All We Have to Say Today

Rich man's war. Poor (wo)man's fight.

What Was the Supreme Court Thinking? Part Two

As is its habit, the Supreme Court has released a whole bunch of decisions right at the end of June. One of the least heralded decisions concerned cable television, and whether cable companies that provide Internet service have to share their networks with rival companies.

The Supreme Court said that the cable companies don't have to share. At first blush, this makes sense. After all, the cable companies own the wires with which their customers are accessing the Internet, so it doesn't seem fair for the government to tell them that they have to invite competitors to use their own private property to compete with them.

That's certainly what the phone companies are going to argue. The Federal Communications Commission, you see, does force phone companies to share their Internet Direct Service Lines with competitors. But thanks to this ruling, this situation might not stand for very much longer. The new head of the FCC, when he's not protecting us from Janet Jackson, is very big on deregulation.

This would be too bad for consumers. Why? Well, when companies don't have to compete, they have no incentive to offer good service, and no incentive to keep prices at competitive levels, either. Do we really want companies to monopolize Internet service? Of course we don't.

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we wish our government would look at those wires as a public resource, like a river. The companies may own the wires, but the ability to transfer information with wireless telecommunications...shouldn't that belong to all of us? Or do the cable companies own the ether, as well?

We sure hope not.

The National Trust

For the next few days, we at the Blasphemy Blog will be delving into the morass of today's Supreme Court decisions, but today, let us take a trip "across the pond."

Tony Blair, who seems to be in the unfortunate position of a being a good man who has only bad ideas, wants to institute a system of national ID cards for Great Britain. It's an unpopular idea, but mostly because it appears that it's going to cost citizens a lot of money. This is not the same reason why such an idea would be unpopular in the United States.

As our blogfriend Steve Gilliard ably points out, this is the kind of thing that would never fly over here. We Americans, for better or for worse, see our government as very far away from us. This is because it usually is very far away from us; lots of us live in places like Montana and Alaska, which are both well over a thousand miles from the seat of the federal government in Washington, D.C. If you went over a thousand miles from London, you'd be practically at the arctic circle, or in Eastern Europe. But you can be very far from the government and still be in the United States.

What's more, we Americans like it that way. We don't particularly want to be checked up on. Sometimes we're perfectly okay if the government wants to check up on our neighbors, but that's just human nature. We like to be left alone, ourselves.

Is that really possible, though? Are Americans actually any further from their federal government than Britons are from the Queen's parliament? That is the question, after all; just because we perceive ourselves to be far from our government doesn't mean that we actually are. The invention of the computer and the ability to weld it to the satellite sort of ended the age of being able to mind your own business. The vast distance between us and our government still means we're out of sight, but in today's interconnected world, we're never really out of range.

It might no longer be a question of whether you want to be checked up on, or who you want to be able to check up on you. You might just have to trust that you can't be checked up on in any way that's going to hurt you. Which kind of scares us, here at the Blasphemy Blog.

What was the Supreme Court Thinking? First in a Series

We at the Blasphemy Blog have decided to begin regularly contributing our two cents to the analytical morass that emerges with every new Supreme Court decision. Legal babble will inevitably result. You have been warned.

So. Kelo v. City of New London. A small, economically depressed New England town wants to redevelop its dilapidated waterfront. In the way of such things, it’s got developers lined up to do it. The thing about waterfront property, after all, is that they’re not making any more of it, except in the Netherlands. And if the waterfront is redeveloped, there will be new jobs and there will be new property tax revenue. The town goes about buying up property for the redevelopment project, and tearing down the old houses.

There’s only one problem: not everyone wants to sell. Even though it’s a depressed neighborhood, there are still people who live there and some of them have actually remodeled their houses and lived in them for decades and have a lot more than just money invested in them. The city is offering good money, but they don’t care.

So the city exercises its power of eminent domain and forces them to sell.

Is this allowed? The Connecticut Supreme Court said it was, and now the United States Supreme Court says it is. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority of five justices, writes that seizing property through eminent domain for purposes of economic development is a time-tested and -accepted power of local governments with which the federal government ought not to interfere.

The human cost of such a decision is now in all the newspapers, and her name is Wilhelmina Dery, who has lived in her house since she was born there in 1918 but who will now be forced to sell to her hometown’s government. Interestingly, it is the four liberal Supreme Court Justices (Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Steven Breyer) who want to kick her out. (They were joined by Anthony Kennedy, who is conservative but also somewhat wishy-washy.) Meanwhile, the conservative justices, William Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Sandra Day O’Connor, all sided with Wilhelmina Dery.

How does this make sense? Aren’t the bleeding heart liberals supposed to stand up for the old and infirm, with the steadfast conservatives shaking their heads over how they hate to do it, but it has to be done? Well, there’s more here than meets the eye.

The power of eminent domain is also used by localities to create parks, bike paths, and nature conservancies. The liberals on the court undoubtedly had their eyes on the larger prize of the power of eminent domain, which promotes the greening of the public space. The conservative justices, on the other hand, are standing up for the libertarian view of property rights, which is that you never have to sell for any reason, even if you’re a slumlord and the city wants to put in affordable housing.

The desire to control one’s private property is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, which is why we dedicated a whopping ten percent of the Bill of Rights to something as trivial as whether you have to quarter soldiers in your house. But we Americans also like our green space, and without eminent domain, there would be a lot less of that in the American city.

Matters are not helped by the fact that economic development projects like this tend to be sinkholes of corruption, with the developers and the city councils in cahoots and Wilhelmina Dery on the outside looking in. The politicians always claim that these projects will result in jobs and tax revenue, which means more money for everyone, but this only works if everyone involved is honest. And usually, they’re just not. Plus, Wilhelmina Dery, who is, after all, ninety-seven years old, probably doesn’t care about all that; she just wants to live in her house.

Obviously, the best solution would be for local governments to use the power of eminent domain responsibly and humanely. In the absence of that, though, we guess we’ll just have to take the parks, which are a pleasant side effect of an often-abused but necessary government power.

We Read the News Today...Oh Boy

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we have not been writing much lately. However, we are pleased to see that the world has been behaving just as strangely while we were on hiatus as it did when we were around to comment on it.

For example, what is Congress up to these days? Congress wants to ban the burning of the American flag, is what it's up to. Well, actually, before that, Congress wants to pass a bill giving itself the power to ban the burning of the flag. Why does it need to give itself such power? Because the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, normally lets you do all kinds of crazy things with flags, including burning them, sitting on them, sitting on the poles on which they fly, and eating them.

Why would a conservative Congress, which normally wants the government to butt out of people's private business, pass such a law regulating behavior like burning a flag? After all, as our blogfriend the Rude Pundit so ably points out, these flags were bought at the store, and presumably belong to the people burning them. Why would Congress care if someone burned a flag in the garbage can behind their house?

Well, the answer is that Congress wouldn't care. Congress wouldn't even know, unless they all happened to be walking by at the time. The only time Congress would know is if the flagburner burned the flag in public, or within sight of a TV camera. But why would someone do that? Because they're mad at the United States and they want get back at us. But how would such a person know that such an action would cause us pain?

Because we keep trying to pass laws to prohibit the burning of the flag. They wouldn't do it if they didn't know it was going to rile us up. Someone should tell Congress to stop tipping our hand.

Not a Good Time to Stand on Principle

Let’s say you’re one of those no-nonsense Senators who believes in meat-and-potatoes government rather than newsworthy gestures. (No, we can’t think of a name either, but bear with us.) Let’s say that you have a personal preference for adding your name only to legislation that results in action, rather than resolutions of apology that are nothing more than pretty words.

When would be a good time to break your traditional stance? How about a bill apologizing for lynchings committed because the Senate refused to pass a bill guaranteeing basic civil rights to every American? We at the Blasphemy Blog think this would be a good time.

Fifteen United States Senators, no-nonsense straight arrows that they are, disagree.

Take Our Word For It

We at the Blasphemy Blog have seen with our own eyes that the death penalty is not fair. It's racist and it's classist. It becomes disgustingly political, and too many prosecutors use it to advance their careers. And they use it dishonestly, playing on the worst of human prejudice in order to get expedient verdicts. The Supreme Court's recognition of this simple fact ought to be applauded.

We freely admit that, even if the death were "cleaned up," we would still oppose it. We're just that kind of always-believes-in-redemption kind of people here at the Blasphemy Blog.

But our point is that we as a nation are not even ready to have that conversation. Our death penalty is not clean and never has been clean, not even a little bit. In the United States, we don't even pretend that we execute only the most barbaric offenders. In the United States, we execute people who kill police, black people who kill white people, and people unlucky enough to be both poor and mentally ill. That is who sits on the death rows of the United States.

Now, many of these offenders are guilty of truly heinous crimes. But a lot of them are not. And a lot of people who are guilty of truly heinous crimes are not even considered for the death penalty. As currently practiced, the death penalty is arbitrary.

So, let's get rid of this arbitrary thing. Then, if we must, let's talk about bringing it back for the most evil, irredeemable serial killers. But only then.

No More Calleys, Please

Apparently, the army is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals these days. By a lot.

We sincerely hope that this does not mean that the army will lower its standards for new recruits, but it’s beginning to look like that’s exactly what they’re doing. Army recruiters are desperate to make quota, and quite willing to overlook criminal records, bad behavior, or incompetence. They’re not being particularly smart about it, either; one group of corner-cutting recruiters was actually exposed by an investigative report by a teenager writing for his school paper at Arvada High in Colorado.

Steve Gilliard, one of our favorite bloggers, points out that the infamous Lt. Calley of the My Lai massacre was a good example of the last-in-his-class-at-officer-candidate-school kind of screwup the army gets when it relaxes its standards. His point could not be clearer: send the screwups to fight, and the fight gets screwed up.

Right now, it seems like the army’s ground forces are largely made up of patriotic kids from small towns, idealistic inner city kids trying to get ahead, and immigrants trying to get citizenship. It’s not necessarily fair that that’s who’s fighting, but better them than Lt. Calley.

War is always a crime, but sending actual criminals to fight a war turns it into some kind of major felony.

The Men We Kill

We believe in the power of poetry to change the world, here at the Blasphemy Blog, being the starry-eyed idealists that we are. These days, with the country at war, our thoughts turn to our favorite poem about war, The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy.

The story of the poem is quite simple: a soldier reflects on the enemy he has just killed on the battlefield, and remarks on how, if he and the man he killed had met at a bar, they would have been just as likely to buy each other a drink. The surviving soldier is not necessarily traumatized by the killing ("Just so: my foe of course he was"), so much as he comes to a realization that war is an odd, unnatural thing quite different from everyday life. ("Quaint and curious war is!")

The key to this realization is the soldier's recognition of what his enemy has in common with him. ("But ranged as infantry, and staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, and killed him in his place.") He sees his enemy as someone he can sit down and drink with, because they are of course both soldiers, both "ranged as infantry," and would presumably have a lot to talk about.

This makes us wonder, nowadays, with asymmetrical warfare now common, and uniformed soldiers now regularly fighting irregular insurgent forces, whether it will be as easy for us to see the common humanity in our enemies. Will it be possible for any American soldier to write a poem or a story about sitting down to a drink with a fanatical Iraqi insurgent? Or do we now consider ourselves too different from those we kill, or those we have others kill in our name?

More Free Poetry

Once again, we at the Blasphemy Blog are feeling all poetic. Check out some more free poetry.

Faith and Works

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we consider ourselves Christians. However, if you pressed us, we would have to admit that we can’t really explain what that means. It seems to us that you’ve got basically two kinds of Christians running around these days: the kind that think you should express your Christianity mostly by helping others, and the kind that believe you should express your Christianity mostly be praising the Lord.

Which sort of Christian are we? We’re really not sure, and this uncertainty is what we think about most often while sitting in Church. We wish it were as simple as saying, well, we praise the Lord and we also help others, or we help others by praising the Lord, or we praise the Lord by helping others. But it really doesn’t seem that simple.

For one thing, when we do things like build houses for Habitat for Humanity, we honestly don’t feel God’s presence. Actually, when we put down that hammer after nailing those shingles on that roof, we feel quite bound to this earth, and in a good way. We feel quite connected to something, but it is to the community of our fellow human beings. We feel that we’ve accomplished something worthwhile, but we don’t think about Jesus.

Likewise, when we ponder the awesome power of whatever force created the universe, we don’t feel like we’re really helping anyone. We’re enjoying ourselves, certainly, and this does perhaps make the world a slightly better place, in that happy people make the world a better place. But this contemplation doesn’t do much in terms of, say, ending world hunger.

So. The two things appear to be separate. Can we then divide our time evenly, contemplating on Mondays and Wednesdays, helping other on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and alternating Fridays? We suppose we could, but that doesn’t seem to make us members of any particular religion. Honestly, it makes us seem kind of wishy-washy.

This is a stigma we are willing to accept, but we do wish we could answer this unanswerable question: how do you get to heaven? Is it the faith that counts? Or is it the works?

One thing we’re sure of, though, is that we can’t engage in the kind of praising the Lord that we see on TV most of the time. Our President and lots of the people who voted for him definitely believe that it’s the faith, stupid, and nothing else. The President said, when he was running in 2000, that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. Some people snickered, but we thought that was not actually that bad an answer. That is, until he said why: the President believes that Jesus is the greatest politician because he “changes your heart.”

Huh? What about turning the other cheek, considering the lilies of the field, and rendering unto Caesar but also unto God? Nice, but not the President’s cup of tea, apparently. Jesus is a great philosopher because he changed the President’s heart. The President is inspired by the power of the Lord, not the wisdom of the Lord.

This is actually quite troubling to us at the Blasphemy Blog, and we wish more people would talk about it on TV instead of the filibuster. We’re troubled because it sounds suspiciously like the President believes that Jesus has made him a better person just like that, without the President having to do anything except acknowledge Jesus’ power to do so.

To us, this seems to turn religious belief into nothing more than a contract: I promise to believe in you, Oh Lord…and in return the Lord promises to wave a magic wand and make us better people. The President seems to be talking like he’s been…perfected somehow.

This is totally alien to our experience at the Blasphemy Blog. How on earth can acknowledging someone’s power over you make you into a better person? Wouldn’t it fill you with constant fear of retribution if you do wrong, and jealousy of the other’s power over you? Is the purpose of Creation nothing more than a demonstration of the Almighty’s power? Is the recognition of that power the beginning and the end of wisdom, with no room for the improvement of our lot as human beings? Aren’t we endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Call us shrill, but the President’s kind of Christianity seems kind of…well…un-American.

No, that is not for us. We’ll stick with the hammer and the nails and the shingles and trying to help others, though it takes us farther away from the contemplation of God. And perhaps, from now on, when asked if we’re Christian, we’ll say, “That’s not for me to decide.”

A Mellow Proposal

The Supreme Court today cleared the way for the Federal Government to keep locking up people who use marijuana for medicinal purposes. Thus will the government continue to lock up glaucoma sufferers and AIDS patients, and also, we must admit, the thousands of people who just like to spend time with Mary Jane and who use medical marijuana laws as an excuse.

Now, we at the Blasphemy Blog do not smoke the wacky tabacky, seeing as how we are already quite capable in the snacking, mellowing out, and daydreaming-about-vaguely-profound-ideas departments. However, we really do wish the government would get off of this prohibition thing.

Instead, we wish the government would make methamphetamine into public enemy number one. In meth we have a drug that is undoubtedly addictive, universally destructive, and hundreds of times more dangerous than the doobies. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why meth is more dangerous; marijuana plants grow right out of the ground, whereas meth is made of fertilizer and battery acid. Meth has to be cooked up in highly flammable labs, whereas marijuana is just a cigarette that people eat when they're done. One of these things is not like the other.

We freely admit: meth scares the bejeezus out of us. This is a drug that does everything to you for real that they used to say marijuana would do to you. Out-of-control sexual urges, check. Permanent brain damage, check. Multigenerational communities of futureless addicts, check.

Meth is the drug of choice among the economically depressed rural poor, but it is also popular with truckers, machinists, and many others in professions that require you to work really hard for hours at a time. This is another reason we don’t like it: we’re suspicious of any drug that would make anyone want to work harder. Paranoid libertarians that we are, we’re afraid that the government is going to start making meth mandatory some day, so as to keep the workforce manically productive at all times.

So we freely admit our bias in favor of herb, grass, or whatever the kids call it; we at the Blasphemy Blog want everyone to be as mellow as us. But would it be too cute of a modest proposal to suggest that we decriminalize marijuana with an eye toward substituting it for meth? Meth is dirt cheap, but we bet that, if the government let those little leafy plants grow, marijuana would be even cheaper.

We would all prefer to have everyone walking around altered by nothing more than coffee, so that we could have normal conversations with everyone we meet, but it’s not going to happen. Given the choice, we’ll take a country of potheads over a country of tweekers any day.

Riches to Rags

When we at the Blasphemy Blog were in high school, we spent a summer studying in Mexico. One of the many ways we found Mexico to be different from the United States was that middle class teenagers did not work in the summertime. Or at any time.

One of our teachers explained to us that this was not because of laziness; middle class Mexican teenagers would probably like to work and make a little extra money, but there were simply no jobs to be had. Mexico, like everywhere else on Earth besides Bhutan, does have McDonald's, but McDonald's in Mexico is staffed by regular working folks, not high school kids earning spending money.

These days, if reports are to be believed, the United States is becoming more like Mexico. Teenagers are still looking for the kind of entry-level, low-paying work that you used to get to pay for your first car, but those jobs are already taken by people who are trying to live on those wages.

This brings two thoughts to mind. First, what does it mean that jobs that used to go to people who didn't need the wages to live now belong to people who do?

Second, what does it mean for the teenagers of today that they're not earning their spending money the way they used to?

We are not economists at the Blasphemy Blog, but it strikes us that neither thing is good for the health of our nation's markets. Both trends, we think, indicate a general deflation of the pride of having a job. For the new full-time low income workers, having a job no longer means supporting a family; it's only part of the process, and now maybe you need a second job, or some kind of federal aid. And as far as the teenagers, never having a summer job in the first place will mean that the lessons of budgeting your own money come that much later.

The place we are headed, we fear, is a Mexico-in-the-90s-type situation, where the middle class is about eighteen percent of the population, the upper class is two percent, and the other 80 percent works at McDonald's, or possibly WalMart. It's already getting harder in this country for working class or poor parents to lift their children into the middle class through their own hard work; soon we may be a country of heirs and servants, like the old days in Europe. We founded a whole new country to get away from that, but we're headed back there.

At times like these, it's important to remember that great Americans often come from nothing. Abraham Lincoln comes to mind, but there are many great (and wealthy) Americans who were born to poverty. We like that kind of Horatio Alger story, but the best thing about it is that it's grounded in fact. But soon it may become nothing more than a myth. That would be too bad.

Back Again

For various reasons, we at the Blasphemy Blog have not been able to post anything here for the last week and two days. Well, a lot can happen in a little over a week, and we acknowledge that we are way behind. Oh, what we would have written if we'd been able...

We might have had something to say about the irony of some of Nixon's old guard going on TV and saying how betrayed they feel the finally-identified Deep Throat betrayed them and their President. We at the Blasphemy Blog would have said something like, Sorry guys, but you did it first. Mark Felt betrayed a President, but you and that President betrayed a whole nation.

We might also have written about the Vice President of the United States being "offended" by Amnesty International's report on abuse in American military prisons. We would have pointed out that we're not sure that a man whose delicate sensibilities are so easily offended has the intestinal fortitude to be the Vice President. After all, if reading reports about abuse in prisons offended him, just imagine what the actual pictures of actual people being tortured did to him, when he saw them. We bet he just went through the roof. Because we all know that reporting abuse, even if it is offensive, can never be as bad as actually committing abuse, right?

Right?

Tomorrow, we will go back to writing about what we think about what's going on now, as opposed to last week.