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lapsedmodernistWhen I was little, the Soviet bogeyman was The Capitalist. A fat, Dickensonian capitalist in a gold pince-nez (like in most state communism initiatives, intellectuals were a counter-revolutionary, subversive class; in USSR there was a particular metonymy that wed Jews, French-speaking intellectuals and other problematic elements on the road to building a socialist paradise), who would take the children away and starve them in factories and whip them and probably lynch them: the narrative of the Evil West was a potpuorri imaginary comprised of the following historical narratives: post-Industrial Revolution Europe, antebellum American South and the decadence of the French royalty before the invention of the guillotine put a stop to all of that (the decadence was captured in a popular poem, which started out: "Eat pineapples, chew the phaesants / Your last day is coming, you Bourgois!")
I wonder if the terror meme in the U.S. today has gotten to the point that when children are misbehaving, "patriotic" parents tell them to be good or the terrorists will come for them.
The quote in the subject line of this post is the opening line of Osip Mandelsham's poem about Stalin, the one that got him sent to the gulag. In the Russian original, the verb that is translated as "feeling" is chuya, which is a derivative of the actual verb "to feel"--chuvstovat', but has different connotations and nuances. chuvstvovat' is a very plain, proper verb, referring either to articulated emotions, or physical, tactile sensations; chuyat' connotes "feeling" which is more primal, intuitive, paralingual, animalistic. More approrpate to a zeitgeist where fear comes from metallic air, from demagnetized compass needles.
I don't believe in the End of History thesis. But I believe in the bottleneck effect. It works a little like a traffic accident, but with decades, instead of cars, crashing into each other. Hence the collapse of a proper time bracket between "now" and "retro." Hence the pomo bricolage of the 50s and 40s, and now, the 20s coming back to the South. And I don't mean the flapper age, either.
Clarence Darrow must be rolling over in his grave, while the William Jennings Bryan Zombie project is eating brains and gathering its strength back, even though Bryan himself had reasons more complicated and sophisticated for waging his stand at the time than could be dreamt of today.
So, today's lesson is on the Scopes Monkey Trial, which has been diluted by decades into a popularly accessible form, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, called Inherit The Wind which is dramatic and heroic as plays should be. Later it became a movie, starring Spencer Tracy, who was as dramatic and heroic as Spencer Tracy should be. The play and the movie are historically inaccurate, and have replaced the public memory of the actual trial, as fictionalized accounts tend to do. It has a "feel-good" ending, with the underdog "Scopes"* found guilty, but "Bryan" dying, like, on the spot, and "Darrow" putting the Bible and Evolution books together before leaving the courtroom, which is supposed to symbolize harmony twixt the two in some theistic evolution-type synthesis. Here is the thing that got lost between the cracks of the decades:
From the get-go, the Scopes monkey trial was a test case. And a calculated one at that. It was originally orchestrated by a man named Joe Rappalyea, who presented the town leaders with an ACLU announcement that it would offer its services to anyone challenging the Tennessee anti-evolutionary statute. Rappalyea was convinced that a public challenge of the new law would help put their town in decline on the map, and revivify it. You see, the population of Dayton had shrunk from 3,000 down to 1,800 in a matter of years. He conscripted Scopes for the test case; the prosecutors, Herbert and Sue Hicks were two local attorneys that were friends of Scopes. Rappalyea originally wanted H.G. Wells to head the defense team, but H.G. wasn't interested. Eventually, after William Jennings Bryan, who hadn't practiced law in years, offered to lead the prosecution, Clarence Darrow signed on for the defense, despite ACLU's original reservations due to Darrow's reputation as a "atheistic zealot," and their reticence of the trial turning into a free-for-all ideological attack on religion in general.
The theatrical setting of the whole endeavor sounds fabulous: "A carnival atmosphere pervaded Dayton as the opening of the trial approached in July of 1925. Banners decorated the streets. Lemonade stands were set up. Chimpanzees, said to have been brought to town to testify for the prosecution, performed in a side show on Main Street. Anti- Evolution League members sold copies of T. T. Martin's book Hell and the High School. Holy rollers rolled in the surrounding hills and riverbanks. " [Douglas Linder, An Introduction to the John Scopes (Monkey) Trial]. Unlike the play would have it, Scopes did not receive medieval villagers-with-torches treatment from his fellow townsfolk.
The interesting part is that after Bryan's defeat ( "Bryan, who began his testimony calmly, stumbled badly under Darrow's persistent prodding. At one point the exasperated Bryan said, "I do not think about things I don't think about." Darrow asked, "Do you think about the things you do think about?" Bryan responded, to the derisive laughter of spectators, "Well, sometimes." Both old warriors grew testy as the examination continued. Bryan accused Darrow of attempting to "slur at the Bible." He said that he would continue to answer Darrow's impertinent questions because "I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee--." Darrow interrupted his witness by saying, "I object to your statement" and to "your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes." After that outburst, Raulston ordered the court adjourned. The next day, Raulston ruled that Bryan could not return to the stand and that his testimony the previous day should be stricken from evidence."-ibid, emphasis mine), Darrow asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so that the case could go to the Tennessee Supreme Court; the jury obliged, and the judge fined Scopes a nominal fee for breaking the law.
What happenned next is very important, and very forgotten: a year later, when the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the Dayton court decision it wasn't on constitutional grounds, as Darrow and ACLU had hoped for. It was on a technicality: since the fine exceeded $50, the jury was supposed to have fined Scopes, not the judge. The case was dismissed, and for all the hoopla, even though it was a setback for the anti-evolutionists, it did not set a constitutional precedent. So ends the heroic narrative of the Scopes monkey trial, and I know it's a big disappointment to everyone justifiably outraged by Georgia's attempts to remove the word "evolution" from high school science curriculums, who has been invoking it in the last few weeks.
My point is about false victories, and the American tendency to seize onto them. A legal advance may turn out to be futile, or even detrimental, unless it is brought into being for the right reasons. So, if the anti-sodomy case in Texas had been decided on the basis of equal protection (as Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her concurrent opinion), rather than the libertarian-in-ethos right to privacy, the victory, would have been more nominal as it would have done nothing for the stigma deployed by the anti-sodomy laws. It's easy to claim legal precedent, or legal victory. Legal obfuscation, sesquipedalian loopholes, they all create a below-rudimentary understanding of law and its applications, and worse, they contribute to the myth of due process, which, of course, is isomorphic with the myth of checks and balances and the three branches. This unwavering faith, in this myth, is what will let Bush off the hook, yet again, now that he has ordered "an independed investigation" into the intelligence failures leading to the war. People are confident! No one is above the law! But can the public explain, or fuck explantions, even understand, what it meant a couple of months ago, when Aschroft recused himself from the investigation into CIA leak fiasco? It created an illusion of following a procedure to ensure objectivity. How many people know that the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to lead the probe, violates the Justice Department's own regulations with regard to choosing a Special Counsel, which stipulated that "The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government." Fitzgerald, as a current Justice Department employee is ineligible to be a "special counsel." But what we see on the news is some flimsy thin Potemkin Villages of objectivity and self-censure, cardboard cutouts that appear three-dimensional to people blinded by the orange mist. My point is, it's easy to construct heroics. It's too bad when decades later, at a Benjaminian moment of danger, we can't feel the ground beneath us.
* in the play and the movie all the names were fictionalized
I wonder if the terror meme in the U.S. today has gotten to the point that when children are misbehaving, "patriotic" parents tell them to be good or the terrorists will come for them.
The quote in the subject line of this post is the opening line of Osip Mandelsham's poem about Stalin, the one that got him sent to the gulag. In the Russian original, the verb that is translated as "feeling" is chuya, which is a derivative of the actual verb "to feel"--chuvstovat', but has different connotations and nuances. chuvstvovat' is a very plain, proper verb, referring either to articulated emotions, or physical, tactile sensations; chuyat' connotes "feeling" which is more primal, intuitive, paralingual, animalistic. More approrpate to a zeitgeist where fear comes from metallic air, from demagnetized compass needles.
I don't believe in the End of History thesis. But I believe in the bottleneck effect. It works a little like a traffic accident, but with decades, instead of cars, crashing into each other. Hence the collapse of a proper time bracket between "now" and "retro." Hence the pomo bricolage of the 50s and 40s, and now, the 20s coming back to the South. And I don't mean the flapper age, either.
Clarence Darrow must be rolling over in his grave, while the William Jennings Bryan Zombie project is eating brains and gathering its strength back, even though Bryan himself had reasons more complicated and sophisticated for waging his stand at the time than could be dreamt of today.
So, today's lesson is on the Scopes Monkey Trial, which has been diluted by decades into a popularly accessible form, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee, called Inherit The Wind which is dramatic and heroic as plays should be. Later it became a movie, starring Spencer Tracy, who was as dramatic and heroic as Spencer Tracy should be. The play and the movie are historically inaccurate, and have replaced the public memory of the actual trial, as fictionalized accounts tend to do. It has a "feel-good" ending, with the underdog "Scopes"* found guilty, but "Bryan" dying, like, on the spot, and "Darrow" putting the Bible and Evolution books together before leaving the courtroom, which is supposed to symbolize harmony twixt the two in some theistic evolution-type synthesis. Here is the thing that got lost between the cracks of the decades:
From the get-go, the Scopes monkey trial was a test case. And a calculated one at that. It was originally orchestrated by a man named Joe Rappalyea, who presented the town leaders with an ACLU announcement that it would offer its services to anyone challenging the Tennessee anti-evolutionary statute. Rappalyea was convinced that a public challenge of the new law would help put their town in decline on the map, and revivify it. You see, the population of Dayton had shrunk from 3,000 down to 1,800 in a matter of years. He conscripted Scopes for the test case; the prosecutors, Herbert and Sue Hicks were two local attorneys that were friends of Scopes. Rappalyea originally wanted H.G. Wells to head the defense team, but H.G. wasn't interested. Eventually, after William Jennings Bryan, who hadn't practiced law in years, offered to lead the prosecution, Clarence Darrow signed on for the defense, despite ACLU's original reservations due to Darrow's reputation as a "atheistic zealot," and their reticence of the trial turning into a free-for-all ideological attack on religion in general.
The theatrical setting of the whole endeavor sounds fabulous: "A carnival atmosphere pervaded Dayton as the opening of the trial approached in July of 1925. Banners decorated the streets. Lemonade stands were set up. Chimpanzees, said to have been brought to town to testify for the prosecution, performed in a side show on Main Street. Anti- Evolution League members sold copies of T. T. Martin's book Hell and the High School. Holy rollers rolled in the surrounding hills and riverbanks. " [Douglas Linder, An Introduction to the John Scopes (Monkey) Trial]. Unlike the play would have it, Scopes did not receive medieval villagers-with-torches treatment from his fellow townsfolk.
The interesting part is that after Bryan's defeat ( "Bryan, who began his testimony calmly, stumbled badly under Darrow's persistent prodding. At one point the exasperated Bryan said, "I do not think about things I don't think about." Darrow asked, "Do you think about the things you do think about?" Bryan responded, to the derisive laughter of spectators, "Well, sometimes." Both old warriors grew testy as the examination continued. Bryan accused Darrow of attempting to "slur at the Bible." He said that he would continue to answer Darrow's impertinent questions because "I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee--." Darrow interrupted his witness by saying, "I object to your statement" and to "your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes." After that outburst, Raulston ordered the court adjourned. The next day, Raulston ruled that Bryan could not return to the stand and that his testimony the previous day should be stricken from evidence."-ibid, emphasis mine), Darrow asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so that the case could go to the Tennessee Supreme Court; the jury obliged, and the judge fined Scopes a nominal fee for breaking the law.
What happenned next is very important, and very forgotten: a year later, when the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the Dayton court decision it wasn't on constitutional grounds, as Darrow and ACLU had hoped for. It was on a technicality: since the fine exceeded $50, the jury was supposed to have fined Scopes, not the judge. The case was dismissed, and for all the hoopla, even though it was a setback for the anti-evolutionists, it did not set a constitutional precedent. So ends the heroic narrative of the Scopes monkey trial, and I know it's a big disappointment to everyone justifiably outraged by Georgia's attempts to remove the word "evolution" from high school science curriculums, who has been invoking it in the last few weeks.
My point is about false victories, and the American tendency to seize onto them. A legal advance may turn out to be futile, or even detrimental, unless it is brought into being for the right reasons. So, if the anti-sodomy case in Texas had been decided on the basis of equal protection (as Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her concurrent opinion), rather than the libertarian-in-ethos right to privacy, the victory, would have been more nominal as it would have done nothing for the stigma deployed by the anti-sodomy laws. It's easy to claim legal precedent, or legal victory. Legal obfuscation, sesquipedalian loopholes, they all create a below-rudimentary understanding of law and its applications, and worse, they contribute to the myth of due process, which, of course, is isomorphic with the myth of checks and balances and the three branches. This unwavering faith, in this myth, is what will let Bush off the hook, yet again, now that he has ordered "an independed investigation" into the intelligence failures leading to the war. People are confident! No one is above the law! But can the public explain, or fuck explantions, even understand, what it meant a couple of months ago, when Aschroft recused himself from the investigation into CIA leak fiasco? It created an illusion of following a procedure to ensure objectivity. How many people know that the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to lead the probe, violates the Justice Department's own regulations with regard to choosing a Special Counsel, which stipulated that "The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government." Fitzgerald, as a current Justice Department employee is ineligible to be a "special counsel." But what we see on the news is some flimsy thin Potemkin Villages of objectivity and self-censure, cardboard cutouts that appear three-dimensional to people blinded by the orange mist. My point is, it's easy to construct heroics. It's too bad when decades later, at a Benjaminian moment of danger, we can't feel the ground beneath us.
* in the play and the movie all the names were fictionalized
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sorry if you don't feel like reading this....
Date: 2004-02-03 08:09 pm (UTC)- a fortiori-
Dean Milk v City of Madison(340 U.S. 349, 71 S.CT. 295), Nebbia v New York (291 U.S. 502), and Lochner v New York (198 U.S. 45) were about interstate commerce and freedom to contract yet were REALLY about public health, class discrimination and monopolies, respectively.
It doesn't matter what grounds a result is reached on, the parties want justice. Lawerence v Texas decided on 14th Amendment Equal Protection would, like Brown v Board of Ed., require injunctive relief at equity. Remember that Lawrence, like Bowers in Bowers v Hardwick, was never actually prosecuted but only charged. A Texas statute struck down on Equal Protection would only arguably have had a lesser impact, it really would depends on the opinions dicta, whether it denounced the statute or not. Dicta is not binding. I don't really think an equal protection argument would be detrimental or false victory for civil rights groups, but the Due Process - Right to Privacy argument is good, yet...
Shit, most early civil rights cases were brought on grounds that obfuscated their true purpose, that was Thurgood Marshall's plan in Brown. Ruth Bader Ginzburg followed that plan in the 70's with gender-based discrimination cases (reed v reed, i think).
I can't think of any legal advance that turned out to be detrimental. even dred scott and plessy were not thought of as advances or victories.
The "myth" of due process has allowed over the past 100 years of progressive jurisprudence the opportunity for millions the right to vote, contract freely, love and marry whom they chose, hold jobs in professional occupations that were previously closed to them, travel interstate and receive public lodging and access to integrated restaurants, vote, run for office, and receive unsegregated and more equal (not just separate) primary through graduate educations.
Do not these results vindicate the sometimes dicey grounds their causes were justified with?
the us government is said to have a constitution written by geniuses, so that morons can operate it correctly. Think of chimps in a self-piloting space shuttle. Separation of powers insures that the branches fight continually with each other, for more power, while zealously covetous of individual sovereignty (federalist #56, i think). I really think todays climate is not even as near as bad as McCarthy era 50's or japanese internments in WWII, or the antebellum south, or america circa 1798 with treason & sedition acts being inforced against suspected french sympathizers.
and these systems of checks and balances and sovereign power pitted against sovereign power are american, but descended from england at it's civil war, and ultimately the classical world, based upon seemingly immutable deductions about human nature.
Re: sorry if you don't feel like reading this....
Date: 2004-02-04 09:43 am (UTC)I wasn't saying that the grounds on which legal decisions were reached somehow undermined the advances of these decisions. i was just saying that that makes them more vulnerable. like, the whole "viability" of the fetus issue in Roe vs. Wade; with technological advances, viability becomes a tricky issue, a fetus can survive in vitro as early as beginning of the second trimester, this gives ammunition to people who scream that Roe vs.Wade needs to be reassessed.
The reason why I brought up the Scopes trial was because with all the idiocy going on in Georgia, in the last few weeks I have heard/read people refer to the monkey trial, saying well-meaning but somewhat incorrect things like "they can't ban evolution in public schools, that was declared unconstitutional in the Scopes trial." And while obviously the Scopes decision was a setback for anti-evolutionists, it wasn't the kind of constitutional victory that ACLU & Darrow had hoped for, which would have set a precedent that would have been useful today. There was no precedent, there was no decision & justification. The decision was reversed and thrown out of court on a technicality, and the State Supreme Court said it wanted nothing more to do with it. So I wouldn't call it a victory, exactly, even though you could teach evolution in schools after that. Obviously, this is just my impression, from my dilletante understanding of the way the law works. But I've done a lot of reading on the subject and that seems to be the case...
Re: sorry if you don't feel like reading this....
Date: 2004-02-04 12:30 pm (UTC)Re-reading Lawrence again, i see how the right-to-privacy due process line of cases had to prevail, in order to overrule Bowers. The court would never state that though, seeing as how Bowers was so ridiculed, it would discredit and politicize the court. (side note - did you know sandy dee DATED billy rehnqvist as undergrads at Stanford?!)
Anyway, I've never studied the scopes monkey trial in any capacity. But yeah, my friend at an Alamaba law school says that shit is fucked up down there.
Re: sorry if you don't feel like reading this....
Date: 2004-02-05 08:57 am (UTC)I did't know they dated as undergrads. That's weird and creepy.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-04 06:46 pm (UTC)>let Bush off the hook, yet again, now that he has
>ordered "an independed investigation" into the >intelligence failures leading to the war.
here's an alternate theory about why he will be let off the hook.
consider the following examples:
1. nixon's lies are discovered and he is nearly impeached and removed from office. nixon: repub, house&senate: democratic
2. reagan attempts to set up a secret gov't and trade arms in exchange for hostages. this is investigated by the house and many officials are indicted. reagan: repub, house: democratic
3. shrub's dad pardons everyone involved, including those who could point the finger at him. then he leaves office. there is no further investigation.
4. clinton is impeached by the house for no reason, and the senate throws out the finding. clinton: democrat, house: repub.
the conclusion i draw from this is that if there is political advantage to be gotten, regardless of whether there is a crime or not, then there will be an investigation followed by consequences. there is no political advantage to be gotten from the house or senate (repub) investigating shrub&co. if he remains the resident next january, then there is still no political advantage (assuming the house&senate don't change parties). and if shrub is sent home, then *possibly* there will be a real investigation with consequences if the house or senate changes party, but only maybe. more likely, even if the white house and both house&senate changed party, then it would just be "let bygones be bygones, we've gotten all the political advantage we want." only if shrub stays resident and either the house or senate (or both) changes party will there be an investigation.
-mjm
Re:
Date: 2004-02-05 09:02 am (UTC)Now would be a good time, in their own interest, for Tenet & present employees (and not just ex-employees and defectors) to stand up and say, "yes, Cheney and Rumsfield were breathing down our neck and cooking intelligence."
Re:
Date: 2004-02-09 06:00 pm (UTC)-mjm
Re:
Date: 2004-02-09 06:27 pm (UTC)Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."
http://truthout.org/docs_04/020804F.shtml
Last year, the CIA was discrediting claims about WMD, according to the people around Shrub, but this year, it is the CIA's "evidence" ("we were all wrong" - D. Kaye) that is to blame for the absence of WMD.
these people have no shame and will say ANYTHING that suits their purposes of the moment. (latest example: see, shrub's interview yesterday)
-mjm