himmler's absolute power and absolute freedom from the leashes of law and conscience.

There's nobody here but us victims.