Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A Harvard-Trained Lawyer on John McCain’s Court

I do so hate it when I am quietly flipping through one of the daily or weekly publications I read religiously on mornings—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, even my own campus’ dismal Daily Princetonian—and stumble upon an opinion piece so aggravatingly simplistic, so lacking in nuance or critical thinking, that I literally cannot help myself but fire up my computer and pound out a furious rebuttal. For such a glib piece of work to come from a Harvard-trained lawyer (and legal commentator of TV network news fame) only adds insult to this injury.

Yet that is precisely what occurred this morning. Jeffrey Toobin’s piece in the May 26 edition of The New Yorker set my blood aboil with its doctrinaire liberal stance on constitutional interpretation, to say nothing of its complete refusal to subject the facts underlying the issues on which he spills his ink to any halfway decent scrutiny. More importantly, in so doing, he has ruined my breakfast. For that, he must pay the price to my word processor.

In his appraisal of John McCain’s recent speech on Supreme Court appointments at Wake Forest University, Toobin digs into McCain’s reference to the 2005 Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that struck down the death penalty for murderers under the age of 18 as unconstitutional. In his speech, McCain expressed disapproval of the majority opinion in Roper—written by Justice Anthony Kennedy—in its reference to “the stark reality that the United States is the only country in the world that continues to give official sanction to the juvenile death penalty.” Toobin writes, “Likewise, Kennedy noted that the only other countries to execute juvenile offenders since 1990 have been China, Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. According to McCain, the United States apparently belongs on this dismal list.”

One wonders whether Toobin means to argue that the Supreme Court ought to judge the constitutionality of policies enacted by democratically elected representatives of the American people based on how commonplace such policies are in the other countries of the world. Such an argument, of course, would be deeply problematic at best, not only in its logical ramifications for US national sovereignty, but also in its complete neglect of the question of whether there is any solid basis for such a judgment in the Constitution of the United States itself. This is not to mention the distinct possibility that McCain does not necessarily believe in the juvenile death penalty, but rather simply believes that its practice or abolition should be decided by American voters, not by the unelected Supreme Court. In true-blue liberal fashion, Toobin leaves these questions completely unexamined.

As for the facts of the case itself, Toobin conveniently glosses over the fact that the defendant slated for execution in Roper v. Simmons was only several months short of his eighteenth birthday. He committed a carefully orchestrated, calculatingly premeditated, heinous murder of a completely innocent woman, tying her up, locking her in the trunk of his car, driving her to a national park and throwing her off a fifty-foot bridge onto sharp rocks in swirling rapids. Toobin takes little notice of this, failing even to question whether someone who is that close to legal adulthood—and therefore surely more than mature enough to grasp both the evil of his actions as well as their consequences—should be eligible for capital punishment for a homicide so depraved as the young Mr. Simmons’.

Leaving these loose ends left so messily untied, Toobin goes on to lambaste McCain for the latter’s objection to the Court’s reliance on the “penumbras” that supposedly “emanate from” the rights explicitly enshrined in the text of the Constitution. He explains that those words come from the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which established the purported constitutional right to privacy that formed the basis for that opinion’s prohibition of bans on birth control for married couples as well as for later decisions striking down anti-abortion laws in the states. Toobin decries McCain’s speech as “a dog whistle for the right—an implicit promise that he will appoint Justices who will eliminate the right to privacy, permit states to ban abortion, and allow the execution of teenagers.”

A Harvard Law School alumnus like Toobin is surely aware that neither the word “privacy” nor any of its possible synonyms appears anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Yet he doesn’t let that stop him from pillorying McCain for daring to protest the Court’s unilateral amendment of the Constitution to include a right that simply isn’t there. Nor does he even bother to explain exactly how the Third Amendment to the Constitution, with its ban on the quartering of troops in private homes—and nothing more—or the Fourth Amendment, with its prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures—and nothing more—somehow translate into a blanket right to privacy. The Griswold Court’s comically flimsy pretext that these rights have “penumbras” that include a right to privacy is taken by Toobin as gospel truth, with not even the barest pretense of critical analysis on his part. Meanwhile, the implications for democracy of such an exercise of raw judicial power (with its addition of a new right to the Constitution by judicial fiat rather than by the will of the American people) are left not only unevaluated, but completely unmentioned.

Let us count the ways in which Toobin’s sophomorically superficial appraisal of McCain’s constitutional philosophy could actually militate against his own political views. He implicitly defends Justice Kennedy’s reliance on the legal conventions of foreign countries to provide what the latter called “respected confirmation” for the Court’s decision to strike down the juvenile death penalty. How would American abortion jurisprudence turn out if it were subjected to this same interpretive modus operandi? As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has pointed out ad nauseam, many European countries, for instance, actually have abortion regulations that are at least somewhat more restrictive than the untrammeled access to abortion that the Supreme Court has force-fed the American people since 1973. These are the kinds of regulations that precedents like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would require the Court to strike down in a fetal heartbeat. Conversely, if the Court were to apply Justice Kennedy’s—and Jeffrey Toobin’s—philosophy consistently, Roe, Casey and other such bastions of judicial oligarchy would have to go out the window. Personally, I have my doubts about the likelihood of that ever happening. Ideologues like Mr. Toobin, whether liberal or conservative, are not known for letting logical consistency stand in the way of their respective agendas.

Let us now turn to the Griswold Court’s “penumbras” and “emanations” nonsense which Mr. Toobin worships so abjectly. If indeed this was a sound legal and logical basis for the Court’s privacy jurisprudence, why not apply it to other constitutional controversies as well? What would then be the argument against finding in “penumbras” of, or “emanations” from, the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause a “liberty of contract” that would invalidate minimum-wage laws and sundry other economic regulations? After all, this would not differ much from a series of opinions the Supreme Court has handed down in the past. I refer, of course, to 1905’s Lochner v. New York case, in which the Court ruled that New York State’s laws limiting the number of hours a bakery could require its employees to work was an unconstitutional breach of the liberty of each worker to negotiate the terms—all the terms—of his own employment contract with his boss. Mind you, neither the Lochner Court nor its successors (which spent the next thirty years obstructing the establishment of the American welfare state on these same grounds) relied on “penumbras” or “emanations” to do their dastardly deeds. Yet surely we could agree that the last thing they needed was another useful pretext for it, no?

One should consider that Toobin’s article is guilty of precisely the same shortcoming of which he accuses McCain: slyly omitting certain inconvenient elements of the issues under scrutiny. I have already pointed out his failure to explain the facts of the Roper v. Simmons case. Later in his article, Toobin notes that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts’ leadership has “approved a federal law that bans “a form of abortion”. Naturally, he neglects to mention the grisly nature of the “form of abortion” in question, scientifically known as “intact dilation and extraction” and more colloquially known as “partial-birth abortion”. This entails pulling most of the fetus’ body from the birth canal, then puncturing the base of the fetus’ skull and suctioning out its brain to allow its head to be removed as well.

Though I have my own opinion on whether such quasi-infanticide should be legal, I do not mean to denigrate the legitimate debate that is to be had about it. Rather, I believe that given the Constitution’s silence on this or any related issue, and given the complex vagaries of the matter itself, the debate should be had, out in the open, by the American people, and that it is their judgment that ought to prevail—not that of nine robed judges on an unelected court.

This point leads directly to the root cause of Mr. Toobin’s insatiable appetite for left-wing judicial activism. It is fundamentally the same as the root cause of many movement conservatives’ appetite for right-wing judicial activism (of the kind that wishes to strike down policies like affirmative action, for example). I refer to the inability to distinguish between the political and the legal—or more precisely, between the political and the constitutional. There are too many minds on both left and right that seem to believe that almost any policy they disagree with must be unconstitutional. As a result, there are too few souls who truly oppose judicial activism in toto; the general tendency is to approve of it—or, more accurately, to characterize it as something other than judicial activism—whenever it yields policy outcomes that suit one’s own ideological predilections.

Mr. Toobin is a picture-perfect example of this. He believes, for instance, that abortion should be legal. A long-ago Court decided, on the flimsiest of premises, that legal abortion was not only right in principle and in practice, but a constitutional requirement as well, and those who beg to differ have yet to build a solid majority on the nation’s loftiest bench since. As a result, Mr. Toobin and his ilk believe that legal abortion is not only the most just policy, but a constitutional right as well, and therefore insist that the Supreme Court enforce that particular viewpoint on society as a whole—the democratic will of the American people be damned.

Omitted from the underpinnings of this childishly kneejerk stance is any consideration of whether the Constitution itself actually supports this view or any other like it. The Supreme Court is treated by Mr. Toobin and his liberal sympathizers, and by their opponents on the right, not as the institution responsible for ascertaining, as impartially and as free from political bias as possible, what the Constitution’s objective verdict is on the issues facing society, but rather as a rubber-stamp for forcing their own biased political opinions on the nation as a whole. If the Court issues decisions that fly in the face of liberal orthodoxy—such as allowing American voters, via their democratically elected representatives in the states or in Congress, to write policy on issues like abortion and capital punishment—well, then, the Justices responsible must be crazy or even bigoted, and more “progressive” types must be appointed to the Court, pronto. What the Constitution itself actually says—or, just as importantly, what it doesn’t say—about these contentious social issues is the last thing on your average politico’s mind.

Nothing else could be the impetus for Toobin’s characterization of the Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia conservative cohort on today’s Supreme Court as “more radical than any that the Court has seen since FDR’s appointments”. To Toobin, only a “radical” could possibly believe that governments should be allowed to ban the puncturing of a half-born baby’s skull and the suctioning out of its brains, or that said governments should not be allowed to forbid a child to attend a school which is already attended by too many other students of his or her skin color.

To Toobin, the age of Chief Justice Earl Warren was “the noblest era in the Court’s history” as much because it was the most liberal era in the Court’s history as for any other reason. Were many of those liberal decisions largely disconnected from well-informed, well-reasoned interpretation of the Constitution itself? Did they inadvertently usurp much of the authority of the American people’s democratically elected representatives in the process? Even if they did, reply far too many judicial liberals, so what? It’s a small price to pay for edging American society a little bit closer to the left-liberal conception of “social justice”.

Perhaps the most dismaying element of Mr. Toobin’s puerile approach to constitutional interpretation is that it comes from a graduate of Harvard Law School. If one can make it through that august institution of higher learning without gaining a more nuanced view of the world’s finest democratic constitution than this, I just may have to take a rain check on that LSAT prep course.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

My Favorite Things

January 2007
I like the scent of Princeton, New Jersey and sunset on the golf course behind Forbes. I like the bustle on Nassau Street and the uterine warmth of the Terrace TV room. I like the Dinky's whistle and the Sunday morning sound of the Grad Tower bell calling the faithful to worship. I like the view of the Montreal skyline from the mighty St. Lawrence. I like the cobblestoned streets of Old Montreal and the wooded slopes of Mont Royal and the brilliant copper dome of St. Joseph's Oratory at night. I like the bars on Crescent Street and the nightclubs on The Main and the backyards of Notre-Dame-de-Grace and the porches of the Plateau and the cafes on St. Denis. I like the rolling hills of the Cimitiere Notre-Dame-des-Neiges and the monuments to the great Montrealers buried therein and the eerie peace I feel when visiting my father's grave.

I like the taste of shish taouk and beaver tails and $1.99 spaghetti bowls from Peel Pub and dark honey beers from Brutopia and ribeyes from L'Entrecote St. Jean. I like rum and Coke and flaming Dr. Peppers and Bacardi Select and Crown Royal and Southern Comfort and smooth shots of Appleton rum. I like the saintly smells that come out of my mother's kitchen. I like meditations at the Unity Church of Montreal and parang at Christmas and steelband practices in dingy uptown duplexes and Jump-Up every summer. I like canoeing on a quiet lake outside Ottawa and bake-and-shark on a Trini beach and grinding with a bevy of beauties at a soca jam on a boat on Lake Ontario. I like politics and history and moral philosophy. I like the courage of the warriors thanks to whom ordinary people sleep in peace (see George Orwell). I like Sustained Dialogue discussions and reading Supreme Court decisions and selecting tunes in the Terrace taproom. I like twangy Canadian French and honeyed Southern drawls and sweet Spanish voices and the beguiling lilt of Trinidadian women. I like nappy hair and Latin eyes and Mediterranean noses and African lips and fiercely sun-kissed skin. I like historical fiction and crime dramas and the charisma of a good movie villain. I like blaxploitation soundtracks and Prince's ballads and I-Wayne's grooves and David Rudder's classics and patriotic anthems and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I like big, boisterous families and the sound of a newborn's cries, the sound of life's longing for itself. I like individual liberty and personal responsibility and closing the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be. I like the honor of a man and the strength of a woman. I like my threads, my voice, my wit, my charm, and my sass. I love my Creator, my family, my hometown and my University. I love the land of my people, the land of my birth and the land of the free and the home of the brave. I love freedom, honor, faith, family and truth. I love life and I thank God for everything and apologize for nothing.

How are the Mighty Fallen

April 20, 2008
Few quirks of modern politics aggravate me quite as much as idolatry: the wrongheaded and ultimately self-defeating tendency of ordinary people to put popular politicians up on a pedestal. The disappointment that ensues when these figures inevitably succumb to the cynicism and dishonesty of politics would be comic, were its implications for citizens’ engagement in the democratic process not so tragic.

A couple of months ago, I noted with satisfaction the apparent end of many African-American voters’ infatuation with former President Bill Clinton and, by extension, current (and irritatingly persistent) Democratic presidential contender Senator Hillary Clinton. I have for some time derided both the glandhanding, pseudo-liberal triangulation that kept the former in power for eight years and the latter’s smug sense that she is entitled both to her party’s nomination and to the presidency. I have long been frustrated with so many African Americans’ loyalty to the Clintons regardless of whether they could readily name any Clinton policies that had directly and substantially improved their lives. And I was frankly disgusted with Toni Morrison’s claim that Bill Clinton’s origins in poverty and a broken home made him America’s “first black president”. Steve Harvey’s standup comedy be damned; this was a degrading conflation of African-American culture with a slew of crippling social pathologies that would make legions of quite authentically black people—myself included—as white as the driven snow.

As pleased as I was—and remain—with the twilight of Clinton worship in the black community, I was annoyed that it was catalyzed by the tendentious misconstruction of a number of the Clintons’ public statements last winter. Senator Clinton in no way denigrated Martin Luther King’s legacy by acknowledging the crucial role President Lyndon Johnson’s support played in bringing the civil rights movement’s goals to fruition. Even if Bill Clinton had called Barack Obama’s career a “fairy tale”—which he didn’t; he called Obama’s unfavorable comparison of Hillary’s Iraq war voting record with his own a “fairy tale”—there would have been nothing intrinsically racial, let alone racist, about the comment. And what was so racist about Mark Penn’s suspicion that unscrupulous Republican strategists might use Obama’s past drug use against him in the general election?

Still, if these teapot tempests prompted black voters to look at the Clintons more skeptically, I was and am willing to live with it. Bill and Hillary have always struck me as political opportunists who seek the presidency for its own sake, rather than to actually solve America’s problems—soulless machine politicians with little principled vision of where they want to take the country. So I was pleased to see the Clinton brand take a beating not only in the black community but also among those Democrats who used to reflexively close ranks around Slick Willie whenever he stood in the Republicans’ crosshairs. I watched with glee as liberals looked aghast at the Clintons’ arrogance in this campaign and asked themselves, “You mean Bill and Hill really are a couple of slick, power-hungry politicians after all? Could the Republicans have been right about them all along?”

I thus fêted Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from total obscurity just four years ago to the brink of the Democratic nomination for president today. I am delighted to see an African-American candidate have a realistic shot at the presidency, due in large part to his transcendence of fruitless racial grievance-mongering—à la Sharpton or Jackson—and his resulting ability to unite Americans of disparate backgrounds behind him. And the underdog-lover in me could not help but cheer as he pulled ahead of Hillary to sit within striking distance of sewing up his party’s nomination.

Alas, with political viability seems to have come the almost inevitable corruption in political character. It was not long before my other instincts—including the aforementioned abhorrence of idolatry and my hatred of cheesy cant—began to kick in. As the winter of 2008 wore on and Obama won caucus after primary, his boyish, big-ear-to-big-ear grin began to smack of smugness, and his gaseous, meaningless mantras—“We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; “Yes we can!”—increasingly grated on my ears. His doctrinaire liberalism squares poorly with my right-leaning centrism. His deification by googols of college kids frankly unnerves me, given my contempt for the snotty, jejune gauchisme that passes for “progressive” thought on most college campuses these days. And I actually have nightmares about that embarrassingly obsequious portrait of Obama with a halo behind his head—seriously!—with which the groupies at Rolling Stone magazine recently disgraced their cover.

Yet none of Obama’s flaws disappoints me more than his capitulation to the same Clintonian hypocrisy to which he claims to be immune.

The illusion of that immunity crumbled in the face of the news that an economic advisor to Obama’s campaign had assured a Canadian TV news network that his candidate’s denunciations of NAFTA—and promises to renegotiate or abrogate the treaty—were mere election-year posturing. Not that I was terribly surprised at the news. I had never figured Obama to have the cojones to screw America’s closest neighbors and trading partners so egregiously. For that matter, I always wondered how he planned to reconcile such a move with his stated goal of restoring America’s image in the world. Now it was exposed as the same old mendacious pandering we’ve come to expect from politicians. “So much for Obama’s new style of politics,” I remember thinking to myself.

So much, indeed. In his recent Philadelphia debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama denied ever having supported a total ban on handgun possession—a denial that flies in the face of his filing of a questionnaire with a liberal advocacy group in 1996 that called for just such a ban. And his promises to begin to withdraw American troops from Iraq immediately upon coming to office did not stop him from claiming, at General David Petraeus’ recent testimony before the Senate, that “no one’s asking for a complete pullout without regard to conditions on the ground” (to paraphrase his words as reported in the New York Times). I will say just this: if you seriously believe President Obama will keep his promise to bug out of Iraq even in the face of the bloodbath that is likely to ensue, I’ve got a subprime mortgage loan to sell you.

I recently had a spirited argument with an acquaintance of mine on this very subject. A committed Obama disciple, my friend conceded the scant difference between Obama’s and Hillary’s policy proposals but put his faith in the former’s ability to “inspire” the American people. Stifling a groan, I asked the obvious question: “Inspire” them to do what? And how is one of the hardest-core liberals in the Senate supposed to particularly inspire more than about half the electorate? And how easily could he inspire them after they are let down, as they are sure to be, by the inevitable compromises of his presidency? I am still waiting on his answer.

Not that any of this will necessarily take much of the bloom off Obama’s rose. The peculiar stubbornness of political idolaters can endure long after the objects of their affection have taken their final bow. John F. Kennedy’s image of bold vision and youthful vigor has been only minimally afflicted by the taint of his foot-dragging on civil rights or the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan’s image as a paragon of fiscal discipline has suffered relatively little—among his fans at least—from the mountainous federal deficits he left in his wake. Ah, well—what does it matter? They inspired people. And thanks largely to that inspiration, I see little hope of persuading people to treat politicians—all politicians—with the skepticism they so richly deserve.

Won’t Get Fooled Again

September 2007

I was eagerly leafing through a recent issue of The Economist magazine when I stumbled upon an article entitled “Presumed Guilty” that brought me to a full stop.

The article concerned a new book, Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson, and its subject, the Duke lacrosse rape case of April 2006, in which African-American exotic dancer Crystal Mangum accused three members of the Duke University lacrosse team of having racially slurred, beaten and gang-raped her at a team party. I was taken aback not at the news that the charges against the lacrosse players were eventually dropped a year later, of which I was already aware. Indeed, upon hearing that news last spring, I had sort of subconsciously assumed that the charges had been dropped not necessarily because the charges were false or the defendants innocent, but simply because neither the available evidence nor the victim’s testimony were solid enough to stand up in court. No, what floored me was the discovery that Ms. Mangum’s accusation against the lacrosse players, far from being merely vulnerable to the glib sophistry of a slick defense lawyer, was in reality, as the Economist puts it, “a transparent lie from the start”.

As Mssrs. Taylor and Johnson detail in their book, it seems Ms. Mangum, who was picked up by the police shortly after the incident, never mentioned having been assaulted in any way until it appeared she might have to spend some time in a mental health facility. In the course of her questioning by the authorities, she subsequently recanted her initial claim—then later withdrew that recantation. Her various accounts of the night’s events included a number of mutually contradictory claims; at different times, for instance, she described her attackers as numbering anywhere from 2 to 20. The police officers who interrogated her on the first night understandably viewed Ms. Mangum’s story with outright incredulity—particularly in light of her admitted history of alcohol and drug addiction and her penchant for “making up far-fetched stories”, according to the Economist article. What made the biggest impression on me, however, was the statement made by her fellow stripper. In the latter’s view, Ms. Mangum’s claims were, in a word, “a crock”.

None of this stopped unscrupulous Durham Country D.A. Mike Nifong—then facing a tight campaign for reelection—from charging three Duke lacrosse players with rape several weeks later. None of it stood in the way of the sordid and in some cases downright illegal tactics to which he resorted, including smearing the defendants in the press and initially withholding contradictory DNA evidence from the defense team, and later simply ignoring it. Nor did it rein in the media circus and political feeding frenzy that predictably ensued. We all remember the public flagellation of the defendants by legions of self-righteous interlopers whose limhited knowledge of the facts of the case was tainted by the implicit bias resulting from Nifong’s prosecutorial misconduct. The newspaper headlines screaming about “a night of racial slurs, growing fear and finally sexual violence”. The students protesting at Duke and on campuses nationwide. The Duke administration’s pusillanimous failure to urge that their own students be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The insipid prattle of crusading left-liberal professors who gave lectures and TV interviews denouncing the hapless athletes without laying eyes on a shred of evidence. And this parade of horrors would hardly be complete without the demagoguery of that slick racial warhorse, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the hordes of media lemmings who have effectively crowned him the de facto Voice of Black America.

None of the aforementioned bandwagon-riders would warrant the scorn heaped on them on this page if the charges against the lacrosse players had been true. But they weren’t. They were false—utterly, shamefully false—and their falsehood should remind us of what common sense should have told us from the giddy-up. As outsiders, as third parties completely uninvolved in the case, who were not at the scene of the alleged crime nor had any firsthand knowledge of the evidence concerning it, we had no way of knowing whether the lacrosse players were innocent or guilty. The right response to the original allegations, both from the black community and from society at large, would have been to at least wait for the criminal trial to proceed and a verdict to be handed down before making any judgments of the defendants. But alas, too many observers felt the need to immediately roast the defendants in the court of public opinion, without any pretense of dispassionate assessment of the case on its merits.

Implicit in this detestable rush to judgment was a deeply poisonous kneejerk assumption on the part of so many of the talking heads: the accuser was a black woman; her alleged violators were affluent whiteboys; therefore these “young, white, violent, drunken men veritably given license to rape, maraud, [and] deploy hate speech”, to quote former Duke English professor Houston Baker, must have been guilty as sin. I can only hope there is no need to dissect this claptrap in too much detail. If it is not self-evident to you, the reader, that white skin, masculinity, and playing an upper-crust sport at an elite university do not make a person a natural-born racist and rapist any more than poverty, femininity and black skin make a person a saint whose word is to be taken as gospel truth, then, truly, I fear for your future.

The hell of it is that this is not the first time a troubled African-American woman has desperately resorted to bearing false witness of rape against white men—tragically tainting the credibility of real rape and hate crime victims into the bargain. Almost exactly twenty years ago, young Tawana Brawley accused six white men in a small upstate New York town of abducting and raping her, only to see the case collapse for lack of any evidence to substantiate her claims. (The good Rev. Sharpton made his bones representing Ms. Brawley, leading the pack with a string of libelous charges hurled at the defendants.) Unfortunately, it seems, America has not learned the lesson of Tawana Brawley.

I remember the early Republican primaries in the 2000 election, in which the panel of questioners asked candidate Alan Keyes—and only Alan Keyes—for his “thoughts” on the case of the NYPD killing of Amadou Diallo the year before. I myself am no fan of Mr. Keyes, but I still applauded when he wisely replied that he was neither a witness to the shooting itself nor a direct observer of the investigation or the evidence, and so quite naturally drew no conclusions and had no “thoughts” on the matter. There’s one page we should all take from Keyes’ book.

At least some true justice has finally been done in the Duke case: the abominable Mr. Nifong has been disbarred and was jailed for one day for his shady deeds, while Duke President Richard Brodhead publicly apologized for abandoning his students to the hounds. As for me, this shameful business has reminded me of my older brother’s wise admonition to take everything I hear with a grain of salt—a bit of advice I intend to act on, particularly when gender and race are involved. My friend’s father recently asked me if I’d demonstrated in support of the Jena 6. I told him I hadn’t, but didn’t have the heart to tell him why: not because I think the defendants had the original attempted murder charges coming—for all I know their cause is entirely just—but because I quite simply do not and cannot have the right answer. After the Duke debacle, I no longer trust the media, outspoken Facebook groups or Al Sharpton to give me an unbiased, credible picture of what happened in Jena. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I won’t be fooled again.

Fear Not, Borat Fans: There's Hope for America Yet

Nov. 26, 2006
Much ink has been spilled about the American bigotry exposed in British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I, for one, think it unfair to conclude from this film—many a blogger and pundit has done recently—that America is a nation “as backward as the fictionalized Kazakhstan from which Borat hails”, as one very good friend of mine here at Princeton's Nassau Weekly put it in a recent article of his.

My learned colleague wrote, “Sure, Baron Cohen and his cohorts selected the best clips from the endless footage they recorded, but the fact that they managed to cull such responses at all is off-putting at the least.” Surely, however, it takes more than one anecdotal “hateful old redneck” or three loutish fratboys to prove that a society as massive and complex as America is as hateful as he. My friend has a much stronger point about comfort levels and the light they may shed on cultural mores in situations like these. But I think this is canceled out by Borat’s potential backstory. We have no idea how many rodeos Baron Cohen had to visit in order to turn up a homophobe like Mr. Rowe—and we probably never will, since Cohen rarely conducts any interviews as himself, preferring to remain constantly in character whenever in public. (Even his recent exclusive Rolling Stone interview shed no light on this.)

Borat should be appraised more critically than the talking heads have done. “Slightly less appalling…is the moment when Borat is told, without hesitation, that a 9MM or a .45 would be the best defense against Jews,” my colleague writes. Never mind, of course, that the gun shop owner ultimately smells something fishy about this ignorant Kazakh and refuses to sell him a weapon. The next offense in this parade of horribles: “Don’t ignore the fact that the rodeo crowd applauds when Borat professes support for America’s ‘War of Terror’.” Dig a little deeper, I say. A crowd of rodeo fans are not going to be listening closely enough to distinguish the phrase “War on Terror” from “War of Terror”, especially coming from a completely unexpected interloper. This rings especially true considering Borat’s heavily affected accent. Some fans may well have noted the error but forgiven it as a slip of the tongue by a man who clearly can’t speak English well and continued cheering out of sheer charity. My Nass colleague himself admits that “a novice like Borat might make such a prepositional mistake.” Mightn’t the rodeo fans have reached that same conclusion and acted accordingly?

Remember that part of Sacha Baron Cohen’s shtick is to deliberately lead his subjects to believe that his character is not only primitive but also not very bright. Interviewees usually humor this bumptious Kazakh and play along perfunctorily, whether out of political correctness, condescension or sheer hospitality. That they cheered Borat’s vow to slaughter “every man, woman and child in Iraq”, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that they took his words literally and actually endorse genocide. At least as likely is that they were just playing along, thinking the poor mook was merely mangling the King’s English. I might well have done the same—and I’m Canadian.

Think of that antique furniture store in Texas. I was as disgusted at the sight of the ubiquitous Confederate paraphernalia as anyone else. But why blithely ignore the elderly owners’ patience and even temper when Borat completely trashes their most valuable inventory—and offers them pubic hair as compensation?

Such “unthinking obsequiousness”—as my Nassau Weekly counterpart rightly decries this tendency—is often motivated by political correctness, as well as the instinct to give a tragically ignorant foreigner the benefit of any situational doubt. This is hardly a fair canvas for the brush of virulent bigotry with which my compadre tars his countrymen. The intentions behind this reflex are honorable, even if they may pave the road to Hell. The salient error is in attributing this slavish politesse to naked prejudice rather than to a cheesy postmodern cultural “sensitivity” and political correctness. (This error is shared by the legions of liberal pundits eager to read in Borat a searing critique of the conservative red-state American culture they constantly bemoan—a delicious irony, given that this sensitivity, and the cultural relativism it engenders, is largely a product of modern American liberalism.)

There is no better proof of this than the dinner party in Alabama. Put yourselves in the shoes of stodgy Southern blue-bloods welcoming a tourist to dinner to teach him American etiquette. Imagine being rewarded with a slur on one of the female guests’ looks, an insult to another guest’s wits, and a display of pictures of Borat with his buck-naked “son”—with close-up shots of the boy’s genitalia. Would you have mollified the other guests by pointing out the “huge differences” between Borat’s culture and your own, and insisting that he could be taught how to conduct himself in polite American society? How would you have reacted to Borat’s return to the dinner table with a big ol’ turd in a plastic bag? Would you have taken him back to the loo to give him a crash course on how to use a toilet and wipe himself, as one of those genteel steel magnolias did? My own Caribbean-Canadian upbringing has left me scrupulously deferential to my elders and guests; yet I doubt I would have been that polite. Anyone else? A show of hands, perhaps?

This is the lesson Borat teaches Americans about themselves: that, far from being hopelessly bigoted, they are an at times idiotically courteous and hospitable people.

“Watch how the camera focuses on nodding children when a preacher calls America ‘a Christian nation’,” my Nass friend writes. He seems to reflexively take this as a sign of religious prejudice, which itself strikes me as rash at best and prejudicial at worst. And to implicitly smear all who believe America to be a Christian nation as Bible-thumping bigots is less than fair in a country whose currency bears the words “In God We Trust” and two of whose greatest social justice movements—for the abolition of slavery and for civil rights—were heavily influenced and driven by Christian altruism and idealism. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not called “Reverend” for nothing. And let’s not forget the Battle Hymn of the Republic, arguably America's greatest patriotic anthem—written by a Christian abolitionist during the Civil War. If ridding America of the scourge of human bondage is what Julia Ward Howe meant by “the coming of the Lord”, I don’t know you all, but mine eyes have seen the glory.

I come from a family of mostly evangelical Christians. Their churches are attended by people of all backgrounds, their services characterized by the very same talking in tongues, “flailing about”, and general religious rapture that my friend so tellingly slips into quotation marks. I can name countless anecdotes showing that such faithful folk are far from the execrable haters so many left-wing pundits suspect they are—enough to outdo Sacha Baron Cohen himself. In the South, mind you, it may be a different story…maybe. But am I going to assume that, based on Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America? I could dig up better primary sources for this thesis. Fear not your God-fearing countrymen, liberal brethren: they are not all out to get you.

Ultimately, Borat teaches Americans little more about themselves than that there are many bigots in their midst—other than that they take their politeness to jokey extents. The latter lesson hardly warrants outraged condemnation. The former is meaningless, not only because it’s scarcely news to anyone not living under a rock, but more importantly because it says nothing about America that couldn’t be said about just about any other country. From the slurring of dark-skinned European soccer players in recent years, to riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities, to a Palestinian cartoonist’s recent depiction of Condoleeza Rice as being pregnant with a monkey, I suspect that any country’s hateful underbelly could be exposed just as shockingly by Baron Cohen’s pop culture “investigative journalism”. America is simply the country he chose to take potshots at in this case. Ah, well. Don’t let it turn you around, my Yankee friends. It’s always lonely at the top.
Race and The Sopranos:
Is the show racist?
April 27, 2006

I was watching an episode of The Sopranos in the TV room in Terrace last week, when a friend of mine made a comment that never fails to make me groan: “Dude, this show treats Italian-Americans so bad…”

I doubt this is the first time you have heard that The Sopranos, in its depiction of poorly educated, foul-mouthed, larcenous, murderous, gun-toting, sexually promiscuous and otherwise degenerate New Jersey Mafiosi, portrays Italian-Americans as being similarly degenerate and criminal. This is the same charge that has been slung at every Mafia-related production from The Godfather to Donnie Brasco, and its progenitors never tire of repeating it whenever a new such production hits the cinema, or in this case, the television. And as a black man living in North America, I am no stranger to the media’s tendency to stereotype entire ethnic groups in the deadliest ways. So what, then, is my take on this critique of my favorite TV show ever? In a word: Bullshit.

For starters, I don’t believe any major mob production has ever been guilty of that charge. No, I don’t believe that Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs or Casino stereotyped Italian-Americans as mobsters. The reason for this is remarkably simple. The US Mafia is an ethnocentric organization: its membership is composed exclusively of Italian-Americans of working-class origins. Therefore, in any production about the Mafia, the main characters will invariably be Italian-American. And the detestable personality traits attributed to them are always realistic to a fault. Look at The Godfather: many of the characters and plotlines of the novel and the first two films were in fact loosely based on real figures and events in Mafia history. Don Vito Corleone was inspired by the dreaded 1940s and ‘50s New York City mob boss, Vito Genovese. Don Corleone’s godson Johnny Fontane was based on Frank Sinatra. Or look at Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino, both of them true stories, adapted from Nicholas Pileggi books that were not the least bit fictional.

The same goes for the exploits of Tony Soprano and his motley crew. I recently read a New York Times article in which a Mafia specialist credited the show for its gritty realism. The best example of this was the Mafiosi’s propensity for profanity: in real life, these guys really do include at least three or four foul cuss words in every sentence they utter. Moreover, real-life Mafiosi really do have mistresses (“goomars”), do regularly sleep with prostitutes, do have hair-trigger tempers that get them into brutal brawls at the drop of a hat, do eat copious quantities of Italian food, and so on. Reviews of the show regularly tap real-life FBI agents, crime reporters and even living, breathing mobsters for their take on The Sopranos. These experts consistently praise the show.

In all, there is no way to portray a Mafioso realistically without depicting him and his compadres as working-class Italian-Americans – poorly educated, violent, profane, and just generally despicable menaces to society. To do otherwise would be a ridiculous distortion of reality.

Actually, The Sopranos, far from perpetuating the stereotypes of Italian-Americans, goes to at times ludicrous lengths to avoid stereotyping them. Watch the show closely and you’ll see that it actually portrays many Italian-American characters who stick to the straight and narrow. The best example is Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi. She is polite, classy, educated, hard-working, law-abiding and successful – a model American citizen. The same goes for the team of FBI agents who have bedeviled the Soprano family since the very beginning of the show’s seven-year run; almost every single one of them is Italian-American. Tony’s neighbor, Dr. Bruce Cusamano, is a suburban, all-American white guy – as Tony scornfully puts it, he “eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.” In high school, Tony’s kids, Anthony Jr. and Meadow, both seemed to have exclusively Italian-American friends (Blundetto, Piacosta, Capobianco, and Scangarelo). Freddy Capuano was the owner of the retirement home where Tony placed his infanticidal mother. The Soprano family’s parish priest is named Father Phil Intintola. Tony’s best non-mob friend – a hapless restaurateur whose wife Charmaine constantly nags him for entertaining Tony and his brood in their establishment – is Arthur Bucco. And the divine Ms. Meadow Soprano is currently engaged to a self-effacing youngster by the name of Finn DeTrolio.

In fact, in taking aim at the show’s treatment of ethnic minorities, Sopranos critics miss the mark entirely. Want to know which ethnic minority groups’ reputations the show does horribly deface? Jewish and African-Americans, that’s who.

Don’t believe me? The show is actually breathtaking in the audacity with which it portrays Jews as shifty, mercenary hucksters and blacks as simple-minded, petty criminals. The main Jewish character on the show is Herman “Hesh” Rabkin, who plays a loan shark in league with the Sopranos. Tony and his uncle Corrado both have Jewish lawyers who embody to a "T" the stereotype of Jews as money-grubbing shysters. And the Sopranos constantly do business with archetypal “niggers” – ignorant, deadbeat and usually incompetent thieves, murderers and “street pharmacists” from the ghettoes of Trenton, Newark and Jersey City. When Tony and his fellows come into contact with blacks, it’s usually with carjackers and stick-up artists, muggers and cocaine addicts, not to mention the occasional gangsta rapper—racial caricatures as deeply offensive as any World War II propaganda cartoon and clownish minstrels that would turn Al Jolson green with envy.

Mafia movies, of course, have shat on racial minorities – mainly African-Americans – for decades now. Remember the Mafia Don convention in The Godfather, when one boss argued that the heroin trade should be restricted to “the dark peoples, the coloreds…they’re animals anyway, so let them lose their souls?” Or Sonny Corleone’s casual comment that “Niggers are having a good time with our policy banks up in Harlem, drivin’ them big new Cadillacs?” Or in Goodfellas, when Henry Hill told his wife, “Jail is for nigger stick-up men who don’t have their shit organized?” The Sopranos simply continues in this tradition. Witness Tony’s apoplexy upon seeing his daughter dating a half-Jewish, half-black fellow student – “Jamaal Ginsberg, the Hasidic homeboy,” as Tony called him – or his blaming an injury caused by a panic attack on a mugging by a gang of black men – or as he calls them, “fuckin’ jigaboo cocksuckin’ motherfuckers.” And crucially, this uniform hatred for the eternal nigger is not only shared by the actual mobsters in the show, but also frequently echoed by the legitimate Italian-American characters who share the screen with them.
Those who have seen any Mafia movie more than once have likely noticed this. Yet I have yet to hear any Italian-American advocacy group protest this portrayal of their people as hideous racists. Whether this is because they happen to share these prejudices, or because they simply haven’t ever noticed them or thought of them as particularly important (which is more likely), I have no idea. But to depict Italian-Americans as detestable xenophobes is, I think, every bit as odious as it would be to allegedly depict them as members or associates of an obsolescent crime syndicate. A more holistic perspective would do these aspiring censors a world of good. Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom.