Contradiction round-up

The professional pollsters at www.fivethirtyeight.com point out that any question with the word ‘illegal’ in it is bound to attract a certain kneejerk response, as in, ‘Do you support the state of Arizona’s attempts to end illegal immigration?’ A large sector, often a majority, will answer yes to that without further ado.

I wonder what the response would have been a few years ago if someone had asked the question, ‘Do you support President Bush’s illegal detention of prisoners accused of terrorism-related crimes?’ Or how about, ‘Do you support the illegal use of torture to extract information from detainees?’

Nor do I recall anyone bothering to poll the public on this one: ‘Do you believe the government should be allowed to wiretap telephone conversations even when the law prohibits it?’ That might have generated an interesting set of numbers before Congress (including one Barack Obama) mooted the argument by absolving the government snoops and their telecom enablers by passing a convenient law ex post facto.

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And speaking of legal niceties, the Times had an interesting piece this week on how the New York Police Department has thumbed its collective nose at the courts by continuing to maintain and consult its database on collars for ‘suspicion’, which disproportionately affect young black and Latino men. That hardly raised an eyebrow—after all, when you can shoot somebody 50 times and get off, no one really expects you to conform to the dictates of The Law.

Also this week there was a rather dreary piece in the Village Voice on the continuing and failing efforts to get mob influence out of the New York unit of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Twenty years after the first receivership and supposed clean-up by a court-appointed monitor, the latest (No. 5) was found to have succumbed to the ample grease and enabled employers to cheat the union’s members of their just wages and benefits. Between the lines you catch a persistent whiff of tolerance of the ongoing activities of organized crime in our fair city. ‘Crime’ as in illegality.

Coincidentally perhaps but probably not, another Times piece outlined the continuing ‘inability’ of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs our busses and subways, to steer clear of mobbed-up contractors, despite repeated warnings. The article noted ‘the authority’s persistent failure, despite its budget problems, to aggressively vet subcontractors in an industry where corruption, fraud and abuse are widespread’.

Reading between the lines, that would mean something like, ‘The MTA constantly does business with organized crime, and nobody really gives a shit’.

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Double-standards abound and are depressingly facile for our biped brethren, as summed up in the hoary quip, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. A major powwow on nuclear non-proliferation ended this week with the Israelis objecting to being singled out, despite the fact that they singled themselves out by obtaining nuclear weapons and introducing them to the Middle East tinderbox.

Ironic that we can go to war over a phony threat of nuclear weaponry entering the region (Iraq) and get our knickers all in knots over a vague possibility of same next door (Iran), all the while refusing to even discuss the already existing Israeli bomb. Who can argue that the fanatic racists now in power in Tel Aviv are less inclined to use it than the Iranian thugs?

In the end, as George W. and his friends demonstrated in the fall of 2000, when The Law doesn’t suit your purpose, there are many ways to get around it. Although the rule of law becomes quite real once it disappears into a police state, the everyday appeal to respect for legality nearly always reflects a highly politicized discourse. We enjoy pretending that we worship at this altar, but more often than not, we are indulging our extra-legal wishes, much as we listen contentedly to sermons denouncing sinners—that is, other people.