Jena 6: A Question of Equal Protection

A comment from a reader prompted me to write the response below, which I then decided to reproduce as a blog post:

. . . [P]erhaps I am guilty of skimming over the details of the beating Justin Barker received at the hands of Mychal Bell and his friends. I’ll repeat again that I think the practice of a bunch of guys “jumping” one person is pretty despicable. It used to happen at my high school and I always hated it. But like many people in Jena and elsewhere, I think the charges, sentence, and incarceration of Mychal Bell were and are excessive.

Ultimately, the adults in this case have to bear the responsibility. If school and law enforcement officials in Jena were interested in teaching these students—Black as well as White—that taking the law into their own hands is wrong, they would have intervened when the nooses were hung, when the Black student was assaulted by White students at the party, and when the Black students had a gun pulled on them. I failed to mention in my blog that the boys reported the incident to the police after they disarmed their assailant but he was not even questioned. Instead, these Black boys were arrested and charged with assault and theft of a firearm after they did the right thing by going to the police.

The signal sent to these boys was that they could not look to school or law enforcement officials to protect them from overt racism—which is psychological violence—and physical violence. Violence is used to put and keep people in their place, and the nooses were supposed to remind Jena High School’s Black students of their place. When these students defied the racists by peacefully gathering under the “white tree” on which the nooses had been hung, District Attorney Reed Walters arrived at the school surrounded by armed police and threatened to end the students’ lives with a stroke of his pen. Is this not intimidation? Weren’t the nooses themselves symbolic of violence to the Black students? Clearly, they didn’t think it was just a prank. Yet school officials and the legal establishment continued to pooh-pooh the issue until it escalated into the violent confrontation with Justin Barker that resulted in his beating. Was it right or necessary? Of course not! Could it have been avoided? Certainly, if school and law enforment officials had taken the racism directed at the Black students more seriously and intervened sooner.

The whole incident reminds me of Simpsons character Chief Wiggum’s response to Marge when she said, as she was being arrested: ”I thought you said the law is powerless?” Wiggum replies, “Powerless to protect you, not to punish you.” Clearly, when it came to protecting Black Students, Jena’s law enforcement officials were asleep at the wheel. When it comes to punishing them, however, they’re operating in overdrive.

If that’s not racism, what is it?

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Update on West Virginia Kidnap-Torture-Rape Case.

ABC has reported that new details have emerged in the case of Megan Williams, who was kidnapped and subjected to various acts of torture, sexual abuse, and humiliation by Karen Burton (top center) and fellow defendants.

According to statements read out during the defendants’ preliminary court hearings, the victim told police she had had hot wax and hot water poured on her, and that she was forced to drink a cup of two male defendants’ urine. All six defendants now face charges of kidnapping, which carry a maximum life sentence. Incidentally, no hate crime charges have as yet been filed—the victim is Black and was called “nigger” during some of the assaults—because, prosecutors say, hate crime convictions carry a maximum penalty of only 10 years.

While I am often critical of local law enforcement officials for failing to investigate possible hate crime cases, this time I would rather the six accused get the maximum penalty than a hate crime conviction.

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Remember When Fairs Were Fun?

Have you ever been to an emergency preparedness fair? No? Me neither. In fact, before last Wednesday, I had never even heard of such a thing. But on that day, someone handed me a yellow and black postcard, just like this one.

I had been living under the misperception that fairs were fun events with ferris wheels and cotton candy—or am I confusing fairs with carnivals. Either way, I had no idea what to expect from an emergency preparedness fair but on the back of the card, I was urged to “Come to the Emergency Preparedness Fair and walk away with info and resources you need to know!”

Apparently, at the fair I would have been able to sign up to receive text alerts from the DC Department of Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency and plan alternate routes out of the city with Metro and DC transportation officials. The fair would also have given me the chance to sign up for CPR and other emergency-response training and see a decontamination tent, emergency response equipment and much more.

By now, it’s probably obvious that I didn’t go to the Emergency Preparedness Fair. The whole thing just left me feeling a little creeped out. I mean, are we that resigned to the inevitability of another attack that we’re now having fairs to prepare us for disaster? Aren’t fairs supposed to be fun, interesting events where you get to see and try new things? New, fun things, like hot dogs, cotton candy, and rides. Not morbid things like bomb-sniffing dogs, decontamination tents and emergency response equipment.

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Free the Jena 6!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Question: When does a schoolyard fight result in an attempted second-degree murder charge?

Answer: When it takes place in Jena, Louisiana and involves Black students.

This story’s been making the rounds in lefty and indie media circles but it’s apparently still largely absent from the mainstream media.

Take a look at the video.

Then take some action.

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Where There is Fear, There is Also Hatred.

The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a cartoon depicting Iran as a sewer with cockroaches crawling out of it and infesting neighboring countries. Enough has been written about how racist this cartoon is—and how reminiscent it is of Nazi and Hutu genocidal propaganda—so I won’t spend any time on that. What is missing from the hoopla surrounding this cartoon is any talk of how national–security rhetoric generally and inevitably dehumanizes entire nations.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush repeatedly assured Americans and the world that his beef was not with the entire Muslim or Arab world, that his quarrel was not even with the people of Iraq. Rather, we were told Iraq would be a stage of the global War on Terror because its leader was a dictator who was collaborating with Al Qaeda and could potentially put his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons at the disposal of international terrorists. Of course, we now know that there were no WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein—brutal and murderous though he was—had no links to Al Qaeda. Today, all Iraqis have to show for our trouble is a destabilized and increasingly violent country in which people have to do without recently available basic services like round-the-clock electricity and sewage treatment. Iraqi women are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being raped or worse, men are routinely kidnapped and murdered simply for going about their lives, and sectarian violence yields ever-increasing death tolls.

Yet the majority of Americans continue to hem and haw about the best way out. Opinion is divided on whether to send more troops, withdraw some troops, pull out entirely, and when and in what manner to pursue or abandon any course of action. The arguments over what to do or not do mostly revolve around the number of American casualties, how much the war is costing, and whether Americans are now more or less likely to be the victims of a terrorist attack. In other words, very few Americans are basing their opinions about what should be done on what’s best for the Iraqi people. The rightness or wrongness of this war is almost always judged from Americans’ point of view and almost never from Iraqis’ vantage point. One exception is the argument that if US troops were to leave Iraq, their departure would be followed by a bloodbath. But although this argument is constantly put forward, we never see any Iraqis who support a continued US presence in their country.

Why is this? Because what Iraqis think doesn’t matter to us. In the process of convincing ourselves that Iraq posed an existential threat to the US, we forgot that Iraqis are people too. National–security discourse is concerned mainly with the protection of one state’s population against attack by another state, so it’s inevitable that the people of the other state will gradually become devalued and eventually dehumanized. Take two hypothetical states, A and B, locked in a war of words. As the people of State A are whipped into a frenzy of fear and paranoia by continuous official reminders that State B poses an imminent threat, they can’t help but begin to fear, and then loathe, the people of State B. Having been convinced that they have to choose between their own survival and that of their “enemy,” the people of State A will not only ignore, mitigate, or deny violence done to ”the other side,” they will eventually welcome and celebrate it.  It becomes a matter simply of kill or be killed because the people of State A now believe that in order for them to live, others must be killed. Hermann Goering, Reichsmarshall and head of the Luftwaffe summed it up:

. . . voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Once the people of State B have been defined as a threat, it’s a short rhetorical step for them to be equated with other threats like viruses, cockroaches, snakes, poisonous mushrooms, etc. State B is a threat so it’s people are dangerous. Viruses and snakes are dangerous too. Ergo, the people of State B are viruses and snakes. What do you do to snakes and viruses when you want to protect yourself? You kill them. But such analogies are seldom made by official spokespeople. Rather, that task is left to journalists and radio personalities.

Ultimately, the essential ingredient for war is fear. Without fear, there can be no hatred. Without hatred, there can be no dehumanization. And without dehumanization, there can be no war. To be sure, organized international terrorism is a legitimate threat but international politics—constructed as a system of states versus states—makes no room for nuance so states can only make war on states. The human tendency to generalize also gets some of the blame. Thus, a nation that produces a handful of terrorists is seen as a nation of terrorists, in the same way that a nation run by a brutal dictator is seen to be brutal. In the international sphere, states derive power and legitimacy from their people. In order to break the power of a state, its power base (i.e., people) must be broken, and there are few better means than war for accomplishing this. Hateful propaganda, like the cartoon in the Dispatch, plays a pivotal role by paving the way to war. Long before the first bomb is dropped or the first shot fired, the people are primed to fear, primed to hate, and primed to tolerate unspeakable violence against their enemies. In other words, they are primed for war.

The cartoon in the Columbus Dispatch clearly shows that some in the US have decided that Iran is enough of a threat to justify a dehumanizing comparison between its people and cockroaches. We can only hope that as a nation, we Americans do not fear Iran enough to allow our government to start yet another war in the Middle East.

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Ignorance Loves Company: Miss Teen South Carolina Knows Little but She’s Not Alone.

During last week’s Miss Teen USA pageant, eighteen-year-old Lauren Caitlin Upton—now better-known as Miss Teen South Carolina—fumbled her way into infamy with a rambling, disjointed, and generally appalling response to a simple question, demonstrating to me that she is neither well-informed nor well-educated. But Caitlin Upton is merely a symptom of a larger problem.

That larger problem, my friends, is that Caitlin lives in a country where knowledge—especially the kind that may be acquired through schooling—is not valued. That’s why the most popular kids in school are never the top students. That’s why the smart kids get picked on. That’s why millions of people who can’t name the capital of Burundi flock to their TVs to watch beauty pageants instead of the international news. And that’s why, as a nation, Americans are woefully deficient in their knowledge of the outside world. Only 21 percent of Americans follow international news closely, while 65 percent admit they lack the background to follow overseas news. Ignorance is part of the American way of life and people like Caitlin Upton merely serve to illustrate this.

Basically, Caitlin’s ignorant because she can get away with it. How else could she have reached the age of 18 without having acquired sufficient English or logic or rhetoric or whatever other foundational skills one needs to answer a question as simple as the one she was asked? Clearly, she’s never had to! She’s pretty, she’s blonde, and that’s enough to have gotten her this far. Her inability to think or articulate opinions is irrelevant to her day-to-day life. As the Young Turks point out, Caitlin took fourth place in the pageant, despite her moronic response!!! Obviously, the message is that nobody cares that this woman is an idiot, as long as she’s pretty. Millions of Americans are getting that message loud and clear.

Caitlin is not unique. She’s not a bad apple or an anomaly or a black sheep. On the contrary, she’s a typical American teenager. Even worse, she’s an archetypal American teenager. She is the American teenager that millions of other American teenagers aspire to be like. And our values do little to help. Beauty pageants are elegant, elaborate affairs that showcase beautiful people wearing exotic costumes. Geography bees, on the other hand, are far less glamorous and receive far less publicity. How many high schoolers would rather win a geography bee than be Miss Teen USA?

Popular culture provides even more prosaic examples. Take country music legend Alan Jackson, for example, who proudly proclaims in a hit song that:

I’m just a singer of simple songs.
I’m not a real political man.
I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell you
The difference in Iraq and Iran.

But country singers are by no means the only Americans who revel in knowing nothing about the outside world. The system is rotten from the top down, and even political figures go out of their way to prove how provincial they are. How many of our political figures can speak a language other than English? How many of them have lived or traveled abroad? In fact, to have done so is considered a political liability. Remember Sen. John Kerry, who challenged George Bush for the presidency in 2004? He caught flack for having lived in Europe, for being a Europhile, and for “looking French.”

Our ignorance of the outside world is not only a part of our way of life, it is an essential component of our very understanding of how we live. Ignorance allows Americans to believe that the US healthcare system is the best in the world, despite studies that rank it far behind those found in other countries. If the majority of Americans don’t even know the names of other countries or where on the map to find them, how can they be expected to know about social and economic systems in those countries? This same ignorance allows us to defend our petroleum-based economy while the rest of the industrialized world is exploring clean and renewable energy alternatives.

Most seriously, this ignorance enabled the Bush administration to successfully conflate Osama bin-Laden’s Al-Qaeda network with all Muslims and all Arabs. Only ignorant people could have been led to believe that a secular Ba’athist like Saddam Hussein would ever collaborate with a theocratic zealot like Osama bin-Laden. Yet this is precisely the argument put forward by the Bush Administration as a pretext for invading Iraq, and the majority of Americans—knowing next to nothing about the Arab and Islamic worlds—swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Today, the people of Iraq are paying the price for our ignorance and gullibility.

In Caitlin’s case, the worst consequence of her ignorance was humiliation. For millions of other people the world over, the consequences of Americans’ ignorance may be far more dire.

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Um . . . anybody seen my guns?

About 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces cannot be accounted for by the US military.

Hmmm . . . and here’s the Bush Administration blaming Iran for supplying the weapons that are being used against US soldiers. Would it be too much of a leap of logic or imagination to say that some, if not many, of those weapons probably wound up in the hands of Iraqi militants?

Good thing the US government didn’t give any really good weapons to the Iraqi military.

Read the full story here.

And, let’s not forget that in the absence of the WMD that formed the basis of the argument for the invasion of Iraq, it’s now looking increasingly like the whole war was nothing more than an oil grab.

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He did it again.

So, the President used his executive power to commute ‘Scooter’ Libby’s sentence because, in his opinion, the 30-month sentence handed down by the jury in Libby’s purgery case was “excessive.”

Big surprise!

I mean, did anyone really think this administration was going to obey the spirit—if not the letter—of the law and let one of their own go to jail? I certainly didn’t. This administration doesn’t exactly have a very good track record of . . . how shall I put this . . . adhering to the rules of transparency and accountability.

The Bush administration came into office under the cloud of controversy surrounding the 2000 election and the Florida vote recount, after it came to light that scores of Black voters had had their eligibility to vote challenged or outright denied. Then the Vice President held secret meetings with big energy companies and refused to release the proceedings of these meetings to the public. Then there was the 9/11 Commission interviews during which the President and Vice President refused to testify under oath.

What else? Illegal wire taps, sneak and peak, extraordinary rendition, reading Americans’ mail, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, firing federal prosecutors . . . the list of this adminstration’s transgressions seems endless.

But perhaps worst of all was the case for invading Iraq, which we now know—and some of us were saying back then—is based on lies. UNMOVIC just wrapped up operations in Iraq, stating that there are no weapons of mass destruction in that country, contrary to what our government told us. In order to bolster their case, the administration relied on flimsy information from the Blair government claiming that Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger in order to build a nuclear weapon. It was all a pack of lies.

Former Ambassador Wilson thought he was doing the right thing by trying to keep the country from embarking on a foolish military adventure in the Middle East. He traveled to Niger and proved that the uranium claim was false. For his troubles, the Bush Administration—in a stunning display of uprightness and moral fortitude—revealed that his wife was a CIA operative, thereby destroying her career.

Scooter Libby was intimately implicated in this plot to defraud the country and go to war on a false pretext. For his role in this scam, Scooter Libby was prosecuted for purgery and obstruction of justice but, thanks to the President, he will not be serving any time.

Which is just as well because, with a name like Scooter, I don’t think he would have fared very well in the big house.

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Salafis Gone Wild!!!

The London Times reported in May on new rules enforced by a group of Salafi militants now controlling an Iraqi province north of Baghdad.

Based in Diyala, the Salafi-dominated Islamic State of Iraq now enforces laws against smoking (repeat offenders have their fingers broken) and bars grocers from displaying tomatoes (considered a female vegetable) next to cucumbers. Farmers are also required to put shorts on their goats.

Good to know we’re not the only ones with wacky moral laws.

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Gas guzzlers are only part of the problem.

Yesterday, I was stopped on the street by a Greenpeace canvaser who told me about her organization’s attempts to increase awareness of global climate change and get voters to put pressure on their congressional representatives to take the issue more seriously. But it’s going to be an uphill battle: The auto industry is already taking steps to pre-empt Congress. My biggest fear is not that automakers won’t make greener cars. Ultimately, I’m more worried that they won’t need to make greener cars because American consumers—once they are convinced that fuel efficiency will come at the expense of safety—will not want to buy them.

On the BBC World Service today, I heard an advertisement that is being run in the U.S. by big automakers who oppose higher fuel standards (I tried to find it online but couldn’t so I have to paraphrase). In the ad, a women is talking to her friend about the friend’s car. The friend answers something to the effect of, “I know it’s bigger than the average car but we just feel so much safer in it.” To which the first woman responds, “Well, you might want to hold on to it because this new law Congress is considering will mean Americans have to buy smaller and smaller cars.” Through these ads, automakers hope to convince  consumers that smaller cars might be more fuel efficient but they’re also less safe.

Obviously, automobile manufacturers are fighting against higher fuel efficiency requirements because it’ll mean higher car prices which will mean fewer cars sold. Since the auto manufacturers are not weaklings, they’re applying so much pressure that now Senators are openly discussing ”compromises” which might so water down the law that it’ll have no real effect on carbon dioxide emissions. But if consumers can be scared away from fuel efficient cars, automakers might be able to argue that there simply isn’t enough demand for green automobiles.

Now it’s an undeniable fact that carbon dioxide emissions are bad for our planet and everything that lives on it. Emissions have wrought havoc on our climate, leading to extremes of hot and cold all over the world (yes, I saw An Inconvenient Truth and I’m convinced!), and the melting of continental glaciers and polar icecaps. And there’s no doubt that increased carbon dioxide emissions are largely the result of human activity. Sure cow farts and other culprits are also blamed for global climate change but I’m going to include those under human activities (after all, who breeds and feeds cows). But, while we might not have the power to keep the Asians from cultivating rice in paddies or the Brazilians from burning down the Amazon (to grow soybeans and raise cattle for McDonalds, by the way!), we do have the power to pressure U.S. automakers to make greener cars that burn less fossil fuel (or no fossil fuel at all) and emit less (or no) carbon dioxide.

Unfortunately, gas guzzlers are only the tip of  the proverbial iceberg, merely a symptom of a deeper disease. These mechanical behemoths are really a manifestation of our self-centered culture, what Michael Moore refers to in his new film Sicko as the “me culture.” In this “me culture,” the individual is king and the only issues of any importance are those that directly impact that individual. So automakers simply have to say, ”fuel-efficient cars will be BAD for YOU because they’ll be smaller and less safe” and Americans will continue to buy gas guzzlers.

Why?

Because our mentality is so warped, our sense of communitarianism so suppressed, that we cannot think beyond ourselves and our immediate family. In the event of an accident, the person driving the hummer might get off lightly but what about the people in the other car? This kind of thinking convinces me that progress on the environmental front will be tough. If people don’t care that their gas guzzler can wreak disproportionate damage on a smaller car and its occupants, how can they be expected to care about the effects of climate change on the other side of the planet?

The new ads appeal precisely to this kind of self-centered thinking. The auto industry no longer bothers to argue that global warming is a hippie, tree-hugger conspiracy or that cow farts contribute more to the greenhouse effect than cars. Instead, they’ve resorted to manipulating people’s fears. Automakers tell us that in order to make cars more fuel efficient, they’ll have to make them smaller. And smaller means less safe. Simple. And so, consumers’ fear of dying in a car accident helps automakers sell inefficient cars under the guise of safety, while the planet gets hotter and hotter.

But in one sense, the automakers are right about smaller being less safe. Advances in technology and transporation have already made our planet smaller. But climate change will also make the world increasingly unstable as more and more people are displaced by drought and famine and the first water wars predicted by the Pentagon start to erupt. Darfur is only a preview of what will happen when competition for basic resources becomes violent. Eventually, everyone—especially those of us fortunate enough to live in developed countries—will have to deal with the real consequences of climate change.

When that times comes, gas guzzlers will not keep us safe.

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