[Mb-civic] Politics of Love and "If Bush appoints Supreme Court majority"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are 2 little essays that may inspire you and scare you.  If you have 
nervous energy approaching Nov. 2 and wanna do something to channel it, 
you can become a telephone activist to drum up votes by going to 
http://calls.johnkerry.com or to  www.voteallyourvalues.org.

----

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1019-21.htm
  Published on Monday, October 19, 2004 by the Boston Globe  

A Politics of Love  
by James Carroll 
  
"We must love one another or die." After 9/11, W.H. Auden's poem 
"September 1, 1939" crackled through the Internet because that line spoke to 
the urgent longing many Americans felt. I cited it myself in a column three 
years ago this week. Auden may have repented of that sentiment, once 
Hitler's purpose became clear, but the words had special poignancy in 2001. 
A tremendous national cohesion bound Americans, and citizens of the world 
sent us messages of concern and sympathy. Love emerged as a public 
virtue. The catastrophe yielded a rare communion. 
How long ago that seems. Has America ever felt so divided within itself, ever 
been so cut off from other nations? As I heard a friend observe the other day, 
the election is laying bare a split between two groups, each of which views 
the other with similar mystified alarm: How can they think that way? Don't 
they realize what disasters will follow if their candidate wins? Partisan disdain 
is as absolute as it is mutual. Both sides recognize the stakes of the election 
as mortal, with one fearing the flames of unnecessary wars, and the other 
fearing yet more attacks like 9/11. Indeed, fear may be the only thing the blue 
states and the red have in common, but what we mainly seem to fear is the 
other side. 

An adaptation of the Auden line was used to express a public fear once 
before, during an election that not only exposed an early form of this national 
division, but made it worse. The infamous "daisy" commercial, in which a 
young girl is seen counting the petals of a flower, as a voice counts down to a 
mushroom cloud explosion, ended with Lyndon Johnson himself saying, "We 
must either love each other. Or we must die." 

The commercial branded Barry Goldwater as a nuclear madman, effectively 
suggesting that a vote for him was a vote for death, and so the ad was not 
really about love at all. The rage that conservatives felt at the smearing of 
their candidate (despite Goldwater's expressed willingness to entertain the 
use of nukes) was part of what mobilized their eventual arrival as the 
dominant force in American politics. What evolved into the unyielding red-
blue divide of the current electoral season can be understood as having 
begun in 1964. 

The daisy commercial resonates still because a subliminal fear of nuclear 
war planted itself in the American unconscious. Nuclear fear is unlike what 
might be called normal fear, because the threat transcends concern for 
individual mortality, calling into question the mortality of the human species -- 
the fate of the Earth, in Jonathan Schell's phrase. The death of the future 
itself is what we fear. The taboo broken by Lyndon Johnson's daisy 
commercial assault on Goldwater was the taboo against speaking openly of 
nuclear war as a present danger. After 1964, the danger did not go away, but 
we Americans would never openly contemplate it again. 

Ironically, because our nuclear fear was never fully reckoned with, we did not 
remove its source -- the massive nuclear arsenal -- even after its Cold War 
justification vanished. And today's endemic American fear of terrorism, 
whether defined in red politics or blue, is rooted in this unacknowledged fear 
of nuclear catastrophe. After decades of implicitly waiting for the mushroom 
cloud to appear over the nation, we saw the clouds of ash rising from the 
World Trade Center as a version of that horror. As I heard the scholar John 
Dower observe, the use of the term "Ground Zero" in New York is an 
unconscious appropriation of the authentic Ground Zeros in Japan. That is 
why 9/11 traumatized us out of all proportion to the scale of destruction, 
which, while tragic, was hardly world-historic. 

America is palpably afraid, but of what? The appeal in Auden's line is rooted 
in the sense that something new has happened in history. But the change to 
which we are desperately looking for ways to respond occurred not in 1939, 
and not in 2001, but in 1945, when we ourselves brought forth the mushroom 
cloud that haunts us still. 

To say, "We must love one another or die" is only to say that, among nations, 
a new communal politics defines the only future there can be. But such life-
or-death global change must begin here, and within this nation, politics is 
more contemptuous than ever. If hate defines us at home, how can we hope 
for love abroad? There is the thing to fear. 

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book 
is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War." 

© 2004 Boston Globe 

 -------------------
 
 
Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court

October 18, 2004
 By ADAM COHEN 

Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could
be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States
might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing
Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel.
The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being
brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and
environmental protections could disappear. 

It hardly sounds like a winning platform, and of course
President Bush isn't openly espousing these positions. But
he did say in his last campaign that his favorite Supreme
Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and
the nominations he has made to the lower courts bear that
out. Justices Scalia and Thomas are often called
"conservative," but that does not begin to capture their
philosophies. Both vehemently reject many of the core
tenets of modern constitutional law. 

For years, Justices Scalia and Thomas have been lobbing
their judicial Molotov cocktails from the sidelines, while
the court proceeded on its moderate-conservative path. But
given the ages and inclinations of the current justices, it
is quite possible that if Mr. Bush is re-elected, he will
get three appointments, enough to forge a new majority that
would turn the extreme Scalia-Thomas worldview into the law
of the land. 

There is every reason to believe Roe v. Wade would quickly
be overturned. Mr. Bush ducked a question about his views
on Roe in the third debate. But he sent his base a coded
message in the second debate, with an odd reference to the
Dred Scott case. Dred Scott, an 1857 decision upholding
slavery, is rarely mentioned today, except in right-wing
legal circles, where it is often likened to Roe.
(Anti-abortion theorists say that the court refused to see
blacks as human in Dred Scott and that the same thing
happened to fetuses in Roe.) For more than a decade,
Justices Scalia and Thomas have urged their colleagues to
reverse Roe and "get out of this area, where we have no
right to be." 

If Roe is lost, the Center for Reproductive Rights warns,
there's a good chance that 30 states, home to more than 70
million women, will outlaw abortions within a year; some
states may take only weeks. Criminalization will sweep well
beyond the Bible Belt: Ohio could be among the first to
drive young women to back-alley abortions and prosecute
doctors. 

If Justices Scalia and Thomas become the Constitution's
final arbiters, the rights of racial minorities, gay people
and the poor will be rolled back considerably. Both men
dissented from the Supreme Court's narrow ruling upholding
the University of Michigan's affirmative-action program,
and appear eager to dismantle a wide array of diversity
programs. When the court struck down Texas' "Homosexual
Conduct" law last year, holding that the police violated
John Lawrence's right to liberty when they raided his home
and arrested him for having sex there, Justices Scalia and
Thomas sided with the police. 

They were just as indifferent to the plight of "M.L.B.," a
poor mother of two from Mississippi. When her parental
rights were terminated, she wanted to appeal, but
Mississippi would not let her because she could not afford
a court fee of $2,352.36. The Supreme Court held that she
had a constitutional right to appeal. But Justices Scalia
and Thomas dissented, arguing that if M.L.B. didn't have
the money, her children would have to be put up for
adoption. 

That sort of cruelty is a theme running through many
Scalia-Thomas opinions. A Louisiana inmate sued after he
was shackled and then punched and kicked by two prison
guards while a supervisor looked on. The court ruled that
the beating, which left the inmate with a swollen face,
loosened teeth and a cracked dental plate, violated the
prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But Justices
Scalia and Thomas insisted that the Eighth Amendment was
not violated by the "insignificant" harm the inmate
suffered. 

This year, the court heard the case of a man with a court
appearance in rural Tennessee who was forced to either
crawl out of his wheelchair and up to the second floor or
be carried up by court officers he worried would drop him.
The man crawled up once, but when he refused to do it
again, he was arrested. The court ruled that Tennessee
violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by not
providing an accessible courtroom, but Justices Scalia and
Thomas said it didn't have to. 

A Scalia-Thomas court would dismantle the wall between
church and state. Justice Thomas gave an indication of just
how much in his opinion in a case upholding Ohio's school
voucher program. He suggested, despite many Supreme Court
rulings to the contrary, that the First Amendment
prohibition on establishing a religion may not apply to the
states. If it doesn't, the states could adopt particular
religions, and use tax money to proselytize for them.
Justices Scalia and Thomas have also argued against basic
rights of criminal suspects, like the Miranda warning about
the right to remain silent. 

President Bush claims to want judges who will apply law,
not make it. But Justices Scalia and Thomas are judicial
activists, eager to use the fast-expanding federalism
doctrine to strike down laws that protect people's rights.
Last year, they dissented from a decision upholding the
Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees most workers
up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a loved one.
They said Congress did not have that power. They have
expressed a desire to strike down air pollution and
campaign finance laws for similar reasons. 

Neither President Bush nor John Kerry has said much about
Supreme Court nominations, wary of any issue whose impact
on undecided voters cannot be readily predicted. But voters
have to think about the Supreme Court. If President Bush
gets the chance to name three young justices who share the
views of Justices Scalia and Thomas, it could fundamentally
change America for decades. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/18/opinion/18mon3.html?ex=1099113917&ei=1&
en=90ef409756daa4cf

----


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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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