Hitchens on Falwell, Bill Barnwell on Falwell’s Critics

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I am posting this from Christopher Hitchens, who — until he inexplicably acquired a body double a few years back — used not to enjoy bombing, but was, of course, never above wearing his anticlericalism on his sleeve:

“The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God’s punishment if they hadn’t got some kind of clerical qualification?

People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup. The whole consideration of this — of this horrible little person is offensive to very, very many of us who have some regard for truth and for morality, and who think that ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men, that we’re — we’re not told that people who believe like Falwell will be snatched up into heaven, where I’m glad to see he skipped the rapture, just found on the floor of his office, while the rest of us go to hell.

How dare they talk to children like this? How dare they raise money from credulous people on their huckster-like (INAUDIBLE) radio stations, and fly around in private jets, as he did, giggling and sniggering all the time at what he was getting away with?

How dare he say, for example, that the Antichrist is already present among us and is an adult male Jew, while, all the time, fawning on the worst elements in Israel, with his other hand pumping anti-Semitic innuendoes into American politics, along with his friends Robertson and Graham…encouraging — encouraging — encouraging the most extreme theocratic fanatics and maniacs on the West Bank and in Gaza not to give an inch of what he thought of was holy land to the people who already live there, undercutting and ruining every democratic and secularist in the Jewish state in the name of God?

I think he was a conscious charlatan and bully and fraud.

And I think, if he read the Bible at all — and I would doubt that he could actually read any long book of — at all — that he did so only in the most hucksterish, as we say, Bible-pounding way.

I’m going to repeat what I said before about the Israeli question. It’s very important. Jerry Falwell kept saying to his own crowd, yes, you have got to like the Jews, because they can make more money in 10 minutes than you can make in a lifetime. He was always full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti- Semitic innuendo.

Yet, in the most base and hypocritical way, he encouraged the worst elements among Jewry. He got Menachem Begin to give him the Jabotinsky Medal, celebrating an alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Jewish fanaticism that has ruined the chances for peace in the Middle East.

Lots of people are going to die and are already leading miserable lives because of the nonsense preached by this man, and because of the absurd way that we credit anyone who can say they’re a person of faith.

Look, the president endangers us this way. He meets a KGB thug like Vladimir Putin, and, because he is wearing a crucifix around his neck, says, I’m dealing with a man of faith. He’s a man of goodwill.

Look what Putin has done to American and European interests lately. What has the president said to take back this absurd remark? It’s time to stop saying that, because someone preaches credulity and credulousness, and claims it as a matter of faith, that we should respect them.”

My Comment:

Yes, Falwell’s contribution to the Iraq war was lamentable. So were those of many other Christian and Jewish Zionists. And secular liberals. But, what is amazing to me in Hitchens’ performance is that he completely overlooks the fact that he himself supported the invasion of Iraq……oh, I forgot, he has good liberal, secular reasons for doing it.

That doesn’t make me like religious extremism (I want to distinguish that from fundamentalism) any better. But it goes to show that there are any number of ways to rationalize murderous policies, if you want to. You don’t have to be religious to do that.
And to balance Hitchens, here is a libertarian antiwar pastor, Bill Barnwell, on Lew Rockwell ,who disagreed with Falwell’s position on the war, but finds Falwell’s critics as disturbing in their denunciations of him as he was in his war-mongering:

“The worldview of such people is to judge another’s personal worth solely based upon whether they are for or against abortion, pro or anti gay rights, or whatever other hot button issue riles them up. While I think Falwell got some issues wrong, this does not make him a piece of dirt in regards to everything else. I’m quite sure I don’t have it all together on everything either; and really, neither does anyone else for that matter. Therefore, we all should be careful about making blanket statements about a person’s worth or intentions.

Certainly many who are laughing off Falwell’s death regularly pat themselves on the back for being so much more tolerant than the “Religious Reich.” Many of Falwell’s critics despised him because of his “hate” (hate being defined as opposing abortion and homosexual behavior). But how does acting like a hateful, intolerant crank show ones love and tolerance? Or does love and tolerance only extend to people who think and act just like they do?

What are some of the nice words being posted around the web in remembrance of Falwell in the hours since he’s passed? Here’s a sample from this site:

“You’re pulling my leg! No wonder everyone is so happy and shiny faced today. I think we all should have lots of premarital (or in some other way offensive to him) sex to celebrate. Yes, I see no ill in celebrating the death of a man who has caused so much pain and suffering to others. Not in the least.”

“I had hoped the fat bastard would have pulled through and lived the rest of his life as a vegetable. Darn, there goes my veggie soup.”

“I think a stake through the heart would be appropriate… just to make sure…”

“wow – this feels as good as the day Reagan died!”

“We’ve been singing this great song in my office ‘Somebody’s burning in hell,

Somebody’s burning in hell!’”

“Yeah – maybe if we’re all nice and respectful and Xtian about it, the fundies will be impressed and like us. Burn in hell you fat hateful lying hypocrite pig!”

There’s dozens of other nice, tolerant, and loving memorials that can be read at that site. But how about hearing from the diversity celebrating folks over here on this page:

“I hope he is gang-banged in Hell by Satan, Saddam, Hitler, and Liberace.”

“makes me want to sodomize as a tribute to him. now, if only I knew the sexual preferences of other gawker readers…”

“So how soon is the funeral, and where? Some serious grave-dancing is in order, here.”

“Our Father which art in heaven, please let Pat Robertson be next!!”

I could go on and highlight posts from plenty of other blogs, but I think you get the point. If these individuals want to act so uncivilized and uncaring, then they certainly have the right to think and say whatever they want, no matter how nasty it might be. But if they make the claim that they are more loving, kind and tolerant than Falwell, or really just loving, kind and tolerant in general, then they should stop lying to themselves. They ought to just admit that they are as uncaring and nasty as the next rigid ideological extremist.

The militant hard-left should stop pretending that it celebrates diversity and cares about all people. Individuals who make up this movement actually only tolerate and celebrate other people who think and act just like they do. Once you deviate from the party line, you become a worthless human being. And if we’ve learned anything from the passing of Jerry Falwell, it’s apparently a good thing if you die.

Celebrate Diversity.

My Comment:

Of course, Mr. Barnwell is forgetting something here. Unlike Falwell, none of his critics are advocating bombing large groups of people.

Still, he makes a good point. Whom are we trying to talk to?
Progressives have someone here who is on their side on this vital issue of war and they completely turn him off – quite needlessly – by their vituperation. It’s hard to get anyone to hear anything new or have a change of heart, when the tone of the discussion is so shrill.

It seems that people sometimes don’t really care whether they’re getting through to anyone. They simply prefer to say what they want to hear…to assuage their own feelings. Which, of course, they manage to do. It’s a form of therapy for them that also solidifies group feeling with other people who agree with them.

But isn’t the point of debate to clarify your position to people on the other side? To persuade them? Not just to justify your arguments to yourself? Otherwise, you might as well stay inside your bathroom and mutter at your face in the mirror. You’re tying to converse with people from very different backgrounds from yours, with different thoughts, different experiences, different conclusions – you have to make at least a small effort at civility. Get out of your pajamas so to speak, brush your teeth, put on some clothes and go down and meet your guests. Don’t snarl at them from behind your locked door. Be a hypocrite, if necessary.

The other point is that, unfortunately, as Barnwell suggests, we don’t really celebrate diversity of opinion these days. We welcome different skin colors (which is good), but we want everyone thinking the same way – or at least in entirely predictable ways that have been scripted before hand. Again, an intelligent response to the ideological divide by Ali Eteraz:

“I always considered myself a humanist and do still. It just cannot be the case that only one “side” of a political divide have a monopoly on humanism. I know for a fact that Isaiah Berlin would not exactly be welcome in some parts of the left; nor Solzhenitsyn. [I also know that Burke would be ridiculed in some parts of the right]. I cannot in clean conscience engage against religious supremacism and exclusion if I engage in ideological supremacism and exclusion.

I believe in human solidarity. In the elimination of cruelty and humiliation. I believe in living beyond labels and identity markers. My motto is, and was, the following:

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same troublous storms that toss the private state and render life unsweet. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religions, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear.

Edmund Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France

I trust in my ability to distinguish between those that advance the causes of liberty and those that undermine it.”


Louisa May Alcott – a poem

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Update:

It’s a hymn by Bunyan, quoted in “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. I remember it from childhood and it sounded like Bunyan and when I looked it up, it was.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always been fond of this poem by Louisa May Alcott. It reminds me of something from Bunyan, for some reason.

Maybe it’s a quote that I don’t recognize. I’ll check.
The words evokes a sentiment probably as far as away as it’s possible to get from our consumer society and its partisan politics. Probably, it will be seen as trite, banal, or escapist by many people today.

But I wonder if that would be because of a failing in the verse or in the readers…

He that is down need fear no fall,
He that is low no pride.
He that is humble ever shall

Have God to be his guide.

I am content with what I have,
Little be it, or much.
And, Lord! Contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.

Fulness to them a burden is,
That go on pilgrimage.
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age!

God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother And The Rest of Us Ho’s

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Jerry Falwell, the evangelical preacher, who founded the Moral Majority, as well as Liberty University, died on May 15, 2007.

There were many things I liked and respected about Dr. Falwell. He built elementary schools and homes for single mothers; he helped alcoholics, the homeless and AIDS victims. He sent money to help the poor and sick in Africa. He built up a large university. When he debated Larry Flynt on TV, I remember he conducted himself with great dignity, generosity and humor.

I hope that he will be remembered for these things at least as much as for the pain his pronouncements over the years caused homosexuals, pagans, witches, abortionists (in his words), blacks and many other groups of varying ontological status.
Mind you, I say that as a childless divorcee, skeptical occultist, ethical pagan, and heterodox Christian whom Dr. Falwell would no doubt have consigned to the flames of hell.

Like most people today my primary difficulty is not with believing, but with not believing. Believing comes altogether too easily. The world – whether seen through the lens of science or through our own eyes – is so complex, variegated, fluctuating, and contradictory that we are ever more disposed to grope for certainty in areas where it may most be an illusion.

Some would say that Falwell’s fundamentalism was of that nature.

But there are other credulities besides religious ones.

How much easier and more comforting to our perpetually aggrieved sense of fairness, for instance, to think that all beliefs – if held with sufficient good will – are the same, all convictions equally plausible, all systems of economics – if only tried with good faith – equally productive.

How easy and – often – how wrong.

Jerry Falwell, for all his flaws – and they were clear enough – was not flawed in that way.

His beliefs were narrow. But by his lights and the lights of many who are fundamentalists, it was the narrowness of the way to eternal life preached in the gospels.

Progressives, who like to sample only what they find most palatable in Jesus’ teachings — like walnuts in an unfamiliar salad — have a tendency to ignore his words as they have actually come down to us. And no wonder. Taken literally (and that, I suppose, is why they are rarely taken literally), they would stick in our craws.

This is the Jesus who once said the gospel was for “the children” of the house (Israelites) and not for the “dogs.” (Samaritans). He may have stopped the adulteress being stoned, but he didn’t deny she was an adulteress. As for the Pharisees, the liberal, well-educated elite of his day, he routinely called them a nest of vipers for the hundred sophistries and metaphors with which they got around tedious religious rules. Jesus often seemed tiresomely literal to them, as well.

And he seems to have lived in expectation of an apocalypse too, even if he also died without seeing it.

But, of course, you will say — that was Jesus. This is Falwell.
And you would have made your point. Jesus was often deliberately opaque, ironic; he iced the sting of reproof with parables, poured compassion over the wounds his words inflicted and made his point as often with artistic silence – at crucial moments.

Falwell was rarely silent, and even more rarely artistic.
But among the many offensive quotes I see attributed to him, I have so far seen nothing that was much more than a blunt, unlovely articulation of some text of Christian or Jewish scripture.

If that is hate speech and potentially discriminatory under the law, as his many detractors claim, then we must outlaw substantial portions of the major religions.

Certainly those portions of the Old and New Testaments, which classify homosexuality among abominations, advocate killing diviners and witches, and celebrate crushing your enemies’ babies on rocks; which relegate women to subordination even in matters of conscience, and – like Falwell – attribute natural calamities and plagues to the wrath of a touchy deity. As a Christian, I speak of the Bible, but I’ll warrant that there are few scriptures that are entirely innocent in these matters.

Words, whether we think they come only from Jerry or directly from Jahweh, can offend.

They can cause immense pain. Ironically, Falwell himself suffered that pain once, very publicly. Pornographer Larry Flynt published a revoltingly nasty parody of a liquor ad, which had Falwell describing his “first time” with his mother in an outhouse. In 1988, in a seminal decision (Hustler Magazine Inc. Vs. Falwell), the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision to award the preacher damages for emotional pain, strengthening even further the protection of free speech about public figures. It was satire, said the justices, and satire has a venerable history, especially in America politics. To limit it would cast a pall over public debate.

Many applaud that decision unhesitatingly. It goes without saying, in our secular world, that pornographic imagery of that sort (I refuse to give it the great, good name of sex) – however maliciously intended – is never harmful in any ‘real’ way, and we are nothing if not realists…..or so we think.

Oddly, the also realistic CIA – whom no one could accuse of swooning sensitivity in these matters – thinks differently. By the 1960s, it had come to regard “no touch” torture – among which sexual humiliation occupies a prominent place – as more damaging than conventional physical torture in the long run. It “leaves deep, searing psychological scars on both victims and — something seldom noted — their interrogators,” writes Alfred McCoy, (The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib, 2004).

Falwell was not directly injured in the same way, of course. But it seems at least odd, if not downright confused, to argue that the very malicious public humiliation of a religious figure respected by a large segment of the population is not
a real injury to him and his followers, while the strong but not vicious articulation of hoary religious doctrines about pagans and witches, for instance, is a real injury to those groups – one that borders on discrimination so powerful that it needs to be outlawed as hate speech, as some have suggested.

That’s to say, a woman like me – qua believer – is supposed to be devastatingly injured if a Jerry Falwell tells her she can’t get to heaven while reading astrology charts. (His heaven, by the way, is presumably something she either doesn’t believe in, to begin with, or if she does believe in, thinks has different entrance requirements).

Yet, the same woman – qua woman – is supposed to be serenely untouched, if not actually enthused, when a Larry Flynt concocts imagery depicting her violently humiliated in pornographic terms. And this schizophrenia is usually to be found in the same progressives for whom sexuality and gender is supposedly a much more serious business than theological doctrine.

There’s no denying that religion has often had a history of subordinating some people to others nor that we are right to regard religious dogma with suspicion when it imposes itself on non-believers through the mechanism of the state. But there are other dogmas besides religious ones. And, allied to the power of the state, they can become quite as oppressive.

It was not overtly in the name of Christianity, after all, but in the name of secular, universal values that the American government bombed Orthodox Christians and Muslims in their own countries in recent years.

It may be time to recognize that some dogmas, whether religious or secular, might be mutually exclusive and it is our refusal to recognize and respect that exclusivity that has led to the current sorry state of political debate. Yet, respect we must. For, while it is impossible to meld irreconcilable beliefs without changing their natures, what is not impossible is to co-exist peacefully as people, while admitting that our beliefs are irreconcilable.

For that to happen, precisely defining religious belief or artistic expression or political speech is less important than cultivating a will to extend generosity to even our most fervent opponents. Style is more essential here than substance.

Jerry Falwell, after all, did disavow hatred for any group, even while he characterized them in accordance with his religious beliefs. And, to all appearances, those beliefs were sincerely held.

It is double-think of the worst kind, then, to label this express disavowal of hate as “hate,” unless you have proof of some kind of disingenuousness. And if you misused language in that way, what right would you have to feel injured if you heard the same Orwellism issue from the mouth of some right-wing talk show host who characterized your own viewpoint about gender or economic policy as “man-hating” or “class warfare”?

None at all.

Here is a modus vivendi easily available to anyone willing to try some agon-istic respect. Left-wing critics of Falwell could simply look at what the preacher said as a form of art. Perhaps a subsidy from the government would even be forthcoming. And fundamentalists could simply think of sexual liberalism as a distinct dogma and let it enjoy the protected status of a minor church. They might then be able to argue against a religious establishment in the public sphere with better success than they have until now.

Some of Falwell’s critics would do well to take a leaf out of his book and at least profess to love fundamentalists no matter how much they hate fundamentalism.
.

Ideas Against Empire

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Murray Rothbard, cited by Joe Stromberg:

“And this is how even a mighty and despotic State gets toppled. This is how ideas effect social and political change – through movements, through alternative visions, through struggle. And this is a change that should gladden the hearts of libertarians, for it shows that a Leviathan State, even a particularly brutal and dictatorial one, can be vanquished….”

What are some of those ideas? One, is to see through the facade of liberal warmaking states:

“…liberal states, by allowing considerable economic freedom, sit atop more productive economies than do backward states. With lower taxes, they can still raise great revenues and assemble superior armed force. They then wield this armed force in projects that interest them as state apparatchiks, while the busy commercial classes pay little enough attention.

Accordingly, liberal states such as Britain and the United States are likely to succeed in imperialist competition, while clunky feudal-mercantilist or dirigiste states are not. This is the key to the much-mooted “democratic peace” imposture. Liberal democratic states get more revenue and win most of their wars. This tells us nothing about the merits of those wars, and little enough about reasons for those states’ foreign policies. (Hint: doing good may not top the list.)

Long ago, John Locke saw the point: “that Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of Party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.” Thomas Paine, too, saw it, when he wrote that, “the portion of liberty enjoyed in England, is just enough to enslave a country by, more productively than by despotism; and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom; and is therefore, on the ground of interest, opposed to both.” And Hans-Hermann Hoppe has made the same point at greater length. [48]

It would be interesting to look at the ambiguities of Locke as an early semistatist modernizer, [49] mercantilist, participant in the slave trade, etc., but there is no room here, and anyway, Locke has plenty of latter-day followers in providing a liberal façade for state activities. They are legion who stand for “free-market” Social Bonapartism – the imposing of “freedom” and “spontaneous order” by US weaponry. That so many Chicagoites are on board the imperial train suggests that the Chicago School always functioned as the right wing of Cold War liberalism. [50]

This is heady brew and one can easily see why enlistments are up in John Stuart Mill’s Own Lancers and the Bentham Berets. Instead of cultivating our own garden – dull work at best – liberventionists have enlisted to “Smash Someone Else’s State,” or to repudiate someone else’s national debt. This creates a bit of a problem.”

More ideas to end an empire:

“What can someone do, who sincerely believes that markets work better than states, that liberty is better than statism, or that life is better than death? Well, he or she can learn to separate America from the state, justifications from good intentions, morality from utility, American political realities from vanished 18th-century essences, freemen from Founders, defense from empire, and so on.”

Read more at “How Murray Rothbard Singlehandedly Brought Down the Saigon Government with Malice Aforethought,” Joseph Stromberg, Lew Rockwell, April 4, 2005.

Government Attacks on Civilians Also Have a Long History…

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I wrote this for a progressive site more than a year ago. I thought it might be a good idea to dust it off and put it out again, just to remind everyone what governments are capable of doing to civilians:

“Washington is shocked, shocked by Seymour Hersh’s scoop about the Pentagon’s “Salvador Option,” an ambitious plan to deploy secret special forces in friendly and unfriendly countries to spy, target terrorists and their sympathizers, and conduct “hits,” all without Congressional oversight. Its model is the American counter-insurgency program in Salvador in the 1980s which funded nationalist death squads to hunt down insurgents.

What’s new today is that the program would be run by the Pentagon, not the CIA, and it would be much broader in scope. According to Hersh, the Pentagon’s gremlins are already at work in Iran prepping targets for possible US or Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

But Washington’s shock is misplaced. There’s nothing new about the “Salvador Option.” At the end of last month, Frank Cass in London released a new book by Dr. Daniele Ganser of the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich called, “NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe,” which offers plenty of evidence that there was also a “Salvador Option” in post-war Europe. It turns out that during the Cold War, European governments and secret services conspired with a NATO-backed operation to engineer attacks in their own countries in order to manipulate the population to reject socialism and communism.

It was called “the strategy of tension” and it was carried out by members of secret stay-behind armies organized by NATO and funded by the CIA in Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and other European countries. The strategy apparently involved supplying right-wing terrorists with explosives to carry out terrorist acts which were then blamed on left-wing groups to keep them out of power.

Only three countries, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland, have had a parliamentary investigation into NATO’s role and a public report. The US and UK, the two nations most centrally involved, are refusing to disclose details, so crucial pieces of the story are missing. Still, Ganser’s book offers some disturbing insights into a hidden aspect of the Cold War.

It all began during WWII when British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, ordered a secret army to be created to fight communism. Allen Dulles, the first chief of the CIA, worked out the original plan, and British MI6 and special forces teamed up with the CIA to train “stay- behind armies” in Western Europe to counter a possible Soviet invasion. It was all very James Bond – only grim – with forged passports, dead letter boxes, and parachute jumps over the channel, according to some of the trainees.

It turns out that what Washington meant by counter-terrorism, might often have been, well, terrorism.

Here’s the money part from one of the field manuals (FM 30-31B):

“…when the revolutionaries temporarily renounce the use of force ….US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger…”

That’s to say, if there wasn’t any terrorism to speak of, the secret armies were prepared to get some going.

According to Ganser, the secret army was behind waves of attacks in Italy in the 1970s. In Spain, it worked with Franco and may have supported over a 1000 attacks. In Germany, it had standing plans to murder leaders of the Social Democrat party in case of a Soviet invasion. It carried out terrorist actions against President de Gaulle and the Algerian peace plan in France. It seems to have been involved in the assassination of Amilcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, prominent leaders in African liberation in the Portugese colonies. It was involved in the coup against Greek Prime Minister Papandreou and fomented terrorism against the Kurds in Turkey. In the Netherlands, Luxemborg, Denmark, and Norway, however, the secret networks don’t seem to have been linked with terror.

The secret armies were first outed in August 1990 when then Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed the existence of Gladio, Latin for sword, a super secret group squirreled away in the military secret service, that had been manipulating the public with terrorist acts that it blamed on the Italian left.

NATO’s reaction to Andreotti’s revelation was first denial, then stone-walling, and finally a closed-doors admission to the ambassadors of the European countries. Since then, although a former CIA director William Colby has confirmed the creation of the stay-behind command centers and networks, NATO itself has withheld details. Asked about Gladio in Italy in 1990, former CIA director Stanford Turner angrily ripped off his microphone and shouted: “I said, no questions about Gladio!”

Today, with the Pentagon’s “Salvador Option” on the table, it’s time to revisit this hidden history of European counter-terrorism. While the Washington press corps seems convinced that the main problem with the “Salvador Option” is that the Pentagon is taking over what’s always been the CIA’s turf, the story of NATO’s stay-behind armies suggests that whether the CIA or Pentagon runs it, the new program will be a very ugly business.

As one of Gladio’s operatives said, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Despite repeated requests from researchers, the CIA, like MI6, refuses to release its files on the subject. Before the government begins the new “Salvador Option,” though, isn’t it time for the world to learn about the very first one?”

The Right to Self-Defense Has a Long History…

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In “The Second Amendment and the Historiography of the Bill of Rights,” David T. Hardy writes:

“The existence of an English militia, comprised not of specialized units but of essentially the entire male population, far antedates even the Norman Conquest.[12] By 1181, every English freeman was required annually to prove ownership of arms proportionate to his landholdings.[13] In 1253, even serfs were required to prove annually that they owned a spear and dagger.[14] Subsequent enactments ordered all healthy Englishmen to own longbows, to train their sons in archery from age seven, and to abstain from a variety of outdoor sports that diverted commoners from the archery ranges.[15] By the fifteenth century, Englishmen already regarded universal armament for national defense as a critical element in their development of “government under law.”[16] This perception of citizen armament as (p.8)a peculiarly English virtue was thereafter reinforced by the rise of royal absolutism on the Continent,[17] with consequent limitation on firearm possession in France and the Empire. Long after her continental counterparts had banned or severely restricted firearms ownership,[18] Elizabeth still struggled to stop her subjects from drawing pistols in church, or firing them in the churchyard.[19]”

My Comment:

As the founders conceived it, the right to self-defense drew both from collectivist and individualist strands in Anglophone political thinking. The collectivist element came from the Classical Republican tradition, the individualist from the Radicals (who also styled themselves Republicans).

And the right to self defense found its theoretical and practical underpinning earlier than Locke or the Enlightenment, in the writings of Machiavelli and in the disorder of the English civil war. Actually, it goes back even earlier, to before the Norman Conquest, as Hardy points out.

From this history, we know that the right to bear arms is both a right of individuals to self-defense against the encroachment of the state and a right of states to have organized reserve units (“militias”).

Being free to defend yourself is absolutely central to the Anglo-American (as opposed to the European) political tradition.

More here at the blog, “Arms and the Law.”

Fining Landlords Who Rent to Illegals

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The city council of Farmer’s Branch, a Dallas suburb, recently took a tough line on illegal immigration by approving fines for landlords who rent to illegal immigrants, making English the city’s official language and letting suspects in police custody be checked for their immigration status.
In “Farmer’s Branch Follies,” Michelle Wucker at the Huffington Post writes:

“Without a doubt, the federal government’s failure to reform our immigration laws bears much of the blame for the counter-productive actions of small towns across the states. Let’s hope that if any good comes of the Farmers Branches of the world, it will be to add to momentum for reform.

Unfortunately, we cannot count on reason from the federal government either. In 1918, the lynching of a German immigrant in Collinsville, Illinois, for supposed “disloyalty” (more likely, for general obnoxiousness, including having accused Americans of failure to display Old Glory sufficiently prominently) pushed a sluggish Congress into action. The law that ultimately passed, however, was not one to prevent lynchings and irrational behavior, but rather to crack down on foreign-born suspicious characters and to muzzle the freedom of speech in general. The logic that turned a lynching at the hands of U.S citizens into justification for the passage of 1918 Sedition Act is, sadly, the same warped reasoning that this year got us Congressional approval of a border fence instead of a set of immigration laws that have something to do with reality.”

My Comment:

Putting the burden on landlords to prove that their tenants have their legal papers in order seems rather unfair to me. But of course, it’s much easier to collect a penalty from landlords. Once again, the state passes the buck to citizens……

The Espionage Act of 1917

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From an article by Charles Adams, “The Land of the Not-So Free,” at Lew Rockwell:
“In 1917 five war protestors were handing out pamphlets on the streets of New York opposing US involvement in World War 1, and promoting Russian Revolutionary causes. They were arrested and charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime to oppose the war, that is –

“Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States…(the war, the flag, the military, the navy, enlistments, buying bonds, uniforms, etc,)…in contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or …intended to incite, provoke or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of the enemy shall be punished by…a $10,000 fine or imprisonment up to 20 years.”

It is a lengthy statute, covering everything imaginable, none of which amount to spying. It gives us a new definition of espionage that hasn’t yet found its way into dictionaries.

In the case of Abrams vs. United States, the protesters were give 20 years prison sentences. It was appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions by a 7 to 2 decision. They had published a pamphlet with offensive words like,

“We the toilers of America, who believe in real liberty, shall pledge ourselves, in case the United States will participate in that bloody conspiracy against Russia to create so great a disturbance that the Autocrats of America shall be compelled to keep their armies at home and not be able to spare any for Russia…If they will use arms against the Russian people to enforce their standard of order, so will we use arms…”

The seven Justices who upheld the convictions rambled on about irrelevant matters like the defendants were Russian immigrants in the US from 5 to 10 years, never being naturalized. They were against the war and any action against the Russian revolution. They advocated a general strike against munitions factories so they could not produce bullets to be used against German and Russian revolutionaries. If the armies of America were kept busy at home they could not be used abroad, wrote the pamphlet. The Court said, A technical distinction may perhaps be taken between disloyal and abusive language…But it is not necessary to a decision of this case to consider whether such a distinction is vital or merely formal for the language of these circulars was obviously intended to provoke and encourage resistance to the United States in times of war…And the defendants, in terms, plainly urged and advocated a general strike of workers in ammunition factories for the purpose of curtailing production of ordinances and munitions necessary and essential to the prosecution of the war.

The dissent by Oliver Wendell Holmes with Brandeis has now become the majority decision with Holmes writing one of his greatly admired comments, that “the defendants had as much right to publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United States.” I imagine the 7 Justices found Holmes remarks enraging. Holmes was known for his brilliant and pithy comments and this was one of his most remarkable. He then went on to state that unless there was an imminent and immediate danger, you can say anything no matter how loathsome and fraught with danger it may be. In time this became the rule in the United States and the resisters of the Viet Nam war can thank….”

My Comment:

This is a piece of history we ought to keep incessantly in our minds, especially with the so-called Hate Crimes Bill on the table and much talk of reviving the Fairness Doctrine.

Does the left really think that hushing Limbaugh and Co. on talk radio is going to redound to its benefit? Will it? Keep hammering on the idea that some speech is “hate speech” and we’ll soon have no speech.

Yelling fire in a crowded theater may be a bad idea a lot of the time, but not if the theater is on fire.

And for different reasons, a lot of people of all sorts of political persuasions have begun to think they hear the crackling of flames.

The End of National Currency

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An excerpt from The End of National Currency, by Ben Steil in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007:

“PRIVATIZING MONEY

It is widely assumed that the natural alternative to the dollar as a global currency is the euro. Faith in the euro’s endurance, however, is still fragile — undermined by the same fiscal concerns that afflict the dollar but with the added angst stemming from concerns about the temptations faced by Italy and others to return to monetary nationalism. But there is another alternative, the world’s most enduring form of money: gold.

It must be stressed that a well-managed fiat money system has considerable advantages over a commodity-based one, not least of which that it does not waste valuable resources. There is little to commend in digging up gold in South Africa just to bury it again in Fort Knox. The question is how long such a well-managed fiat system can endure in the United States. The historical record of national monies, going back over 2,500 years, is by and large awful.

At the turn of the twentieth century — the height of the gold standard — Simmel commented, “Although money with no intrinsic value would be the best means of exchange in an ideal social order, until that point is reached the most satisfactory form of money may be that which is bound to a material substance.” Today, with money no longer bound to any material substance, it is worth asking whether the world even approximates the “ideal social order” that could sustain a fiat dollar as the foundation of the global financial system. There is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their holdings.

So what about gold? A revived gold standard is out of the question. In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system. But private gold banks already exist, allowing account holders to make international payments in the form of shares in actual gold bars. Although clearly a niche business at present, gold banking has grown dramatically in recent years, in tandem with the dollar’s decline. A new gold-based international monetary system surely sounds far-fetched. But so, in 1900, did a monetary system without gold. Modern technology makes a revival of gold money, through private gold banks, possible even without government support.”

But then, the author goes on:

“As for the United States, it needs to perpetuate the sound money policies of former Federal Reserve Chairs Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan and return to long-term fiscal discipline. This is the only sure way to keep the United States’ foreign tailors, with their massive and growing holdings of dollar debt, feeling wealthy and secure. It is the market that made the dollar into global money — and what the market giveth, the market can taketh away. If the tailors balk and the dollar fails, the market may privatize money on its own.”

Sound money policies of Alan Greenspan? What might the author be thinking or wishing us to think with that?

But here’s a different take on the subject:

“You see, if central banking were an honest métier, there would be no reason to have it at all. Private banks could do the job better. But people are ready to believe anything. Somehow, they think that rich financiers and power-mad politicians get together to run a central bank for the benefit of the people! Well, I’ve got news: it doesn’t work that way.”
That, by the way, is from “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” forthcoming this fall from the joint pens of well-known financial writer, Bill Bonner, and yours truly…….

V-Tech Whitewash: Review Panel Finds University Response Very Effective and Very Successful

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Telling It Like It Isn’t:

V-Tech Review Panel Finds University Response Very Effective and Very Successful

“I think we know enough about the response to know it was very effective and a very successful response,” said retired state police superintendent W. Gerald Massengill, the chairman of the review panel appointed to investigate the Virginia Tech shootings. That was in a May 11 article in the Washington Post called “Va Tech Panel Outlines Agenda.”

Agenda is about right. How does 33 dead over a two and half spree on a campus crawling with cops count as “very effective” and “very successful”?

About the same way as V Tech is now apparently about “breaking down bureaucratic barriers among the courts, the school and the state as it relates to mental health information.”

More federal undermining of privacy laws, in fact. Just what we need from an administration already up to its intrusive eyes in domestic surveillance.

Massengill, by the way, is the man who led the Virginia State Police in the 9-11 attack on the Pentagon and the other panel members are Tom Ridge, the first U.S. secretary of homeland security, a top policy maker in state higher education, an administrator of the FBI’s center for the analysis of violent crime and two medical experts.

According to Massengill, the police gave him a timeline that “helped convince him that they responded as quickly as they could after the two people had been shot in West Ambler Johnston Hall.”

Since it’s the lynch-pin of the panel’s bizarre conclusion, that time line warrants more examination than the media has been giving it.

The timeline first entered the public debate on April 26, 2007 in this AP report: “5 Minute Delay Crucial in Tech Shooting.”

The article reported what is now regarded as the official version of the killings at Virginia Tech on 4/16:

Cho got to Ambler Johnston Hall a bit before 7 am; he killed his first 2 victims with a Glock 9 mm (a fairly ordinary handgun) with two rounds; his second bout of killing (30 people) was at Norris Hall and it took 9 minutes. Police supposedly took 3 minutes to get to Norris and 5 minutes to get into the building, where several entrances had been chained shut from inside.

Witness accounts are often contradictory and/or mistaken and a crisis, in recollection, can seem to have taken much longer than it actually did, but still, think about what’s supposed to have happened in 9 minutes:

Cho walked up and down the halls (2, 3 minutes, at least); he poked his head into a few classrooms a couple of times and left without doing anything; he fired steadily but with pauses in between, methodically breaking through doors that had been barricaded (that should have taken a minute at least), shot, left and returned to at least two classrooms (another minute or so each); stood over and shot students and fired individually at each (a minute?) in at least two classrooms. Although the students were trapped inside, they were barricading doors, running away, throwing themselves over each other, or jumping through windows, so they were moving targets that required him to aim and move too. And reload.

And then he shot himself. His last victim, wounded and on the floor, said he watched the gunman’s legs move to the front of the classroom, then heard a pause, then shots. No one actually saw the suicide, so what happened must remain somewhat tentative.

Why Nine Minutes

If Cho fired 170 rounds (or 255 – in at least one account) in Norris Hall, as reported, he fired almost 18 rounds per minute or a round roughly every 3 seconds. I’m not a marksman, so I don’t know if that’s likely or not. If you also take into account that he was reloading and pausing, he must have been firing an even higher number of rounds per minute than that most of the time. And, if we go by the multiple wounds in each body (3-4), he must have made about 120-130 hits (out of 170 rounds) in 9 minutes. So far as we know, he was an amateur with at most a few weeks of practice. I am not sure if that scenario is plausible or not. And again, I’m not trying to refute the timeline so much as evaluating it. But I do wonder how officials can be so sure of it. And why.

This was a time line posted on Wiki (it’s since been deleted, but you can find it, with the original footnotes, on my blog, which has collected material relevant to the case):

* 9:42 a.m.: Students in the engineering building, Norris Hall, make a 9-1-1 emergency call to alert police that more shots have been fired.
*9:45 a.m.: Police arrived three minutes later and found that Cho had chained all three entrances shut.
* Between 9:30 and 9:50 am: Using the .22 caliber Walther P22 and 9 millimeter Glock 19 handgun with 17 magazines of ammunition, Cho shoots 60 people, killing 30 of them. Cho’s rampage lasts for approximately nine minutes. A student in Room 205 noticed the time remaining in class shortly before the start of the shootings.
* Around 9:40 a.m.: Students in Norris 205, while attending Haiyan Cheng’s issues in scientific computing class, hear Cho’s gunshots. The students, including Zach Petkewicz, barricade the door and prevent Cho’s entry.
* 9:50 a.m.: After arriving at Norris Hall, police took 5 minutes to assemble the proper team, clear the area and then break through the doors. They use a shotgun to break through the chained entry doors. Investigators believe that the shotgun blast alerted the gunman to the arrival of the police. The police hear gunshots as they enter the building. They follow the sounds to the second floor.
* 9:51 a.m.: As the police reached the second floor, the gunshots stopped. Cho’s shooting spree in Norris Hall lasted 9 minutes. Police officers discovered that after his second round of shooting the occupants of room 211 Norris, the gunman fatally shot himself in the temple.

From this Wiki account (which is quite conservative and can be verified from other published time-lines), the shooting really could have taken place any time between at least 9:30 and 9:50 – a space of 20, not 9 minutes.

But even on its own terms, the official timeline seems a little odd. If students heard gun shots (which could only have been at the very latest at 9:40), and if police reached the second floor at 9:51, that still makes 11 minutes, not 9.

Why, you might ask, am I quibbling about a few minutes? After all, no one could really have been sure of anything in all the confusion. True. But that’s all the more reason why insisting on those 9 minutes seems peculiar. Especially since we also have at least one account that the police got there much later than in the official story. Confusion again? What about the video footage of the scene and reports indicating police hiding around the building? Or reports they came out of nowhere (BBC, April 17). That doesn’t square with the official story saying they rushed straight from that 9-1-1 call to Norris. More confusion? Possibly. But each additional contradiction becomes that much less plausible as simple error.

But the insistence on 9 minutes does make sense if you think about the bigger picture.
If the gunman only took 9 minutes, then the onus on the police to explain their behavior becomes much less. It’s then no longer a question of what they were doing for the half hour or so in which Cho was rampaging through Norris Hall (not to mention the two hours before) but only what made them delay after they got to Norris at 9:45 (3 minutes after the call).

And that’s simple – the doors were chained shut. Ergo, they had to wait 5 minutes while – by this reckoning – Cho finished off his 9 minute spree.

That this is the significance of having a 9 minute time-line is pretty clear, since the police officers quoted in the article direct their criticism specifically at the 5 minute delay. The critics say it was those few minutes that most significantly increased the number of victims. Meanwhile, for some reason, they’re silent about what the police were doing for the two hours before.

Bringing in the Military

Then, tacked on to the criticism of the 5 minute delay is a discussion (for the first time in the media) of what is known as the ‘active shooter’ paradigm in police operations. The critics say the 5 minute delay wouldn’t have happened if V-Tech had been treated from the start as an ‘active shooter’ situation.

What is an ‘active shooter’ situation? It’s a sniper or shooter crisis where swifter and more aggressive police tactics are required because the perp is careless about his own life and therefore more likely to take as many down with him as he can. Those aggressive tactics, called, ‘Immediate Action Rapid Deployment,’ were developed in the nineties, but really came into prominence only after the Columbine school shootings in 1999. But they still aren’t operational everywhere, supposedly because of lack of funds and training.

But notice that ‘active shooter’ is being referenced in the 4/26 article only in terms of the 5-minute delay. Why? Maybe because it’s a strategy with several advantages:

1. It lets the police take some blame, but not so much that the massacre looks like a case
of negligence. That’s a move that makes it possible to take the focus off police failureand put it on policy changes requiring more laws, more force, and ultimately more
federalization.

2. It dampens public outrage at the individuals who really are culpable. A 5 minute delay isn’t going to work anyone up the way a 2 hour delay would.

3. It lets officials introduce the ‘Immediate Action Rapid Deployment’ (IARD) paradigm into campus policing without undercutting the decisions taken by the administration or the police.

Now, IARD is a distinct step in the militarization of police response and is very much a part of the trend to systematically erase the boundaries between wartime military actions and domestic policing. Domestic crises are more and more described and tackled in military terms, just as foreign military actions are being palmed off as policing operations.

Which is why the article goes on, ”This is a seminal moment for law enforcement as far as I’m concerned because it proves that minutes are critical”

Yes – it’s seminal. V-Tech is going to help put military responses squarely on campus.

What I’m suggesting is that the more officials can take the blame off V-Tech, the more they can push for additional federal policies and laws.

So, if my thesis holds good, officials should also be taking that 2 hour gap between Ambler Johnston and Norris off the table as fast as possible, because that’s where the administration’s culpability is most obvious. Are they?

Indeed they are. One of the first things the V-Tech review panel appointed by former Governor Kaine has done is to state flatly that shutting down the campus couldn’t possibly have done any good because the shooter could always have gone back into his dorm and shot the 900 or so people who lived there. I quote,

“On Thursday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said that the massacre may not have been averted if the Virginia Tech campus had been locked down after the two shooting deaths at the dorm. ”Well, if the campus had been locked down — because the shooter lived on campus — I mean he could have gone into his dorm with 900 people instead of going into a classroom (and) he could have shot people there,” Kaine said in his monthly listener-question program on WRVA-AM and the Virginia News Network.”

Well, surely this is a straw-man. Locking down the campus was not the only option. V-Tech could also have made an announcement on its PA system for students to lock themselves into their rooms or stay off campus. A siren could have gone off to alert people, instead of an email notice. Police could have been rushed in to guard buildings (they should have been doing that anyway, since there had been a couple of bomb threats in the weeks preceding). How did they manage to shut down the campus so efficiently in August 2006, when survivalist and killer, William Morva, was on the loose?

Kaine’s tendentious announcement also overlooks another bunch of really serious failures on the part of V-Tech. How was it that on a campus where the student population had been disarmed by policy, there were no monitoring cameras nor armed security guards near the dorms who could have stopped the shooter in the first place? Even measly little schools have them; why not this lush, plush campus with its own golf course, power station and airport and what the BBC calls “meticulously manicured” lawns?

How could V- Tech promise its students that the campus was gun-free, if they had no metal detectors or security checks to ensure it? How did Cho leave campus to post his video and re-enter loaded with ammo and guns and not set some detector or alarm off? How could he have even entered a dorm without a security card in the first place? And why were students entering and leaving Ambler Johnston until 10 AM (according to student reports) after the shooting at 7:15?

Is none of that worth noting? Would a little vigilance in any of those things not have helped at all? Does it really just boil down to those 5 minutes?.

Or is the media trying to frame what’s at stake? Seems like it, especially if we look at what else’s is going on.

Framing A Story

Quite early on, Time magazine had an opinion piece (“Va. Tech’s President Should Resign,” John Cloud, 4/19), which – with little serious argument – explicitly directed the public’s attention away from the delay between the two shootings and toward the danger signals Cho was sending up for two year before the shootings.

Now, those two years are problematic too. But the useful thing about focusing on the two years is that the failure to follow up on Cho’s problematic behavior – unlike the two hour delay – can always be blamed on policies.

And in fact, people are doing just that. Inevitably they’ll reach the conclusion that, mirabile dictu, none of it was V-Tech’s fault at all, either. It was the fault of laws, policies, programs, etc. etc…

Notice this report on 4/25 on MSNBC, for instance. It describes students standing firmly behind the V-Tech president and administration. It makes a striking contrast with earlier reports in which students repeatedly and loudly criticized the administration.

Looks a lot as if this show of student confidence developed later. But who’s pushing for the vote of confidence for the people at the top? Let’s see.

Quote: “Johnson plans to present the university Board of Visitors on Thursday with an online petition with thousands of signatures of support for Steger and Flinchum. Steger also received an endorsement from the governor.

”Charlie has been acting as a very, very good president,” Gov. Tim Kaine said. ”This kind of event could happen anywhere on any campus, and there has been an innocence taken away from the students. But the positive values, and academic tradition of this university will help the community stay strong, and keep this university attracting students.” End quote.

I’ve written about this kind of media framing before. First, the media sensationalizes. This is the pulp drama of personal narratives, human interest stories, emotion, drama, color, personalities… Then, when we get to the heart of the matter, the focus quickly shies away to broad questions of law and policy. No one’s ever at fault now. It’s always a failure to communicate, bad laws, not enough funding – anything that lets the bosses off the hook.

That was the MO of the media during the torture debate. Questions about what actually happened were quickly framed out and the debate focused on creating better policies rather than on punishing the people who created the bad ones. It was ultimately only the alternative press which pushed the debate back to where it belonged.

Likewise, at V-Tech, the mainstream public debate has been relentlessly about more federal laws of all kinds – more gun control…. or federalizing the mental health data base… or militarizing security…or imposing speech codes.

Which fits in perfectly with where this government wants to go, as a recent piece by James Bovard, “Working for the Clampdown,” in The American Conservative Magazine (April 27, 2007), indicates. Bovard describes how the Defense Authorization Act of September 30, 2006 makes it easy for the president to impose martial law in the event of what he calls public disorder — which might just be something like an antiwar protest on campus. (Not for nothing was it the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that held a hearing on college campus security on 4/23 and on 4/26).

Meanwhile Congressman Ron Paul’s Texas newsletter, “Straight Talk,” describes the dangers of an impending and unconstitutional ‘hate crimes’ bill (HR 1592) that has every potential to create a category of “thought crimes.”

With that in mind, you begin to see that despite the overwhelming focus on them, V- Tech is fundamentally not about these things:

It’s Not About More Gun Laws:

The gun control argument runs — Were guns not growing on Virginian trees, this would never have happened, ergo – we need new laws. No guns for nut jobs.

But the trouble with this line of reasoning is that Virginia Tech is already a gun-free zone. Theoretically at least. The university beat back an attempt (in just 2006) by the state of Virginia to allow student to carry concealed weapons on campus. And, Virginia’s gun laws already do prohibit deranged people from purchasing firearms. When Cho bought his two handguns, he was already committing a felony.

It’s Not About More Mental Health Reporting

OK, you ask, then how come Cho’s record of derangement didn’t stop him from buying two guns?

Well, that’s because he had no record. Forget the Feds. He didn’t have one with the state. No one gave him one.

But doesn’t that make the case for more laws regulating the mentally deranged? Not really. The real problem was that the laws already in place weren’t followed.

First, let’s be precise here – no psychiatrist ever saw Cho. A licensed social worker recommended sending him to a treatment facility (and got a special judge to do it) and then a PhD psychologist reckoned he was a threat only to himself (and had the same special judge release him) – all in about 24 hours flat. Some evaluation. It was not only shoddy on its face but in flat violation of state law, which requires an MD to do the job. (“Cho Seung Hui’s Commitment Papers,” Bonnie Goldstein, Slate, April 24, 2007). That’s strike two just there.

And now, strike three. Although Cho was ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, it turns out that no one kept track of whether he did or didn’t. Or kept records of any kind, apparently, all of which is a violation of existing state law.

More details have emerged about what happened at the three state institutions through which Cho passed (“Cho Didn’t Get Court-Ordered Treatment,” Brigid Schulte and Chris L. Jenkins, Washington Post, May 7, 2007).

These were V. Tech’s Cook Counseling Center, Blacksburg’s New River Valley community services board, and nearby Christiansburg’s Carilion St. Alban’s Clinic, which is where Cho ended up staying overnight. Each now says it had no reason, jurisdiction, or wherewithal to follow up. They all saw no evil, heard no evil….. and did nothing at all.

Says Mike Wade, the Blacksburg board’s community liaison, “Since we weren’t named the provider of that outpatient treatment, we weren’t involved in the case.”

Says Terry Teel, Cho’s court appointed lawyer, of the court’s role in overseeing the treatment, “We have no authority.”

Says Christopher Flynn, director of V-Tech’s Cook Counseling center, “I’ve never seen someone delivered to me with an order that says, ‘This person has been discharged; he’s now your responsibility.’ That doesn’t happen.”

Really? What’s on paper contradicts all of them.

Re Virginia Tech. Here are VA state guidelines with which state universities have to comply (Act H 3064 approved by the Governor on March 21, 2007, not even a month before V Tech):

“The governing boards of each public institution of higher education shall develop and implement policies that advise students, faculty, and staff, including residence hall staff, of the proper procedures for identifying and addressing the needs of students exhibiting suicidal tendencies or behavior…….. Nothing in this section shall preclude any public institution of higher education from establishing policies and procedures for appropriately dealing with students who are a danger to themselves, or to others, and whose behavior is disruptive to the academic community.”

Re New River: Virginia state law says that community service boards “shall recommend a specific course of treatment and programs” for people such as Cho who are ordered to receive outpatient treatment. The law also says these boards “shall monitor the person’s compliance.” [Wade claims that’s “news to him.”]

Re St. Alban’s, Virginia law says that if a dangerously mentally ill person ordered into treatment doesn’t go, he can be brought back before the special judge, and if necessary, in a crisis, be committed to a psychiatric institution for up to 6 months.

Let’s put it this way: If Virginia state guidelines for universities had been followed, Cho’s history would have been on record and campus police would have had an eye on him already. And if he had been properly evaluated and monitored according to state mental health requirements, he would have been labeled a danger to society and the state police would have stopped him buying a gun.

So tell me, why do we need more laws when people aren’t following the ones already on the books?

It’s Not About More Funding:

Was it because there weren’t enough funds, as some argue? Community service boards apparently handled 115,000 mentally ill people in Virginia in 2005 at a cost of $127 million. That works out – very roughly – to about a thousand bucks per person. I don’t know if that’s shabby or not. But it doesn’t really seem relevant here. What would it have cost additionally in time or money to call up and find out if Cho had gone into treatment? Ten minutes and the cost of a local phone call.

The whole business is that amazing – no one seems to have known anything or done much of anything. No one seems to have followed up or even thought they had to. For instance, reports say the Cho’s family didn’t seek treatment for him because they didn’t have enough money, yet the family lives in an affluent Virginia neighborhood, sent their children to elite private schools, and gave Cho enough spare change for videos, a car, a cell phone, an escort service (at least once), firearms, an ungodly amount of ammo and training at a firing range.

Isn’t it much more likely that if Cho’s family didn’t get help for him, it was because of the stigma attached to mental illness, which is much greater among Asian families? And would more money really have made that better?

Let states spend as much as they want on community mental health. But don’t tell me Virginia Tech happened because of lack of money.

It’s Not About More Federal Data Bases:

Some argue that reporting to the Feds has to be tightened because under federal law, Cho’s voluntary confinement would have automatically prevented him from buying a gun. (Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Virginia Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform).

Well, in the first place, as we’ve seen, if he’d been properly evaluated, state laws themselves would have stopped Cho. If people don’t comply with state laws, why are they any more likely to comply with federal laws?

According to the FBI, Virginia is already the leading state in reporting mental health dis-qualifications to the Feds. But, the problems is that Virginia state law is a tad different from the federal law. It lists only two categories that would warrant notifying the state police – “involuntary commitment” or a ruling of “mental “incapacitation” – neither of which applied to Cho, who was confined “voluntarily” and wasn’t ruled incapacitated.

Immediately after the shootings, Governor Tim Kaine (a Democrat) eliminated this distinction. He also said he thought V-Tech would help push through legislation he supports that would also subject firearms sales at gun shows to instant background checks (legislation introduced annually in Virginia that dies before a floor vote in the General Assembly).

[Interestingly, a move to expand Virginia’s mental health laws was already in the works in October 2006. It’s goal was to “modify the criteria for placing people in emergency care by eliminating a requirement that they pose an “imminent” danger to themselves or others.”
Precisely what’s now being demanded as a result of the V-Tech shootings.]

But will making every state law automatically comply with federal law on this make things better or worse? I’m not sure. If people know that their mental health evaluations automatically go into a federal data base, will that make them even more reluctant to seek help they might need? Is it a provision that might be misused by vengeful spouses? I don’t know. And what if, in the present political climate, expression of certain beliefs – say, conspiracy theories about the government – were classified as signs of mental derangement? And suppose you could be forced into psychiatric evaluation for that? What if the hate crimes bill on the table now makes even thinking or speaking a certain way a sign not only of derangement but of criminal intent toward society. You get my drift. I’m afraid that the unintended bad of more federalization might come to outweigh the hoped-for good of standardization.

In any case, to my mind, the real problem lies with the special justice who released Cho and then decided he had to attend outpatient – not inpatient – treatment  Whether Cho was sent to V Tech’s Cook center or not (Cook’s not returning calls), mental health advocates and state officials call it pretty unusual to order outpatient treatment for someone labeled a imminent danger to himself. Usually, it’s an inpatient order, says Mary Zdanowicz, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center. And, a 1994 survey of special justices found that outpatient treatment was ordered in just 8 percent of the commitment hearings, among other things, because they’re hard to monitor (Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission).

In short, measured just by current laws and care standards, Cho’s evaluation seems to have been shoddy and the special justice’s remedy poorly conceived.
And I don’t see why more laws would change that.

In fact, part of the problem looks like too much regulatory apparatus and too many state bodies with orbits that were designed to mesh but ended up clashing and too little common sense and care.

The three agencies involved at V-Tech shared responsibility like the three crones in the myth shared one eye — they fumbled so much as they passed it around that they dropped it.

In short, what we have here is a full-throttle display of the Diminishing Utility of More Bureaucrats and Laws (DUMBEL), whereby what was everyone’s responsibility became no one’s job.

Meanwhile, the policies that should be discussed are not.
We still have no account of what medication Cho was taking, although his room mates have told us they saw him taking a pill regularly in the mornings.

And we have even less discussion about a matter of crucial importance now:

How to hold the state accountable for laws it expects us to follow but doesn’t follow itself.

A piece in the Chronicle of Higher Educatio, April 24, describes the potential for litigation at V-Tech and quotes lawyers who have suggested that the university showed gross negligence.
But of course, the panel’s swift and well publicized conclusion easily gets to trump that in the public debate.

Meanwhile, the media, which rushed to shove microphones and cameras in the faces of grieving friends and family, hasn’t shown much interest in reporting on what victims face if they do try to press their claims: The doctrine of sovereign immunity. A relic of common law, it protects a state university like Virginia Tech from litigation by citizens. States have relaxed the doctrine to allow state hospitals, for example, to be sued for malpractice, still, any plaintiff at V-Tech, I am reliably told, would have to establish a case of gross negligence and they would have only 6 months to press claims. That means any stalling by the university helps it to avert a lawsuit by reducing the amount of time victims have to collect information and prepare a case. It’s very likely that the victims don’t even know about the doctrine.

The doctrine of sovereign immunity, by the way, holds that a state can do no wrong because the state creates the law and thus cannot be subject to it. On that count at least, it looks like the State of Virginia is already perfectly in synch with the Federal government these days.