In the News
Photo courtesy of Markus Winkler via Unsplash
Saturday, April 27th, 2024
What a week! And I don’t mean in a good way.
There were four big stories this past week. 1) The passage of the military assistance bill along with the squeeze play on TikTok. 2) The protests on college campuses. 3) The oral arguments before the Supreme Court concerning presidential immunity. 4) The criminal trial in New York of Donald Trump. Without going into detail ...
1) Obviously (at least to me), the passage of the military assistance bill is a good thing. Ukraine desperately needs the equipment it will provide. It is disgraceful that it took this long for it to pass because it has allowed Russia to regain some degree of momentum and caused some deterioration in Ukrainian morale. But the facts of war remain consistent: You can neither win nor lose without a lot of civilians being killed. The facts of the Republican-led House remain constant as well: It’s a chaotic mess with too few members interested in governing and too many interested in performance, not to mention too many disinterested in maintaining America’s role in the world.
About TikTok: If there are genuine security concerns related to China, then it's reasonable to require its sale by China or banishment in America. However, I don’t see this as a simple issue of free speech, as some argue. There are always alternative platforms to express one's views or to get one’s news. TikTok, after all, is just one of many.
2) The pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses. What a mess! Never think for a moment that anything that involves Israel and the Palestinians is simple. There are four thousand or more years of history on the part of both peoples to easily condense it into one overly reductive formula. Young people often see things only in black-and-white terms, and reality only exists within their lifetime experiences. Besides, for there to be some kind of settlement, both sides (Israel and Hamas) would have to give up on their objectives. Those objectives are mutually exclusive.
One of the least fortunate things about large-scale demonstrations around hot-button issues is that they often get defined by their most extreme participants. Allowing extremists to get a pass tends to taint all demonstrators. The extremism of a few is like an infection. It is contagious and affects the many by reputation, if nothing else.
By most accounts, demonstrators have mostly been peaceful regardless of whether one agrees with their pro-Palestinian agenda or not. But those who applaud the actions of Hamas on October 7th are deplorable, particularly when it comes to faculty members, even if I think they have every right to make their opinions public. On the other hand, demonstrators cannot legitimately claim their right to free speech while, at the same time, insisting that their opponents have no such right. That is not free speech.
Obviously, there is a considerable amount of anti-Semitism being expressed. Some of it is overt, some … well, let’s call it anti-Semitism adjacent, as in defining Zionism as racism or calling for Israel to be eliminated as a nation. Do they have a right to be anti-Semites? Yes. Do anti-Black racists have a right to their bigotry? Yes. Both are detestable. But you cannot, in academia at least, prohibit any expression of race-based racism in the classroom while simultaneously permitting anti-Semitism (or my anti-Semitism adjacent formulation) both in the classroom and on the wider campus. And your overriding concern is micro-aggressions in the classroom?!
A question: Is academia paying a price for its apparent leftward drift in the liberal arts since the 1960s? Truthfully, I don’t know if that drift is even true, even if it looks like it; I’m too far removed from academia. But given the (to me) overly restrictive policies regarding speech in the classroom, in being overly concerned for the “hurt feelings” of students and of micro-aggressions against particular groups of students (in particular, the various People of Color and LGBTQ communities) while at the same time ignoring the concerns of Jews (and perhaps others), seems kind of inherently bigoted to me. It amounts to defining permissible and impermissible ideas. It’s a kind of left-wing version of what some on the extreme right do, like Ron DeSantis in Florida.
Finally, colleges cannot treat their students as adults outside the classroom and as children inside it. Perhaps too many of America’s finest academic institutions have, indeed, lost their way.
3) It really would have been better had the Supreme Court not taken up Trump’s claims of unlimited immunity and allowed the previous court rulings to stand. Instead, one can foresee some of the justices trying to carve out some kind of test to determine what specific acts constitute official and private behavior. No matter how many conservative justices have railed against the notion of courts making law, this court has managed to do it in several cases. For example, the negation of the plain reading of the 14th Amendment because it would lead to chaos if implemented as written. Not that they (and their liberal colleagues) were wrong in their assessment, but they obviously are perfectly willing and able to abandon their so-called principles and make up new laws when they want to. Regardless, Trump’s attorney argued, in effect, that if President Biden had candidate Trump (or anyone else) murdered, that would be in his official capacity and, therefore, immune from prosecution forever. Or, as Louis XIV said, “L’etat, c’est moi. It is nonsense. The Trump’s lawyers know it. I’m sure the justices all know it (however much some of them may want to allow it). As for Trump, I have no idea what believes in terms of the Constitution. But since he doesn’t care much for it or any law, it doesn’t really matter; if president, he will do whatever he can convince his minions to do. The more interesting question is whether any court could stop him. After all, the rule of law exists only if there is someone willing to enforce it.
4) In the trial in New York, there is little question about what Trump did regarding Stormy Daniels along with Karen McDougal and the planting of fake stories about Hillary Clinton. The only legal question is whether what he did in the case of Stormy Daniels was a crime. What is blatantly clear is that we are all being covered in the sleaze and slime that accompanies Trump wherever he goes. Trump corrupts everything and every individual around him. It’s quite extraordinary. In carrying that slime into the Oval Office, he makes us a part of his corruption. He slimes us all, all the time. Should we re-elect him, we would become an integral part of the sleaze; we would be knowingly embracing the slime. I don’t understand why his followers don’t understand this. Even more, I don’t understand the support he gets from evangelical pastors and orthodox Jewish rabbis. Is the achievement of their public policy goals worth the corruption of their souls as well as ours? The answer, so far, is self-evident.
Obviously, I could write lots more about all these stories. They are all big and complicated. And they matter. But by the time 6 p.m. rolled around on Friday, I just wanted to hide away from the world for the weekend.
But then something happened.
My wife and I had been invited to attend an event in Coxsackie, NY, put on by Capital Independent Media, a company that owns five local newspapers in the Albany, Columbia, and Greene County areas. The event’s purpose was to honor fifteen individuals and five non-profits in the tri-county area for their dedication to public service. I don’t mean politicians. I mean individuals who seek to find ways to help their fellow citizens both as individuals and as communities. The individual honorees didn’t do these things as part of their jobs; they did them out of their feelings of communal responsibility. Their reward was not financial but in seeing how their efforts helped to transform lives.
Throughout the whole evening, I didn’t hear a word about politics. I have no idea if any of the honorees or attendees were Democrats or Republicans, but given the rural nature of much of the area, I’m sure there were both. But this was not about politics. This was about people being good neighbors, about people helping their fellow man without looking for a reward beyond knowing that they had helped — good people doing good.
After a week of being immersed in the world’s muck, there was, at last, some good news. Good news matters, too.