He who holds the firewood for the masses is the one who freezes to death in wind and snow.
慕容 雪村 (Mùróng Xuěcūn)
21st Century Institutions: the U.S. Supreme Court
Among certain kinds of Americans, rational legal arguments against the cruel and arbitrary use of power have always been seen as inconvenient abstractions. Essentially no one with enough muscle, money, or guns has ever taken them seriously. The law for such people is a tool, not a constraint, and so are the judges who administer it.
Nevertheless, we’ve been repeatedly assured by everyone from legal scholars and historians to high school civics teachers that the United States Supreme Court, with its constitutional imprimatur and lifetime judicial appointments, is uniquely well-defended against practitioners of this sort of cynical Realpolitik. It has a successful 200+ year history, our civic mythology tells us, of defending itself against outside political interference, and has proven to be an effective sanctuary for the disinterested legal processes necessary to ensure the equal justice under law promised above its front door. Assuming all of that is true, which is, frankly, a very big assumption, how is it, then, that the jurisprudence of the current conservative majority has come to resemble something cobbled together out of bits left over from the Nazi Volksgerichtshof, or the Catholic Church’s Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición?
In broad strokes, I think the story goes something like this: judicial independence, like academic freedom, is an aspirational concept. It appears to exist in the real world only when nothing of much real significance — political significance — is being contested. As a result, during much of the Court’s history, events have denied — or more charitably, spared — its justices the historical agency that myth-makers have insisted on attributing to them. Far from being the arbiters of the Republic’s destiny, they have, more often than not, gone about their business as the humble servants of convention that some of the more conservative justices clearly believed themselves to be.
As it turns out, however, servants of convention, no matter how humble they may be as individuals, often have the nasty habit as a collective of preferring injustice to instability, especially when the threat of instability is largely manufactured, and the injustice can be directed exclusively toward those convention holds in low esteem. While in public justices were alway careful to genuflect to the theoretically sacred principle of equal justice for all, in private they looked upon perceived insults to the powerful with extreme disfavor, regardless of their legal justification.
The Warren Court seems to have been genuinely different. Perhaps the difference was a response to the tectonic shifts in the postwar political and economic order that were becoming increasingly apparent in the Sixties, or perhaps it was down to more personal experiences in the lives of individual justices that weren’t accessible to historians and observers of the Court then, and would be even less so now. In any event, it’s clear that the decisions Warren, Douglas, Frankfurter, and Brennan came to embrace placed their jurisprudence far to the left of any that adherence to convention would seem to have dictated at the time. This was a surprise to everyone, I think, not just to conservatives, especially given the fierce suppression of the Left that was already taking place in the Fifties under the aegis of Cold War anticommunism.
One could argue (I would definitely argue) that while the Warren Court was good for justice, it was not at all good for political stability. As liberals might have expected, had they not had their eyes so firmly fixed on the prize, the powerful felt powerfully insulted, and rightly so, given their expectations. The history behind those expectations was simple enough: Whatever cases the Court took up, whatever decisions it handed down, it had always been careful not to challenge the privileged influence over public policy that members of what, for lack of a better term, could be called the American ruling class, took for granted as a tribute to their status. As the liberal majority on the Warren Court began handing down decisions like Brown v. Board of Education, Engel v. Vitale, South Carlina v. Katzenbach, or Watkins v. United States, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that such deference was effectively at an end. To the more conservative members of the ruling class in particular, this looked like nothing so much as the betrayal of ingrates who had somehow managed to forget who put them where they were, and had gone to work for the enemy instead. (Damned Roosevelt. Damned New Deal. Damned Negroes. Damned Women. Damned Commerce Clause. Double-damned Earl Warren. Etc., etc.)
In their historical role as the defenders of privilege, representatives of the political right have since argued, somewhat disingenuously, but not entirely without justification, that liberals were guilty of accepting from the Supreme Court what at the time they couldn’t possibly have gotten from the ballot box. In cases of systematic injustice, liberals have argued in response, the Court has a duty to intervene wherever and whenever the legislative branch is prevented from supplying the necessary remedy.
I admit I was sympathetic to the liberal argument when police dogs, firehoses, and Bull Connor were being marshaled against a busload or two of Freedom Riders, not least because it was already clear to everyone in the country that without intervention by the Court, the electoral process in the southern states would continue to be so severely compromised that justice for African Americans would remain unattainable for decades to come. While I still believe that the Supreme Court was the obvious remedy at the time for an intolerable system of injustice in the southern states, I’ve also come to accept that what the right was denouncing as legislation from the bench was indeed antidemocratic in the technical sense, and dangerous in the more general sense that it revealed at an extremely unpropitious moment in our history just how questionable the political justifications were for the Rule of Law that the public was being asked to accept as a sort of secular sacrament.
This was made abundantly clear during the Senate confirmation hearings for Robert Bork. At the time, the ideological hegemony, not to mention a majority of Senate votes, rested in the hands of the Democrats, who, exploiting what they should have realized would be a short-lived tactical advantage, ignored precedent and stated openly and unequivocally that regardless of his judicial qualifications, Bork was unacceptable on ideological grounds alone. Although I agreed with their evaluation, I had serious doubts about the wisdom of their decision. Once the dust had settled, it was clear to me that no serious observer of the American justice system was ever again going to feel entirely comfortable mentioning an independent judiciary and the Supreme Court in the same sentence.
The Republicans quite understandably complained about what they saw as a violation of precedent, but they also took careful notes. In the 33 years since the Bork hearings ended, they’ve successfully moved the ground of their battle with liberals over the makeup of the Supreme Court from abstruse arguments about original intent and judicial precedent to the more promising terrain of Senate confirmation hearings, where opposition research and character assassination have been shown to yield more concrete, as well as more immediate results. After Bork, it seems safe to say that any judge ambitious enough, and well connected enough, to have a chance of being nominated to the Supreme Court, would be well advised to make certain that nothing in the public record from the time he or she entered law school, or perhaps even high school, contains the slightest trace of provable bias toward either side in the ongoing cultural and ideological wars. During the hearings themselves, direct questions, if they are answered at all, are to be answered with the kind of anodyne bloviation usually reserved for sports heroes or Hollywood starlets. In extremis, outright lying is the only intelligent choice, especially if it can be supplemented by a display of outraged innocence (see the Kavanaugh hearings).
Unsurprisingly, such bravura performances of our all-American black robe commedia dell’arte have yet to deliver us the jurisprudence that all evolving democratic societies need and should have every right to expect, nor are they ever likely to. Weak reeds that they are, the justices themselves are only partly to blame for this sad state of affairs. A lifetime of displaying their malleability, their willingness to go along to get along, is indisputably what’s snagged them a seat on the Supreme Court bench in the first place. Once they’re safely settled into their new sinecure, integrity, even if any of them can remember what is actually meant by the word, will almost certainly look like more work to them than it could ever be worth. Sadly, that’s as much on us as it is on them.
As I see it, the outlook, especially in the short term, is dire. In the present political climate, we can almost certainly expect future Supreme Court nominees to have on their résumés not only an extended history of Federalist Society ass-kissing, but also appalling examples of sadism toward the less fortunate. There isn’t going to be any way to keep them off the Court, either, at least not any way that’s compatible with civilized behavior. Should those of us who are declared opponents of the authoritarian right give up, then, and let them turn the United States into another Turkey, or Hungary, or Brazil? Or should we prepare ourselves instead for the second civil war they’ve been threatening us with ever since Barry Goldwater first assured the assembled brownshirt wannabes of the Republican Party that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice? (NB: these are not questions that either Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders is qualified to answer. Make of that what you will….)
From 1970: Say Easy Rider
This is from the first issue of a two-issue, tabloid-format newsprint magazine Stephen Williamson (no, not the economist) and I published as undergraduates in 1970, and which I long thought had been lost forever. Steve, as it turns out, is — fortunately — more of a packrat than I am, and preserved some copies, so I get to republish it 50 years after its first appearance. I’ve corrected a couple of typos, but otherwise left it as it was, including the abhorrence of contractions which I’ve long since overcome, assorted capitalization and punctuation crimes, and a grating insensitivity to 21st century gender pronoun and racial nomenclature norms, which I’ll just have to live with. We all have a past, no?
If the twentieth century had any essential lesson to teach us, it is this: we are finally on our own. Kings have been dead since the French Revolution. Nietzsche broke the news about God a century ago, and to any perceptive observer it is obvious that the state suffers from a terminal cancer. We are running out of history. What has brought us the concentration camp and the H-Bomb no longer has much to offer us.
For anyone born after 1940, independence is the natural attitude; the illusion of authority has evaporated. Our generation feels free to snicker when the thought police masquerade as destiny, an achievement George Orwell clearly believed to be impossible. Nevertheless, the baggage of the past has not been as easy to dump as we thought. What began as the Aquarian Age has recently come to look more like a kind of simultaneous rerun of all but the most irrelevant episodes in history. The remnants of the student radical movement have restricted themselves to recovering the nineteenth century millennium, as though they somehow had forgotten that Stalin was the result of the first run-through. People in communes wait patiently for technology and international culture to disappear. What a damn shame it would be if someday their descendents had to fight the Sioux-Blackfoot wars over again!
There is certainly a kink somewhere when a generation with as good an understanding as ours has had of the gap between reality and human perception starts producing astrologers, communists, and subsistence farmers. Given what we know, it makes as much sense as Free Enterprise or the Cold War. I suspect the explanation lies somewhere in the difference between the extent of the possibilities we can see and the amount of personal energy required to realize even the most limited of them. We want a lot, and we can have only a little. Our tendency is to make up the difference by magic. We blame our impotence on a Power Structure that is already discredited, and play at revolution. We’re more ready to believe in Tarot cards or the Great Spirit than to live with our natural limitations. We have yet to learn that ending repression does not give anyone supernatural powers, or maintain his innocence.
The issue isn’t whether or not other cultures and ideologies reveal wisdoms ours lacks, but whether we’ve picked up on them for the sake of wisdom or for an easy way out of our own troubles. There is quite a difference between learning from the Indians to respect the ecological balance and believing yourself to be the reincarnation of Crazy Horse. Like practicing astrology seriously or advocating guerrilla warfare, living in tepees in the twentieth century United States amounts to schizophrenia, and it’s dangerous. The bombs and concentration camps will remain, and we won’t be able to see enough of the world that produces them to discover where they are coming from. Chances are we won’t be able to understand even the simplest of things that happen to us from one day to the next.
There is good evidence that this is going down already. The illusions of youth culture or hip culture or whatever are almost as strongly defended as the illusions we call the American Dream. Everybody is hip to what the cops did in Chicago, and says so. With considerably less provocation the Hell’s Angels did a lot of the same at Altamont, and no no seems to notice the similarity, let alone the analogy it implies between us and Mayor Daley.
When we don’t notice, people get hurt, just like they did when the Haight went under and acid visionaries were replaced by needle freaks; just like they did when the Weathermen decided they had a right to crack heads, or Charles Manson decided he was Attila the Hun.
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper have noticed and they’ve made a fine film about it. I can’t think of a more convincing image of the unpleasantness that can come from parts of the world a man has chosen to ignore than the end of Easy Rider. A lot of people have put it down for being paranoid, but they are missing the point. Of course it’s paranoid—a paranoid dream from beginning to end. That is its strength.
This film, unlike any other I have seen in a long time, openly prefers the psychological reality of experiences to the realistic description of an objective world in which such experiences presumably take place. Nearly everything which happens in Easy Rider is seen as Billy and Wyatt, the two main characters, would see it, and every character except them and possibly their lawyer is as two-dimensional as their understanding of him. I wouldn’t argue that Fonda and Hopper intended to make the film that way, but I would argue that they showed good sense in leaving it that way once it was edited. It sets up the audience beautifully.
Billy and Wyatt are not aware of what is going on around them outside the limits of their perception. Neither is the audience—the film represents Billy and Wyattâ’s perception as reality. For those in the audience who belong to our generation the identification is particularly strong. Like Billy and Wyatt, we know that the world is fucked, and that there isn’t much we can do about it. We are on the same trip. Making a big dope deal, buying a beautiful motorcycle, and heading down the road to Mardi Gras appeals to us. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.
No one discovers what is wrong with it until Billy and Wyatt do themselves. From the second shotgun blast to the silent end of the film, it breaks in a long wave over both the characters and the audience; the horrible surprise of an intrusion from the world outside the myth both are sharing.
What surprises Billy and Wyatt is that the rednecks really are out to get them. What surprises us is the sudden end to the illusion we are into too deeply to back out of in time. The shock of the last scene isn’t the shock of death, but of its opposite; of waking up. When Billy and Wyatt are murdered our fantasies die with them, and for that moment we are uncomfortably exposed to the reality of the theater around us. Psychologically it is akin to being discovered masturbating. The sadness comes in having to stop too soon, not in having to experience someone else’s death. Our sympathy is for ourselves.
Had that been all there was to Easy Rider, identification with the characters, titillating violence for a minute or two, and then a return to our unexciting lives, it would have compared favorably with Goldfinger or Bullitt, but it wouldn’t have had anything to say. The film is important because Fonda and Hopper enclose within it a comment on both the psychological processes involved in identifying too strongly with a myth, and the dangerous consequences which are in store for one who lives his life inside this myth. The danger is not to be taken literally; it isn’t that the rednecks will shoot us down, although that is one possibility. The danger lies in the destruction of our humanity. Being on our own trip isolates us from one another. When finally no one can recognize the real existence of anyone else, just being alive will be danger enough for all of us.
Fonda and Hopper have left to many clues in Easy Rider for us to miss the point, although none are so obvious that they prevent us from making the emotional identification with Billy and Wyatt that gives the film its power. They are there for us to discover in retrospect. After the film is over it remains to us to separate the myth from the reality; to understand what it is that we’ve felt so deeply.
The first hint of what is really going on in the film is, of course, the title. As Fonda has explained it in interviews, easy rider is Southern slang for a pimp—the only one who doesn’t have to pay. Responsibility is the price of freedom, deadness is the price of living in a myth—those are the obvious implications.
Again, it is hard to escape the fact that the road Billy and Wyatt are traveling doesn’t lead where they think it does. Instead of ending in Mardi Gras, it ends in death. A night in jail and the murder of their friend the lawyer were warning enough. There were alternate routes, such as that of the rancher who loaned them his tools and fed them. They were even given outright invitations to try another one. As wrapped up in themselves as they were, they were welcome at the commune, and obviously, to at least the whores in New Orleans, they were attractive. What kept them on the move was not really a quest for freedom—possibly just the opposite.
There are reviewers who have pointed out what appears to be another inconsistency. Although it is Billy and Wyatt who introduce him to pot and give him lectures on the evils of society, the lawyer seems a much more well-rounded character than either of them. Whether or not this was the result of better acting on the part of the man who portrayed him, as reviewers have suggested, is not what is important. His presence in the film serves two purposes. First of all, it shows that Billy and Wyatt’s analysis of society is essentially correct. Society is stultifying, and any man who prizes his self-respect would like to break out of it. Hippies don’t bother the lawyer; he recognizes that they have some good ideas. But he does serve also as a kind of contrast to Billy and Wyatt. He is much more firmly rooted in the world than either of them. He feels no need to style himself Captain America, but, as the flying saucer tales shows, he is more creative and alive than the two characters for whom freedom is supposedly a specialty.
There are other indications that Billy and Wyatt have a harder time relating to themselves and others than should be true of free men. Wyatt is rebuffed twice by the leader of the commune—once when they are smoking in the abandoned adobe, and later in the commune when he is trying to ball one of the women. It could happen to anyone, but Wyatt doesn’t understand that. He freaks, just as both of them freak later on acid in the graveyard. Despite the jumbled cutting in the graveyard scene, there is solid evidence that both characters have their share of personal demons.
The key to all these indications that Billy and Wyatt are not what they imagine themselves to be lies in the character of the more introspective of the two, Billy. Wyatt is a kind of Sancho Panza—a man interested only in what he can get. Billy is a little more cautious, a little more aware, and consequently a little more stylized, especially as Fonda plays him. His “we blew it,” and the image of the burning bike that intrudes on his thoughts provide the context for not only his withdrawn personality but for all the rest of what happens in Easy Rider as well. He begins bit by bit to become aware of what is wrong, but the film ends before he really gets to the heart of it. The rest of the task in dumped in the lap of the audience, where, in fact, it has lain all along.
For those of us who went to this film just to get stoked up on our own innocence and the evil of rednecks and other oppressors, there are a couple of other scenes that remain to be considered. Neither are acted in the usual sense of the word. The first is hardly more than a couple of seconds long, and appears to have been shot in the streets of New Orleans without any prior planning.
Billy is careening down the street during Mardi Gras with an open bottle in his hand, which, in the spirit of things, he offers to a passing black. The look on that man’s face and his gesture of refusal are enough by themselves to sum up the whole peculiar history of the South. His is the classic double-bind. A drunken white has offered him a drink, a drink which other whites might beat him or worse for accepting. Yet, when he turns it down, he must also keep smiling. Otherwise his refusal might be interpreted as an insult to white generosity, also a dangerous offense. Billy doesn’t understand the black’s behavior and blunders on down the street. He is too busy with his own problems.
The other scene takes place in a southern cafe. All those rednecks trading jokes about how people in their county customarily handle “Yankee queers” were real live rednecks, not actors. They were showing off, of course. The movie people indulged them in a little play-acting, and they enjoyed themselves at it, that’s all. Still, there was no script. Just where in hell did they get that long list of epithets and tortures they were tossing back and forth, I wonder.
At that point in the film everyone should wonder. The boundaries between acting and reality are not clearly drawn in Easy Rider, but neither are they in the world of experience. From the black man’s point of view, there must not seem to have been much difference between the man whose dream prevented him from noticing another’s pain, and one whose dream is to inflict pain. One of the corollaries to the central point made in Easy Rider is that the two dreams lie very close together, and the transition between them is as hard to spot as it is frequent.
If that seems hard to believe, get a copy of the January 21st Rolling Stone and look at the picture of Mick Jagger at Altamont. There he stands, with his high-heeled boots, and his knuckles in his mouth, watching four or five Angels butcher a man on the stage ten feet away. It must have been one hell of a rude awakening for the author of Street FIghting Man, and for the other 300,000 people who were watching, too, for that matter.
It is the same kind of awakening that is previewed for us in Easy Rider, one which awaits every one of us, who, considering ourselves beyond the errors of past times, refuse to pay attention to anything but our own dreams. In the twentieth century, we are all being forced to live outside the law. If there is one thing for us to remember, it is this: to live outside the law, you must be honest. (Anybody can say that.)
Playing the Piety Card Yet Again
So…a secular attack on religion is what’s wrong with us. This from Donald Trump’s latest bagman/consigliere, William Barr. I’d love to be able to say with a straight face that God is not mocked, but I’m well aware that every time one of these pious hypocrites’ bosses gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, we’re in for another torrent of God-mockery. It might be a Billy Graham wannabe calling the Almighty’s wrath down on us liberal perverts at a congressional prayer breakfast, or a cameo appearance on Fox News by a semi-professional Jesuit sophist like William Bennett, or maybe a diatribe on Twitter from some finger-wagging moral majoritarian of unknown provenance, one of the legion who once flogged their handicraft spiritual wares on Sunday morning local TV, but now all seem to work for Koch Industries or the National Rifle Association. The sad truth is, we’ve seen it all before, and we’ll doubtless see it all again. (I wonder, did Barr take off his American flag lapel pin for this speech in order to avoid being accused of secular idolatry, or did the White House dry cleaning service just forget to reattach it?)
Credere, Obbedire, Combattere
Yeah, yeah, I know. But like they say, sometimes it does rhyme.
Punishments To Fit the Crime
Donald Trump: Strip him of his iPhone, his Secret Service protection and all his assets. Dress him in overalls and a court-mandated ankle bracelet. Give him a bible, a bullhorn, and a family-size bottle of Oxycontin. Order him to remain within the city limits of Bluefield, West Virginia for the rest of his life.
John Bolton: Equip him with an M4, a Ka-Bar, a pair of camouflage cargo pants, and a Rambo wig. Parachute him at midnight into the outskirts of Teheran or Aleppo or Pyongyang.
Betsy DeVos: Require that henceforth everyone who performs a service for her, from plumbing to asset management to sex, be educated exclusively at the University of Phoenix.
Stephen Miller: Confiscate his passport and deny him access to currency or credit of any kind. Require him to choose between being chased barefoot across rural Mississippi for the next 20 years by mounted prison guards and bloodhounds or speaking only Spanish for the rest of his life. Depending on which he chooses, make sure he wakes up outside the Parchman Farm perimeter fence, or in the center of Tegucigalpa.
Mitch McConnell: Confiscate his principal residence in Kentucky under federal asset forfeiture laws. Provide him with a new principal residence in the Fillmore District of San Francisco. Require him henceforth to run for the Senate from California.
Dick Cheney: Waterboarding, I think. No less than 183 times. Then, if he survives, Guantanamo for, oh, I don’t know how long. Until the last of the other detainees is released, maybe. Let me think about it.
Sean Hannity: Arrange (through the customary diplomatic channels) a papal order of excommunication. Deliver him, bound and gagged, to the leadership of Opus Dei. Invite them, as true servants of the Living God, and of Holy Mother Church, to perform the first auto da fé in almost 200 years.
Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto*
Es gibt viele Arten zu töten. Man kann einem ein Messer in den Bauch stechen, einem das Brot entziehen, einen von einer Krankheit nicht heilen, einen in eine schlechte Wohnung stecken, einen durch Arbeit zu Tode schinden, einen zum Suizid treiben, einen in den Krieg führen usw. Nur weniges davon ist in unserem Staat verboten.
There are many ways to kill. You can stick a knife in someone’s belly, take the bread out of someone’s mouth, not heal someone’s illness, stuff someone in substandard housing, work someone to death, drive someone to suicide, lead someone into war, and so forth. Precious few of these are forbidden in our country.
―Bertolt Brecht
I’ve been a fan of Brecht’s for a long time, mainly because he never failed to depict our emperors without their clothes, and always stood for the one indispensable principle of any civilization worthy of the name: that in the end, either we all matter, or none of us does.
*A quote from Cicero: “Let the safety of the people be the highest law.” Fifty-five years on, I still remember being in a car with some other half-wasted students from Oklahoma State University, passing by the Grady County Courthouse in Chickasha, Oklahoma late on a 1960’s Saturday night. Since the courthouse just happened to be an Art Deco masterpiece, and lit up like a fairground attraction, I got a good look at it as we passed. On the side of the building, high up, was the motto “The safety of the state is the highest law.” That sounds like fascism, I remember thinking as the building passed from view behind us. Indeed….
21st Century Character Studies, Part II
It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, or Jack Dorsey are unscrupulous; it’s that they don’t seem to have any idea what scruples are.
21st Century Character Studies, Part I
Ryan Zinke — and the horse he rode in on — are finally on their way out of Washington. In the Trump era his resignation surprises no one, and bothers no one much except his erstwhile supporters at Breitbart and the Washington Times. Most of us expect these paragons of Western libertarianism to get caught with their hands in the public till from time to time — and to be unrepentant about it when they do — because we know that in Washington, if not yet in the rest of the country, the performance of virtue has come to be indistinguishable from virtue itself.
When asked by the press to react to his downfall, Secretary Zinke did what is now customary for embarrassed Trumpistas. He blamed the irrational partisanship of his political enemies, and assured everyone that he nevertheless remained steadfast and undaunted. There’s an old saying, he reminded us, that a man should do right and fear no one. That’s what he’d always done, and what he planned to do in the future, come what may.
There’s an old saying. Yes, there is — a very old saying, as it turns out. Like so many other ancient proverbs brandished by the right wing, it sounds more authentic in the original German. Here’s one of the earliest recorded examples, from 1592:
Fürcht Got, Thue recht, Schew niemandt
Fear God, do the right thing, stand in awe of no one. Fearing God has gone by the wayside over the years, even among Christian fundamentalists, but the rest has apparently carried a whiff of Lutheran rectitude across the centuries and continents all the way to present-day Montana, and to Ryan Zinke. Given that Zinke is actually a German name, it isn’t such a stretch to imagine a Zinke great-grandfather’s words of wisdom detached from their original context and turned into a utilitarian political bumpersticker by a descendant who has no real idea who he is, or where he came from. It’s a common American story, this. From Saint Patrick’s Day parades to mariachi concerts in the park on Cinco de Mayo, we both are, and are not, who we think we are.
Is Secretary Zinke who he thinks he is? Does he really embody this ancient teutonic motto that he’s so fond of quoting, or is he simply a hypocrite? The truth is that we have no reliable way of knowing. In a media environment which seems to evaluate politicians in the same way it does film stars, it’s all too easy to confuse performance with reality. For those of us who actually do want to distinguish between the two, and who are continually tormented by that sinking feeling that we’ve seen this film before, context is everything. Fortunately for us, there’s a scene in a film — the classic German film, Der Blaue Engel — which illustrates almost too precisely the context at issue here.
The plot of the film is well known: a bourgeois professor is seduced, humiliated, and destroyed by a bohemian showgirl who doesn’t share his supposed values, but understands his suppressed passions all too well. The famous scene in which Professor Rath first awakens to Lola’s seductive charms, and the farce first begins its turn toward tragedy, is followed directly by a closeup of the painted motto above the now empty bed in the professor’s flat, which reads:
Tue Recht und scheue Niemand
The German is more modern than the Sixteenth Century version, and the fear of God is already long gone, but the motto is the same as the one Secretary Zinke is so fond of repeating. The problem with his use of it is that, just as in the case of Professor Rath, the moral of his personal story isn’t at all the one that he’s trying to sell us. It’s actually irrelevant to our interest as citizens, and as voters, whether or not he believes it himself.
Professor Rath was undone by lust, Secretary Zinke by greed. Both are human failings, to which every one of us is susceptible. It’s not that doing right and fearing no one is per se a bad ideal of personal conduct, especially in a democracy, it’s that when one can’t manage to live up to such ideals, a confession is in order, not least of all to oneself. What Secretary Zinke doesn’t get — or doesn’t think that we’ll get — is that ideals must always of necessity be leavened with a little humility. In a just society, or more to the point, a society in which every public figure’s conduct is under surveillance 24/7/365, setting oneself up as a paragon of virtue is not just a bad defense for influence peddling, it’s a ticket to social and political oblivion.
Newton’s Sleep and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
What to do about Facebook? Teaching fifth-graders to code doesn’t seem like the right answer. Teaching them William Blake might be….