[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s seminal crime drama “Heat” in which Lt. Vince Hanna invites master criminal Neil McCauley to coffee. The scene is notable, of course, for being the first in which Al Pacino and Robert De Niro share screentime together. But in terms of the story, it marks a rather rare kind of encounter between enemies. Here they are sitting together, the cop and the thief, sharing personal life details they undoubtedly don’t share with their colleagues, achieving a sort of understanding and mutual respect despite the fact that their goals put them at potentially deadly odds with each other. In watching the two, there is the feeling that their opposition is not personal but professional, making the way in which they carry out their antagonism something rather noble. Yet the idea of noble enemies is not one we’ll find in Washington or in the vast sea of commentary that spills into it.
Consider the President. There is no shortage of issues on which to disagree – fairly. Free market advocates won’t like the idea of a public health care system, for example. They’re wrong, in my opinion, but it’s a fair disagreement and the discussion is all the better for accepting different viewpoints. Yet for all the legitimate disagreements to be had with President Obama, it’s very icky to see this obsession with his birth certificate. Suddenly, it’s not a noble antagonism – the idea of the “loyal opposition” – but one that’s geared towards sliming fundamental character. After all, we don’t need to even fake respect let alone have a mature discussion on Obama’s policy ideas if we can prove that Obama isn’t even American, an effort related to the rather disgusting smear that Obama is some sort of Muslim Manchurian candidate poised to destroy the country with some kind of socialism. This sort of nonsensical, insubstantial opposition to Obama has manifested itself most recently in the form of a bill requiring Presidential candidates to submit their birth certificate to the Federal Elections Commission, an idea that it itself might not be unreasonable had it been passed a century ago and independent of a fringe that gives tin foil hats a bad name. To get an idea of how truly sad this affair has become, we need look no further than U.S. Army Major Stefan Frederick Cook, the reserve soldier who refused to deploy to Afghanistan on account of his belief that Obama is not a U.S. citizen and therefore not eligible to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Then there’s the Sotomayor confirmation, opponents of which have resorted to charges of racism and reverse discrimination in an attempt to discredit her. (Limbaugh, Gingrich, Buchanan, various GOP senators.) Really? Racist? The problem is that most of us are not lawyers – we don’t know the law in detail – and most of us have not taken the time to study Judge Sotomayor’s rulings. Furthermore, we did not try the cases. We did not listen to testimony, examine evidence, nor do any of the things needed to be able to fairly judge the case. This means that we are in a difficult, disadvantaged position when it comes to evaluating Sotomayor’s suitability to serving as a Supreme Court Justice. Yet instead of trying to dig at her judicial record, instead of studying the empirical record of her judgments, the best opponents can manage is to attack her character as a racist based on flimsy comments that completely ignore the realities of not being white in America? Here is the grand spectacle of race in American writ large, and since this has been discussed elsewhere by more qualified sources, I will only ask this: if Sotomayor had been a white man, would she have been subjected to these accusations?
When It’s Not Enough to Win
Again, I’m not saying that it isn’t fair to question Sotomayor on her experience and judicial record, but that the opposition has gone from beyond reasonable to an outbreak of hives. Perhaps this is a reflection of a broader issue, a competitiveness that isn’t based on the value of winning, but sees the value of winning as stemming from someone else’s utter defeat. In other words, it’s not enough to win; the losers must be humiliated and destroyed. The legal system, for example, is based on an adversarial relationship between prosecutor and defense. As has been noted by critics of the legal system, most notably in a recent article in Skeptic magazine, this adversity has bubbled over into a prejudice that translates into assuming guilt instead of innocence. Defense attorneys get little to no glory; prosecutors get to puff out their chests with mantras of being tough on crime. We cheer folks who take down the criminals, but ignore the people who defend us from miscarriages of justice. In the end, we have set up a system of bad faith opposition between prosecutors and defenders.
And this bad faith has consequences. For example, this assumption of guilt may explain why the Powers That Be tend to resist investigations into potential Bush administration misconduct. Ironically, while it may be that those calling for investigations are overzealous in their conviction of assumed guilt, opponents feed into this by agreeing, in practice, that the mere existence of an investigation is proof of guilt in-and-of-itself. What we need instead is to view investigations as tools in sorting out the true from the false until a clear, honest picture emerges. In a sense, this notion of noble enemies – mutually respectful opponents – informs not only political discourse, but legal discourse as well. Call it the romance of the dialectic in which the noble opposition of thesis and anti-thesis isn’t about one or the other’s destruction, but the creation of a superior synthesis.
Frédérik Sisa invites you to visit www.inkandashes.net.
