Month: July 2013

Sin.  Remorse. Confession. Redemption.  These are the steps of an ancient process of acknowledging a societal standard for behavior and using a form of public confession with its resultant  humiliation to induce behavior modification.   Hester Prynne, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of the struggles of an individual and society to come to grips with ‘unacceptable’ behavior, wore a Scarlet Letter to identify her action to the community and her acceptance of her action.  The rudimentary nature of the Letter belied the complex considerations all the characters in Hawthorne’s novel face in dealing with and facing up to  sin, guilt, piety, rejection, anger, sanctimony, and hypocrisy.  Hester as part of her own redemption accepts her role and consequences of her behavior, the punishment, and takes a road of personal dignity to help others in the novel, not as strong as herself, to finally face up to their own demons.

Hester’s strong example finally gave strength to community leader Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale to admit his own role in her requiring the Letter and finally confessing and thereby achieving some redemption.  Shame, both public and private, formed a mighty anvil upon which all learned and shaped their responses.

Well, there are no Hester Prynnes in own current society’s leaders.  The concept of public shame helping to curb poor behavior in politicians and force a dignified response has lost all impact.  We are being treated to a special group of people who can not be humiliated and are immune to public shame.  The sins are old fashioned but both the reaction of the public and the individual to their liability is not.

Anthony Weiner, a nondescript former New York congressman who achieved a modicum of fame through a special talent of expressing outrageous bombast on TV and marrying a member of the  extended Clinton royal family,  proved to have a more prodigious skill – taking pictures of his privates and sharing them with anyone who would care to look.  Forced to resign his congressional position by the shear volume and inappropriateness of his hobby, he lay in the reeds for a year and a half before determining that a morally deficient New York City public would have amnesia for his personal deficiencies and love for his over-the-top bombastic politics.  He found himself in a short time leading the race for Mayor of the country’s largest and most influential city.  Unfortunately, his alter ego, a pornocentric superhero named “Carlos Danger”  continued to prowl the internet, extoling superhuman body parts and expousing the potential actions of these capacities on various young women, and has come to public attention. The public exposure of personal perversion used to be a special scarlet letter for politicians, but no more. Mr. Danger has determined to stay in the mayoral race, and  is relying on the public’s comfort with immorality as no longer defining a public character, as if complete lack of discipline in a personal life would suddenly evolve into good and just public governance.

The modern disconnect is not limited to Mr. Weiner.  The mayor of San Diego is Bob Filner, who has determined that being in a position of power as mayor, allows him special dispensation at seventy years of age to grope, taunt, grab, and demand lascivious behavior from whatever female happens to come within his force field.  Apparently as a democrat campaigning against the republican party’s supposed war on women, he felt he had vaccinated himself with women to the extent that he could nuclear. Public righteousness, private hypocrisy – the modern cultural equivalent of “do as I say, not as I do.”  Is there sufficient humiliation to force Mr. Filner to resign?  Mr. Filner doesn’t think so.  Once again, being in a position of power to tell other people how they should act and follow workplace laws has made him impervious to law in his own mind.

The examples could go on and on, but it really relates to a progressive societal exhaustion with having a shared concept of behavior. The mutual tug that both Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale felt has left us as a society, and we have drifted into the hypocritical circus of the bizarre.  Because Speaker of the House Bob Livingston felt his own internal shame of having had an affair in his life, while accusing President Clinton of similar malfeasance in office, he determined to resign in 1998.  President Clinton, who perjured himself and broke numerous workplace laws having sexual relations with employees, felt no shame, and did not resign.  Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, whose IRS prosecuted untold numbers of individuals for tax evasion, felt no shame or need to resign, despite not having paid his own.  Barack Obama in 2004 , working to gain national prominence by running for Senator from Illinois, made sure that his formidable republican Senate opponent Jack Ryan’s private court documents in a divorce child custody case be exposed through the press detailing some private accusations his wife made regarding Mr. Ryan’s sexual requests of her.  Knowing of Mr. Ryan’s unwillingness to drag his child through the political mud, he counted on Mr. Ryan’s personal shame to drive him from the race, and succeeded.  That certainly did not lead to Mr. Obama feeling a Arthur Dimmesdale moment to release private personal birth records or college transcripts which no doubt would reveal at least ‘inconsistencies’ in his personal storyline, but it did lead to a Senate seat, national prominence, and eventually the Presidency.

All roads of understanding lead to the concept of Shame requiring the secondary concepts of personal guilt and desire for redemption to be present to have any last effect.  We see in our modern society a significant disconnect, in that the exposure of personal flaws are merely a temporary hurdle to overcome, not a abject lesson to learn from, and grow beyond.  Our current society desires a feel good strategy of pick and choosing things to become outraged about, avoiding any collective responsibility, acting beyond approved laws, spending beyond approved limits, and fundamentally denying any personal remorse or collective action to change.  Is it no wonder, that our unwillingness to stand as Hester Prynne and wear our Scarlet Letter, learn about ourselves and achieve collective dignity in acts, has led to a generation of politicians who are oblivious to their own dignity and societal clarity?

Shame…shame on us all.

 

     The past week was pregnant with omens for those of us who fear the permanent estrangement of a people from the magnificent experiment in liberty their founders created for them.  The fragile nature of our experiment, a means of societal empowerment in which the free will of a people is balanced by the order of measured laws, has finally become visibly shaky.  Though multiple somewhat disparate events came together to paint a picture of distress, the final framing was achieved by the President, the chief law enforcement official of the United States, suggesting the only thing separating him as a black American from a racially profiled shooting and a miscarriage of justice was  three decades of life.   Three more years of such leadership, and we can remove the uncertainty as to the great experiment’s final extinction.

The first of the peals of thunder was the declaration that the once great American metropolis of Detroit was going to file for bankruptcy. A half century ago Detroit stood as a colossus of cities, home to hundreds of thousands of jobs building the premier implement of personal freedom, the automobile, flush with the highest standard of middle class living in the world.  Fifty years of one party government and unionized monopoly in city services and education,  and city now finds itself with one third the population, a horrid crime and murder rate, a collapse of available services, an almost 50% functional illiteracy rate,  miles and miles of abandoned capital in shuttered homes and businesses,  and a suicidal governance that still manages to spend a hundred million dollars a year more than it takes in in revenue.  The final nail in the bankruptcy coffin is a common story, the governmental class securing for themselves gold plated pensions and health benefits that swallow up essentially all the available tax base, with hardly any thing left for essential role of city government, police and fire, snow removal and sewer maintenance, and no hope to fund future needs.  Is this the distortion of a republic or the corruption of a democracy?  It is very much the synthesis of both, as the key feature of contract between the governors and the governed, the integrity of the compact and the respect for its institutions and laws, has been lost.

The second wave of disturbance was the testimony of IRS officials before Congress that indicated that everything put forth by the executive branch thus far in the scandal has been a deceit.  From the initial claim that the apparent coercive efforts of the IRS to suppress  grass roots political groups they saw as a threat to the President’s election were driven by a few rogue agents in Cincinnati, to the farcical claim that the extra scrutiny was equally applied to all political groups equally, the testimony showed a ugly laceration across the chest plate of equality under the law and a government without prejudice.  Forty years ago, the idea that the executive branch would interpret the President’s will as a ticket to intimidate American citizens was an impeachable offense.  Now, a direct line of command from a political appointee of the president is secure to the offense, and the media projects a collective yawn.  The evidence is growing of a direct White House effort to use the powerful enforcement arms of the executive branch to manipulate the national election to their favor, a direct assault on the constitution they were sworn to uphold.  Darker clouds can not role across the  compact  a government holds with its people.

Finally, one of the great triumphs of a free people, the right to trial by a jury of peers with a presumption of innocence was put forth for all to see in Florida, and the result was viewed not as a  celebration of the magnificence of such a process denied to so many people throughout history, but rather a hysterical denial of the justice obtained. The Bill of Rights secures for every citizen in the Sixth Amendment the right to an impartial process without the intimidation of the governing class:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense

The Zimmerman trial offered all Americans to see the process in all its glory, the presentation of evidence, the burden of the prosecution to identify the perceived offense beyond a reasonable doubt, and the care to allow the jury to deliberate without prejudice or intimidation. The President had a perfect opportunity to celebrate the protections the unique American judicial system offers all Americans.  Instead he found a need to demagogue the issue and incite the development of a myth of injustice and racism where by all accounts of those who watched the trial, there was none.  It was a pion to the mob mentality, that asks for a premeditated justice, a bias for a perceived outcome to assuage a perceived cultural disadvantage.  It fed into the national consciousness that once again the system of principled laws was at fault, not the actions of the individuals.  To a progressively civically illiterate population this is becoming easy to believe.

A once great city collapses on its own hubris. A government intimidates and manipulates its own citizens to secure its permanence.  An impartial ruling of law is attacked as a miscarriage.  Like a terminal disease slowly sapping the strength of the body, the outer edifice still superficially appears to stand, but progressively feels the tiredness and  incapacity.  America with so many strengths of foundation, is experiencing the death of nations, and the government sworn to diagnose and defend against threat, is instead helping to plan its funeral.