gracchusdixit

Less than a month ago, several hundred thousand people crowded onto the streets of New York to demonstrate against the world’s passivity in the face of climate change.  Although this was by far the largest demonstration of its kind anywhere at any time, it was largely ignored by the national news media, whose attention was riveted on some poor fool with a pocket knife who clambered over the White House fence and thereby embarrassed the Secret Service.   This easy surrender to distraction shouldn’t surprise us.  We have been ignoring, or denying, man’s impact on the planet so long that it has become almost second nature.  Indeed, we’ve doing it for more than 200 years.

In 1798, an English cleric, scholar and political economist named Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population,  which became instantly controversial.   Malthus was a contrarian of the most fundamental sort, who argued that ideas of social progress, human perfectibility, and a utopian technological future were delusions.  He was particularly vexed by global population growth, which he judged to be an unstoppable force that would inevitably exceed the food supply, and, when a tipping point was reached, would contract and collapse because of famine, pestilence or wars fought for the possession of diminishing resources.  In the decades after An Essay on the Principle of Population appeared, Malthus’ predictions were sometimes ignored but more often vehemently rebutted.

And in truth, he got a few things wrong.

Malthus published his essay just as the Industrial Revolution was getting underway.  He did not foresee the consequences of the scientific and technological innovations it spawned.  In particular, he did not foresee the capacity of global capitalism to expand and sustain consumption.  Indeed, the word “capitalism” hadn’t been invented yet.  Adam Smith, the so-called “father of capitalism,” never used the word.  It took another 50 years for Karl Marx to do that and to produce the first detailed analysis of its social and economic effects.

Later acolytes of market capitalism lambasted Malthus, pointing to the fact that global food production was expanding; technology had found ways of replacing, or circumventing, limited natural resources; and population wasn’t contracting but growing steadily, albeit with “temporary setbacks” during times of depression, epidemic, or war.  As a result, the arbiters of conventional wisdom all but consigned Malthus’ thesis to the dustbin of history.   They decreed that this prophet of natural calamity had got it all wrong, that humankind could, in fact, have its cake and eat it.

While Malthus may have missed some of the details, it now seems abundantly clear that he got one very important thing right: natural resources do indeed have their limits.  Malthus worried that productive capacity would not grow fast enough to feed a growing population.  But the problem we confront turns out to be growth itself, which, like a cancer, is consuming everything in its path.

It can no longer be denied that the earth is getting warmer, the climate is becoming more violent, sea levels are rising, lakes and oceans are acidifying, and large swathes of the globe are turning into desert.  Endless growth—more people, more production, more pollution—has outstripped the planet’‘s ability to cope.  No one can say with certainty what the ultimate costs will be, except that they will be devastating, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable peoples and nations.

While nearly all sane people now accept this reality, few are as yet prepared to accept its cause.  The consumption of fossil fuels is merely a symptom.  The ultimate cause is our economic system.

Growth is the engine of capitalism, and growth is merely a euphemism for consumption.  The cancer of consumption has metastasized to the point that it permeates, and poisons, not only the natural environment but our mental environment—the very way we think.  We judge the health of our economy entirely by the metrics of consumption.  When consumption slows, we call it a “recession;” when it stops altogether, we call it a “depression”.  It never occurs to us that another choice exists, that we can live with less, that living with less may soon be the only way to live at all.

Technology isn’t going to save us.  Recycling won’t rescue us.  “Green” energy will not spare us.  The system that replaced wood with coal, and coal with oil, and now aims to replace oil with natural gas, will not lead us to the promised land.  There is no promised land other than the earth that sustains us.  We cannot continue to consume more and more and expect that earth to comply forever, absorbing infinite amounts of the junk, waste and toxins.

Those who believe that our economic system can somehow forestall the looming catastrophe are indulging in the utopian fantasies that Robert Malthus analyzed with devastating clarity two centuries ago.  Malthus did not say when the tipping point in man’s relationship with nature would come, but he surely would not be surprised that it has come at last.  Nor should we.   It turns out that Malthus was right after all.  If we ignore him again, there won’t be a second chance for any of us to get it right.

The philosopher George Santayana famously said:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Those who run our country appear to have forgotten his warning.  Not only have they plunged us once again into the quagmire of the Middle East, but they have embarked upon a so-called “strategy” that is eerily familiar.

At  the conclusion of World War I, the victorious British and French carved up most of the defeated and defunct Ottoman Empire into a hodgepodge of colonies, mandates and protectorates.  This division of the spoils was designed to benefit their own interests—interests that were little different from ours today, i.e., a steady supply of oil and a “stable” political order that would do their bidding.

The British got control of what had been ancient Mesopotamia, a region (never a country) that was populated by different peoples, home to diverse cultural traditions, and for centuries a breeding ground of conflict—between Egyptians and Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians, Turks and Arabs.  The British imposed a made-up king upon this made-up country, and they called it “Iraq.”

It didn’t take long for the people of this tangled and turbulent region, whose wishes had never been considered let alone consulted, to resent and resist the “stability” that had been imposed upon them.  Trouble followed, and it took the form of what today would be called an “insurgency”.

It so happened that Britain’s Minister of War at the time was none other than Winston Churchill, then as ever a man bellicose to his fingertips and infatuated with the latest technological playthings of war.  Churchill was determined to crush the unrest and to preserve Britain’s imperial interests.  His problem was that the British Empire lacked the military muscle it had once possessed.  After four years of catastrophic slaughter on the Western Front, the British people were worn out, the British economy was all but bankrupt, and the British Empire was stretched beyond its means or its will.  Churchill came up with what he thought to be a solution, one that would minimize costs and reduce the need for “boots on the ground”.  That solution was air power.

For much of the 1920s, death from the air was Britain’s strategy of choice for enforcing its control of Iraq.  The Royal Air Force bombed, machine-gunned, and gassed insurgents wherever and whenever it encountered them.  Needless to say, many of those the RAF encountered—we shall never know the actual number—weren’t “insurgents” at all.  They were merely unlucky civilians who happened to get in the way.  The antiseptic euphemism, “collateral damage,” hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had been, there is little doubt that Churchill would have embraced it as a useful turn of phrase.

There were some protests back home in Britain and more than a few skeptics.  But the witch’s brew that Churchill had cooked up—a concoction of lethal force, low costs, and minimal (British) casualties—quickly became so seductive that the same strategy was applied elsewhere:  in Yemen, in Palestine, in the Sudan, on the porous Northwest Frontier of India where today Pakistan and Afghanistan converge.

The story from the generals and the commanders, and from Churchill himself, was ever the same.  The attacks were invariably “successful”.  Noble RAF pilots were taking steps to “avoid civilian casualties”.  Air power was deemed to be “less brutal” than other techniques, producing a “minimum of destruction and loss of life”.

All that, of course, was how Britain’s leaders chose to see things from their elevated perch several thousand miles away and several hundred feet up in the air.  It was not how things were seen by the people “on the ground.”  And ultimately, it was the people on the ground who prevailed.

Britain’s strategy of terror from the air did little to put down the “insurgents” or to prevent the disintegration of the Empire.   Instead, it inflamed  and embittered the opposition until Britain’s position in the Middle East became untenable.  When the British finally withdrew from Iraq in 1932, the country they had created immediately began to fall apart.  One coup followed another, until Iraq’s made-up monarchy was unmade and overthrown.  A series of terrible military dictatorships followed, culminating with the most terrible of them all, that of our old friend and foe, Saddam Hussein.  We all remember what happened next.

We may remember, but our leaders evidently do not.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of a hundred years ago.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of ten years ago.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of yesterday.  History never forgets.  Why, it must be asked, do they?  History never forgives.  Nor, it must be said, should we.

There is much hand-wringing over the looming and apparently unstoppable consequences of climate change.  As there should be.  The prospect of global catastrophe is not a pretty sight.

On the other hand, the precipitous warming of the planet does offer certain practical and psychological consolations, if we are prepared to recognize and appreciate them.  To mention but a few:

The country club memberships of a great many white, well-fed, and self-satisfied Republicans will become worthless, since there will be no water left to green up the links and lawns where they spend so much of their time, squandering so much of the planet’s resources.

For the same reason, swimming pools will disappear, ending the torment of countless homeowners who didn’t realize until it was too late that building a pool is the equivalent of flushing money down a toilet.

MacMansions and suburban sprawl will disappear as well.  There won’t be enough energy to heat, cool or light the mansions or any way of reaching them to begin with.  In time, their deserted hulks will rot and collapse, supplying centuries of sustenance for the termites, who, like the roaches, will probably outlive us all.

The problem of obesity will likewise disappear, since food production will shrivel and food prices will skyrocket, making it all but impossible for most Americans to eat their customary three or four, highly caloric squares a day.  This, in turn, will not only reduce health care costs, it will dramatically reduce the cost of clothing.  There will be only two sizes:  skinny and anorexic.

The Interstate Highway System, which we lack either the money or the will to repair, will be left to crumble into gravel, since no one will be able to afford a drive of more than a few miles.  This will spare us all a great deal of aggravation, end the plague of road rage, and have the salubrious effect of lowering both highway fatalities and insurance rates.

We will no longer have to put up with the fetishistic cult of the ubiquitous plastic water bottle or suffer endless lines in front of the recycling machines at local grocery stores.  The only water left will be undrinkable, and those who are still able to get their hands on the last few drops of the fresh stuff won’t want to advertise the fact.

Many “red” states below the Mason-Dixon line will become uninhabitable as average summer temperatures rise into the mid-100s and no amount of money in the world can keep the air conditioners running.  Of course, northern “blue” states may be disinclined to welcome a horde of white-flight immigrants seeking cooler climes.  In which case, they would be well-advised to start building border fences right now.  This will have the added advantage of boosting their economies and providing jobs.  After all, one can never have too many border guards.

As oil prices inevitably fall and the value of oil reserves plummets, the economy of Texas will collapse.  Since the oil industry is the only plausible excuse for Texas to exist in the first place, its population will all but evaporate.  If the Mexicans are foolish enough to want this boringly barren real estate back, we should wish them well and bid the few remaining Texans a cheerful adios.  Presumably, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders will have to adopt a new dress code and pick up some Spanish if they wish to stay in business.

Southern Florida will be under water, ending a century and a half of rampant real estate speculation, environmental contamination and unspeakable bad taste.  Of course, some will lament the passing of Spring Break, but by then, it will be so hot everywhere that bikinis and thongs will be de rigueur as far north as Bangor.

Lower Manhattan will also be under water.  This, once and for all, will put an end to the investment banking business, and we shall never again have to worry about bailing out the likes of  J. P.  Morgan and Goldman Sachs.  They will probably relocate to Switzerland, and the tidy Swiss can tend to them forever more.  This will give the Swiss something useful to do, since there will no longer be any skiing on their snowless Alps.

Finally, we shall at last be treated to the sound of the gods laughing.  It was King Lear who said: “As flies to little boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”  As the planet bakes and mankind broils, there will be plenty of sport for the gods to laugh at.  The best we can hope for is to laugh along with them.

When the United States invaded Iraq 11 years ago, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld invoked the phrase “shock and awe” to describe both the strategy behind the invasion and what he expected the consequences to be, i.e., a joyful welcome from a “liberated” people, a quick and painless withdrawal, and a trivial cost tidily paid for by all that lovely oil lurking beneath the Mesopotamian sands.

Things, of course, turned out rather differently.  After squandering more than a trillion dollars and at least 100,000 American and Iraqi lives, the nation we supposedly liberated is disintegrating before our eyes, and, along with it, most of the Middle East.  The shock of our invasion left behind, not awe, but an awful mess.

Now, we are at it again.

Many of the very people who advocated the invasion of Iraq in the first place—Republican neocons, Democratic “hawks,” armchair generals on both right and left—have prodded the President of the United States into involving us once more in the very quagmire we thought we had left behind.   Their excuse is that the President lacked a “strategy” for dealing with the carnage and chaos they were largely responsible for  creating.  About that, they were, and are, right.  The President didn’t have a “strategy” before and he doesn’t have one now.  But neither do his critics.  The reason in both cases is that no possible strategy exists for dealing with a situation that is hopelessly beyond our control.

The interventionists proclaim that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—a.k.a., ISIL—must be stopped.  Fine.  But exactly how?  And why do they suppose that stopping this latest incarnation of Islamic extremism—even if that were possible—is going to change anything?  We “stopped” Al Qaeda by killing Osama Bin Laden, and before we knew it, a new breed of extremists sprang up from the earth like dragon’s teeth.  Why do they imagine that quashing ISIL will have a more lasting effect?

They assert that we must take the fight into Syria.  Fine.  But then what?  The bloody civil war in that country will continue unabated, and its bloody dictator  will continue slaughtering people until another round of insurgency and revenge begins all over again.

They say that the Iraqis must take charge of defending their own country, by forming stable political and military institutions.  Fine.  But saying so does not make it so.  Iraq is an artificial country, cobbled together by the British after the end of the First World War.  It has never had a stable, reliable, or even remotely democratic government.  Miracles may happen, but praying for miracles doesn’t amount to a “strategy”.

They insist that our “partners in the region” must step up to the plate and join the fight.  Fine.  But have they taken a close look at those “partners” or given any thought to their motives?  We have supported authoritarian regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for decades, regimes that ignore and oppress their own populations and, behind our backs, have encouraged and subsidized the very terrorists we now expect them to condemn.

What our foreign policy elite cannot bring themselves to say is this:  the United States is largely responsible for the mess in the Middle East, and more meddling by us will do nothing but make matters more terrible than they already are.

We destroyed the Iraqi state and dismantled its institutions after years of propping up its vile dictator.  We toppled the only democratically elected secular government in the history of Iran and installed a phony authoritarian monarch in his place, poisoning relations with that country ever since.  We intervened in Libya to oust another dictator, one of the few we didn’t like, then left the country to disintegrate.  We have turned a blind eye to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and its repression of Gaza’s Palestinian population, prompting an endless cycle of violence and retribution by Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The truth is, we have never had a “strategy” in the Middle East beyond the immediate protection of our narrow economic and political interests.  While proclaiming the values of democracy, human rights, and liberal institutions, we have done absolutely nothing to advance those values anywhere in the Muslim world.

The beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker were shocking and barbaric.  By all means let us put an end to the awfulness of those responsible.   But let us also put an end to the shockingly awful “strategy” that created ISIL in the first place.  In one year alone, Saudi Arabia beheaded 79 people, many for petty offenses against a repressive and medieval religious code.  If we want to end extremism in the Middle East, perhaps we should worry less about our enemies and spend more time worrying about our so-called friends.

When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, it was taken for granted that the local cops were crooked and would close ranks to protect their own the moment there was even the slightest threat of public scrutiny or reform.  There was no talk of “heroes” back then.  The police were looked upon as a necessary evil—useful to have around when “they” got restless.

“They,” of course, were the city’s African-American citizens, who were expected to content themselves with shoddy public housing and paltry public assistance in place of integrated neighborhoods, decent education, and equal opportunity in the workplace.  Needless to say, this sulfurous bargain broke down from time to time, whereupon the boys—they were all “boys” in those days—with their badges, clubs, and guns were called in to “do their duty,” which was to make sure that white Chicagoans suffered no more inconvenience than was absolutely unavoidable.

Today, half a century later, remarkably little seems to have changed.

In the space of as many months, the nation has seen—quite literally seen—four lurid examples of police brutality against black Americans.  In Los Angeles, a 51 year-old woman was thrown to the ground and straddled by a member of the highway patrol, who proceeded to smash her head against the pavement for trying to cross a highway.  In New York City, an unarmed man was surrounded by half a dozen police officers for selling cigarettes on a street corner, wrestled to the sidewalk, handcuffed, and choked to death.  In St. Louis, a shoplifter, who may or may not have had a knife but was apparently demented, was gunned down by two cops, who leapt out of their car with pistols drawn and fired off twelve rounds in less than 20 seconds.  And in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, an unarmed 18-year-old was shot six times, two of those shots striking him in the top of the head as he tumbled to his knees and toppled forward.

As everyone knows by now, the last of these incidents sparked a wave of protest, to which the local police responded with a display of force so excessive that it would have been right at home on the streets of Beijing, Kiev or Cairo.  Some people blame this on the fact that police departments across the country have in recent years been steadily “militarized” in both training and equipment.

It is worse than that.  It is the thinking of the entire country that has been militarized.

Whenever we encounter a problem, we now declare a “war”.  We have declared a War on Terror, a War on Crime, a War on Drugs, even a War on Cancer, not to mention a dozen other maladies whose names few of us can even pronounce.  Physicians no longer treat illness; they “fight” it.  Patients no longer recover or succumb; they “win” or “lose” their “battles”.  The metaphor of struggle—of warlike, heroic struggle—is all around us.

The trouble with this metaphor is that it obscures the difference between real war and phony war, between genuine heroes and brass-buttoned pretenders.  Thus it is that everyone who puts on a uniform nowadays—every soldier, sailor, aviator, cop, firefighter, or rescue worker—is instantaneously anointed a hero in his own eyes and in ours.  Since the day we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, we have been called upon to “support our troops”.  Now, we are expected to support all our other “warring heroes” with equal fervor and as little thought.

This adulation of the heroic sounds innocent enough until you remember the questions it leaves hanging—the questions of behavior and responsibility.   The truth of the matter is that few of us have the physical or moral courage it takes to act in a genuinely “heroic” way—and even fewer of us ever actually do.  Real heroes are as rare, and as perishable, as perfect snowflakes.  This is no less true of soldiers and police officers than it is of everyone else.

There is no doubt that war is a dangerous business, and so, at times, is police work.  However, the mere fact that danger is involved does not constitute heroism.  Coal miners face more danger, more routinely than cops, and every year far more of them “die in the line of duty”.  Yet we do not call them “heroes”.

Nor is there any doubt that war can be a dirty business, and so, all too often, can police work.  When cops gun down or strangle unarmed citizens, when they turn their weapons against one class of citizens to protect another, when they lie and conspire and conceal to shield one another, they do not deserve our respect or thanks; they do not deserve our support; and they certainly do not deserve to be called “heroes”.

The theme of the last Gracchus was the unraveling of the Pax Americana, that is to say, the global political, military, and economic arrangements the United States put in place after World War II.  Borrowing from the famous words of Yeats, it concluded:  “Unless we act, if we do not change, the blood-dimmed tide of history may eventually drown us all.”  One reader, after some kind words about that article, asked for another to “spell out what we must change”.  This is a tall order, which cannot adequately be encompassed in six or seven hundred words.  But here, inadequate as it may be, is an attempt.

Change begins with truth-telling, so let’s begin by confronting three uncomfortable truths about ourselves:

(1)  The Pax Americana is at its heart an imperial enterprise designed to enrich the United States, often at the expense of other peoples and nations.  This is not to say that our influence in the world is entirely without good intentions or sometimes benevolent results.  It may even be that our imperium is more benign than others have been.  But that is not its main purpose.  In pretending otherwise, we all too often deceive ourselves, but we deceive no one else.

Earlier empires were more self-aware.  The Romans didn’t conquer the world to civilize it; they conquered it to acquire power and wealth.  When the average man on the Roman street was sent to war, he knew exactly what he was fighting for, and as long as he got his piddling share of profits, he had little need for lofty moral rhetoric about Rome’s civilizing mission.  It was, after all, a Roman historian who put these words in the mouth of a “militant barbarian” resisting the invasion of his country:  “Where the Romans make a wasteland, they call it civilization.”

Perhaps ordinary Americans would feel the same way if they had been bluntly told that we invaded Iraq, not to protect ourselves from non-existent weapons of mass destruction, but to control its oil fields and to protect the economic interests of Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell.  Instead of putting their sons and daughters in harm’s way, they might have chosen to turn down their thermostats, buy smaller cars, and put solar panels on their roofs.

(2)  The American “way of life”—a “way of life” that we are constantly being told must be preserved and defended—cannot be sustained.  Five percent of the world’s population cannot go on consuming 25 percent of its resources, expecting the other 95 percent to put up with such a fundamentally unjust arrangement forever.  The only way to prolong this arrangement is for the United States to use force and still more force until no amount of force is any longer sufficient or economically viable.

Every earlier empire eventually faced this insoluble equation.  Either the money runs out, as it did with the British Empire, or the balance of power is overturned by the conquered, as happened with the Romans.  Inevitably, a “way of life” that is sustained by imperial exploitation leads to terrible consequences.  In its waning days, the British Empire confronted terrorists in India, in Malaysia, in Ireland, and in Jewish Palestine.  Today, many of those terrorists are—rightly or wrongly—lauded as patriots.

If we were prepared to confront such facts, then we could make a choice.  We could cling to our privileged way of life and face the consequences, or, if we wished to go on living at all, we could learn to live more modestly.  The British finally, albeit reluctantly, learned that lesson and gave up what was left of their crumbling empire; the Romans never learned it, and their way of life collapsed.  We must abandon the myth that we are an “exceptional” people, who can ignore the rules of history and live by our own rules instead.  History makes no exceptions—for us or anyone else.

(3)   Last of all, we must shake off the pride that comes with power.  There is much in our history to be proud of, and we should never shrink from that.  But justifiable pride and puffed-up imperial self-congratulation are different things.

When Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he was not talking about military or economic power.  He was speaking about the powerful moral ideas of universal human liberty and equality.  Those were the ideas that, once upon a time, made this country a “city upon the hill,” inspiring the rest of the world with a living example of freedom, civic virtue and democratic practice.

The ultimate truth is that the democracy our Founders envisioned and bequeathed to us is now all but gone.  If we are to have any hope of winning it back, we must acknowledge what we have become—a global imperial power with a “way of life” that is sustained by war and the industries of war.   Millions of Americans owe their livelihoods to this imperial enterprise, and hundreds of millions around the world hate us for it.

This, above all else, is what we must change.  Because this is the only change that will turn back the blood-dimmed tide before it washes us away.

Reporting on an anti-immigrant protest in the small city of Murrieta, California, Fox News Channel began by juxtaposing the words “They’ve had enough!” with an image of the Statue of Liberty.  The words, of course, were intended to justify the behavior of the protestors, who showered profanity, racial slurs, and threats of physical violence on their hapless targets, three busloads of women and small children on their way to a nearby Border Patrol processing center.  The mayor of Murrieta seems to have instructed his police to protect the protestors rather than the immigrants they were trying to intimidate.  Later, he expressed, not regret, but “pride” in the protestors for exercising their “right to free speech”.

To associate such people with the Stature of Liberty is both ironic and deeply shameful.  For more than a century, “Lady Liberty” has symbolized our country’s welcoming embrace of immigrants from around the globe, and the words inscribed on the base of the statue have come to signify everything that is generous and decent about our country:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

There was a time when millions of Americans knew these words by heart and could recite them from memory, because they recognized that they or their parents or their grandparents had come to this country precisely as the words say—as “wretched refuse…yearning to breathe free”.

The anti-immigrant protestors in Murrieta and elsewhere in our country seem to have forgotten not only what Lady Liberty stands for but their own origins.  There is no American who is not an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants.  The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth were immigrants.  The Dutch poltroons were immigrants.  The Cavalier lords of Maryland were immigrants.  The Scots, German, Irish, Italian, Polish, and Scandinavian masses who poured into the country throughout the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries were immigrants.  Even the people we call “Native Americans” were immigrants from the frozen land mass of Asia.

It is not good enough to draw a line between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, to say that the one group came here the “right way” and the other got here the “wrong way”.  The Puritans had no visas.  The Dutch did not pass through the halls of Ellis Island with identity papers in hand.  The only “documentation” possessed by the countless slaves who came here in chains was a bill of sale.  How many of the other millions who poured into this country—the Irish fleeing famine, the Italians escaping poverty and revolution, the Jews and Slavs running from pogroms and tyranny—came here “legally”?  We shall never know.

It is not good enough to draw a line between those who “make” and those who do “take,” between those who “pay taxes” and those who “don’t”.   Immigrants built the transcontinental railroad.  Immigrants manned the factories and worked the farms that turned this country into the productive powerhouse of the world.  Immigrants came here then, and come here now, to work, paying taxes even when the taxes they pay buy them no legal protections or rights.  Immigrants, legal and illegal, made this country and without them this country would not exist.

Nor is it good enough to deplore “amnesty” as if there were something terrible in that.  We gave amnesty to the slave owners and secessionists of the Confederacy after they tore this country apart.  We gave amnesty to the worst of our enemies in the Second World War after they tried to annihilate us.  And we have given amnesty, more than once, to illegal immigrants after they proved themselves to be hard-working and law-abiding Americans.  It was Ronald Reagan, of all people, who said: “I believe in amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”  Even Reagan was wise enough to realize that “sometime back” countless Americans “entered illegally”.

And it is certainly not good enough to draw an arbitrary and self-serving line between “real Americans” and everyone else.  Those who assert that they, and they alone, are authentically American may be able to fool themselves, but they can’t fool anyone else. This was not a barren or empty land when the first white Europeans arrived.  Every inch of it was stolen from someone else, often violently and in blood.

We are all “wretched refuse,” and the only thing that entitles us to call ourselves Americans is the “yearning to breathe free”.  When real Americans encounter that yearning in others, they do not shut their eyes, turn their backs, and harden their hearts.  Real Americans lift the lamp of freedom and open wide the golden door.

The present conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States may be the most destructive, subversive, and incompetent in our history.  That is saying a lot, since we have at various times had Court majorities that upheld slavery, defended segregation, and denied women the right to vote.  Harsh as it may sound, the characterization nonetheless seems just, given this Court’s general record and, particularly, given the decision it made a week ago.

In finding for the owners of Hobby Lobby against the federal government, the Court gave corporations, for the first time in our history, the religious protections hitherto provided only to individuals.  The majority opinion, written by Samuel Alito, is a travesty, which violates both simple logic and the very Constitutional protection it purports to uphold.  Invoking the 1992 “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” and the clause in the  First Amendment which forbids Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” Alito made three spurious and absurd arguments.

First, he drew no distinction between the religious freedoms of individuals and corporations.  On the contrary, he denied that such a distinction exists, although the Constitution speaks only of persons, never of “corporations,” let alone of corporate “rights.”

Second, he concerned himself entirely with protecting the religious beliefs of Hobby Lobby’s owners, who purport to equate contraception with abortion.  He had nothing to say about protecting the religious freedom of Hobby Lobby’s female employees whose beliefs may point in an entirely different direction.

Finally, he accepted the “sincerity” of Hobby Lobby’s owners on face value, without question or challenge, stating: “The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.”  The fact that the owners of Hobby Lobby “believe” something does not make it so.  None of the four contraceptive methods “at issue” is defined by any credible medical source as an “abortifacient.”  What is more, Hobby Lobby has invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies that manufacture drugs that are, indisputably, abortifacient.  What is really “at issue” is the sincerity and truthfulness, not only of Hobby Lobby’s owners, but of Justice Alito himself.

Hobby Lobby is merely the latest in a long series of disturbing—and duplicitous—decisions by the conservative majority on the Court.  These decisions share a common ideology and a consistent flaw: a clear preference for one kind of freedom over another, for one class or category of people over another.

In Heller, the Court overturned a century of law, invented a new interpretation of the Second Amendment, and declared gun ownership to be an individual right.  Under the guise of the “right to bear arms,” the Court decided that the interests of gun manufacturers and the NRA trumped the rights of many more Americans whose lives are endangered by rampant gun violence.

In Citizen’s United, the Court declared, for the first time, that corporations have the same First Amendment protection which the Constitution gives to individuals. In McCutcheon, it went even further, declaring “money” and “speech” to be identical.  Under the guise of “free speech,” it upheld the interests or corporations and the wealthy over the rights of ordinary citizens.

In Holder, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, asserting that laws which prohibit racial discrimination at the polls are not only obsolete but themselves a form of racial discrimination.  Using language and arguments that would have been very much at home in the antebellum South, it invoked “states’ rights” over the rights of historically disenfranchised and oppressed minorities.

Whenever this Court has faced a choice between one kind of freedom and another,  between one class and another, it has chosen freedom for the powerful, the privileged and the bigoted.  Once upon a time, we looked to the Supreme Court of the United States as the court of last resort, as the one voice in the land that could be counted on to preserve and protect the freedom of every American.  That day is gone.

Republican legislators throughout the land are passing laws designed to prevent women from ending unwanted or dangerous pregnancies.  Many of these legislators aren’t content to impede or stop abortions.  They want to criminalize the women who seek them as well as the physicians who provide them.  Even worse,  many of their laws also attack contraception, inarguably the most effective way of preventing the very abortions they claim to deplore.

Such people invoke “family values” and call themselves “pro-life”.  But their assault on women has nothing whatever to do with preserving families or protecting life itself.  If Republican lawmakers and their constituents really cared about the lives of women and their children, they would champion decent healthcare and daycare, sufficient nutrition, and robust public education.  They would care as much for those who are already in the world as for those who have yet to enter it.  The truth is, protecting “life” isn’t what obsesses these people.  What obsesses them is sex—and, in particular, the desire to control the sexual and reproductive choices of women.

No one ever revealed this more clearly (and unapologetically) than Rick Santorum during his ill-fated run for the Republican Presidential nomination a couple of years ago:

“One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is, I think, the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception’s okay.  It’s not okay, because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Although Santorum’s view of “how things are supposed to be” reflects a particularly bizarre stew of Catholic and evangelical attitudes, all the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—have, to one degree or another, always been obsessed by the “sexual realm.”  The Christian obsession, however, may be the most grotesque.

The obsession didn’t begin with Christ himself, who had remarkably little to say on the subject.  It began with Saint Paul.  A lifelong bachelor, Paul advocated celibacy, railed against  “fornication,” denounced the idea of men even “touching” women, and tolerated marriage solely because he realized that total abstinence was, to put it mildly, a “reach” for anyone less tied up in psychological knots than himself.  This concession certainly didn’t come about because he believed that Christians, or anyone else, needed to propagate.  Paul imagined that Armageddon was just around the corner at which point all earthly life would come to an abrupt end.  For him, the procreative function of sex was an irrelevance.

Then, of course, there was Saint Augustine, the most famous of the Early Church Fathers, who was infamously tortured by his own sexual urges.  His personal experience  of those urges caused him to worry that, in any contest between sexual desire and God, sex just might win.   We have Augustine to thank for the lamentable notion that sex is “original sin”.  Worse yet, it was Augustine who decided that Eve was to blame, by bringing sin into the world and tempting Adam.  Adam, poor bastard, was simply the innocent victim of Eve’s sluttish duplicity—an interpretation that Rick Santorum would undoubtedly find congenial.

After Augustine, things went steadily downhill, in ways that even he did not intend.  Other Church Fathers—Ambrose and Jerome among them—were so tormented by the sin of sex that, for them, even the containing bounds of marriage were inadequate.  Nothing less than total abstinence would do.  This was not something that Augustine had advocated.  But it was too late.  The genie was already out of the bottle.

And that genie is still with us, spreading its mischief in one “red,” evangelical state after another.  In the name of “protecting life,” sex-obsessed Republicans are determined to stamp out the sin of sex by controlling and punishing the original sinners—women.

What such people refuse to recognize is that sex is a perfectly natural part of life.  It doesn’t require procreation or even marriage for its justification.  It simply exists, like life itself. Those who deny this aren’t “pro-life” at all.  They are life-deniers.  We should deny them the chance to impose their obsession on the rest of us.