This American Attention Whore

Since the National Law Journal has just posted an article about TLB, I figured this is a good opportunity for a time-out from the serious law talk, which has occupied this forum for most of the month of June, and talk about some of the stuff that probably isn't mentioned often enough around here. A little levity always helps this kind of situation get going and so I'm going to quote from a post entitled, In Defense of Paris Hilton, by comedian, and talking monkey, Joe Rogan:

Paris Hilton is a guilty pleasure bordering on a national obsession.

What’s the deal? I understand that seeing her everywhere can be annoying, and that she’s got no discernible talent, and all that good shit… but I really don’t understand all the hate. The day she got out of jail a friend of mine who is normally very rational and intelligent was actually angry. Really fucking pissed. “Why the fuck should she get out of jail early? She gets home confinement in her fucking mansion? I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit!”

Meanwhile, across the world horrific drama goes on every minute of the day and gets relatively little attention. Bombs drop, and IED’s explode, people die… Cool, fun loving people that will be sorely missed by their loved ones vanish from the earth every day, but on the news it’s marginalized to a number. “13 US soldiers lost their lives in battle this weekend, making this one of the deadliest months on record.” Reduced to a number. A 1 in 13. A part of Monday’s update on the weekend’s action for those that went fishing and want to keep up on the count.

But Paris Hilton is BREAKING fucking news. Even when they’re talking about other shit they’ve got a Paris Hilton update scrolling across the bottom of the screen. “Paris Hilton hasn’t eaten or slept in days!” Larry King actually devoted at least two entire shows to Paris, and had people that were friends of Paris on. He asked CRAZY questions, like “Is Paris down to earth?”

“Really?” I was watching it and that was all I could think. Just “really?”

This whole scenario just seemed like a funny scene in a Judd Apatow movie or something. Just wow… how fucking weird are we? This is what we care about most while we’re in the middle of this crazy modern day holy war? I’ve actually heard a conservative talk show host say that if the media concentrated on each and every death and went into detail about it people would lose their taste for the war. He went on to say that the American people, especially the young just don’t understand the sacrifice it takes to keep this great land free.

Joe Rogan is one of the best comedians performing today simply because he's honest, and straight honesty is so horrifying you have to laugh or you'll completely freak out. Well, right now, I'm not laughing, and I think we should all be very freaked out-- not panicked-- just freaked out. It's good for the heart to get a little freaked out every now and then. It hopefully snaps you out of your drone-like complacency and you ask, "Yeah, who are those guys that died in some foreign land over the weekend?"

I don't know who they are. Do you? I'm all the way in China and I know Paris got out of jail (again) but I have no idea what's happening in Iraq. That troubles me, and I wonder what I'm going to do about it like some fat couch-potato wondering what he's going to do about his gut. Is the answer the same for both situations? Get off my ass? The couch-potato knows he has to go to the gym and eat better, but what do I do about the men and women that died over the weekend?

Cindy Sheehan, the "Peace Mom" who gained national attention protesting President Bush's Iraq war policy, officially told the world that she will resist the war no more. Since her son, Casey, died in the Iraq war, she has been working for peace in the Middle East and the US media dubbed her an "attention whore" for her efforts. In her resignation she said:

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an "attention whore" then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey's brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every day since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

Are you freaked out yet? Of course, I don't even know if I want peace in the Middle East. Peace is a nice idea but so is utopia. I have to ask what the warhawks ask, "Is it realistic?" The people who hate the war say it's a war for oil and those who are for the war agree! Hey, at least there is a point that everyone agrees on! But if I agree with that, then shouldn't I be joining up? Or maybe what I should be doing is inventing an alternative to oil...?

What about this phrase I hear every so often: "They're fighting for our way of life!" Isn't that a telling phrase? What is our way of life? Isn't it American Idol, bad beer, bar-b-ques, and... attention whores? Isn't the contemporary American dream that we're all going to someday be movie stars and rock stars and millionaires? What do we do when that reality doesn't manifest? Watch Fight Club again? Seek out a new catharsis like UFC or  24?

Something interesting you notice when you leave the US and you come to a communist country like China is that there are no cops. I'll go days without seeing a cop and when I eventually do see a cop, he's probably unarmed and directing traffic. The US is a police state! China has four times the number of people as the US and yet the US has more people in jail and prison than any other nation in the world. Are you freaked out yet? Why does the US have so many people locked up? There just happens to be more bad-asses in the US than anywhere else? Violence begets violence? Is this the way of life that is being defended by our nation's young men and women?

And what about the detainees being held at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? We have devoted a significant portion of this blog's dialogue to the debate about the rights of the detainees. A recent article by Harper's magazine said that the lawyers defending the detainees "have been tarred with ethnic slurs and accusations of homosexuality, accused of undermining national security, subjected to continual petty harassment. They have also had their livelihoods threatened through appeals to their paying clients. These events have been reported as separate incidents in the press, but this conduct results from a carefully orchestrated Bush Administration policy that goes under the rubric of lawfare." Is this even remotely surprising now that the CIA is showing the world their "Family Jewels"?

Perhaps nothing shocks us anymore? Maybe no one believes anything is real anymore? It's just one very long TV show and it's all just make believe... It's this kind of apathy that encourages countries like China to produce TV documentaries called "The Downfall of America"... But what can be done? How do you overcome this inertia? Perhaps I'm completely digressing from my point, and so we should go back to Joe Rogan, who said near the end of his blog post:

Every day sons, brothers, and friends come home dead in boxes from a fucked up war in a foreign land, and the only people that freak out are the ones that know them. It’s gotten so bad that the media are actually forbidden from taking pictures of the flag draped coffins as they’re being shipped stateside, but the cameras never stop taking pictures of the crying little rich girl in the back of the police car. And please, don’t get me wrong… I’m not immune to the fascination. I watch it like all the other little monkeys.

I have to admit that I'm also guilty. There is a very interesting post on the Listless Lawyer blog entitled, On Truth and Meaning, which has a quote about Alice in Wonderland that summarizes this post really well:

In the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland, the White Rabbit reads an obscure verse which was apparently quite irrelevant to the case. The King triumphantly exclaimed “That’s the most important piece of evidence we’ve heard yet.” Alice flatly contradicted him and said, “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.” The King then said, “If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.”

I don't start to freak out until I try to find meaning in any of it. Perhaps we should just laugh it off and get back to our work... Except it's just not very funny, is it?

[UPDATE: Click here for a visual representation of U.S. military deaths in Iraq, courtesy of Michael Moore. You can learn the names and some background information about the U.S. military men and women who have died in Iraq at Honor the Fallen.]

Comments

[Dylan J. Condit]

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" - Alice

You're right Travis, it's not very funny at all. Thank you for writing this.

If I only had a world of myown...

[Wendy Jackson]

"Something interesting you notice when you leave the US and you come to a communist country like China is that there are no cops. I'll go days without seeing a cop and when I eventually do see a cop, he's probably unarmed and directing traffic. The US is a police state!"

China executes more than 150 times more people each year than the US does. That might have a "chilling" effect on crime. So--I don't know that the right conclusion to be drawn is that the US is a police state (in comparison to China). Rather, because the accused have substantial civil rights (check Amendments IV, V, & VI), there may be more willingness to push up against (or outright break) the law in the US. That greater willingness to engage in borderline/illegal activities then requires broader enforcement to keep crime at acceptable levels. We should remember that Freedom/Rights and Security are two sides of the same coin.

[Travis Hodgkins]

I'm reluctant to play number games because numbers are always so manipulatable... According to the US Department of Justice, in 2005 there were 3,254 people waiting to be executed in the U.S. of A. I'm not sure how anyone can say that more people have been executed under the compulsion of state in China than anywhere else in the world when those numbers have never been released by the Chinese government. People at best have estimates and those estimates range from 1,000 people in 3 months to 15,000 in a year. It all depends on which organization you're getting your numbers from or what renegade Chinese person has decided to badmouth his homeland because he or she has been wronged. The fact remains that the US has over 3,000 human beings locked away in a cell awaiting their deaths. If you're not one for the death penalty, then this number should appall you. If you are a proponent of the death penalty, and maybe you think it has a good deterrent effect, then maybe China is your kind of place and you think the US should pick up the pace. Apparently, China is more efficient than the US is about killing people sentenced to death, and it's obviously having the desired effect, which is less crime and less fear.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that the US still has more people in prison or jail than any other country in the world. The US also has more cops, more lawyers, and a very overworked and active judiciary. You say that's the price for security, and I query, "What security?" I can walk the streets of any Chinese city without fear and without worry that I'm going to be accosted or robbed. Yet, back in the U.S. of A. where we have more cops and supposedly more security, two people were shot dead two blocks from our law school just before spring semester ended. Don't remember? Check your Hastings email because the Dean sent out a letter explaining the situation and using it as a justification to maintain increased security on campus. My fellow law students are afraid to walk around the neighborhood at night. Is this the security that you're referring to in your comment? Because if it is, then I'll take the couple thousand executions in China as opposed to the hundreds of thousands that are imprisoned in the US.

And let us not forget to query who is China executing? People make statements like China executes more people than any other country and we're all supposed to put a tissue to our eye and think, "Thank god almighty I don't live in that heathen commie country!" The people being executed in China are not all saints, they are some bad dudes. For instance, one of the people executed in 2004 was a murderer and rapist (see http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-02/14/content_306131.htm). He murdered 67 people, and he would use hammers and meat cleavers to kill entire families. Now I know that in the US we might have put him in a cell right next to Charlie Manson and we would have all pondered the horrors of his bad deeds and every couple of years we'd send in a journalist to find out how he is doing and make sure he is getting enough bologna sandwiches. However, that shit does not fly in China, the Chinese killed his murdering ass. If you want to cry about it, well, it's a free country, go ahead-- hell, they would even let you cry about it in China.

I also noticed you threw out a bunch of fancy lawyer speak about the US Constitution. Last time I checked, which was pretty recently, China also has a Constitution and they also have a judiciary. Hell, they even let people appeal their death sentence now. As Americans, what we need to keep in mind is that we grew up in a country that has seriously hated anything having to do with communism for a long time. Not to mention, we blame the Chinese for a few blemishes on our national pride. Take for instance a little incident we call the Korean War and the Chinese call the Repulsion of the American Aggressors. We also shouldn't forget that the Soviets and the Chinese made our job in a place called Vietnam practically impossible.

We're prejudice. Frankly, Americans think they have it all right and the rest of the world is wrong, and Americans believe their way of life is so right that they even go out of their way to help these less fortunate people that have to live in these horrible places like China. Back in America, they try to drum up support for their causes by printing wild stories about thousands upon thousands of people being executed when in actuality they have no hard data. Why do they do this? I don't know. They got tired of watching American Idol and suddenly they decided they were going to help other people. The problem is that Americans fail to realize that not everyone in the world wants to live like they do. Not all the women in the world want to wear pants and have a career. Not all of the governments in the world believe that freedom comes from imprisoning a large portion of society. As shocking as it may seem, many people in the world prefer to squat rather than sit on a porcelain bowl.

Read once more what Sheehan said in her resignation. Sheehan is a woman that did all she could to stop the American war machine, to free us from the police state, and she was pushed down from every side until she was broken. The powers that be in the US-- republican, democrat, liberal, conservative-- let me make it easy, the people who are making the most money (we're all making money off it) from the war machine, the police state, the military industrial complex-- did not want her to succeed. None of us wanted her to succeed because none of us truly want the system to change. We like our jobs and we like our toys and we like our status and it comes from war. Change the system? We are the system. Change it from within? How? We were raised in the system. All we know is the system. Without the system we're lost. Destroying the system for us is tantamount to suicide. To fix the system we would have to collectively reformat our minds, wipe the slate clean, but then who would reprogram us? You can drop-out as an individual but you'll never be able to think outside the parameters of your American upbringing. It will always taint your every thought and motive.

Freaked out yet?

In his "Military Industrial Complex" speech, President Eisenhower said, "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Ponder whether unwarranted influence has taken acquisition of the government. Consider whether we take things for granted; whether misplaced power exists and persists; and whether the American citizenry is alert and knowledgeable. Then tell me whether our methods are peaceful and if peaceful methods are being used to fulfill our goals. Tell me whether we have failed President Eisenhower or if he somehow failed us. Tell me whether the military industrial enterprise could have had any other outcome. Then, and only then, will I even begin to ponder whether the Chinese should or should not execute murderers and rapists in their own country.