Corey Robin's Blog, page 62

The Narcissism of Our Metaphors

We write for readers. But sometimes we got get caught up in our own words. We forget the reader. We are misled by our metaphors; we make meaning for ourselves. Shakespeare’s characters certainly did. They were self-involved.

 

—James Wood, “Shakespeare in Bloom,” The Broken Estate

Fight Racism. Confirm Clarence Thomas. (Updated)

I’ve been reading Jill Abramson’s and Jane Mayer’s Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, the definitive account of Thomas’s confirmation battle, which came out in 1994. Here are eight things I’ve learned from it. Among the many surprises of the book is how men and women who were connected to the confirmation battle, or to Thomas and/or Anita Hill, and who were little known at the time, would go on to become fixtures of and issues in our contemporary politics and culture.

1. Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, was Clarence Thomas’s classmate at Holy Cross. They had long conversations.

2. Clarence Thomas was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for eight years. When Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, Strom Thurmond proudly declared, “I’ve known Clarence since he was head of the Unemployment Commission.”

3. Gary Bauer and Bill Kristol vacationed together at the beach each summer, along with their families. In the summer of 1991, at the Delaware shore, they planned the Christian right’s campaign to get Thomas confirmed to the Supreme Court.

4. Citizens United was formed by Floyd Brown in 1988 in the wake of the failed effort to get Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court. Brown helped make the Willie Horton ad. Getting Clarence Thomas confirmed by the Senate was one of the organization’s first missions. In 2010, Thomas was part of the slim majority that ruled in favor of Citizens United in Citizens United v. FEC. Though several arguments for his recusal in the case were brought up at the time, no one mentioned Citizens United’s contributions to his confirmation.

5. One of the ads pushing for Thomas’s Senate confirmation to the Court featured a photo of Thomas with the headline “To the Back of the Bus!” The copy read:

As the left strives to keep Judge Clarence Thomas from his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s like forcing blacks to take a seat in the back of the bus. Fight racism. Call your U.S. Senators and urge them to confirm Judge Clarence Thomas.

6. Angela Wright, one of Thomas’s accusers whose testimony was buried by the Senate Judiciary Committee, worked for Charlie Rose when he was a Democratic congressman from North Carolina. [Update: Actually, the congressman Charlie Rose whom Right worked for was not the Charlie Rose of TV fame. My mistake! Thanks to Steve Hageman and Rick Perlstein for the correction.]

7. Kimberlé Crenshaw was part of the legal team advising Anita Hill.

8. Thomas liked to say that his favorite character in Star Wars was Darth Vader.

Updated (May 26)

9. One of the charges levied against Thomas in the hearings was that he had once spoken favorably about the views of Steve Macedo, the Princeton political theorist, who was at the time a conservative (and a professor at Harvard). There was an extended colloquy during the hearings between then Senator Joseph Biden, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Thomas—Utah Republican Orrin Hatch also got in on it at one point—about whether and why Thomas was attracted to Macedo’s views on natural law and property rights.

10. Along with Kimberlé Crenshaw, Janet Napolitano, Obama’s former Homeland Security Secretary, was also part of the legal team advising Anita Hill. Now she is the President of the University of California, where Crenshaw is a professor.

11. One of the leitmotifs of Mayer’s and Abramson’s book is how much Biden botched the Thomas/Hill hearings. From beginning—when Hill’s allegations first came to light—to end, when the Senate voted to approve Thomas, Biden got played, was cowed, caved into pressure from the White House and the Republicans, or simply didn’t care or understand enough of the issue to push for a fuller and fairer investigation of the facts.

12. When Howard Metzenbaum, also on the Judiciary Committee, found out the specifics of Anita Hill’s allegations about Thomas, the Ohio senator said, “If that’s sexual harassment, half the senators on Capitol Hill could be accused.”

Fight Racism. Confirm Clarence Thomas.

I’ve been reading Jill Abramson’s and Jane Mayer’s Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, the definitive account of Thomas’s confirmation battle, which came out in 1994. Here are eight things I’ve learned from it. Among the many surprises of the book is how men and women who were connected to the confirmation battle, or to Thomas and/or Anita Hill, and who were little known at the time, would go on to become fixtures of and issues in our contemporary politics and culture.

1. Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, was Clarence Thomas’s classmate at Holy Cross. They had long conversations.

2. Clarence Thomas was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for eight years. When Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, Strom Thurmond proudly declared, “I’ve known Clarence since he was head of the Unemployment Commission.”

3. Gary Bauer and Bill Kristol vacationed together at the beach each summer, along with their families. In the summer of 1991, at the Delaware shore, they planned the Christian right’s campaign to get Thomas confirmed to the Supreme Court.

4. Citizens United was formed by Floyd Brown in 1988 in the wake of the failed effort to get Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court. Brown helped make the Willie Horton ad. Getting Clarence Thomas confirmed by the Senate was one of the organization’s first missions. In 2010, Thomas was part of the slim majority that ruled in favor of Citizens United in Citizens United v. FEC. Though several arguments for his recusal in the case were brought up at the time, no one mentioned Citizens United’s contributions to his confirmation.

5. One of the ads pushing for Thomas’s Senate confirmation to the Court featured a photo of Thomas with the headline “To the Back of the Bus!” The copy read:

As the left strives to keep Judge Clarence Thomas from his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s like forcing blacks to take a seat in the back of the bus. Fight racism. Call your U.S. Senators and urge them to confirm Judge Clarence Thomas.

6. Angela Wright, one of Thomas’s accusers whose testimony was buried by the Senate Judiciary Committee, worked for Charlie Rose when he was a Democratic congressman from North Carolina. [Update: Actually, the congressman Charlie Rose whom Right worked for was not the Charlie Rose of TV fame. My mistake! Thanks to Steve Hageman and Rick Perlstein for the correction.]

7. Kimberlé Crenshaw was part of the legal team advising Anita Hill.

8. Thomas liked to say that his favorite character in Star Wars was Darth Vader.

Joseph de Maistre in Saudi Arabia

Via Suresh Naidu comes this news about our second staunchest ally in the Middle East:

Saudi Arabia is advertising for eight new executioners, recruiting extra staff to carry out an increasing number of death sentences, usually done by public beheading.

No special qualifications are needed for the jobs whose main role is “executing a judgment of death” but also involve performing amputations on those convicted of lesser offences, the advert, posted on the civil service jobs portal, said.

…

A man beheaded on Sunday was the 85th person this year whose execution was recorded by the official Saudi Press Agency, compared to 88 in the whole of 2014, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Amnesty said there were at least 90 executions last year.

Most were executed for murder, but 38 had committed drugs offences, HRW said.

Which, as Suresh points out, reminds us of this passage in Joseph de Maistre’s St. Petersburg Dialogues. Readers often get caught up in the heavy breathing, the blood and gore, of Maistre’s prose. But it’s the emphasis on the jobholding, material aspect of the executioner that’s really most important here. He’s a family man, he works for a wage, he eats his meal.

I am sure, gentlemen, that you are too accustomed to reflection not to have pondered often on the executioner. Who is then this inexplicable being who has preferred to all the pleasant, lucrative, honest, and even honorable jobs that present themselves in hundreds to human power and dexterity that of torturing and putting to death his fellow creatures? Are this head and this heart made like ours? Do they not hold something peculiar and foreign to our nature? For my own part, I do not doubt this. He is made like us externally; he is born like us but he is an extraordinary being, and for him to exist in the human family a particular decree, a FIAT of the creative power is necessary. He is a species to himself. Look at the place he holds in public opinion and see if you can understand how he can ignore or affront this opinion! Scarcely have the authorities fixed his dwelling-place, scarcely has he taken possession of it, than the other houses seem to shrink back until they no longer overlook his. In the midst of this solitude and this kind of vacuum that forms around him, he lives alone with his woman and his offspring who make the human voice known to him, for without them he would know only groans. A dismal signal is given; a minor judicial official comes to his house to warn him that he is needed; he leaves; he arrives at some public place packed with a dense and throbbing crowd. A poisoner, a parricide, or a blasphemer is thrown to him; he seizes him, he stretches him on the ground, he ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises it up: then a dreadful silence falls, and nothing can be heard except the crack of bones breaking under the crossbar and the howls of the victim. He unfastens him; he carries him to a wheel: the shattered limbs interweave with the spokes; the head falls; the hair stands on end, and the mouth, open like a furnace, gives out spasmodically only a few blood-spattered words calling for death to come. He is finished: his heart flutters, but it is with joy; he congratulates himself, he says sincerely, No one can break men on the wheel better than I. He steps down; he stretches out his blood-stained hand, and justice throws into it from a distance a few pieces of gold which he carries through a double row of men drawing back with horror. He sits down to a meal and eats; then to bed, where he sleeps. And next day, on waking, he thinks of anything other than what he did the day before.

And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association.

Arendt, Israel, and Why Jews Have So Many Rules

For more than five decades, readers of Eichmann in Jerusalem have accused Hannah Arendt of being a self-hating Jew. In the current issue of The Nation, I turn that accusation on its head. Eichmann in Jerusalem, I argue, “is a Jewish text filled not only with a modernist sense of Jewish irony…but also with an implicit Decalogue, a Law and the Prophets, animating every moment of its critique.” The reaction against Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the other hand, often coming from Jews, “has something about it that, while not driven by Jew-haters or Jew-hatred, nevertheless draws deeply, if unwittingly, from that well.” What explains this reaction from Jews? Perhaps, I go onto write, it has something to do with the jump, within a relatively short period of time, “from the abject powerlessness of the Holocaust to the mega-power of the modern state” of Israel. That jump “not only liberated the Jew from his Judaism but also allowed him to indulge the classic canards against it.” Arendt was one of the earliest to spot that jump; the half-century-long campaign against her, which shows no signs of abating, is but one register of its consequences.

Along the way, I talk in my piece about the banality of evil, that moment in the 1960s when Norman Podhoretz wasn’t a fool, negative liberalism, the argument last fall between Seyla Benhabib and Richard Wolin, why Jews have so many rules, Matthew Arnold, and what the wrongness of Eichmann‘s readers reveals about the rightness of its arguments.

Read it here.

From the Department of You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up

The Brooklyn College Excelsior reports:

Author, civil rights lawyer, and political commentator Alan Dershowitz spoke at an event Wednesday evening in the Woody Tanger Auditorium on academics and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and criticized campus departments that sponsored controversial events that he said were one-sided.

…

The Brooklyn College Israel Club hosted the event, entitled “Israel-Palestine: The Case for Nuance.” The Brooklyn College Department of Political Science, along with the Tanger Hillel at Brooklyn College, three other academic departments, and other groups all sponsored the event.

…

“I objected to the fact that several Brooklyn College departments sponsored anti-Israel events,” Dershowitz said in an interview with The Excelsior after the event.  “Any department should not sponsor controversial speakers unless they are prepared to sponsor both sides.”

Got that? At an event co-sponsored by four academic departments, where he is the only speaker, Alan Dershowitz complains that academic departments are sponsoring events that are one-sided.

Alan Dershowitz is incapable of listening to anyone. Including, apparently, himself.

Frederick Douglass in and on Baltimore

It occurred to me Friday morning that Frederick Douglass spent quite a bit of time in Baltimore as a slave. So I re-read his Narrative and wrote a column for Salon:

Across the street from Baltimore’s Mondawmin Mall, where violent protests erupted last Monday afternoon, stands Frederick Douglass High School. It was from that school that students emerged at 3 p.m., only to find themselves in the crosshairs of the police. The school is named after the famed abolitionist who spent 10 years a slave in Baltimore. Anyone familiar with Douglass’ most famous work—”Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself“—cannot but feel a bitter irony in that juxtaposition of Douglass High and the riots of the past week. For once upon a time, Baltimore offered Douglass a glimpse of freedom, which “laid the foundation and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”

…

There was, in short, something about the city itself, with its forcible confrontation of difference, that made a difference. Especially in the life of this black slave: “A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation.”

Historical comparison, across the divide of two centuries, is a risky business. But it’s hard not to reread Douglass’ “Narrative” against the grain of this week’s events in Baltimore and the decades of urban poverty and police brutality that preceded them. Though urban life has experienced a revival across the U.S. in recent years, that revival is premised not on a mixing of racial and economic categories, a meeting of different peoples and nations of the sort described by Douglass, but instead on a grim machine of racial absolutism and economic separation.

Even more jarring is Douglass’ contrast between the coercion of the countryside and the relative (I stress that word) freedom of the city. So tyrannical was the regime of the plantation and its satellites that Douglass resorted to the most political of metaphors to describe it. The plantation is “the seat of government for the whole twenty farms” surrounding it.

Today’s city—if you’re working class or of color—is also policed heavily. But where the plantation’s police—the overseer, the slave patrols—did their damnedest to wrest every last ounce of labor from the slave, today’s police keep watch over the unemployed or semi-employed. In the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray—whose death while in police custody sparked the riots—grew up, one in four juveniles is arrested and the unemployment rate is 58 percent. The plantation’s police extracted labor; the city’s police preside over its disposal.

Read more.

Splendor in the Nordic Grass

Once upon a time, the Swedes taught Americans how to have good sex, make great films, and build socialism. Not anymore:

Four vacationing Swedish police officers helped out after two homeless men began fighting on a New York City subway – and showed it’s possible to subdue violent suspects without hurting them. The officers — Samuel Kvarzell, Markus Asberg, Eric Jansberger and Erik Naslund — were riding an uptown No. 6 train Wednesday on their way to see “Les Miserables” when they responded to the subway driver’s call for help, reported the New York Post.

A bystander began recording cell phone video after the officers pulled the pair apart. The video shows one of the brawlers sitting calmly on the floor, flanked by two of the Swedish police officers, while two others kneel on the other man – who is more unruly – to hold him face-down on the floor.

“How do you feel?” one of the officers asks the seated man, who says he feels fine. The other man struggles, but the pair of officers calmly keep him pinned to the floor. “I can’t breathe,” he screams, as he rises occasionally from the floor but is unable to escape.

“Take it easy,” one officer repeatedly tells him. “Sir, calm down, OK? Everything is going to be OK.” The man eventually calms down, and he admits to the officers that he’s not injured after they ask.

The Swedish officers held the men until New York City police could board the train and take them into custody. “We came just to make sure no one got hurt,” Asberg said. “We were trying to stop the fight.”

Of course, not every police interaction ends with a suspect’s death or injury — but social media users pointed out the difference between the way the Swedish officers behaved and recent tragic cases involving American police.

This Raw Story piece reminded me of an article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. “The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison” profiled a maximum-security prison in Norway. After opening with a breathtaking account of her drive up to the prison—replete with narrow fjords, winding roads, and lush fields of rapeseed, barley, and cows—the reporter explained why we were bearing witness to all this splendor in the Nordic grass:

I walked up the quiet driveway to the entrance and presented myself to a camera at the main door. There were no coils of razor wire in sight, no lethal electric fences, no towers manned by snipers — nothing violent, threatening or dangerous. And yet no prisoner has ever tried to escape. I rang the intercom, the lock disengaged with a click and I stepped inside.

To anyone familiar with the American correctional system, Halden seems alien. Its modern, cheerful and well-­appointed facilities, the relative freedom of movement it offers, its quiet and peaceful atmosphere — these qualities are so out of sync with the forms of imprisonment found in the United States that you could be forgiven for doubting whether Halden is a prison at all. It is, of course, but it is also something more: the physical expression of an entire national philosophy about the relative merits of punishment and forgiveness.

…

As we stood on a ridge, along with Jan Stromnes, the assistant warden, it was silent but for the chirping of birds and insects and a hoarse fluttering of birch leaves disturbed by the breeze. The prison is secluded from the surrounding farmland by the blueberry woods.

You get the idea. American prisons are profoundly unnatural, Norwegian prisons are as pastoral and peaceful as the countryside that surrounds them.

The two articles seem to be part of a pattern I’ve noticed of late in which Scandinavia is held up as a model for better policing and better prisons. Okay, it’s just two articles, but in the Styles Section, that makes a trend.

Given the casual sadism of the American system of crime and punishment—from prisons to policing—it probably seems churlish to even question the import of these articles. Anything that would make our hellholes just a little bit less of hellish, our police a little less murderous, has to be welcomed. Still, I can’t help but think that, overall, these articles signify a larger setback to the social imagination.

Fifty years ago, we looked to Scandinavia as a model of social democracy, of how we might push our laggard welfare state to something more generous and capacious than food stamps, unemployment, intrusive case officers, and miserly payments to mothers with dependent children. Now we look to the region for ways to build a more humane carceral state.

As the Times Magazine puts it: “The extravagant brutality of the American approach to prisons is not working, and so it might just be worth looking for lessons at the opposite extreme, here in a sea of blabaerskog, or blueberry forest.”

Or we marvel over how cozy (Les Miz!) Scandinavian police officers—who are not just white, but Swedish white—can be when they subdue black men in New York’s subways.

By all means, let us borrow our social lyric from Scandinavia. But, please, let it be Dancing Queen rather than the last scenes of Miss Julie.

When George Packer gets bored, I get scared: It Means he’s in the mood for war

Greg Grandin called me on Friday.

Greg: What are you doing?

Me: Working on my Salon column.

Greg: What’s it on?

Me: George Packer.

Greg: Low-hanging fruit.

Me: Did you see that article he wrote in The New Yorker, where he says he’s bored of American politics?

Greg: Uh oh. Bombs away.

Me: That’s the first line of my column! “When George Packer gets bored, I get worried. It means he’s in the mood for war.”

So here is said column, just out this morning. Packer did say he was getting bored of American politics, so I examine how his political ennui so often gives him an itch for heroism, sacrifice, and war.

Packer belongs to a special tribe of ideologically ambidextrous scribblers — call them political romantics — who are always on the lookout for a certain kind of experience in politics. They don’t want power, they don’t seek justice, they’re not interested in interests. They want a feeling. A feeling of exaltation and elation, unmoored from any specific idea or principle save that of sacrifice, of giving oneself over to the nation and its cause.

It’s not that political romantics seek the extinction of the self in the purgative fire of the nation-state. It’s that they see in that hallucination an elevation of the self, a heightening of individual feeling, an intensification of personal experience. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They think they’re shopping for the public good, but they’re really in the market for an individual experience. An experience that often comes with a hefty price tag.

Perhaps that’s why, after the Charlie Hebdo murders, Packer was so quick to man the ideological ramparts.

You can finish it here.

 

Why the Left Should Support Star Wars: It’ll Never Work

A reader from Australia sent me the following quote from Alexander Cockburn (somewhere past the 32 minute mark):

Liberals sometimes say, “We want weapons that work.” No we don’t. We want weapons that don’t work. We should be in favour of Star Wars, it will never work…