THE SYSTEM
posted by Dean Barnett
Soxblog
In golf, there’s an old truism that when the pressure’s on and you’re struggling, the old bugaboos that plagued you in the past will resurface to bite you again. So if your big issue has always been a monster slice, the pressure will induce a monster slice.
That’s an apt analogy for what elements of our society have gone through since 9/11. The pressure’s been on – the world changed all of a sudden, or at least our perception of it did. All of our institutions faced graver times and a more in-your-face challenge than their current members ever had. And almost without fail, they’ve reverted to form.
I wrote a couple of years ago that we had to deal with the fact that a lot of our institutions simply wouldn’t be up to the challenges of the day. To be perfectly frank, some of these were easy calls. Did anyone think that Hollywood would be remotely capable of playing a constructive role in an existential challenge? The best that we could hope for is that the stars and studios would ignore the crisis. The thought of a resurgence of WWII era Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart type patriotism was simply ludicrous.
Yes, most of the entertainment world’s ranking poseurs made an appearance on a televised benefit concert ten days after 9/11, but it didn’t take long for them to begin spouting their half-educated theories about why America is such a rotten place. Within four years, the community rallied behind a tendentious pack of lies like “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Some Hollywood types have gone so far as to craft a film for the Arab world’s consumption that shows American soldiers brutalizing innocent Muslims; the film even propagates the sickening blood libel of Jews stealing the blood of Gentile children. The obviously unwell Gary Busey stars as the Jewish doctor who organizes the scheme. Anyone who expected better from Hollywood was deceiving themselves.
Logically, we had to know that academia would acquit itself no better. After putting moral relativism on a pedestal for the past thirty years, how would the Academy be able to actually label and then appropriately condemn pure evil? So since 9/11, we’ve seen a widespread movement to divest in Israel; somehow the professoriate overlooked the genocide in Darfur and the repression in Saudi Arabia and other Sharia’a run lands and settled on Israel as the world’s locus of evil. Go figure.
The academy’s debased state meant Larry Summers’ effort to reform a place like Harvard was doomed to fail. Even if Summers had combined the personal charm of Cary Grant with his 190 I.Q., the academy wasn’t going to buy what he was selling. Much truer to form was Yale’s panting over getting a Taliban official on campus to show its openness to other cultures.
The media were also destined to be a detriment to the cause. The days when an Edward Murrow or Ernie Pyle could actually take their country’s side during a war have long since passed. Now the press considers its mission to be an annoying gadfly constantly “telling truth to power.” The press isn’t as partisan as most people think; the ink-stained wretches hated Clinton also and did everything in their power to make his life miserable. It’s just in their nature to be destructive to their hosts, sort of like parasites.
The courts were a predictable nemesis as well. It’s not just because too many judges are more comfortable in a universe of theories than a world of facts; they would rather make high-minded points about the durability of the constitution than wrestle with how to acknowledge the fact that the constitution is not a suicide pact.
But the courts’ problems extend beyond the judges to the attorneys. Our adversarial system of justice is on the whole a good thing. But it also means, indeed almost dictates, that many lawyers will consider justice a game. This applies to prosecutors as well as defense attorneys.
What happened in the Moussaoui trial yesterday was typical on a variety of levels. The judge has been itching to avoid the death sentence since the trial began. Meanwhile, the prosecutor behaved in an extraordinarily irresponsible fashion. Such is the state of our judicial system.
So where does the disrepair of our institutions leave us? It means we have to rely on other institutions that are up to handling the challenge. The military has been magnificent. It will have to continue to be. The executive branch has at least embraced the challenges; even though its performance hasn’t always been stellar, the fact that it willingly faced its era’s tests puts it miles ahead of the legislative branch, which showed its true nature during the bipartisan demagoguery regarding the UAE ports deal.
It also means that until and unless the dysfunctional institutions reform themselves, we’ll have to put the responsibility for the struggle onto the institutions that can handle it and stay away from those that can’t. That’s why things like military tribunals and NSA snooping are a “good” thing – there’s no other acceptable alternative.
As a wise man once said, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want.
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