The Authoritarian Mindset

Did you know that the President has authorized the killing of an American citizen based on secret evidence without any judicial oversight? How could this possibly be legally justified?

In the fullest administration statement to date, Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, said in a March 24 speech the drone strikes against Al Qaeda and its allies were lawful as part of the military action authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as well as under the general principle of self-defense. By those rules, he said, such targeted killing was not assassination, which is banned by executive order.

That is to say, wherever there sits a suspected terrorist (suspected based on secret evidence, remember), there is a war zone. In these sorts of places we send unmanned drones, drones that have killed about 14 terrorists for every 687 civilians. Given that we tend to trumpet this whole rule of law thing (ya’know, pillar of our government and all) we ought to probably ask how it is we know this terrorist is a terrorist if he hasn’t been convicted of any terrorism related charges. But that would be a silly question, al-Awlaki is a terrorist because the President says so. That’s the authoritarian mindset. At least somebody is mad about that:

But I’ll be god damned if I’m going to pretend it is ok to start ordering the assassination of American citizens, even if it is done “legally” and ordered by politicians I generally like. This really is not a tough call at all. This is not because I am some crazy civil liberties absolutist. This is just basic common sense, and this kind of thing would set an absolutely horrible precedent. It is beyond me how anyone could get upset about Gitmo and Abu Gharaib and then think assassination of citizens is ok. Personally, I’ll take terrorized by guard dogs and waterboarded over a bullet to the brain pan.

Kagan: The Quiet Careerist

Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan represents one of the worst features of liberal academia, the conscious effort to approach profound injustice with dispassionate objectivity. Scholars who either refuse, or are incapable of, expressing genuine moral outrage towards the more nefarious aspects of our political establishment (like illegal NSA wiretapping and the ever-expanding, constitution-shredding executive branch) give the illusion of normalcy to what is in fact a radical departure from legal tradition. Elena Kagan, this shielded scholar, ought to have made her viewpoint clear and vociferously attacked the executive abuses of the past eight years, but she was almost entirely silent on all the important legal issues of the day.

It has become clear that Kagan is far more concerned with her career objectives than the world of ideas. Kagan—who appeared in her high school yearbook wearing judge’s robe and holding a gavel—has so carefully shielded herself that even people around her simply haven’t a clue what, if any, strong personal convictions she might have. Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog described her reserved character: “extraordinarily – almost artistically – careful. I don’t know anyone who has had a conversation with her in which she expressed a personal conviction on a question of constitutional law in the past decade.” The New York Times editorial page has even asked Kagan to “open up,” for she has “spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.”

You wouldn’t marry somebody after five cold and apprehensive dates, so why would you want to select a justice based on the five narrowly technical and non-ideological scholarly papers she has written? In fact, it’s even easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get somebody off the Supreme Court! The process of selecting Supreme Court judges is very much to blame for the shielded lives that prospective judges lead. David Brooks has argued the politics of the selection process “gives a brilliant and gifted person a strong incentive to be reticent and cagey.” What a strange system we have crafted for filling this lifetime position, a system that demands we trust the President’s choice simply by virtue of it being the President’s choice. We simply need to know more, or we could, as Glenn Greenwald argues, very well end up moving the court to the right.

Some critics have found this uncertainty simply unacceptable, and the confirmation process “a vapid and hollow charade, in which repetition of platitudes has replaced discussion of viewpoints and personal anecdotes have supplanted legal analysis." Critics like Elena Kagan circa fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, Kagan has vowed to renege that critique and be more reserved when she is questioned by the Senate. This is a very disturbing trend in the selection of Supreme Court justices, a trend that weakens the ability of the Senate and the public to pressure the President on this decision of profound importance. People in positions of authority undoubtedly desire to manage and manipulate information to service their ends. If we have learned anything over the past decade it is that the only way the public can protect itself from these abuses of executive authority is to demand full disclosure on matters of such importance. Others, like Larry Lessing, friend and supporter of Elena Kagan, have lauded her secrecy, “she has spent her time, not blogging, not twittering, not trying to be out there in the forefront of every single legal issue, just doing her job, and doing it extremely well.” I think we’d all be a little bit more comfortable if she had a Twitter account.

Up in the mornin' and off to school, teacher is teachin' the Golden Rule...

photo credit: Jon Chiang

School is just wrapping up for many; Summer's fast approaching. For others, like myself, the limited Summer term (at The University of British Columbia, see photo above) is just beginning. This presents the perfect opportunity to share with you my pick of school songs. However, my main concern is to relieve myself of these nagging thoughts about the music industry. Enjoy the music, because here comes a diatribe. Perhaps you would like to listen to my picks while I rail against the music industry? In any case, my top ten songs about school (or at least songs that use school as a device to speak to more important manners, namely, love and war):



1. Homework - Otis Rush


2. What did you learn in school? - Pete Seeger


3. Wonderful World- Sam Cooke


4. School Days - Chuck Berry


5. Another brick in the wall - Pink Floyd


6. Good morning little school girl - Muddy Waters


7. Whole Lotta Love - Led Zeppelin


8. Maxwell's Silver Hammer - The Beatles


9. Hey Little School Girl - Marquees


10. School's Out - Alice Cooper



The songs I've chosen all have something in common, a characteristic one would hope all music has, they're all about something. I'm not going to sanctimoniously argue that the only music worth listening to is moving and poetic music that transforms the way we perceive of love, school, the political arena, etc. In fact, that couldn't be further from my view, one needs only to look to the abundance of crude and superficial selections I've made. Take for instance Maxwell's Silver Hammer, what new perspective on modern life does this murderous med student give us? Absolutely none. My number one choice? No depth to Homework, the song is simply describing the struggle we've all had to do our homework when there is a pretty girl around. These songs are not tightly crafted philosophical arguments, but they have real substance that I can point to without embellishing their value. They present a particular message, situation, or feeling in a coherent manner. In essence, it's possible to answer the question what is the song about? or even the question what is this song's thesis? For example, Chuck Berry's School Days leaves one with the conclusion that Rock can save you ("delivery me from") from the oppressive and monotonous experience that is school. Pete Seeger's What did you learn in school? leaves one with the rather grim conclusion that school might just be propaganda. 



What of contemporary popular music? Well, the majority doesn't warrant discussion. One simply needs to read the lyrics and they'll see that most songs are void of substance and hold no particular view on anything. We shouldn't damn them all though, sometimes they present a sort of formulaic coherency (why can't Lady GaGa answer her telephone? She's too busy dancing!) That's about as far as popular music will take you in terms of meaning, and that's OK. 

However, the level of uniformity in popular music is disquieting. These artists would perhaps better understood as commodities. They are synthetic frauds, auto-tuned ("like plastic surgery"), their sound pre-fabricated for total uniformity, their beats tightly crafted for the purposes of selling ringtones ("There's only music so that there's new ringtones.") Even the dancing, rigid steps helped along by quick camera cuts. You can tell Michael Jackson is a good dancer because his camera panned out to let him dance, the same way Bruce Lee's camera panned out to let him fight. When you don't have a Bruce Lee or a Michael Jackson talent then you're left with nothing but strategic camera cuts and editing tricks to give the illusion of talent. Today's pop music is full of these tricks, featuring about as many quick and dizzying cuts as a Jasan Statham movie, but I digress. 



The economic structure of the modern music industry is very much to blame for the high levels of conformity in popular music. The reality of the modern recording industry is that the record itself is but a small part of a larger brand. Sponsorships, endorsements, clothing labels, perfume, ring tones, and live shows all serve to marginalize what used to be the product (that is, the record). Despite what the record industry tells you, there has been nothing better for corporate America than the dwindling record industry and the proliferation of internet music downloads. As the record loses its economic importance, the corporate world can refocus on doing what it does best, manipulating us into buying their stupid bullshit. The music is now but a delivery system. We have come so far as to embrace what used to be labeled "selling out," as artists shamelessly boast of their commercial success. Wherever our celebrities now go, they are traveling mannequins.

The heavily centralized nature of today's marketplace furthermore stifles artistic expression. These large institutions are in fact defined by their incentivization of conformity. Why would a record label or large corporate sponsor want to get behind a dangerously subversive character who has no regard for polite society or artistic convention? That would be both artistically and politically risky. From an economic perspective, such risks are stupid and irresponsible. It simply takes the most elementary of reasoning to realize that it would not be an economically sound decision to disrupt the order from which you profit.

As for indie or alternative music, we can’t as easily generalize such a fragmented market. But I’d like to again emphasis the point of coherence. Detached hipster musicians so often pretentiously hide behind their craft rather than revealing anything of themselves or their view. We often run into the problem of music being about nothing. We haven’t solved all the questions surrounding love and war, yet some artists have decided to just not sing about these things and play with their synthesizers (presumably they’re in the grip of postmodernism, or perhaps they just have nothing to say). I feel utterly hopeless when people embrace incomprehensible nonsense only to abandon it at the point it becomes too popular and therefore uncool.

So I’m not so optimistic about contemporary music, but let me temper my critique by saying that I am speaking only of general trends--there certainly remains many good contemporary finds. But take a look at the masters of old, you should never be waiting on something new to arrive when there is so much more gathering dust as it waits on you.