The Roberts Court would appear to be contradicting itself when it ruled both for the First Amendment in the case from Wisconsin Right to Life’s airing political ads in violation of McCain/Feingold but against it in the Alaska teen’s right to unfurl a “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner across the street from a school function. But what is revealed here is actually a major theme of contemporary conservatism that, in the minds of the movement, trumps minor issues like a consistent interpretation of the Constitution. This theme is more in line with the pre-Colonial notions of Tory vs. Whig than anything we recognize from the last century-and-a-half or even the libertarian conservatism of the post Barry Goldwater era.
This court, and much of the movement that created its majority, consistently defers to power and privilege for its own sake and against the individual, even if the government steps in as an advocate for that individual. Two other decisions from the past week reveal the theme almost as strongly. In one, “taxpayers” were denied the right to sue over the president’s Faith Based Initiatives on grounds of separation of church and state, and in another, corporations and developers were given tremendous new authority to drive through exceptions to the Endangered Species Act at the local level.
The Court seems to be saying, in effect, “If you are a corporation or a developer or a private entity we like, you get precedence first; if you are an authority figure such as a school administrator, you get precedence second; if you are an individual or the environment, you get precedence not at all.”
The empowerment of these elements in our society runs counter to the notions of Jeffersonian democracy we hold dear. To say that the private sector collectively has, in some cases, more of a right to press its case in a public forum than an individual creates a class of “super-citizens” out of corporations and lobbying groups, many of which command a good deal more money and influence than all but the richest, most powerful individuals. They are able to control the lives of thousands through employment or layoff, and run what are essentially protection rackets, demanding subsidies and tax breaks in states and municipalities whose economies depend upon them. Bill Gates as an individual may be able to fire all his housekeeping staff, but only Microsoft (or perhaps Boeing) could singlehandedly devastate the economy of Washington state by moving all its jobs overseas.
Some of the thinking inherent in allowing corporate entities the same free speech rights as regular folks posits that corporations are, legally speaking, people. This allows them to hold property and be represented in court—all things necessary for a business or lobbying group to do what it needs to do. Fair enough. But it takes little to make the corporate person an absurdity. It would be silly to argue that a corporation has the right to marry or vote, after all, and when things go wrong at a company like Enron, it’s not the company that goes to jail; it’s the Jeff Skillings and the (had he not died first) the Ken Lays. You can only punish a corporation monetarily, since, in a very real way, it only exists monetarily. A corporation is a contract (or a series of them) much more than it is a person, so there is no sense in which it should be granted the same rights as a citizen beyond the bare few it needs to conduct business.
We can hear this thinking echoed in the language of the conservatives who refer to We, The People as “taxpayers” almost exclusively. Corporations, of course, pay taxes, so we are equivalent. But whether or not you pay taxes you are still a citizen. Your right to vote or peaceably assemble is not revoked when you fall below the income level at which the IRS starts taking its share. “Taxpayer” is a word they use instead of citizen, and it’s a neocon sleight of tongue, meant to imply that those who do not are out of the equation—and those who do have limited rights, rights, apparently limited by their status as mere income-earners.
This also reinforces the Whiggishness of current conservative thought: corporations are the rough equivalent of duchies and dukedoms, their leaders the rough equivalent of an aristocracy. It makes sense from the aristocratic point of view that the duchy would be afforded more rights no matter who, currently, holds title to it.
From a democratic point of view, the “Bong Hits” case is also instructive. Chief Justice Roberts here argued that the school’s principal could “reasonably” interpret the student’s banner as advocating an illegal activity, and so was within her rights to suspend the student and tear down the sign. Two assenting justices noted that they would have ruled differently had the sign been more clearly political, but I’m skeptical of that, as the student himself acknowledged during the confrontation with his principal that the message was an absurdist exercise in his First Amendment rights. He was being upfront about his intentions, and it should have ended there. But even a cursory look at the actual content of the sign would have revealed that it’s just what the student says it is. You don’t need to be an English major to see that it’s satire, designed to hit (all puns intended) several politically sensitive issues at once while, in and of itself, communicating nothing in particular. Further, he did it off school grounds and across the street from the school function. So while he certainly could have been busted for truancy, it makes no sense to bust him for the banner he unfurled.
The message this sends is not only that students have limited rights, but that the power of the school administrator is sovereign at nearly all times and in nearly all aspects of a student’s life and communications. What if the student had posted a similar message on Facebook? Would the justices have ruled any differently? Facebook communicates with far more students than a banner near an Olympic torch parade. Would he have been “advocating drug use” to the whole cyberworld in that case? And while I absolutely understand the need for the educational system to at times control student behavior, the “Bong Hits” case represents a student who is off campus and acting in a way that is well thought out, deliberate, measured, and funny. He is not being “disruptive”; he’s making a point. Sitting in the back of the class and making fart noises is disruptive, and that may deserve detention. What this student did is admirable and deserves a medal.
But again, the power is granted to authority and privilege and being denied to the individual as a matter of course. Perhaps the Roberts Court is merely trying to prepare the high school students of today for the aristocratic future it is currently creating for them.
I got an ultra-interesting e-mail today from a gentleman who has done a multimedia presentation of my “Paxil Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” poem. I’m surprised that someone I haven’t met in person has read it, let alone put effort into doing an animation for it. Check it out!
PS — There’s new stuff at the Village if you haven’t checked it out lately!
Most immigration bills that come through Congress amount to the equivalent of trying to end depression by punishing suffering. And while there’s a lot to discuss in the current and perhaps moribund, one it is, like all the other ones, just a way to foment a discussion that is utterly moot. At best it provides only temporary relief for the undocumented already here. At worst it fines the poor and discriminates against the uneducated, making the experience for the undocumented something of a microcosm of what they experience in their home countries anyway.
That is, of course, the problem to begin with. It’s the economic inequalities in Latin America that drive illegal immigration, not the border policies of the U.S. government. Recent attempts to “crack down” on illegal immigration with fences and National Guard units and xenophobic “Minutemen” have only pushed border crossers further into the desert, killing hundreds every year as they die of thirst, exposure, and automobile accidents while fleeing border patrol agents. This speaks of both the immigrants’ desperation and of their genuineness: they are not coming here out of malice or greed or to get back at us for stealing Texas by taking all the jobs none of us would do anyway. They’re coming here because they have two options: live poor in the United States or starve at home. That they risk death means the bargain is worth it, and nothing short of a border fence made entirely of the bones of dead immigrants and adorned with their heads on pikes is going to deter them, if that. We should simply start thinking even halfway empathetically: if we were in the same position, most of us would do exactly the same thing.
The U.S., of course, has helped fuel Mexico’s woes through NAFTA and through protective farm subsidies at home—policies we from the plains states are loathe to give up. Our lack of interference with Mexican oligarchy and the oil it rides on doesn’t help either, but then, our own oligarchs have done much in the past 25 years through the tax code and deregulation and corporate welfare programs and the dismantling of the unions to make the U.S. steadily less income-equitable. The irony is that as Mexicans and other Latin Americans are fleeing here in search of opportunity, our own economy is more and more closely resembling the ones they’ve fled.
Fences and walls have historically failed: from China’s Great one to Hadrian’s lesser one, from the one in Berlin to the new one in Israel/Palestine, fences and walls are symbols that the policies haven’t worked and that the policy makers have stopped trying. This fence will be no different, and this proposed policy is proof of that.
Virginia Woolf’s notion of a “room of one’s own” in which women could be freed from the responsibilities of domestic life had a good deal of resonance when she postulated it in the first half of the 20th Century. It could easily be argued that women, who still perform the bulk of housework, still need to hear Woolf’s message in the first few years of the 21st. But I wonder if we have problems finding and creating writing spaces now that go beyond questions of gender and that threaten the basis of fine writing itself.
What we lack now that Woolf did not as much is the rapid shrinkage of private space both physical and psychic. While the bulk of the building boom of the ’90s was in single family dwellings, many of them of substantial proportions, all “family” space implies a shared domain, not space freed and individual. This has been good for children, many of whom have been able to take advantage of their parents’ own need for space by holing up in their rooms to cruise the web and watch DVDs and play endless games of Grand Theft Auto. But the privacy is not reciprocal, as parents may seek their own space but have been programmed by the powerful “family values” movement to be open to juvenile invasion and be attentive to their children’s expressed needs. The responsible parent, we are told, focuses on the family, as indeed a conservative pressure group is named. This parental guilt cuts out a lot of domestic activities not directly related to child-rearing; writing then becomes selfish and irresponsible.
Then there is the set of expectations inherent in the socially acceptable ideas of marriage. In order to be honest, open, respectable partners, we must give up a good chunk of our sense of self in terms of money, time, personality. Only dysfunctional couples have separate bedrooms, we are told, and many would be very suspicious of a partner wishing to keep her own quarters exclusively for the purpose of writing.
Temporal space is the most frustrating loss, and as experienced it’s a form of psychic space created by sociological expectations much more than it is a problem for contemporary physics. Productivity is a dear asset to our economy—more dear than the people who perform the jobs, actually, as outsourcing has shown. But that pressure also means we have to work like drones to be part of the hive. In the aircraft industry, a very important part of the economy of my region, one is considered a slacker if she works just the mandatory 40 hours a week. 50 or 60 hour workweeks are not just the norm but the only way to get ahead. When one factors in grocery shopping, housecleaning, church or social obligations, one is left with precious little time for her esoteric scribblings. Even more than we are told we owe the family, we are told we owe the boss.
As space-invasive (the specter of a certain arcade game from the early 1980s wells up when I write that—and who over the age of 30 hasn’t wasted substantial time and quarters at one of those?) as our families and jobs tend to be, the bulk of incursion into our physical and virtual rooms we bring upon ourselves. The telephone began the trend, and Woolf would have been familiar with that. But as ease of communication has increased since then, so has frequency decreased its quality. Since we can communicate so much more, and in so many more ways, now, we disrupt both the sustained attention writing requires and the quality of thought needed to accomplish writing of any merit.
The telephone’s placement in the home literally hardwires invasion into one’s literary space, but the television exacerbates matters. TV invades space insidiously: its friendly reliability helps us pretend to overcome loneliness (and writing is the most lonely of professions), but it also chips away at the very idea of private space. Any one installment of the Jerry Springer show will illustrate how little we think of TV space as public space. Here, as in any number of similar talkshows from Dr. Phil to Oprah and back, “guests” bare all figuratively and sometimes literally in an attempt at—what? Confession? A solution to their Oreo fetishism or their goldfish bigotry? It isn’t ever exactly clear what motivates these people to seek the lighted stage instead of the therapist’s couch. But what is clear is that they see little or no distinction between the public and the private, and, endlessly modeled and piped into what was once our own private space, neither do we.
The World Wide Web, of course, with its blogs and chatrooms and webcams and YouTubes, has utterly annihilated the wall that TV tore down and that the telephone put a door in. The advent of e-mail alone produced new and invasive avenues into personal space. How many of us write (or rewrite) using a word processor at the same time that we have at least one e-mail program running and/or a web browser open and logged onto a web-based e-mail program or favorite blog? Just the fact that we use the same tool, the computer, for all these things proves that our space—that space of our own that Woolf considered so vital—has essentially disappeared.
Cellular phones, of course, mean that we cannot even take our space with us and create a room of our own away from the shared, wired spaces of our homes. No more can we find solace in a restaurant or cafe, a library or a shady nook at the local botanical park. Worse yet, our cells and PDAs now come equipped to surf the web and access our space-breaching e-mail as well.
Naturally, all of these technologies are also equipped with “off” switches. But it isn’t so much the existence of them that poses a problem than the expectations we and others have of their use. Try to function very long without either e-mail or cell phone. It could be done, of course, but not without the loss of some serious social ties. Besides, access implies use: we’ve paid the bills for the cell and the high-speed hook-up, so we figure we might as well use them. We can access all our friends all the time, so we figure we should. We live in the Information Age, after all, and information must therefore have some kind of value, as people seem to be making a lot of money off it.
But writing, even the most straightforward kind of journalism, is not about information; it’s about concepts and contexts and ideas. The creation of those, the making sense of the information we’re awash in, takes both space and time, and we’re not willing to begrudge it that when raw footage is perceived as so much more “real.”
It’s probably ironic that this essay was written in a rather public place: in front of a classroom as my students wrote essay tests about Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” But there, in front of those 20 people, there was psychic space: all who were there were there to write, either of their own volition or to meet a requirement for a General Ed. credit. And so we created a writing space, one in which the relationship between the writer and the page is inherently respected, at least for as long as the exercise continues or the class is in session. We essentially created a room of our own, however temporary it may have been.
The difficult question now is this: how can we allow ourselves this necessary space outside the confines of the educational artifice?