Thing I Know #91. “Esteem” is something sought with the greatest urgency by those who struggle with doubts about whether they’ve earned it.

Dick Morris on the connection between Barack Obama’s new administration, and the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s…and other stuff. “Emasculating intelligence”:

President-elect Barack Obama’s new head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, called the legal reasoning which gave the president broad powers to authorize “rough” interrogation of terrorists “shockingly flawed…bogus…outlandish.” She said it allowed “horrific acts” and demanded to know “Where is the outrage? The public outcry?” This is the person who will decide how to interrogate terrorists.
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Doesn’t [Obama] realize that without warrantless FISA wiretaps we could never have uncovered the plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (how could we have gotten a warrant for conversations about the bridge when we didn’t yet know that al Qaeda had it in its sights?) Has he forgotten that we only found the name of the operative who was tasked with destroying the bridge because we subjected Kahlid Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, to “rough” interrogation techniques? Does he really mean to leave us vulnerable to terrorist attacks?

Yes he does. Not because he is callous or fiendish, but because the new president seems to carry the thinking that animated the decisions of the Warren Court on defendant’s rights over into the battle against terror. When the Warren Court first ruled that all defendants deserved free lawyers, that they had to be explicitly told of their right to remain silent, that evidence not obtained through warrants was inadmissible as were any “fruits of the poisonous tree” it occasioned great controversy (enough to help Nixon get elected president). Law and order types said that these decisions would lead to the release of thousands of criminals who would otherwise be in prison and would cause tens or hundreds of thousands more innocent people to become victims of serious crime. And they were right. The decisions of the Warren Court had exactly this effect.

The Warren Court is a fascinating little pearl in the big, fleshy oyster of American history. This is the chapter in which it became obligatory for our system of justice, and therefore our government, to pretend one thing was true while it knew, beyond doubt, that a contrary thing was true. Whether you believe the infectious condition in our country’s intellect is terminal, or not, this is the moment where we caught the bug. We decided material success was a loathsome thing in 1932, and then in the early 1960’s we decided it was a grievous sin to actually know something. “Rules” had to be followed, and if the rules weren’t followed you had to pretend not to know what you actually knew.

Throwing around words like “Constitution,” I’m sure, seemed so harmless at the time. That’s where the Warren Court was getting its authority, so it was mandatory to use that word, right? Trouble is, the C-word carries with it an implication of non-negotiability, at least to the atrophied mind. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan found this out…make this one guy’s day unpleasant, or let nine planeloads of people burn to death? I’ll take the latter, please, Alex.

PAT BUCHANAN: Let me ask you a couple questions. This Bojinka plot that was going to bring down nine airliners over the Pacific at one time, apparently that was broken by the fact that enhanced interrogation techniques were done in the Philippines on people they caught there. Was that immoral, to use these on an individual, which you might constitute torture if it saves nine passenger planes from going down over the Pacific?

[KRYSTIA] FREELAND: Do you think it would be immoral to preemptively kill someone who hasn’t committed a crime yet?

BUCHANAN: Let me tell you something — it would be moral to take Khalid Shaikh Mohammed out and say here, and shoot him in the head, but it’s immoral —
FREELAND: For what he’s done already.

BUCHANAN: Exactly. But it’s immoral to water board him three minutes?

FREELAND: I’m asking you.

BUCHANAN: I’m saying it’s moral to kill him and given what he’s done and what you know he’s done, it is moral to impose physical pain upon him, excruciating pain, to get information to save lives, yes.

FREELAND: I disagree. I think there’s a very, very clear line.

The tragedy involved in these arguments is that people end up shouting at each other about what’s moral. At that point, it’s clear to everybody no minds are going to be changed.

But they also — both sides — occasionally bob back into the land of where you talk about what will happen if we do this, and what else will happen if we do that. This, unlike morals, is “provable” or at least can be subject to the objective commentary of history.

On the other hand, the “waterboarding is immoral” people aren’t really headed there, they’re just providing the illusion of doing so. Nobody opposed to wiretapping, or waterboarding, really wants to get into a prolonged discussion of what happens if we repeat the Warren Court days, and just build taboo upon taboo to prove what good people we are. They don’t wanna go there.

Because what’s the first question you ask? Where’s-the-benefit. Who, back in the halcyon days of the Warren Court inventing one new “right” for criminals after another, looked to America from around the world and said to themselves, “ah…what a nice, bright, beacon of civilization for us, the rest of the world’s countries, to admire.” Who did that? Who’s ready to do that now? It comes down to that, doesn’t it…who’s ready to love us all to pieces, when our government promises never to do any wiretapping and never to do any waterboarding — who hates us today? There is nobody. Hating the country is a strategy, used by its enemies to get what they want; to peel back the armor.

If, God forbid, this nation does come crashing down in our lifetime, it will be the conclusive event to a madcap vicious-cycle fools-errand of trying to prove what good people we are, to nameless faceless strangers around the world who will never, ever, in a million years, no matter what, ever recognize it. We’ll prove ourselves to death this way. And we’ll do it without becoming better people.

As Morris pointed out, we’ve done it before. It didn’t lead to a Golden Age of worldwide opinion smiling upon America’s wonderful, wise, benevolent Government. It led to the exact opposite, in fact. People talk of that time as emotionally frayed, a vast landscape of wreckage devastated by “Vietnam and Watergate.” But the wreckage came from men not knowing if their wives and children would come home from wherever they were, each night, alive and intact. It was a triangle of unholy forces consisting of Vietnam, Watergate and Warren Court justice — that endless deadly-good cycle of proving, in futility, how decent you are. That suicide pact that somehow isn’t thought of as a suicide pact, even though it is that and is little else.

Several years ago I noticed my son was starting to engage in “reasoned” debate about discipline, restrictions, et al, not so much as a matter of reason but as a matter of ritual. (Cut me some slack, because when they’re seven or eight, you have to do some studying to tell the difference.) I instituted a “Budweiser” policy, in which the parental rejoinder is an immediate, and deliberately thoughtless, “Why Ask Why?” That’s the exact opposite of what our prevailing sensibilities say a “thoughtful” parent is supposed to do. Parents, especially fathers, should be open to the idea that they’re fallible. In fact they should be looking for excuses to admit it. But hey, I’d already been doing the why-ask-why thing with his mother for years. One tires rather quickly of encountering dissent, constantly, which exists solely for dissent’s sake.

Or at least I do.

It seems schools don’t.

No wait, read that article again. Not schools. The justice system. The ACLU. The system that binds those three together. System. Why do we need a system? A system is an assemblage of parts forming a complex or unitary whole. Why are things so complex? It’s a dress code policy. You’re either in compliance with it or you aren’t.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Toni Kay Scott showed up at Redwood Middle School in “a denim skirt, a brown shirt with a pink border, and long socks with pictures of Tigger.”

This violated the school’s dress code, which requires certain colors or fabrics and bans clothing with words, photos or symbols.

The Chronicle, quoting from the lawsuit, says the 14-year-old “was escorted to the principal’s office by a uniformed police officer and, along with two of her schoolmates, was sent to an in-school suspension program called Students With Attitude Problems.”

The ACLU says her younger sister, a sixth-grader named Sydni, was sent to the principal’s office for wearing shirts emblazoned with pro-Christian and anti-drug messages.

“I agree; no midriffs, mini-skirts or cleavage,” the girls’ mother says in a statement from the local ACLU. “School is a place to learn. But anything above that should be my call as a parent. Pink socks and two-tones are not a crime. That’s just nitpicking.”

The overly-opinionated mother then went on to opine about who had ownership over these decisions…whoops, no she didn’t. Or at least there’s very little written about that, that I can see. Just “anything above that should be my call as a parent.” Should be, maybe. But isn’t. You don’t know how to deal with that?

See, that’s the problem right there. All this bloviating about what’s “not a crime.” Not too much consideration for who owns a decision. Nobody’s saying what all kinds of parents said back in my day…”there may be lots of good points to be made against this policy…I personally might not even agree with it…but those are the rules.”

I’m not at all against challenging things that are unfair, and I’m certainly not against teaching the next generation to do that as well. But here’s what the mother missed: That is Phase Two. Before you get into all that, the child first needs to learn how to comply with rules. Stupid ones. How to say to herself, “I have a turf, and my turf extends to this point, that decision over there is made well outside of it even though it has some negligible day-to-day impact on me, and I’m going to respect that.”

When kids learn all about Phase Two before they learn about Phase One, the problem that comes up is that they don’t learn how to recognize this boundary. To the lazy, weak mind, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening — it’s what the kid wears, after all. Shouldn’t my precious darling be able to wear what she likes? But in the mind of a kid, especially a kid at the center of a controversy like this one, boundaries don’t figure into it. They can’t. Nobody’s really backed the brat into the corner in which she’s forced to learn about them.

So the world just becomes a big playground, in which nobody really has ownership of a decision. Everyone ends up loudly, pugnaciously, bullyingly announcing their opinion of that other guy’s decision, appealing this, overturning that…doing whatever it takes to prevail.

What kind of arsenal do they have to make sure that is the case? Talk loud. Bribe the people who are supposed to be “in charge.” Maybe blackmail some of ’em with some none-too-complimentary newspaper-printing.

Vox populi vox dei. Mob rule. Pitchforks and torches waving over the angry multitudes who are storming the bastille. Appeal to bandwagon. “Can I Get An Amen Here?”

The irony?

The irony is that by channeling the satanic energy of the thoughtless mob, this ends up being an egregious assault upon the individual, which, by design, was supposed to be the beneficiary of defense. The thoughtless parents tried to produce thoughtful adults for the future, who would speak up in favor of right-over-wrong — instead, they produce jealous idealogues. Right vs. wrong doesn’t enter into it. They try to indoctrinate the yearlings with selflessness, and they unleash upon the world vast hordes of selfish little snots. They create a European type of world, one in which everybody’s nose is intruding into everybody else’s business. Nobody owns any decision. Your neighbor can sue you for growing a tree that hangs over his driveway — and then, when he’s done with you, the guy living clear across town can sue for the way the tree looks. And, over the fact that a two-stroke engine was used in the chainsaw that cut it down. A world in which nobody with an opinion is ever told “I’m sorry…you might think that’s your business…but it simply isn’t. You don’t have standing.”

This is exactly the kind of world the parents were trying to avoid making, when they went to the ACLU to sue for the “right” of their li’l babums to dress as “individuals.” That’s why Phase II has to come after Phase I; kids aren’t capable of learning how to behave as individuals, if they haven’t learned to respect authority, so they can learn to respect the boundaries to which authority extends.

To put it more simply — nobody really cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

I feel such a sense of pity for the Jamba Juice manager or Starbuck’s manager or Blockbuster Video manager who’s put in the position of having to hire some of these spoiled brats. These brats who are utterly incapable of saying to themselves, “that’s a stupid rule, but until it’s overturned I’m going to do what it says so nobody can say I did not.” And I feel sorry for the brats, too, when they start to accumulate some experience and get into jobs with serious responsibility…and prestige…and visibility…and rivals.

Because not every little personal conflict, in life, can be settled by dashing off to the ACLU, pissing and moaning about the way you were mistreated…or offended…or slighted…or unfairly restricted. This is still Earth, a round ball filled with red-blooded humans that are three-dimensional and real. If we are destined to dissolve into a puddle of complete anarchy, even if that is unavoidable, it hasn’t quite happened just yet. And every li’l unpopular rule, as of now, is not necessarily up for appeal.