Author Archives: Sheila

This Isn’t Dunkirk

Longtime readers of this blog know that I rarely, if ever, post about foreign policy. There’s a reason for that–I am uninformed about most aspects of such policies, and I am deeply conflicted about America’s obligations vis a vis purely humanitarian concerns. 

When it comes to warfare, I mostly agree with those who insist we should keep our cotton-pickin’ hands off unless there is a very clear American interest to be protected, or a humanitarian crisis of significant proportions that we are actually in a position to ameliorate. I will readily admit that the definition of American interests and the nature and extent of humanitarian crises are matters of considerable debate.

If I had been the person determining the parameters of America’s intervention in Afghanistan, I would have approved an initial intervention to root out Al Qaida and “get” Osama Bin Laden–but not the slog of the subsequent 18 years, during which we wasted trillions of dollars–not to mention the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

But here we are.

President Biden has made what I consider the absolutely correct call–and the media and self-styled pundits, abetted by deeply dishonest Republicans sensing political advantage, are having a field day attacking him for, among other things, recognizing and admitting the obvious.

I think that Michael Moore, of all people, has it right in the following paragraphs. (I say “of all people” because I tend to find Moore tiresome–you usually know precisely what he’ll say because, like far too many people, he approaches all issues through an unshakable, pre-defined lens. Sometimes, of course, like that “stopped clock” he’s right; sometimes, not so much.)

In this case,I think he is “on point.” In his recent letter, Moore wrote about our departure from Afghanistan: 

This is nothing here to celebrate. This should only be a monumental gut-check moment of serious reflection and a desire to seek redemption for ourselves. We don’t need to spend a single minute right now analyzing how Biden has or has not messed up while bravely handling the end of this mess he was handed — including his incredible private negotiations all this week with the Taliban leaders to ensure that not a single enemy combatant from the occupying force (that would be us; e.g., U.S. soldiers and spies and embassy staff), will be harmed. And Biden so far has gotten every American and foreign journalist out alive, plus a promise from the Taliban that those who stay to cover it will not be harmed. And not a single one has! Usually a force like the Taliban rushes in killing every enemy in sight. That has not happened! And we will learn that it was because of the negotiating skills and smarts of the Biden team that there was no mass slaughter. This is not Dunkirk.

Dozens of planes have safely taken off all week — and not one of them has been shot down. None of our troops in this chaotic situation have been killed. Despite the breathless shrieks of panic from maleducated journalists who think they’re covering the Taliban of the 1990s (Jake Tapper on CNN keeps making references to “beheadings“ and how girls might be “kidnapped” and “raped” and forced to become “child brides”), none of this seems to be happening. I do not want to hear how we “need to study” what went wrong with this Taliban victory and our evacuation because (switching to all caps because I can’t scream this loud enough): WE ARE NEVER GOING TO FIND OURSELVES IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS AGAIN BECAUSE OUR DAYS OF INVADING AND TAKING OVER COUNTRIES MUST END. RIGHT? RIGHT!!

Unfortunately, we probably will find ourselves in similar situations, because a substantial portion of our citizenry believes we have the right–indeed, the duty–to impose our will around the globe, irrespective of any threat to genuine American interests.

Is our exit from Afghanistan being accomplished smoothly? No. To the extent both the war and the exit were bungled, we’ll need sober analyses of those failures in order to inform future foreign policy decisions. But sober analyses are not what we’re getting–for that matter, even presumably straightforward eyewitness reports of what is occurring “on the ground” are wildly inconsistent. 

If people of good will are truly concerned about the fate of non-Taliban Afghanis–especially Afghani women–under a fundamentalist religious regime, what they can and must do is extend a welcome to those who want to emigrate, and work to facilitate their speedy immigration and resettlement.

It is telling–but not surprising– that the monkeys throwing poo in hopes it sticks to the administration are unwilling to do that.

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Memorializing History?

The angry battles over the propriety of statues commemorating Confederate soldiers, and the somewhat different arguments that regularly erupt over the design of war memorials and the like, are reminders that–as a species–we humans like to erect permanent (or at least, long-lasting) mementos of people and events we consider worth memorializing.

There are probably psychological studies probing the reasons for that evidently widespread impulse, and I thought about what that desire to commemorate might tell us when I read a request from Lester Levine, who regularly comments here. Lester asked me to post the following announcement/invitation to the community that converses (or lurks) on this site.

You are a creative bunch. So, as we all wallow in health and political turmoil, I would like to invite you and anyone you know to deeply immerse hands, minds and souls in an engaging project. It will require minimal artistic skills and “production” time.

In addition to my curmudgeonly comments on this blog, I am Lester Levine, the only person to read all 5,201 entries to the 2003 World Trade Center Memorial Competition. My 2016 book highlights the 100+ most innovative designs submitted. That research forever interested me in the role of memory/memorials in history and culture.

And so, as we approach 9/11/2021, I am struck by how the January 6, 2021 event has also been “named” by its date.. Likewise, I can’t help but wonder about the artistic/intellectual challenge of imagining a physical marker for historical memory. It was not war; there were few killed. Yet, many think the event was a seminal moment for the United States and all that it stands for.
___________________________________________________________
Announcing the “Remembering 1/6 Design Competition”
Opens 8/17/21
Open to anyone, anywhere
Entry format, rules, questions – [email protected]
Entries due by midnight US Eastern time, 10/22/21 to [email protected]
Judged by creators of innovative 9/11 memorial entries
Winners announced on 12/6/21
____________________________________________________________

I will be interested to see what the people responding consider appropriate “markers” of that very troubling and ominous event.

I just hope that a hundred years or so from now there are still people around to see whatever monument is ultimately erected.

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The Scales Of Justice

We are all familiar with “Lady Justice”–the statue of a blindfolded woman holding scales, intended to represent the dispassionate weighing of evidence leading to a just result.

The justice system has developed a number of rules governing how the “weighing and measuring” symbolized by those scales occurs. Rules against the consideration of hearsay, for example, are intended to exclude evidence that is essentially gossip–matters for which the person testifying cannot personally vouch.

Most people understand why courts disallow hearsay, or allow cross-examination. The reasons for other rules are less intuitive. As Paul Ogden has recently noted on his own blog, statutes of limitations fall into that latter category.

Ogden shares his concerns about a recent case brought by a woman against singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, alleging that he molested her when she was twelve years old– in 1965. 

Let’s think about this.

The “Me Too” movement ushered in a long-deferred accounting of the exploitation of women by men who were often in positions of power and/or privilege. “Me Too” has done a lot of good–but like so many overdue movements, it has had its share of excesses. The state of New York, in a recent effort to protect abused children (male or female), passed the New York Child Victims Act. Among other things, it temporarily expanded by decades the statute of limitations for child victims to bring civil lawsuits.  It also protected the identity of those bringing such lawsuits from disclosure–presumably, even the identity of plaintiffs who are now adults.

On the surface, it might seem that allowing individuals much more time to bring a lawsuit would advance justice. But as Paul points out, there are sound reasons for statutes limiting the time periods within which suits can be filed. As he notes, in 1965 “Lyndon Johnson was President, man had not yet stepped on the moon (1969), and seat belts were not yet required in cars (1968).  

As Paul also notes, extending or eliminating statutes of limitations can put accused people at a distinct disadvantage.  As time passes, memories fade, witnesses die, evidence gets lost, destroyed or simply buried by history.  Statutes of limitations exist to ensure that claims are litigated while the evidence is relatively fresh and the evidence proving or disproving the claim is still available.

In his post, Paul lists the specific allegations of the complaint and details the monumental difficulty of proving or disproving those allegations over 50 years later.

We can certainly debate the ideal time period within which lawsuits should be commenced, but declaring “open season” for such suits not only makes the achievement of certainty virtually impossible, it invites all sorts of mischief. Let’s say you were on a date in college, had a bit more to drink than was wise (but not enough to make you insensitive), and had consensual sex that you later regretted. As the years pass, you “remember” the incident a bit differently–perhaps as date rape. If your “assailant” comes into a lot of money later in life (perhaps through fame, perhaps through hard work, perhaps through inheritance–whatever), how tempting would it be to use the justice system to confirm your now-sincere but somewhat “adjusted” recollection of the event?

I am absolutely not suggesting that tardy allegations are all–or even mostly– manufactured. I’m sure they aren’t. And I have no idea whether the plaintiff accusing Dylan was actually abused or not. She may well have been.

The point is, after the passage of a certain amount of time, it is absolutely impossible to know. 

Achieving justice requires according fundamental fairness to both the accuser and the accused. The rules governing “due process of law” are meant to ensure that injured people get their day in court, and that unfairly accused people have the means to demonstrate their innocence. 

Being as fair as possible to both parties means requiring an aggrieved person to sue within a reasonable period of time. Admittedly, what constitutes a reasonable time is debatable.

Research has shown memory can be unreliable at pretty much any time, but requiring that litigation be pursued while any witnesses are still likely to be alive and probative evidence is likely to be obtainable–seems only fair. 

It’s the process that is “due.”

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Defining Moderation

Remember our prior discussions of the Overton Window?The Overton window is the name given to the range of policies that are considered politically acceptable by the mainstream population at a particular time. It’s named (duh!) for someone named Overton, who noted that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within that range.

The rightward movement of the Overton Window over the past few decades explains why the hand-wringing of the “chattering classes” over the disappearance of “moderation” is so misplaced.

I have noted previously that in 1980, when I ran for Congress as a Republican, I was frequently accused of being much too conservative. My political philosophy hasn’t changed (although my position on a couple of issues has, shall we say, “matured” as I became more informed about those issues)–and now I am routinely accused of being a pinko/socialist/commie.

My experience is anything but unique. I basically stood still; the Overton Window moved. Significantly.

As the GOP moved from center-right to radical right to semi-fascist, the definition of “moderation” moved with it. America has never had a true leftwing party of the type typical in Europe, but today, anything “left” of insane is labeled either moderate or “librul.” That makes these tiresome screeds about the lack of moderation dangerously misleading.

As Peter Dreir recently wrote at Talking Points Memo,(behind the TPM paywall),

Here’s how the Los Angeles Times described how the infrastructure bill was passed: “After months of negotiation among President Biden, Democrats and a group of moderate Republicans to forge a compromise, the Senate voted 69 to 30 in favor of the legislation.”

The Times then listed the “ten centrist senators” — five Republicans and five Democrats — who worked to craft the bill: Republicans Rob Portman (OH), Bill Cassidy (LA), Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitt Romney (UT) and Democrats Jeanne Shaheen (NH) Jon Tester (MT), Joe Manchin (WV), Mark Warner (VA), and Sinema.

But by what stretch of the imagination are Cassidy, Portman, Romney, Collins and Murkowski “moderate” or “centrist” Republicans? None of them are even close to the “center” of America’s ideological spectrum. They all have opposed raising taxes on the wealthy, toughening environmental standards, expanding voting rights, adopting background checks for gun sales and limiting the sale of military-style assault weapons, and other measures that, according to polls, are overwhelmingly popular with the American public.

As the essay points out, there is no longer any overlap between America’s two major parties. There may be some overlap among voters, but not among elected officials.

What we have experienced is what political scientists call “asymmetrical polarization.” Over the past decades, as the scholarly literature and survey research make abundantly clear, Republicans have moved far, far to the right, while Democrats have moved slightly to the left.

Finding a center point between the far right and the center-left may be “splitting the difference,” but only in an alternate universe can it be considered “moderation.”

When I became politically active, people like Michael Gerson were considered quite conservative. But Gerson stopped well short of crazy, and he has been a clear-eyed critic of the GOP’s descent into suicidal politics.  Gerson recently considered the spectacle of DeSantis and Abbot, who have been playing to the populist base of today’s Republican Party.

These governors are attempting, of course, to take refuge in principle — the traditional right not to have cloth next to your face, or the sacred right to spread nasty infections to your neighbors. But such “rights” talk is misapplied in this context. The duty to protect public health during a pandemic is, by nature, an aggregate commitment. Success or failure is measured only in a total sum. Incompetence in this area is a fundamental miscarriage of governing. Knowingly taking actions that undermine public health is properly called sabotage, as surely as putting anthrax in the water supply….

The problem for the Republican Party is that one of the central demands of a key interest group is now an act of sociopathic insanity. Some of the most basic measures of public health have suddenly become the political equivalent of gun confiscation. It’s as if the activist wing of the GOP decided that municipal trash pickup is a dangerous socialist experiment. Or chlorine in public pools is an antifa plot. There can be no absolute political right to undermine the health and safety of your community. Or else community has no meaning.

If “moderation” means finding middle ground between sociopathic insanity and common sense, language has lost any ability to inform or communicate. When presumably serious commentators misuse such terminology, it just makes it more difficult to cure–or even understand– our manifest political dysfunctions.

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Highways And Critical Race Theory

Opponents of (a dramatically-mischaracterized) Critical Race Theory are essentially arguing against the recognition of just how deeply racism has affected American law and culture. They argue–and some undoubtedly believe–that civil rights laws created a level playing field, and that it’s now up to minority folks to stop complaining and make use of their equal opportunities.

The problem with that belief–even if we leave aside the sociological effects of two hundred  plus years of history–is that it is wrong.

As a society, we are just beginning to appreciate the extent to which racial animus has been baked into our laws and customs. (I was shocked to read The Color of the Law, for example, which documented how deeply the federal government was implicated in redlining and the segregation of America.) Only because I was involved in an effort to modify plans for rebuilding Indiana’s interstates within Indianapolis’ downtown did I become aware of the degree to which the original placement of those highways was the result of racist motives and assumptions.

Fifty-plus years ago, when the interstate system was built, entire neighborhoods were razed to make room for them. Homes, businesses, and urban amenities were destroyed, and the highways  became barriers between neighborhoods, cutting people off from job opportunities and retail options.

Subsequent environmental studies have shown that air pollution from highways negatively impacts student outcomes in nearby schools.

All of these negative impacts fell most heavily on Black neighborhoods and businesses, and that was definitely not accidental. As an architect recently wrote in The Washington Post about North Claiborne Street, formerly a bustling corridor in New Orleans:

There were many masters on North Claiborne, and Black New Orleanians were the beneficiaries of their talents. There were doctors, lawyers, retailers, insurance agents, teachers, musicians, restaurateurs and other small-business owners. The avenue stretched across the Tremé and 7th Ward neighborhoods, and in the Jim Crow era, it served as the social and financial center of the Black community.

The government tore up the avenue nearly 60 years ago, burying the heart of Tremé and the 7th Ward so the Claiborne Expressway, part of Interstate 10’s transcontinental span, could run through the city. New Orleans wasn’t alone. The same kind of thing happened across the country; Black communities like those in St. Paul, Minn., Orlando, Detroit, Richmond, Baltimore, Oakland, Calif., and Syracuse, N.Y., were leveled or hollowed out to make way for federal highway building. The Biden administration hopes to use the massive infrastructure bill now working its way through Congress to help remedy the harm done by these hideous scars, to “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments,” in President Biden’s words. It’s not clear how much of the trillion dollars that lawmakers are contemplating will actually make it to places like North Claiborne. But those places aren’t just abstract line items in a budget resolution to people like me; they’re lived realities — vivid examples of how racist planning destroyed communities of color in America.

Our aging infrastructure now requires repair and replacement, and a number of cities have recognized the harms done by those original siting decisions, They have also recognized   how racist assumptions–and all too often, conscious racial animus–prompted those decisions, and have moved to ameliorate them. (Indiana’s DOT, it will not surprise you to learn, has thus far resisted similar efforts to fundamentally redesign those highways and reconnect neighborhoods.)

There are numerous reasons to rethink the country’s interstates, and most of those reasons have nothing to do with race. City centers have changed, historic districts have proliferated, we know more about the negative effects of highway pollution, etc. But we also shouldn’t forget why so many of those highways were built where they were.

As the author of the Post essay concluded:

I do not understand why we can’t look at these infrastructure relics the way we look at monuments to white supremacy, such as statues of Confederate heroes and obelisks apotheosizing the Lost Cause. The statues are hurtful reminders of the times when Black people and Native Americans were seen as commodities or nuisances that needed removal. But urban highways are more than a reminder; they continuously inflict economic, social and environmental pain on neighborhoods like mine. Like other monuments to racism, they must be removed. The nation has a chance to support the rebuilding of disenfranchised and fractured communities and make them whole. It won’t be easy, but I hope we will seize the moment.

We don’t look at highways as monuments to White Supremacy, because we don’t know–and haven’t learned–how White Supremacy influenced–determined– their placement. It’s just one more aspect of our current society whose origins we prefer not to understand.

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