The Law and Other Anomalies

When New Orleans found itself under water a couple of years ago, the legal community jumped forward to fulfill its social obligations by providing help of all kinds to the distressed New Orleans community.  Lawyers labored nobly and long to facilitate aid, solve real estate problems, provide legal services and provide the infra-structure necessary to rebuild the City and environs.

At the time I was very skeptical as to the direction of some of that effort.  The needs and sufferings of the people, and the impetus and desire to assist, could not be denied.  No one wants to see others in need, particularly through no fault of their own.  But the pledge to rebuild New Orleans to its former glory presented a logical problem:  a strong argument could be made that rebuilding that city was not very smart from a utilitarian standpoint.

At the time, some climatologists pointed out that the city was likely doomed in the not too distant future.  In a world of cold logic, it probably made sense to relocate the whole thing, including its people, somewhere else.

The undertaking of such a novel and in some ways cold-hearted program did not appeal to the government, nor to the lawyers either;  the American way is to rebuild, bigger and better, and to be optimistic and forceful, to conquer impediments.  Nor had our population fully integrated the reality of global warming, an issue tied up with what has proven to be unimportant ancillary issues such the relative role of human participation in the warming process.

Recent events have reoriented much of popular thinking.  The science tells us that human existence is speeding global warming.  But it also suggests that without human intervention we still will be in trouble.  Recent coverage in the New York Times is chilling: a modest rise in the ocean levels will flood out of existence a good deal of the United States, including but by no means only New Orleans.  The colored Times maps showing a nonexistent Florida and a vastly shrunken New York City have the makings of a sensationalistic movie, and I am willing to bet anyone that such a screen epic will follow shortly. The factoid that at one point in our world the oceans were hundreds of feet higher than today suggests that we should be building beach cabanas in Denver.

Conversations about installing flood gates along the lines of some in Europe seem surreal, and in any event scientists are sure that gates can be effective only in some, not all areas, particularly when one looks at the cost factor.  Burdened by the economy, the President a couple of days ago refused to take a leadership role in addressing the issue at an international conference on the subject, with its implicit subtext of curtailing the consumption of hydrocarbons.  As in the past, immediate presidential concerns are trumping the problem of the 900 pound elephant; it is easier to herd the ten pound cats.

The role of law in a logical world, faced with these issues, is clear; plan for a different coast line.  Congress needs to address this kind of law; you cannot bring a lawsuit and deal with this type or magnitude of problem.  Certainly unemployment would be cured for a century; the amount of labor of every sort, even unskilled, that it would take to move Manhattan (figuratively of course) to, say, a nice plot of open land just outside Pittsburgh is, at base, incomprehensible.

So the power of law and lawyers will again be directed, in New York and New Jersey and even inland in Northern New Hampshire, to rebuild what we had.  And to suggest otherwise is to seem both cold-hearted and hysterical. Hysterical even as we continue to pump water out of New York City basements.

One day, the cost to our society of flood insurance may well dwarf all the entitlement costs about which we are now squabbling.

Who would have thought that our future might be imperiled not by missiles, nor by nuclear bombs, nor by terrorists, nor by virus dumped into our drinking supply, but by salt water?

There is an old joke that if you have two Jews you will have three opinions.  Former US Congressman and New York Mayor Ed Koch this weekend added, “And also four different temples.”  This joke is not a joke but an indication of the fragmentation of what can no longer seriously be categorized as “Jewish political thought” when that category has been totally deconstructed.

This past weekend I chaired a conference in New York City on the Jewish Vote, the Holocaust and Israel.  Speakers included Mayor Koch, present Republican Congressman Bob Turner, famous talking heads Tevi Troy and Hank Sheinkopf and several academics and authors, all under the auspices of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.  The conference was excellent in substance, tracing Jewish voting trends from Hoover to the present from both academic and political perspectives.

As interesting were the reactions of attendees.  Much of the audience was older, conservative, angry with Obama, seeing the election in terms of support of Israel.  Younger attendees were almost bemused by what they considered to be a narrow view of the world and of the election, saying “this is not how the younger Jewish community views these issues,” suggesting that a focus on the Holocaust as informing current voting is old fashioned in style and irrelevant on the ground.

And after spending a whole day at the conference, locked in Fordham Law School, attendees stepped out into the bright Manhattan sunshine and confronted a demonstration by a couple of dozen Hasidic Jews, dressed in dark coats and with untrimmed hair, holding signs objecting to the conference itself as purporting to address the US elections from the standpoint of the Jewish community; these observant Jews thought that any involvement in politics as a group was wrong-minded (signs admonishing us not to address political issues “in my name”).

Whether there is a Jewish vote (which implies some sort of bloc) or just a set of statistics reflecting historical voting patterns in Jewish neighborhoods is much a matter of semantics.  How Jews voted historically (typically Democratic from at least the ‘20s onward, almost without regard to attractive Republican positions) or were likely to vote this year (among the aged attendees of the conference, I don’t think Obama could get elected dog-catcher) was explored but without likelihood that the conference would change anyone’s mind.

The more interesting issue is, what if anything can be said about Jewish political views with any confidence that one is speaking for more than a fragment of the alleged cohort.  There are numerous groups speaking (they say) for “the Jews.”  I conclude that we too, this weekend, even as a scholarly and open forum, were viewed as just another one of many fragments.  Is there merit in attempting to bond these fragments, or at least some of them?  Is there any prospect for doing so?

Important here is the gap in defining what is important for the Wyman Institute, or for many of the groups focused on the Holocaust.  A younger view wants relevance to the problems of today: current issues, current genocides not only focused on Jewish victims, issues currently presented to us by the world.  An older view says that yes, we can hear that, but there is another thread here, that Jews must be alert to their personal and special risks as historical punching bags over centuries and across continents.

It seems to me the older view has a fear in delivering overtly the message that Jews should beware of the world even today, even as assimilated peoples in settings where the illogic of societal prejudice actually running wild seems paranoid.  The older view is two fold I think: first, it is not paranoid when “they” are in fact talking about you; second, how many times do we have to replay the same conversation before it sinks in that today’s logical person is well advised to keep a weather eye peeled towards the almost inconceivably irrational beast?

I see a generational disconnect that must be overcome.  I see older elements of the Jewish community hesitant effectively to express the old fears, almost dismissing younger elements as so ill-educated as to be beyond reach.  I see younger elements appropriate offended that their eldest living forbears would so dismiss them after nurturing them and educating them and setting them loose to compete (and succeed) in the world at large.

There is both wisdom and lack of patience on both sides of the divide.  And there are so many ancillary divides, including but not limited to the guys across the street who invoke the Bible to criticize even holding the discussion.

It is not odd that voting, viewed by historians of democracy as the ultimate expression of political freedom, should highlight the schisms within our polity, and within its constituent elements.  But whoever wins the election this November, there is work to be done to bring together some of the older strands of Jewish political thinking with the J-Street crowd.

The other day a man, Wade Michael Page, now sketchily described as a neo-Nazi white supremacist, shot some followers of the Sikh religion at their Wisconsin Temple, a patently deplorable action regardless of the backstory of either the perp or the victims.  Beneath the obvious, this has set off a semantic war with unknown ramifications.

At first, knowing nothing about the shooter, the authorities speculated it was an act of domestic terrorism.  Then the ignorant diagnosis was downgraded to a “type” of terrorist attack.  On today’s NPR news program, mention was made in passing that there was an ongoing investigation into whether this was an act of domestic terrorism.  Aside from a spotty military career and a few drunken brushes with the law, we have learned only that Wade played with White Supremacist bands (a category of which I and doubtless many others were hitherto unaware).

What would flow from a conclusion that indeed this action falls under the “T word”?  Why do we seem to have a compulsion to attach some extrinsic categorizing label onto what happened?  It is logical to understand that the shooter was nuts just by reason of acting clearly outside of what our society accepts as human behavior; that societal definition also labels the shooter a criminal who can escape punishment only if he can prove a certain elusive and legally ill-defined supreme level of nutiness.

At first blush one might think this is just another incident of the human passion for categorizing events so as to create a better understanding of those events and the world as a whole; patterns are both mentally comforting and sometimes reveal trends or syndromes that, once identified, may require societal remediation.

A more cynical view is that people innately want to punish what they find abhorrent;  it is a way to put that action in its place, to distance us from it, to put it into a category that we know we reject and thus to insulate us temporally and morally from that action and the mental set that drove it.

A recent New Yorker article discusses the capsizing of a pleasure yacht after a fireworks display in a fancy area of Long Island, which carried three young children to their deaths as they were trapped in a cabin below-decks.  The reportage noted that the boat was raised and was the subject of intense local police and FBI investigation, reflecting a need to understand the tragedy and indeed see if some punishment was appropriate to such people as may be viewed as guilty of some transgression of law or attentiveness.

The drive to affix blame and punish it is also at work in the case of the Sikh shooting.  The perp is quite dead; it is not likely that punishing him is worth considering.  If we can find that the deceased killer was part of some conspiracy, some movement, some group representing the wrong kind of violence, then we can blame them, and try to punish them by law; perhaps silence or disband them, at least infiltrate and monitor them.  Society wants to protect itself from groups that will harm that society.  (This creates serious problems of balancing civil liberties, a different subject for a different time.)

One of the issues is that a single person can have bad ideas, can get these ideas from groups that espouse them, and can act fundamentally alone in the physical sense (if not the intellectual sense) and thus kill large numbers of Sikhs (or any other group) and there is no one to blame except either the ideas or the deranged killer (who is likely either then already dead or clearly nuts).  An unsatisfactory conclusion.

Hence, we look for available conspirators.  If this cohort does terrible things, they are semantically “terrorists.”  Of course this word now carries heavy freight after 9-11; we know in our deepest part that terrorists are a thing unique, singularly deranged and to be stamped out.  Would it not be nice to find that the Sikh shooter was part of a cohort we can label as terrorists and then treat them violently because that is how one must deal with terrorists in this terror-burdened world?

It is frightening to think about what next happens if someone with a police mind-set, after careful analysis of unclear definitional factors, declares at a major press conference that yes, indeed, the shooter of Sikhs committed an act of domestic terrorism.  What do we do?  Does this just give us comfort psychologically (yeah, they are terrorists, they are bad, they are not like me, they are sort of rare so I am likely safe) and we move on?  Does this lead us to arrest or suppress those whose ideas, but not actions, he shared?  Do we do that only if he had physical contact with these people?  Do we do that if the only contact is that they shared ideas?

I wish the FBI and police would stop trying to classify this event as terrorism.  I get a bad feeling that the classification will achieve nothing but some negative unintended consequence.