Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  The truth is that the United States has essentially accepted violence—and particularly brutal sexual violence—as an inevitable consequence of incarcerating criminals. Indeed, prison assault has become a cliché within mainstream culture. The news and entertainment media refer to it nonchalantly. Prime-time TV shows, such as Oz, depict the most awful scenes of rape and carnage. Popular TV dramas routinely depict police taunting potential defendants with threats of the violence and sexual abuse they will face in prison. Indeed, last year 7UP ran a TV advertisement in which a teasing threat of sexual assault in prison was part of a lighthearted pitch for selling soda. The advertisement ran for two months without objection and was only pulled after criticisms from prisoners' rights groups.

  So accepted is assault as part of prison life that an outsider might conclude that on some basic, if unarticulated level, we think it an appropriate element of the punishment regimen. Perhaps we believe that allowing prisons to be places of horrific acts will serve as part of the utilitarian deterrent effect of criminal sentences. Or perhaps we recognize that prison rape and assault are an unavoidable byproduct of the rape and assault in society generally, so that our goal here is not utilitarian but retributive: that is, even though we cannot eliminate rape and assault, we can at least reallocate them. Thus, when we purport to incapacitate convicted criminals, what we are really doing is shifting to them, the most "deserving" among us, the burden of victimization.

  The Prison Rape Elimination Act is better than nothing—unless, of course, it represents the last gesture politicians intend to make in the direction of addressing this problem. Assuming the study does not blinker reality by denying the prevalence of the problem, it will presumably mandate or exhort state and federal officials to monitor, train, and discipline prison staff and enhance inmate security—all under a threat of withdrawal of federal funds or the firing of negligent officials. Of course, the government would thereby be implicitly forcing prison officials to spend vast amounts of money they do not have and that Congress is unlikely to give state legislatures in the first place.

  Perhaps while this federal study is under way, there are other, more honest ways of acknowledging what the American prison system has created. Perhaps every sentencing judge should require that a defendant headed for prison be given extensive "pre-rape counseling" in the hope that he or she can take some small personal steps to reduce the risk of attack. Or perhaps we could require judges to demand data about the differential risks of rape and assault for different types of prisoners in different prisons and begin to factor such data into any sentence. "You committed murder, so let's send you somewhere where you're really likely to be raped." In that way we will be at least as brutally honest with ourselves as we are literally brutal with our prisoners.

  Moore's Law

  The immorality of the Ten Commandments.

  By Christopher Hitchens

  Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 2:04 PM PT

  The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).

  The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.

  So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art—and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). The next instruction is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant, sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute prohibitions were best avoided.

  There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole enterprise.

  In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.

  One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.

  It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

  "Natural-Born" Killer

  Abolish the idiotic constitutional clause barring immigrants from the presidency.

  By Jefferson Morley

  Posted Tuesday, Feb.
25, 2003, at 12:57 PM PT

  Any section of the Constitution that kept Henry Kissinger out of the White House can't be all bad, but Article II, Section 1, Clause 5, is pretty close. The clause, which forbids anybody but a "natural-born" citizen from becoming president of the United States, is a national embarrassment.

  The discriminatory effects of Article II are not small. The last U.S. Census counted 12.5 million foreign-born, naturalized citizens, about 4 percent of the population. ("Natural born" is not the same thing as American born. John McCain, for example, was born in Panama, but to American parents. He is a "natural-born" American citizen.)

  Eliminating the natural-born clause might expand the presidential talent pool and improve the contest. It would almost certainly foster a more ethnically diverse field of contenders. Say you're a Democrat looking for new faces. You might wish for a telegenic, up-and-coming woman with executive experience. What about Michigan's new governor, Jennifer Granholm? Forget it. She was born in Canada. Maybe you think a Democratic ticket should include someone with business experience. How about liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros as a candidate? Nope. He was born in Hungary.

  If you're a Republican tired of candidates named Bush, don't bother weighing the presidential potential of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. She was born in Taiwan. Perhaps you think it's high time the GOP cultivated a Hispanic candidate for the Oval Office, someone like Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez from Florida. Sorry, he was born in Cuba. Do you yearn for another charismatic Californian with proven screen appeal a la Ronald Reagan? There will be no President Schwarzenegger: His Austrian origins bar him.

  No natural-born requirement exists for the vice presidency, but constitutional scholars agree that an immigrant vice president could not assume the presidency upon the death or incapacitation of the president. This effectively prevents an immigrant vice presidential candidate, since the entire purpose of the veep is to be able to succeed the president.

  The actual effects of the natural-born clause are not as important as its symbolism. Barring immigrant citizens from the White House is a pointless insult. Such nativism is weirdly out of place in the charter of a multicultural nation where immigrants run our largest businesses, command our armies, and preside over our courts. The natural-born clause elevates the accident of birth over the accomplishments of the individual. It compromises the American faith that social mobility and openness foster national strength.

  The natural-born clause has an unimpressive pedigree. Stanford historian Jack Rakove says it was drafted by a committee at the 1787 constitutional convention, which was charged with designing a chief executive position for the new American government. The language was "silently inserted into what became Article II and was adopted without debate" by the constitutional convention, Rakove says. Nor was the provision discussed during the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, he adds.

  The founders' motivation, Rakove says, "was almost certainly the fear of foreign influence over an official who would be commander in chief of the armed forces and would have significant foreign relations duties and so on."

  But if there is a risk of undue foreign influence on the president, a proposed constitutional amendment introduced in 2001 by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., would take care of it. Under the language of House Joint Resolution 47, anybody who had been a citizen for 20 years would be eligible for the White House. Frank plans to reintroduce a version of the bill this year.

  It doesn't take a Karl Rove to recognize that abolishing the natural-born clause could be a winning political issue for either party. The most immediate beneficiaries of eliminating the natural-born clause would be Hispanics, the country's largest ethnic minority. For Republicans, such a constitutional amendment would give substance to their rhetoric of inclusion. For Democrats, it would signal to Hispanics that the party is serious about expanding opportunity for immigrants. For either party to take the lead in pushing for Congress and state legislatures to approve HJR 47 would encourage the other to get on board, if only in self-defense.

  Granholm in 2008! From the White North to the White House!

  Dallas Through the Looking Glass

  The plot to link JFK's death and Watergate.

  By David Greenberg

  Posted Thursday, Nov. 20, 2003, at 10:55 AM PT

  In November 1973, on the 10th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, the New Left muckraking magazine Ramparts ran a long essay titled "From Dallas to Watergate: The Longest Cover-Up." The author, Peter Dale Scott, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, put forth the idea that Kennedy's murder and the scandals then engulfing the Nixon administration were linked. Though a reader could search the article in vain for any direct connection, Scott made much of the hints of what he called a "sinister overlapping of conspiracies." Noting that key players in both incidents had ties to organized crime and U.S. intelligence networks, he claimed that secret American efforts to kill Fidel Castro held the key to an ongoing massive cover-up.

  In late 1973 theories like Scott's were proliferating. From that historical vantage point, the twin traumas of Dallas and Watergate seemed to bracket a decade of disorientation and dashed promise. Many Americans, wondering how an era ripe with hope could devolve so fast into turmoil and crisis, began to reach for conspiracy theories to explain where "the '60s" had gone awry. This was the moment, with dreams of revolution (or merely reform) now dead, when outlandish notions about Kennedy's death—and, more important, a cynicism about the workings of American democracy—took root.

  Elaborate speculations about Kennedy's murder had begun, of course, earlier—almost from the moment he was shot. Shock and grief, along with lingering mysteries surrounding the killing and the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, stoked doubt that a lowly maniac could really snuff out such an august leader. But what started as normal human disbelief evolved in the next decade into a conscious program of radical skepticism, especially among the ranks of the New Left.

  From authors like Mark Lane and Edward Jay Epstein (whose 1966 books poked holes in the official Warren Commission Report holding that Oswald had "acted alone") to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (who in 1967, amid much fanfare, indicted a local businessman in the alleged plot), assassination sleuths imagined a rogue's gallery of villains—Soviet agents, CIA operatives, Mafiosi, oil barons, Fidel Castro, even Lyndon B. Johnson—enmeshed in the intrigue.

  Garrison's failure to convict his suspect set back the nascent conspiracy movement. But soon the all-too-real secret plotting of the Nixon administration revived speculation. "With Watergate, in '73 and '74, you start to see a new wave of theorizing about it," said Max Holland, who is completing a history of the Warren Commission. "Groups start springing up independently, looking backward at the assassination through the lens of Watergate." Watergate, after all, was a conspiracy—a grand jury named the president an "unindicted co-conspirator"—and the crisis seemed to validate the worst suspicions about the dark machinations of government officials.

  It only whetted suspicions that certain people and places from assassination lore resurfaced in the Nixon saga. It turned out that Nixon had visited Dallas the day before Kennedy's assassination—his law firm represented Pepsi-Cola, whose bottlers were meeting there—and the coincidence piqued those who were inclined to implicate Tricky Dick. Skeptics pounced, too, on learning that some of the men who burgled the Democratic Party headquarters in June 1972 had participated in the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs 11 years earlier. And when Nixon's successor, Gerald R. Ford, pardoned the ousted president in September 1974, conspiracists, aware of Ford's service on the Warren Commission, concluded that the new chief executive was simply sealing the grand cover-up once more.

  Some, enterprisingly, sought to link Dallas and Watergate in a single octopus-like plot. Mae Brussell, a Stanford graduate, had spent much of the 1960s cross-referencing the 26-volume Warren Report into a 27,000-page concordance, according to P
aul Krassner, then editor of the underground paper the Realist. (Now deceased, she still inspires assassination buffs who call themselves "Brussell Sprouts.") When she heard about the fateful break-in, she recognized certain names and affiliations from her research and banged out a 21-page article for the August 1972 issue of the Realist. As in Peter Dale Scott's Ramparts piece, the exact argument was hard to find. But the thrust was clear: that a clandestine government serving the interests of military and industrial hard-liners had murdered Kennedy and was responsible for the Nixon scandals then coming to light.