House of Eratosthenes

Last Supper I find this to be ironic. This movie should be considered a warning to all bloggers, conservative and liberal — and overzealous activist judges who run around striking down any law they personally dislike, under some rancid and overly-delicate “interpretation” of the “Constitution,” jotting down any ol’ text to justify the decision they’ve already made before they cooked up a single word of the opinion. The movie applies to this pretty well. It, like all great ones, is about two stories: The cosmetic one that skims along the surface, and the deeper one that labors on in parallel far beneath. The visible and shallow story has to do with five grad students living in a cottage, growing vegetables, going to school, wallowing in their liberal-ness and feeling really smug about it. They pontificate a whole lot and they actually ponder very little. Their only point of disagreement, at first, is about whether it should be allowable to turn on the boob-tube when a certain bloated conservative media icon, obviously modeled after Rush Limbaugh, spews his hated right-wing venom on television.

They have no visible means of support and no visible need for any. Of course, in the first act there is no need to think anything out. Things are crystal clear. Liberals good, conservatives bad. But there this sense of frustration that a civil war is taking place, and people like the conservative demagogue are winning and the liberals are losing. They aren’t doing anything to advance their cause. Clearly, something must be done.

Like a Hitchcock masterpiece, the film forces the main characters downward through a bunch of layers of moral decay to the point where they’re killing people, without once making the audience go “oh, come on now.” The main characters make bad decisions, and you identify with the character even though you know the decision is bad. You have to keep watching because you want to see what consequences develop. And this is the deeper sequence of events grinding away far beneath the surface. The protagonists “know” what is right and they “know” what is wrong, they have moral certitude, but they are bored with isolationism. They become righteous warriors and end up perpetuating what nobody can deny is darkly evil. And the magnitude of evil is stepped up gradually, expertly, as the situations that motivate the evil are gradually muted, until our heroes are tempted to do anything while being provoked by nothing.

Not much point to spoiling this movie or doing anything that would approach that. The ending is deliberately left open to multiple interpretations. You should purchase or rent it, see it all the way through to the last frame, and see what you think. Debating it is interesting (link requires registration).

But anyhow. I said this applied to the Hazleton situation, and I should explain. This seems a convenient metaphor with what’s happening with illegal immigration. Not the real debate about illegal immigration, which I see is this: We understand the law becomes a tool of oppression as opposed to liberty when it is enforced selectively, and we have some greedy businesses who want it enforced selectively so they can use illegal labor and pump up their profits by breaking the law. Not that — the other one. Our bigot liberals want us to respect people with “good” skin colors, which means “non-white.” So there is the law, and then there is this big old moldy notebook binder filled with sniveling excuses they can add to on the spot. Oh, our “undocumented migrant workers” work so hard. We need them. They’re just trying to feed their families. You don’t want to pay six dollars for a head of lettuce, do you. Snotty, whining excuses like those. Our liberals have learned they can add to the snivel-book by pulling brand new excuses out of their asses to fit whatever situation arises, whereas the law has to be legislated, negotiated, reviewed, appealed.

They like the snivel-book better than the law. The law just gets in the way. It is unclean. It incorporates the viewpoint of people who aren’t all glorious and wallowing in their own liberalness, like the liberals.

Granted, poisoning some conservative person and burying him in a tomato patch is a terrible thing to do, compared to sneaking across the border of an overly-permissive country to feed your starving family. But the two situations are exactly the same, and I would further argue it isn’t just liberals who are susceptible to such a moral down-slide. But the situations are identical. We have our illegal immigrants who’ve chosen to make a lifestyle out of breaking the law. We have our crooked businesses that employ them, and then we have our political agitators who give them cover and manufacture all these fairy tales about how our illegal immigrants follow the law every single day after breaking it by coming here. All these people have decided the law simply gets in the way of what they’re trying to do. Their mission is so incredibly glorious, that in working toward it they can commit crimes that are serious enough that if someone committed the same crime in opposing them, they’d all scream, cry, wail, bitch and moan…

…in other words, the remarkable thing isn’t that they break the law to achieve their glorious missions. You might say the incredible thing is that the mission is glorious enough to righteously float on a bed of hypocrisy. The law, then, becomes a tool used to entangle and subdue their opponents, while they escape the same tentacles by means of a convenient, self-granted license. Their mission is glorious and noble, after all. And so, corrupt, illegal businesses can keep on employing contraband labor, and the trespassers can continue to slip across the border. And our everyday liberals can insist that “hate crime laws” be rigidly enforced while border laws…aw, well, here’s today’s excuse why they don’t and shouldn’t matter.

The liberals in the movie want to propagate their values by killing off anyone who doesn’t share them. The liberals we have in real life, want to propagate their “respect” for non-white people, by declaring America’s borders null and void. Both fall prey to rather elementary failings in logic. You can only invite so many people to supper and your tomato patch is only big enough to hold so many bodies; there is no correlation, statistical leanings notwithstanding, between being an illegal alien and having a certain skin color; if you’re so “right,” you should be able to use the dinner table to talk the issue out instead of to murder someone with arsenic; if someone’s willing to break a law by hopping a border, they may be willing to break a law by doing other things.

It’s an expensive proposition to get a civilized society humming along under a set of laws that are open to re-inspection, negotiation, appeal, and that apply to all classes. It’s far easier to undo such a society, by declaring some among us to be exempt from the laws because they’re toiling away on a mission that is so noble, laws ought not apply. I think that’s what we’re starting to learn now. If the illegal aliens should be granted a license to skip across our border, then you have to grant them a license to do as they please while they’re here. Can’t grant one without the other. The mission of the illegal immigrant is far too noble, as is the mission of the everyday liberal, who wants to let the illegal immigrant in. And so of course, our system of justice has to be undone one layer at a time, while we slowly slip toward insanity. We become confused, muddled, babbling and incoherent just like the liberal heroes in the movie’s final scenes. Everything that would have made us sensible, along the way, has to be undone. Sense of right and wrong, restraint, ability to reason, language itself. They all have to be unfastened so the noble goal can be achieved, and the tomatoes can be fertilized.

Decision here. Arguing that the regulation of immigration is an “intimate affair,” it concludes that Hazleton is messing around in areas where the municipal authority does not belong. Better to let the feds retain autonomous authority over that intimate affair, even if little is being effectively done, than to let a more energized body step in. Add another page to the snivel-book. Now it’s the duty of every layer of authority, beneath the federal government, to let drug deals go on, to let cars get vandalized, to let women get raped — as long as it’s the right class of people doing the dealing, vandalizing and raping. That’s for the feds to handle, and if they’re not handling it, you just mind your own business. That’s what Judge Munley says. The affair is intimate.

You know, we can certainly survive someone tearing the tag off a mattress here and there. What we can’t survive is a law that means something when it’s applied to one class of people, and nothing at all when applied to another — and a retinue of black-robed stewards adding pages to the snivel-book any time our country’s borders are about to actually mean something. To accommodate that, we have to become enemies of logic and common sense. And we’ll end up fertilizing the tomatoes ourselves.

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Our DownslideFriday, July 27th, 2007

Our Downslide
Friday, July 27th, 2007