On Jefferson Davis Avenue, in New Orleans, stands a statue of the man, "Profound scholar of the constitution, In judgment sound, in morality firm, in resolve steadfast" or words to that effect, but most of all, "Patriot."
In Cabin John, Maryland, stands the Union Arch Bridge, which, legend has it, was dedicated by Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In 1861, Lincoln sent a detachment of calvary to remove a plaque from this bridge because the plaque listed various officials who had part in the construction of the bridge: Montgomery Meigs, of the Army Corps of Engineers and Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War.
Apparently, Mr. Lincoln disagreed with the idea Mr. Jeff Davis was a patriot.
There must be a difference between traitor and patriot.
Some would say it's all in your point of view.
Others would say it's in where you stand now.
Far as Mad Dog can see, there are parallels and then, there are parallels.
In the case of the "War" on "Terror" both war and terrorists have bullets and bombs and there are deaths and innocents (non combatants) are killed and maimed.
Of course, in the case of the war on terror, there are no armies, no capitals, no flags, no actual battles--and as Carver once said of the "War on Drugs" in The Wire , this isn't even a war. Why not? "Because wars end," Carver replied.
This is a subtlety lost on Senator Graham, of course. Many things are lost on Mr. Graham. Mr. Graham does not approve of people who hail from places which are in rebellion against a power which they feel has been imposing its will over them, not respecting their local traditions and values, a place like Chechnya, for example, or say, South Carolina.
Of course, you cannot compare the Chechnya rebels to the rebels of South Carolina. They were both rebelling against a stronger neighbor from the north which insisted a separatist movement would not be tolerated, but the Confederacy had an army with uniforms and canon and they fought out in the open and they were Christians, praying to a Christian God. In fact, these rebels were so upright and upstanding Mr. Graham's fellow South Carolinians fly the Confederate flag over their state house to this day, just to show the guerrilla spirit is still alive and well in South Carolina.
Chechnya knows all about guerrilla spirit. Apparently bombs go off every week there, and no police station is safe.
The Confederates in South Carolina might just admire that, if those Chechnyans were Christians and wore nice gray uniforms.
But now we have the Confederates back in positions of power and when they are United States Senators they invoke hell fire and brimstone against the unholy, unwashed terrorists from foreign places, and Heaven Knows, we don't like foreigners and we ought o re examine our immigration policies which allow undesirables like Russians or Chechnyans or people who don't speak English at home from unloading their baggage here in the United States.
In fact, when the Russians point out a potential trouble maker and the FBI investigates and that trouble maker subsequently makes trouble, well the FBI has dropped the ball on the one yard line. Fumbled, I tell you! The FBI ought to be able to predict human behavior. What have we been spending all those hard earned tax dollars down at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia if not to be able to read minds and predict future behavior by nasty, ill meaning violent revolutionists?
Mad Dog can see where Mr. Graham is coming from. Same place he is always coming from. South Carolina.
A friend who worked for the U.S. government in an agency which oversaw international trade once remarked, with a Cheshire smile, "We worry a lot about whether or not we are racist in this country; we don't hold a candle to the Europeans."
He spent a lot of time in England, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia, so I thought he probably knew of what he spoke.
Today's New York Times carries a stunning article by Jonas Hassen Khemri, the first generation son of an immigrant to Sweden.
He details what is was like growing up dark skinned in Sweden: being stopped on the street, questioned, asked for government ID, thrown into the back of a police van, then told only , "You may go now." Listening to government ministers defending racial profiling blandly by saying, "Oh, well, they are the guilty ones." Watching his father sweating out interrogations by Swedish officials, who looked at his government ID dubiously--this guy says he's Swedish, well he doesn't look Swedish. Hearing of friends beaten up in police vans. Followed about in stores by security guards with walkie talkies, who assumed if you are dark skinned, theft must be afoot.
It all sounds like stuff we have put behind us in the United States, having faced our own different modes of racism forthrightly. Of course, until now we haven't succumbed to that special terror of government power--the National ID--which some of us remember from the old movies in which the Gestapo stops Lauren Bacall or some other heroine and says, "Unt now, I vould like to zee your papers." Red staters rage about the indignity of background checks for gun purchases, but they have no reservations about the indignity and huge leap in government control embodied in a national ID card. You want to see real terror and oppression: Just vote for a national ID card.
We've gotten by that sort of thing here in the USA. Well, mostly.
Of course, not all of us. When the Boston bombers turned out to have been born in Russia, and, damn it, one was dabbling in Islam, well, Lindsey Graham is right there with the "Suspend the Constitution!" cry. Hey, why should we give this ungrateful foreigner any rights? Let's just hang him now without a trial (a South Carolina specialty) or put him away for life.
Well, there's precedent for life imprisonment, no trial--Gitmo.
And also Stop and Frisk in New York City, the city of Michael Bloomberg a semi liberal mayor, who apparently is not disturbed by racial profiling, if it happens in zip codes where people don't have much money or power. Mayor Bloomberg worries about allowing people to drink gargantuan soda pop but he does not worry about people thrown up against a wall by his own police.
Mad Dog would like to humbly suggest: The reason we go through the dance of doing things within the Constitution is not out of respect for heinous criminals; it is for ourselves. We do not take the pains and expense of trials for the sake of the accused, any more than we do funerals for the sake of the dead. We do funerals for the sake of the living and we do trials for the sake of the citizens who do not stand accused, that we may all demonstrate our respect for a little mentioned and oft ignored idea: The Law.
We are better than the guys who set off bombs and blow legs off people because we think hard and long before we do harm to anyone.
Having cared for wounded accused in emergency rooms and on the wards, Mad Dog was struck by how surprised they were by the kindness, or at least by the absence of hostility they saw in the nurses and doctors rendering care. In some cases, Mad Dog had the impression these men had never experienced human kindness and it was disturbing to them. They were suspicious at first, then tentatively responsive, but often they withdrew again, as if they knew responding to kindness would make them vulnerable, so they retreated into indifference. Some of them could not help themselves, however and they were the ones most often psychologically damaged--by all the respect and fairness. So Mad Dog doesn't buy the approach of the Lindsey Grahams of the world. Just beat those miscreants like dogs. No, if you really want to make them suffer, treat them with respect and they begin to feel a connection to humanity. That's the greatest pain.
You want to really inflict pain on the surviving Boston bomber? Once you have him reasonably stable and comfortable, once you have shown him care and concern and made him feel well again, bring around one of those girls who knew him in high school, or from college, one of those girls who called him a "sweetheart" who thought of him as a kind, funny, caring person, and simply allow them to visit; allow him to return to that person he once was. As Mephistopheles says in Faustus, the greatest hell is remembering happier times. The greatest hell for this 19 year old will be remembering the person he was before he was transformed.
So, with our system of laws, of treating the accused as innocent until proven guilty, we honor not the accused, but ourselves. We worship at the alter of "justice."
Well, mostly--unless you are a villager blown up by a mistaken drone attack.
But, at least, most of the time, outside of Gitmo, and drone attacks and Stop and Frisk, we try.
Nobody's perfect.
One way to feel better about yourself today: Consider Lindsey Graham. Consider his whole ridiculous state. If you have done something lately you think was pretty stupid or ill considered, just think of Lindsey Graham. Compared to him, compared to the several million people who voted for him and live their smug little lives in South Carolina, you are a tower of intelligence, discretion and moral fortitude.
"I did know Jahar. In the 4 years of high school I spent with him, he
was nothing but a kind, unassuming, gentle person. He was funny, had
lots of friends, and was very athletic. I haven't spoken with him since
high school (we graduated in the same class from Cambridge Rindge &
Latin)."
Another acquaintance said she knew Dzhokhar from the University of
Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She said he had a group of "maybe four or five"
Russian-speaking friends whom he was never without. "All I really knew
of them was that they smoked weed and liked to party, just like regular
kids. Jahar was such a sweetheart."
--From the Internet
So how does a kid who enjoyed his friends, seemed engaged, had success in school wind up fashioning a bomb which blows the legs off people, robbing a 7 Eleven, shooting a policeman to death, throwing bombs at police?
Of course, Mad Dog wondered whether or not the police could have been wrong about the role these two brothers played in the bombing. Showing them walking down the street carrying backpacks hardly proves they had bombs in those back packs. But if they really did throw bombs at police, were caught on surveillance robbing a 7 Eleven, were identified by the man whose car they hijacked, sounds like a case which might get an indictment out of a grand jury.
Assuming for the moment the police got the right guys, Mad Dog asks: How do you go from being a kid who is embraced by his friends to a maniac who is alienated enough to kill wantonly?
They interviewed a man in Watertown who said he was happy the kid had been captured alive because he wants to hear him answer a lot of questions.
Mad Dog is not sure the answers will actually provide much insight. But if he were dead, there would be zero chance for answers.
It is hard to work up much sympathy for the person who blew legs off people, but the image of this 19 year old crawling off to die in the backyard boat of some Watertown citizen does strike even the cold black heart of Mad Dog as sad. A wounded animal is always pretty pathetic. Once they are defanged, no longer a threat and just dragging themselves off to find a hole, it is not the same.
Mad Dog knows the obvious question is coming: Would you have felt that way if there were footage of Hitler dragging a leg behind him, off to his bunker? And the answer is: No. Mad Dog would be unmoved.
But a 19 year old kid, who not long ago was a "sweetheart." Makes you wonder.
Hanah Arendt, commenting on Adolph Eichmann on trial in Israel, reflected on the banality of evil. The people who carried out Hitler's final solution, for the most part, were not foaming at the mouth fanatics, but ordinary people who simply bought into the Third Reich's notion that killing Jewish babies and Roma was a good thing.
Looking at the images of the two young men suspected of participating in the Boston bombing, a red headed woman on the street was shaken by their ordinariness: "They could be anyone," she said with a shudder. "They look so unremarkable."
Most people seemed to harbor a working hypothesis about their motivations. Mad Dog assumed they were avenging drone strikes in Afghanistan/Pakistan which have killed innocent villagers. Others have suggested it was some libertarian anti tax group. Each person seems to have a favorite villain, depending on that person's most cherished group to hate.
But what will we do with the information, if it ultimately does come out? If it turns out to be an Afghan out for revenge? Or if it is a latter day Columbine alienated teen ager group? Or if it is a white supremacist group? Mad Dog supposes we'll use the information to support our own biases: See, that's where that type of thinking leads to-- the killing of innocent people.
In the end, the result may be a surprise: Some years ago a sniper shot people in the Washington, DC area in what appeared to be a totally random way. Police were looking for a white guy in a white van. It turned out to be a black man and a black boy firing from the trunk of a dark sedan. The man was out to kill his ex wife, and the other shootings were a ruse. If he had shot only his wife, he would have been the prime suspect, but if he shot her as part of a random shooting spree, she's just another random victim.
Or, we may never know, just as we never knew who sent those Anthrax ladened letters. Now we have letters to President Obama laced with Ricin. An echo from the past.
Oddly, just days after Boston, a fertilizer plant leveled much of a Texas town. Timothy McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb to level the federal building in Oklahoma City. Echos from the past.
Has Rush Limbaugh had time to say, "Nobody's talking about background checks for people who buy fertilizer" yet?
We are fortunate to have someone in the Presidency who can rise to these occasions. After eight years of cringing, what a relief to hear from a man who can soar rhetorically, and who can rally our spirits.
The news from Boston was pretty bleak, made bleaker by the efforts of careerist reporters, who were thrown on television and radio with no news to report, but with hope in their hearts this could be their own big moment. So they interviewed each other and repeated the words de jour : "Chaos" and "Heart wrenching" and "Like a war zone" and "panic."
Which is to say, the news people had no news to report beyond the first three minutes: Two explosions ripped through crowds around the finish line of the Boston marathon after the first wave of (fastest) runners had finished, and at a time when the spectators lining the street had diminished in number. Had the bombs gone off earlier, casualties would have been higher. Police are in the early stages of painstaking investigation and really will have nothing to say until they gather evidence and reconstruct and think out what the evidence means, which means we will all just have to wait to learn what happened.
There was alarm and there was surprise, but there was not "chaos,"as far as Mad Dog could see: Doctors who were in attendance in significant numbers ran straight toward the victims lying across from them, despite the obvious danger, and police reacted with calm and deliberation and the hospitals swung into their well rehearsed "disaster" drills, as they have been trained to do, and patients were transported to the waiting teams at Mass General, Tufts and Boston Medical center and operating room teams awaited them and treated them, and intensive care units received them, even at Childrens' Hospital, and while many questions remain about who did this, why, and how, what was never in question was the proficiency, efficiency and efficacy of the medical community, one of the nation's best--in Boston--and the calm deliberate and speedy response of the "first responders" the police, fire and rescue.
As far as Mad Dog can bring to mind, this is the first attack which actually took a toll of civilians since 9/11/2001. There have been thwarted attempts--the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber, but this is the first that went off and killed people since New York, 2001.
Speculation immediately was centered on Middle Eastern terrorists, as it was immediately after the Towers came down in 2001. In the case of the Towers, that speculation was basically on target. Not so clear here, yet.
It must be remembered, Timothy McVeigh fit nobody's profile of a Middle East terrorist.
As any fan of The Wire knows, there is much that can be learned from a patient, thorough, unhurried examination of the crime scene, done without bias or preconceived notions, just methodical, meticulous and clean. When emotions run high, sometimes the in charge cop has to order everyone out of the area, just to allow those with specific tasks to do their jobs.
Eventually, we will learn more of value, but watching the yammering nabobs on TV Monday, we saw the worst of the commercial news making machine. They did not serve the nation well.
Mad Dog begs the reader's indulgence: Let it be understood, Mad Dog attended public schools until he matriculated at a private college. One of Mad Dog's sons went to public schools, the other to private schools from high school through college.
So Mad Dog claims experience in both realms, and no particular emotional attachment to either.
In today's New York Times is an article about a high school teacher in Albany, New York who assigned her class the task of writing a "persuasive piece" using traditional high school essay structure (5 paragraphs: introduction, 3 paragraphs, conclusion) as an argument to a Nazi teacher "Jews are the source of our problems." "You must argue Jews are evil and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"
Now, of course, no analysis is on firm ground without knowing the facts, and we do not have all the facts in this newspaper report. Did the teacher give the students other options? Could they in fact choose some other topic designed to make them think in terms which most current Americans find repugnant? Did the teacher preface the assignment with a discussion of what the Nazis espoused, the history and outcomes of their time in power? What, in short, was the context of the assignment? Did students object? What was the response to their objections? And what did she mean by "solid rationale?" What does anyone mean by that?
All we know is Maruertie Vanden Wynagaard, the superintendent of Albany's schools said, "Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity."
Obviously, we have Ms. Wynagaard concerned to protect her own job, but it is not at all obvious we have a lack of judgment.
Rabbi Eligberg said, "The assignment was flawed in its essence. It asks students to take the product for a propaganda machine and treat it as legitimate fodder for a rational argument. And that's just wrong."
Actually, not.
Clearly, the rabbi does not like the exercise of mind games. The rabbi wants only to hear, "This is wrong." He is made uncomfortable by or has never attempted, the exercise of inhabiting "evil," living in its skin, getting its feel, moving within it.
Mad Dog has on occasion tried to get into the mind of really freaky people: Republicans like Paul Ryan, various Texas and South Carolina senators and Congressmen, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and even, yes, people like Joseph Goebbels and Adolph Hitler, and Henry Ford (author of "The International Jew.") It is a clinically useful exercise: Imagine I am a germ. What would I do? What would give me pleasure and what would I seek?
In law school, I am told, students are made to argue for the defense and then assume the role of the prosecutor. It's a way of making them identify the types of arguments made and to understand the vulnerabilities of these arguments. It is a way to prepare oneself for the fight.
But in public schools, students and teachers alike have to be always mindful of "how it would look" or "how that might sound" if some politically unpopular or incorrect statement leaks out from the classroom into the press or general public.
The superintendent, we are told, met with "Jewish leaders" in Albany to assure them she did not endorse the Third Reich, Adolph Hitler or anti Semitic sentiments.
All this sounds very familiar to Mad Dog. By the time he finished 12th grade, he was convinced his teachers, with some happy exceptions, were mediocrities and not smart enough to teach their much more intelligent students.
The whole dreary exercise of form over content--5 paragraphs. Why five? Introduction, conclusion. What is so important about that? What makes that form "good?"
In college, where the professors were not looking over their shoulders, the discussions were so much more intelligent and relevant and deeply cutting. There was no superintendent meeting with community leaders to reassure everyone children in classrooms were not being taught Nazi doctrine as received truth.
Mad Dog has often fantasized about what if? What if, in a former life, Mad Dog had been a Hitler Youth? An SS trooper? A concentration camp guard? What would that have felt like? How would he have dealt with the cruelty?
Mad Dog realized it might have begun with love, of all things. Listen to Hitler's speeches and notice how much time he spends building a picture of beauty, an imagined world of blond, blue eyed, healthy, smiling, happy boys and girls, those darlings of the Third Reich who will sweep away the badness and replace it with purity. All those efforts to breed beautiful blond girls with beautiful blond boys. And the movies of those Aryan youths--it's all so euphoric and Hitler riding by, standing in an open automobile, arm straight out and women thronging to him, arms outstretched in ecstatic salutes; they are weeping with joy.
You are taught to love, to desire, blond hair, white skin. That can look so clean. And after the mud and grime of WWI trenches, clean must have been a very sacred thing. Then you see people who dress in black and wear long curls for sideburns and who do not look like that blond ideal. Can you feel the repulsion? But what of their children? Do you not feel badly murdering the children? Well, but children grow up.
You get the idea: You can, by suspending your own conditioned responses, get to a new place and see the world, however tendentiously, from behind different lenses.
And you can use that knowledge: When Mad Dog was an intern, working on a ward where people were dying in droves every day, he and everyone he worked with, became inured to the significance of death and physical destruction. As nurses wrapped bodies, they chatted about which bar they were going to after work. And Mad Dog recognized: We are no longer even seeing these people we are packaging. He could see that because he had imagined that kind of behavior before.
And from that perspective, you can achieve a new power to attack the flaws in the thinking, the perceptions.
In his own life, Mad Dog was raised as a white child among people who were soul mates to the Nazis. White Southern racists, who earnestly told you swimming in the same swimming pool as Blacks would infect you, for whom the idea of a white girl dancing with a black boy at a school dance was nothing less than miscegenation, for whom homosexuality was a sin against God, for whom Catholics were suspect, Jews barely tolerated pariahs, and the best life on earth was for two white Christian people, boy and girl, to meet in high school, marry after college and produce three little pure white children who would repeat the cycle.
So anything which rattles a cage strikes Mad Dog as a step in the right direction. That cannot happen in schools which are publicly funded, politicized, where teachers must teach to the tests to satisfy the political postures of downtown politicians, schools run by careerists who care only for their own jobs and naught for something as lofty as opening young minds.
