The Law

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

As a general rule I’m not the sort of man
who thinks our world’s best served by putting other
men into jail. This one Jewish brother
who got famous later on, he said, I stand
with the least of you, the whores and lepers and
the murderers and thieves. Of course, his mother
knew who he hung out with. She discovered
that’s what mattered when the Roman cops ran
into the garden and hauled him out and strung
him up; shouldn’t one of them, at least,
have spent at least one night on a concrete floor?
The question outlived her son’s name on her tongue.
Did he deserve to die like some dumb beast?
Even the beasts—even then—got more.

No, Angel

Books and Literature, Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion

Not six-wingèd, nor a fiery wheel,
not four-bodied, though a living being,
human but for other human’s seeing
only what they a priori feel
to be true. Did he say fuck? Did he steal?
Was he sometimes prone to disagreeing?
Black? A teen? All but guaranteeing
some journalistic posthumous appeal
to see the nuance, meaning the bad sides.
No life is a story, and no story has
two sides: it is a universe, expanding,
not some taxonomic Alcatraz.
Here is the truth your subtlety elides:
there is no peace surpassing understanding.

If Obedience Is a Condition of Existence, Then We Must Resist by Disappearing

Culture, Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Things that Actually Happen, War and Politics

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

A cop writes that he has the right to shoot
a man for walking too aggressively,
shoot if he delays or if he flees,
shoot if he fails to kowtow or salute,
shoot if he gets too smart or thinks he’s cute.
The predicate of law is immunity
for lawmen; ours is a cop timocracy,
the badge the only property, the boot
the only vote. The price of life is death,
therefore, if you don’t wish to buy it, you
must make an effort never to be born.
Not far away from here, borne on the breath
of a heat-bleeding highway, a hawk or two
rise in spirals over the mice-filled corn.

A Prophet of HaShem Whose Name Was Oded

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

One character in my current novel-in-progress remarks at a point that God’s non-existence is a joke that proves He is a Jew, a sentiment that’s guided my own non-relationship with the Old Man since around the time the act curtain dropped on my bar mitzvah and we all retired to the Uniontown Country Club for bad chicken. I became a bar mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue—it was the slightly more stable of the two aging congregations in Uniontown—but I was really raised Reform. I am still moved by the High Holy Day liturgies, and I retain a great fondness for the Friday Night Shabbat service. But.

Somewhere along the way, someone smuggled in the Prayer for the State of Israel, a scandalous little piece of political agitprop that’s always made me cringe. Depending, I think, on the congregation and the prayer book, it either joined or supplanted the silly but less objectionable prayer for political leaders, a sort of broad wish-to-the-wind that our rulers comport themselves decently and conduct themselves with sage restraint—you can understand why a diasporic community would consider that a reasonable hedged bet, a proper blessing for the Czar, so to speak.

The Prayer for the State of Israel, on the other hand, has the Cold War stink of a kindergarten classroom being drummed to its feet to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Written in 1948, the year of the Nakba, it further affirms in the minds and hearts of so many American Jews an indelible link between spiritual Judaism and political Zionism. I always wonder that it doesn’t seem out of place in a Temple full of Americans, but then, I see some Miami Beach shonda babbling excuses for atrocity on the cable news programs, and I think, Oh. Oy.

American Jews have been bought off with Birthright beach vacations in Tel Aviv and campfire temple trips and a pack of lies about an empty desert waiting to be planted with those trees we bought in Sunday School with the leftovers of our Tzedakah money. The next time you see some terrible white man wondering where are the Muslim moderates who will condemn whatever dictator or terrorist or cartoon-villainously acronym’d insurgency the great minds behind CNN et al. are on about in a given week, ask yourself, where are the American Jews who will speak against the Israeli pogrom in Gaza? They are out there, of course, but too quiet, and too few.

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20^th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

The 18th Brumaire of Samuel Alito, et al.

Economy, Justice, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Religion, War and Politics

As usual, the problem in the broadest possible view is the existence of men.
Since I haven’t got a quick fix for that, a few thoughts on the Hobby Lobby, the ACA, (the) God(s), and the Supreme Court, in no particular order.
Short of a divine program/pogrom to eliminate men via the rapid evolution of some kind of viable mammalian parthenogenesis (Are you there, God? It’s me, Jacob), the problem is less the historical animosity of the major religions to sexual freedom in general and women’s sexual freedom in particular—more about these below—than it is the specifically American weirdness of crafting a broad national policy in which the healthcare of most working-age adults and their children is provided by those adults’ employers through contracts with rent-taking private health “insurance” companies.
Of course, the US does have a public healthcare provision for the elderly and (some) of the (very) poor. Medicare and Medicaid broadly undercompensate hospital systems and providers, who in turn vastly inflate the billed costs of services, which are subsequently “negotiated” down by private “insurers”, who in turn mark back up their own costs to the companies and occasional individuals who contract with them. These so-called insurance companies are really more brokers than insurers. Hilariously, most companies actually hire 3^rd-(4^th?)-party brokers to negotiate rates with these very insurance companies. Along the way, any number of other con men, from vastly overpaid doctors to millionaire health system administrators to big pharma firms dip into this huge pool of sloshing money to extract their share of the racket. It is the stupidest system of public provision ever dreamed up in the mind of man; it makes the most corrupt developing-world griftopia look like a paradise of reasonable governance. At least when you bribe a policeman for a bogus traffic stop, you know exactly what it costs and what you’ve got out of it. Can you say the same for your latest hospital bill or “statement of benefits”?
No, duh.
The Hobby Lobby decision itself is a good bit narrower than the more dire reactions would have you believe, and it does appear that the ACA’s existing mechanism for allowing religious non-profits to opt out of certain coverages for moral reasons by effectively shifting the cost back to the government provides a reasonable mechanism for continuing to subsidize the contraceptive coverage for women whose private, for-profit employers opt out.
Naturally—this being America!—the deranged result here is another row of dominos in the Goldberg device: the federal government mandates a private business purchase a marked-up employee health coverage plan from a different private entity with the proviso that some of the mandated coverages are actually optional and the business may direct its insurer not to include such coverages, in which case the government will step back in to pay for them semi-directly. Does that sentence make sense? No, not really. Yes, exactly.
Obviously, this expensive, stupid system would best be replaced by a national, single-payer system, like all the other good ones in the world.
“We woulda, if it wasn’t for those evil ReTHUGlicans intent on opposing anything that President Obama wanted to do.” –Liberals
Yeah, who’s the superstitious religious nutsos who believe based on faith in the absence of evidence here? A historical note: the ACA passed with no support from the opposition party. The reason the Democrats did not pass single payer is that the Democrats did not pass single payer.
Returning to the Supreme Court for a moment: has ever any cryptomasonic gaggle of semi-intellectuals in the history of human society labored so conspicuously to cloak their inevitable arrival at their own obvious a priori conclusions in an evidentiary process? Again, you wanna talk religion? How about the belief that nine concurrent lifetime Popes operating under a principle of practical infallibility that makes the claims of the actual Vatican seem positively modest by comparison are going to utilize some marvelous hybrid of inductive and deductive reasoning to protect the holy principles of democracy, whatever those are. Of course this was going to be the outcome. Hey, I cheered too when Anthony Kennedy laid down the unassailable mandate (pun intended) that we gays can marry, but I ask you, is the system/institution that put that question beyond appeal a good one, now that the worm turned and the same old codger decided that, while gay marriage is good, ladies having too much sex is bad?
As for the Hobby Lobby, I’ve got an MBA and shit, and I cannot come up with a definition of a “closely held company.” Or, rather, I can come up with any number of definitions, all of them perfectly reasonable, which I could very easily apply to almost any company on earth, from the corner store to Exxon/Mobil.
Now, in general, I have more sympathy for religious peculiarity than your average American liberal; I am the sort of person who looks upon the word Balkanization with something less than total horror. I think that the conservative/orthodox religious opposition to contraception is wrong and incoherent, but I’m almost as skeptical of the use of the coercive power of the government to force them into moderating those views as I am of the notion that drone strikes in Pakistan will free women from the burqa. Are the Hobby Lobby owners hypocrites, investing in birth control on one hand while forbidding it on the other? Yes, they are human. But let’s take the Hobby Lobby owners at their incoherent but nevertheless sincere word: they believe God doesn’t want them to pay for their employees to use (certain) forms of female contraception.
Is this sexist, odious, and inequitable? Yes. But.
If the US had a functioning labor market that didn’t force so many people, especially women, to work for whatever checkout line would deign to hire them, this would all be much less critical. We could go on believing that corporations were voluntary associations rather than effectively feudal fiefdoms and that those who don’t agree with Ma and Pa Hobby Lobby could just vote with their feet.
Of course, we all know that that’s not the case. Labor is unfree. People are stuck in these shitty jobs. The Hobby Lobby is actually a good one in that it pays better wages than your average WalMart. A person’s access to healthcare should not be subordinate to the crackpot morality of their bosses. But here is the thing. It shouldn’t be subordinate to the perfectly rational desire of their bosses to save money on the health plan either. And here we are, back at single payer as the only equitable solution.
Just as a side note, the Court’s other opinion, Harris v. Quinn, regarding the mandatory payment of union dues, also made liberals mad. Hey, remember earlier this month when President Obama busted the Philly Transit strike? Yeah, I thought so.
The way to protect individuals from the whims of their employers is to provide everyone—everyone—with a basic provision of food, shelter, clothing, medical care. Forget the “employer mandate.” Give everyone healthcare. Forget the minimum wage. Give everyone a guaranteed minimum income. Scarcity, by and large, is a scam.

A Sulz on Women

Economy, Education, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

A few brief thoughts on the New York Times-Sulzberger-Abramson affair.

It’s awfully difficult to feel badly for income discrepancies where people are making hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars. Beyond a certain income level, which I would set at significantly less than $100,000 per year, it’s all just surplus value; its only purpose—if that word applies—is luxury purchasing for purposes of status signaling. This is not to say that women executives should be paid less than their immediate male counterparts; rather, no one should be paid so much money to be a general manager.
In any case, the focus on corporate income inequality between men and women is a classic example of mistaking a symptom for a syndrome. Women are not paid less than men—whether in the executive office or at the greeters line in WalMart—because late capitalism is malfunctioning, but rather because that is a function of capitalism. Yes, women’s inequality long predates the modern economy, but the systems of capitalism incorporate preexisting forms of social and material inequality to their own end. A great deal of time and attention and political will is about to be frittered away “addressing the growing concern” over income inequality in the nation’s corporate media. Meanwhile, the question of what it means to have the nation’s singular newspaper a publicly traded corporate entity and the nation’s media in general an elite enterprise accessible as an occupation almost solely to those whose families have the previously acquired resources to support their effectively unpaid labor for as much as a decade will go largely unasked and entirely unanswered.
In other words, yes, it is a problem in a narrowly defined sense that a woman reporter for the Times is making eighty grand a year while her male colleague is making ninety-five, or what have you, but it is a problem in a much broader sense that she went to Bryn Mawr and he went to Brown and both of their New York rents were floated by their parents for 4-5 post-undergraduate years of internships and sub-$30K reporting gigs; that these two employees consider this a natural state of affairs; that their employer considers it so (obviously) as well. These are the people who report on “income inequality.” In a very circumscribed sense, they experienced and performed low-income labor—for them, a rite of passage, a way station.
Here is where the difference between the C-level and the checkout lane start to look a little more important. Let’s go back to that certain level of income. For all practical purposes, the difference between $400K and $500K—this is roughly the range we’re talking about for these Times editors—is meaningless. There is nothing of actual value that these people can’t buy; they can buy anything they reasonably want or need many times over. The idea that the arithmetical equality of dollars-per-annum for a bunch of rich people is a measure of anything beyond mere counting is the fundamental error here. What is at stake is a status claim.
Meanwhile, a representative sentence from The New York Times:

Republicans contended [that Seattle’s attempt to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour] would be a job-killer, while Democrats asserted it would help alleviate poverty. Economists said both might be right.

Wait, that isn’t fair! The Times has strongly editorialized in favor of raising the minimum wage!
Well, sure, but then again, a few months later.
Stop looking at the stories and start looking at the coverage. The narrative it builds is of a fraught and deeply technical political and economic question being argued passionately at the highest levels of government, in academia, and in the media—a debate mediated by and, in a perverse sense, for people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars—the sort of people for whom there is something called “the economy.” “Both might be right”!
These are the sorts of ersatz and imponderable conversations that capitalism, personified by its functionaries, likes to have both with and about itself. Have you recently used the phrase “rising inequality.” Ding-ding-ding! You listen with some anguish to NPR pieces on the “growing gap between the rich and the poor.” You, like the Times, recognize that it’s impossible to live on the minimum wage alone, and that even $15/hour condemns a wage-earner to a life of struggle and fretting over the bills. But isn’t it true that mandated upward pressure on the low end of wages will force businesses to slow hiring? The unemployment rate is so high! We need more jobs! No, we need good jobs! Oh, woe, what is a “the economy” to do?
Pause. Here’s a question that you rarely hear anyone ask. What is money? I’ve always been very fond of the late author Iain M. Banks formulation in his first science fiction novel. Money is a “crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing.”
Rationing! You mean, like communism?
Yes, Virginia.
Stay with me. In 2010, women comprised 47 percent of the total US Labor Force. Now, estimates differ, as the Times might say, but broadly speaking, women are assumed to make somewhere between 75-85% of what men make in, as the Times might say, broadly comparable positions.
Okay, I want you to imagine the Times, or any similar publication, publishing an editorial that says women should not make as much as men for the same work because of the fundamental damage that “some Republicans” or “some economists” say that “equal pay” would do to our old friend, the economy.
Because, after all, the cost of bringing the compensation of all women in the workforce into wage/salary parity with men would far exceed that of increasing the minimum wage—even dramatically—for the just several million people who earn it. So why, then, is the one a debate and the other a moral imperative?
I’m glad you asked! Capitalism is a system of surpluses, and it allocates them upward. It gives more rations to people who already have a pile. Should women make as much as men, blacks as much as whites? Yes. But these debates are moral proxies for debates that we are not having, at least, not in the pages of the Times. The answer to the question of whether a woman line worker should make as much as the guy next to her is yes. The answer to the question of whether Jill Abramson should have made as much as Bill Keller is smash the system of state capital and reallocate the surpluses in the form of lifetime guaranteed housing, clothing, food, and study for everyone. I am not being crass here. There is, quite literally, plenty to go around.
Yeah, well, how does this affect Hillary’s chances in 2016?
There is, of course, a corollary debate. This debate has to do with the question of why it is that women in leadership roles are pushy and opinionated while men are strong and decisive, or, well, you pick the opposing pairs of adjectives—why, in short, is the behavior of women judged on measures of temperament, and men’s on measures of will? It strikes me that the actual question being asked here is: why, upon achieving a position of dominance, aren’t women as free to act like monstrous dickheads as men? The management behaviors ascribed to both Abramson and her predecessors are the worst kind of B-school blowhard psychopathy: management based on fear; power maintained by its own inconsistent application. These sorts of hard-driven, hard-driving, chair-tossing, dressing-down applications of personal power within a rigid hierarchy of authority are, like that big ol’ salary, a kind of surplus; an excess; an overage. So the question can’t be: how do we permit a few more women to behave like the lunatic men who’ve been running the show all these years, but how do we prohibit or prevent anyone from acting this way? And here, too, the answer is a more fundamental sort of levelling, because the other option, which is the false promise of our society, which is the belief that it is the duty of each person to scramble madly from the broad base toward the unattainable height, is a Sisyphean punishment where we all—well, most of us—under the weight of our own bodies are forever sent tumbling down the sides of the same brutal slope.

Imitation of the Human

Culture, Justice

Gordon Brown offered an apology to Alan Turing in 2009. If there’s a certain temporosemantic incoherence in the notion of apologizing to a dead man, then it at least accords with the broad moral norms of repentance and absolution. There’s nothing to be done about the injustice now, but England feels very badly about it. Inadequate, yes, but there’s an appealing modesty to the gesture; it isn’t glib, and it doesn’t gall. There could never be a truly adequate act of contrition, and insufficiency should generally be hemmed in by a wide zone of humility. Apology identifies the correct object of culpability. The government that offered it did wrong. It can’t really do right, but there’s a degree of straightforward sincerity to it all.

Well, shit, the only thing that might have redeemed the Queen’s Christmastime pardon of Turing would have been if she’d addressed it, “From one queen to another.” Obviously there’s an ancient form to these documents, but if there is gross indecency here, it’s in the idea that the figurehead Queen of England, in the form of a hopped-up ecclesiastical potentate, could have the sheer temerity to extend her “Grace and Mercy” in the service of absolving a man who never did anything wrong to begin with. Politeness is always lost on the aristocracy, despite its self-sealed belief to the contrary, but the language and timing here is absurdly rude.

As either a Jew or a non-believer—take your pick—I find the idea of an actual divine representative, a heavenly elect here on earth, to be pretty hilariously idolatrous, though I am willing to give your various Popes and Patriarchs a degree of laisser prier tolerance, but is there a more preposterous representative of Grace on this earth than the Queen of England, a less likely vessel, a more absurd pretender to the seat? Turing doesn’t require your pardon, Lizzy; rather you, his. Some sort of majestic retroactive vacation of the indecency law in its entirety would have been less tone deaf, less insulting, and less presumptuous.

I suppose it’s asking too much to suggest this goofy Wettinian drag show comport itself to the standards of decency expected of its audience, but I, for one, as a gay man, am awfully tired of the self-congratulatory attitude of lousy beneficence as these monarchs and judges and legislators haul themselves toward the glory of delivering their approbation. The proper attitude of the British state to its victims, of whom Turing was just one of the more prominent, is shame. Would it kill ya to show a little?

More Sinned Against than Manning

Culture, Justice, Religion, War and Politics

We all knew that the conviction of Bradley Manning was a fait accompli before the trial began, and the government’s petty and vindictive rejection of his plea offer only certified that the amoral keepers of order, beginning with the President himself, considered this sinful spectacle of vengeful formality a necessary bit of instruction, pour décourager les autres. I use the word sinful advisedly. The fact that the government went through with the trial indicates how truly despicable the powerful become when they’ve been embarrassed, how small they are, and how distant from what is good.

You know, I joined Twitter because I wrote a novel and it seemed wise to weasel my way into a few more online forums in anticipation of its publication, but I’ve been gratified to make some interesting new friends and acquaintances, several of whom are devout Christians. I’m not religious in any practical sense of the word, but I’ve always been conservative by temperament, however radical my politics, and although I’m no more inclined to believe that Yahweh is real than I ever was, I do find that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become both more austere in my moral judgments and more communitarian in my social thinking, habits I certainly associate with the Judaism of my youth, however wishwashy and Reform it may have been. I don’t know, this Shabbat is my brother’s Yahrtzeit, and I always get sentimental. Nevertheless, even if I don’t believe in God and feel no affinity for the concept of a god, then I do believe, abidingly, that there is such a thing as justice, and that justice is more than some dull codex of laws, fairly and blindly applied. There should be room for forgiveness, tolerance, and exigence, and when we afflict the weak and the powerless with our harshest punishments, we traduce justice and sully ourselves. The desire to punish, the eagerness to see punishment, reveals, I think, a human soul, or being, or whatever you want to call it, that secretly fears this very outcome for itself—trial, judgment, and punishment for its sins.

The government tortured Bradley Manning; they tried, literally, to drive him mad, likely in the belief that he would then give up some other participant in a concocted conspiracy. They later accused him of vanity, but is there anything more vain than powerful, paranoid men imagining their own secret persecution? Still, I want to resist the urge to let my heart break for him, because I think that he’s stronger and braver than me; had I been subjected to what he endured, I would not have endured. I doubt I’d have done what he did to draw the vicious ire of the Executive and the military to begin with, even if I’d had the opportunity. Fear would have stopped me, or malaise, or plain indifference. So it seems indulgent to offer him my pity, and instead I would offer my anger.

Manning is a prisoner of politics and conscience. As I sit on my designer (if dog-stained) couch in my pretty little row house in my lovely city wondering how much more furniture or art my ex will want to take as we dissolve the last eight years of life together, it feels vain to have any opinion, to share any sentiment at all. It feels decadent. But my god, we were twenty-three when we met! We were trawling through Pittsburgh bars and going to museum parties. We were the same age as Manning when they arrested him. And I believe that what is really decadent is to cast him as some speechless other, with whose experience and suffering I can feel no connection. I would have hit on Bradley Manning if I’d met him in a bar when I was twenty-three. I can’t help but feel. Another political little queer. The difference, of course, is that he was in the right place, or the wrong place, and he was more formidable than me.

What does the Manning case say? I won’t say mean, because what does anything mean? It says that our rulers are small and vengeful and afraid. The language of security and peril that’s come to cloak every official announcement is decadent. The hounding pursuit of those who undermine and question the imperatives of security and the reality of the peril is decadent. The hollow liturgy of a show trial is decadent. I’ve never been much of a nationalist, never felt especially inspired by America, always known that we are a nation like any other, built on bones and fairy tales as much as anything else, but I do appreciate the power of myth to model society, and this lousy episode really makes you wonder, what is our national myth? What does America have to offer itself anymore? We’ve become very adept at hurting people for nothing. I wonder: is that all?

Brookstoßlegende

Justice, Media, War and Politics

Does anyone remember when David Brooks was a conservative? Me neither, and yet the adjective persists. He’s gotten great mileage out of the not-very-original but not-very-objectionable-either argument that a society, properly constituted, is a nested set of smaller societies, from friends and family on up through your block, your council district, your diocese, etc., all the way up to the Federal Government. He combines these with a Burkean horror at the excesses of the French Revolution; for David Brooks, it is always 1789 1968. This in turn gets folded into a frothy meringue of faddish neurobabble and pop psychology. The result is an odd chimera, a giddy atavistic technocratic utopian anachronist: a Benthamite Whig monarchist. Imagine that on your coat of arms.

Anyway, Brooks uses his column today to accuse Edward Snowden of taking the delicately wrought matryoshka doll that constitutes American civilization up to the roof and hurling it callously onto the sidewalk below. He accuses Snowden of betraying his own mother. Betrayal is one of those words that you only ever encounter in two contexts. In actual politics, betrayal is part of the lexicon of fascism. I’ll let others on the internet accuse Brooks of this. Despite his authoritarian predilections, Brooks is not a fascist, any more than Brooks is a conservative, or a liberal; Brooks is just a grumpy, entitled suburbanite on the downhill side of middle age—il est lui-même la matière de son livre. The other area in which one encounters betrayal is in the realm of romance. Ah, so that’s it. The odd tone of Brooks’ column grinds against what one expects from a polemic, but it does remind you of a breakup letter. Brooks isn’t outraged; he’s jilted.

Gore Vidal famously, or notoriously, quipped: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Vidal was a real aristocrat, and so he could turn his curdled humor on his own noblesse oblige; Brooks is an arriviste, lacking the confidence to giggle at his own certainty; he echoes everything in that sentence that follows positive and nothing that precedes it. Brooks views himself as essentially metonymous with the United States of America, thus the attitude toward Snowden. I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me! You can’t break up with me! I’m breaking up with you!

The column is full of peculiar, #slatepitch counterintuitions (“He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods”), which, in true Dear John fashion, simultaneously accuse Snowden of never doing the dishes and of always getting water all over the counters when he does the dishes, but there’s one fascinating and bizarre politico-historical claim that merits an additional note:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.

I have searched in vain, and I find no part of the Constitution, original text or amendments, that makes any provision whatsoever for the keeping of secrets, official or otherwise. In such absence, the accusation makes literally no sense at all. If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now tell me what you know. The founders did create the United States in part to protect against the issuance of general warrants by an unanswerable government. The closest they get to mentioning 29-year-olds is in making 25 the minimum age for Representatives, 30 for the Senate. Mostly, though, both bodies are occupied by Mr. Brooks’ cohort. Boy, they’re really doing a bang-up job.

Not Yet a Breach, but an Expansion

Culture, Justice, War and Politics

Well, if you ask me, it’s fitting that the Supreme Court should begin hearing gay marriage arguments in the middle of Passover, since they are the institution of American life that most anachronistically apes the social organization of an ancient desert tribe: a bunch of old yahoos handing down inerrant judgments— inerrant, that is, until the next round of revelation. How many times can the same elders haul their asses up the same mountain in order to discover slight revisions to the covenant? Plenty! But seriously, guys, lemme ask you: aren’t you just a bit uncomfortable with your so-called rights hinging upon the good sense of a panel of retirement-age lawyers? Prophets have to produce plagues and miracles; Justices don’t even have to produce decent prose.

We all know that Changing Social Attitudes ® consign the Anti-Gays to the overtaxed metaphor indicating social obsolescence, and in the face of all that historical inevitability, the epochal question before the Court withers. In fact, the question is not: will the US Supreme Court legalize gay marriage? Rather, it’s: will the Justices temporize a rickety legal barricade to the unavoidable full-faith-and-credit Federalization of same-sex marriage rights? Either way, the answer is probably yes. The Court is historically over-credited with defining the American social compact, for good and for ill. In reality, the institution’s default position is legal proceduralism, and for all the sting of its occasional sharp decisions, it remains a jellyfish, fundamentally helpless, adrift in larger tides and currents.

By the way, I hate the idea of gay marriage. My boyfriend and I have gotten along just fine for many years without the approval of a Justice of the Peace, thank you, and I resent everything implied by the idea that we’d have to go through a sort of social swearing-in just so that I can put him on my health plan and give him the house if I get hit by a bus. I actually have a kind of cultural affinity with conservatives on the issue, albeit a partial one. They believe marriage is a sacrament, as do I. The difference is that they wish to retain the state’s interest in a sacral institution, whereas I want marriage to be wholly spiritual and the government to be out of it altogether. City Hall has no compelling interest in the joining of two souls.

Apparently, one of Scalia’s most offensive comments In Re: The Gays was that expanding civil marriage to same-sex couples was the equivalent of giving death benefits and suchlike to someone’s longtime roommate. But we should be giving death benefits to someone’s longtime roommate, or adult-child caregiver, or the surviving sister of your pair of kooky cat-lady spinster aunts or whomever. We should allow single, unattached people to designate inheritors and not punish their estates for the fact of their never having married. I am all for the expansion of rights, but same-sex marriage is actually about the unfair expansion of privileges for people who choose long-term pair-bonding. What about all the single ladies?