The Tyranny of the Tenuous Majority

During a recent trip around the channel horn, I had the unfortunate (though admittedly self-inflicted) experience of watching a conversation between Fox News personality Bill O’ Reilly and ex-Speaker of the House-turned-Historian Newt Gingrich. The matter on the table was the judiciary branch of government, particularly how to wrest liberals from having any influence in it. Gingrich openly called for a purging of liberal judges, and attempted a somewhat bastardized historical reference to Thomas Jefferson’s attacks on the last minute judicial appointments John Adams made before leaving office in 1801, known infamously as the “Midnight Judges.”

As I watched these two men congratulating each other on their brilliance (I assume their admiration for each other’s misogynistic personal lives was saved for off camera), I kept coming back to two chapters in book one of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America. Chapters fifteen and sixteen specifically, which deal with an idea he termed “the tyranny of the majority.” In these chapters, Tocqueville observed that American majorities “frequently display the tastes and the propensities of a despot,” and that “in such a republic a more insufferable despotism would prevail than in any of the absolute monarchies of Europe; or, indeed, than any that could be found on this side of Asia.” As I slumped in my chair reading this, Tocqueville offered redress. “The legal profession,” he argued, was “the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.”

Yet it is this last bastion against the tyrannical majority that conservatives are now hell-bent on tearing down. Take Orrin Hatch’s address to the Christian Coalition “Road to Victory 2004” as example. There he asserted “judicial activism destroys the people’s right to govern ourselves, to have our values influence public policy and define the culture. America needs judges who know their proper place and are committed to stay there.” According to Tocqueville, and seemingly those voted to ratify the Constitution, the judiciary’s “proper place” was to check people from asserting their majority will over minorities who dissent. That, after all, is the foundation of a free society. Conservatives will apparently have none of that.

That the tyrannical majority would make subjects of dissenting citizens comes as no surprise, given the theocratic overtones of post-election conservative rhetoric. Jerry Falwell has resurrected the “Moral Majority” through the formation of the “Faith and Values Coalition, which is “a national organization designed to maintain the national momentum gained through "values voters" who swept President Bush back into office on November 2.” First on the FVC’s to-do list is to see through “the confirmation of pro-life, strict constructionist U.S. Supreme Court justices and other federal judges.” Tocqueville be damned. His observation that “The moral power of the majority is founded upon yet another principle, which is that the interests of the many are to be preferred to those of a few” was supposed to be problematic, not prescriptive.

Ultimately, the result of all of this was Tocqueville’s observation that “this state of things is harmful in itself and dangerous to the future.” Though he checked his concerns in 1831 with the qualification that “I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day,” our present condition teeters in the balance. Whether the judiciary will be used to impose the will of the tenuous majority in America remains to be seen. Given this context, it seems a perversion of the intended role of the judiciary. With the legislative and executive branches firmly under conservative control, those who value freedom over tyranny would do well not to allow impositions of majority will to determine the course of judiciary appointments over the next four years.

This is obviously problematic given the self-righteous zeal with which social conservatives fuel their agenda. In the weeks after the past election, editorials in conservative weeklies like The American Spectator and The National Review rang of the same themes. Bill Bennett among many others wrote that “President Bush now has a mandate,” which seemed somewhat inaccurate given the closeness of the election. The conservative response to such criticism was pointed. “Who Needs a Mandate?” asked William Tucker “we’ve got a majority." He punctuated his observation with a battle cry: “Let’s get ‘em George! They ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

No, we haven’t.

I'll Be Back After This Non-Commercial Break.

As I sit here listening to Curtis Mayfield, wondering what to write, I realize that at this particular moment I have no will to turn the sharpening stone and grind my axe. I've got a cup of coffee, a well-travelled copy of Moby Dick that I've been whittling away at, and a road trip to Buffalo on the horizon. All told, despite the maelstrom swirling about us politically, economically and socially, I'm good.

I could very easily start dealing on the Bush oligarchy about the recent revelations of systematic and sanctioned torture in the "War on Terror," their weak dollar policy, or their insistence on extending the use methyl bromide pesticides in the United States which do great damage to the ozone layer. Not today though. It's just not happening.

In spite of my conscience, I'm shutting the blast furnace down and taking the week off. I'm going home to sit around with my family, stay out too late with my friends, and walk around aimlessly in the woods. Sure, I'll still be thinking about these things, but with more contemplation and less bombast. Rather than be angry and frustrated, I am going to try and just be.

Call It A Comeback

There are moments in our lives when desperation seizes us and hope seems a bastion long since past. Inevitably, we search for a moment relegated to another time and place that, if recollected properly, will offer a moment's reprieve from our dark and stormy reality. I never really had a story that offered me such comfort, until yesterday, while I was sitting on a barstool watching a muted television tuned into the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (or ESPN). It was then that I realized that the story I could use "in case of emergency" had been sitting on the shelf waiting for me since January 3, 1993.

That was the date of "The Comeback." You don't have to know sports to know that teams come back from behind all the time. It seems remarkable at the moment, but then the memory fades as other comebacks and sports stories obscure the feat. Not this one though. Of all the histories sports offer us of such circumstances, this one was the grand daddy of all of them. It is simply billed as "THE Comeback."

Come with me, back to Buffalo, New York in January 1993. If ever a team (and a town whose hopes for collective identity rise and fall weekly with the success or failure of its football team) was on the ropes, it was the Buffalo Bills at halftime. They were losing to the Houston Oilers 28-3 and to put it mildly, were getting their asses handed to them by a bunch of guys in wearing white and powder blue outfits. This was Buffalo in January, and a team from Texas was running them ragged. Did I mention they were in white and powder blue?

What Bills Head Coach Marv Levy said at halftime to his players, I have no idea. Many of their starters were hurt, and the backups must have felt desperate. Upon recollecting the game for an article in Football Digest a few years later, he simply said, "We were getting crushed." We've all been there...Those moments when life is kicking your ass, and it's wearing a white and powder blue uniform to boot. Sometimes you just want to stay in the dressing room, throw out a white towel and forget the game entirely. Fuck it. It's over.

This is why "The Comeback" hit me like a ton of bricks yesterday. The Bills did not quit. They came back out of the tunnel running right into the madness, and even the guys in the upper decks, enduring the January Buffalo windchill were going nuts. Rest assured, the Batavia Party Zone was raging. Everyone there, at that moment, believed in "The Comeback" before it even happened. Sure, the guy who takes his shirt off to reveal a target so people can throw iceballs at him could have given up and took off to "beat the traffic," but he stayed. When the Bills came on the field, the place went collectively insane.

And then it happened. Not "It" as in "The Comeback," rather "It" as in gut check time. The guys in the white and powder blue outfits told everyone to shut the fuck up, intercepting Frank Reich's pass for a touchdown. Now it was 35-3. Some of those people who believed at the half did start to leave to beat the traffic. People at home turned off their television sets, and figured it would be a good idea to snowblow one more time before they couldn't open their garage doors. The only people left were the die hards. That's when you look around and take note. Whoever is with you when it's 35-3, after your halftime momentum has been crushed, they are the true believers. At that moment, they probably believe in you more than you believe in yourself.

And then "IT" happened. The Comeback. A touchdown, an onside kick, another touchdown. Desperate plays for desperate times. In a period of seven minutes, about the time it took for the quitters to get to their cars and turn on their radios, The Bills had scored four touchdowns. Oh, to see the look on their faces, driving home from the game on "The 219" as The Bills and the people who believed in them started looking around the stadium, realizing that history was being made and they were there to experience it, because they didn't quit.

But the game wasn't over. Classic victories never end so quickly. The team in white and powder blue weren't going to quit either, as life never does when it so obviously wants to beat you down, and the Oilers tied the game to force an overtime. If The Bills were going to win this game, they were going to have to put in some overtime of their own. The Oilers had momentum once again, and The Bills were reeling. Whether it was luck, fate, strategy, or an incalculable combination, Nate Odomes intercepted a pass that basically kicked death off of the Buffalo doorstep. The Bills made good on this fortunate occurence, and marched down the field just close enough for Steve Christie to kick a field goal. Despite my less than Van Miller-like recounting of these events, there was nothing anticlimactic about it. The place went shithouse crazy. Sometimes you just need a little, and they got it. The Bills won. "The Comeback" is now legendary. The persistent and the faithful were rewarded with a page in the history books.

I've known this story since it happened. I'm from Buffalo and I remember it well, but I guess I was just never able to put it in any context that was relevant to my life. After doing a little reading about this game (on which a lot is written), I like what Marv Levy had to say about the team's ability to come back. He said "One key to our resiliency was that the players were very close to each other. A lot of them were there for a long time and developed close friendships. They really cared about each other as human beings, not just as players." The lesson is simple. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to make a comeback, you've got to believe in yourself, the people around you, and even the crazy guy in the upper deck with no shirt on, because if they're there even after the locker room speech and the run through the tunnel when things don't go your way despite your best efforts, it's because they believe in you, and they can't all be wrong, right?

As to a critic of all this might say, the Bills didn't win the Superbowl that year, or any of the other years they were in it for that matter. This is true, but again I defer to Marv Levy for a response. Regarding the Bills loss to the Dallas Cowboys in Superbowl 27, he said "We didn't win, but just getting there was a real testament to our fortitude and heart. These guys never quit--they never gave up. Beating the Oilers in the playoffs was proof of that." Looking back, I'll take "The Comeback" to a Superbowl win any day, because if it came easy, no one would appreciate it. It may not be a Superbowl win, but it's the greatest comeback in sports history, and the life lessons woven throughout it are worth too much to write off so easily. Whenever life is kicking my ass on my home field in its white and powder blue uniform, I'll remind myself of "The Comeback," and come out of the tunnel raging.

The End (Of The Semester) Is Nigh!

As a college professor, I simultaneously enjoy and dread the end of the semester. I enjoy it because it means a break is iminent, either Christmas or the summer. I dread the semester's end because it means a littany of students will be calling on me who have done absolutely nothing all semester, yet feel compelled to litigate a grade for themselves that they have not earned.

This is simply the result of consumer culture. Students believe that being at a university is a right, not a privilege, and as "customers" they should be able to negotiate the best possible deal for themselves from the professor. Now, far from being an elitist, I wish more people went to college. I also wish more college students took their studies seriously. However, the mood in America right now is decidedly anti-intellectual, and students who don't know a damn thing about the way the world turns feel compelled to challenge new ideas rather than consider them. "Different" is problematic in America at the moment, and the mentality of some of my students reflects this. Rather than actually learn anything during their time in college, so many students are simply engaged in the process to put off adulthood and to get a diploma that theoretically renders them qualified for life outside of the ivory tower. The question I often pose to them upon the conclusion of the courses I teach is this "what if you actually learn something in the process during this chase for credentials that actually changes your worldview, making it seem different than the way you thought it was before you came here?" After all, learning implies a certain degree of change, if not evolution.

Many of the students who come to litigate their grades are simply unable to demonstrate to me that they've learned anything. I ask them straight up, "what have you learned in my class?" Their answers are inarticulate, fumbling, desperate. Their pride in being able to "B.S." a paper comes crashing down around them, and I admit a small part of me enjoys watching them muddle through their first consideration of having actually learned anything about the world or themselves over the course of the past four months. The larger part, however, sinks as I realize that despite my efforts and all the bombast, none of the example I've tried to set for this young mind seems to have made any impact or even slightly resonated whatsoever.

This is not to say that my students, or students in general, are largely incompetent. Quite the contrary, most are able and articulate, respectful and appreciative of their situation. They constitute a silent majority. I even respect those who haven't done a thing, but simply don't have the nerve to ask for a decent grade because they know that they haven't earned it. When I deal with litigious students, I simply depersonalize the situation. I tell them that it's nothing personal, and on a barstool we'd likely get on just fine, but that is not the nature of our relationship. It's just like the military. Some make it through basic training, some don't. Some make it through sniper school, some wash out. It doesn't mean they are bad people, or incompetent, or ignorant. It just means based on the criteria for evaluation, they didn't make the grade. Their ability to accept this, try and creatively rectify it or simply bitch their way through the bureaucracy says alot about their character or lack thereof.

Ultimately, I have to remind myself of something a colleague of mine told me a year ago. This seasoned veteran of the trade told me that sometimes when you're dealing with students, you just want to shake them and say "Stop acting like an 18-21 year old!" There's something to that, and I'll try and remember it as I get through the last weeks of the semester.

On Habits, Routines &c.

Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Vine Utley in 1819 in response to the doctor's inquiry about the history of his physical habits. I think these are worth attention, as I find myself so often seeking to assert a degree of normalcy and routine into an otherwise improvised existence. Jefferson, according to his letter, slept from five to eight hours a night with variations, in his words "according as my company or the book I am reading interests me." He added that he never went to bed without "reading of something moral, whereon to ruminate in the intervals of my sleep." This leaves us to wonder if he ever ruminated on the morality of owning slaves. The answer is yes, but that's an entirely seperate consideration.

Next, Jefferson wrote that "whether I retire early to bed or late, I rise with the sun." Herein lies a challenge to those of us who would seek to adopt the habits of what Jefferson termed the "hard student." I like this idea. I reminds me of Henry Rollins and the whole "part animal, part machine" ethic, postindustrial identity crises notwithstanding. Waking up with the sun is no small task, regardless of whether you own slaves or not, and you've got to respect him for being able to assert at age of seventy-six that "I am again a hard student."

Once he got up, Jefferson would engage in a habit that further tests our commitment to routine as a source of health and vitality. He soaked his feet in cold water, every morning, "for sixty years past." To this habit, Jefferson attributed the fact that he had been "fortunate...in the article of health." That is committment. Think how easy it us for us to stand groggily under a warm stream of pressurized water, as steam fills the bathroom and NPR delivers the news of the day, to take pills for ailments rather than change the habits that bring them on in the first place. How soft are we by comparison to the Jeffersonian example of a "hard student?"

As to diet, Jefferson "lived temperately, dining on little animal food...as a condiment to vegetables, which constitute my principal diet." He went on, "I double, however, the doctor's glass and a half of wine, and even treble it with a friend." Good advice. Eat less dead animals, and drink twice more than health professionals recommend.

As the establishment of a "daily routine" is something we all try to implement and negotiate given the constant flux of our day-to-day demands as "flexible" workers, students, parents, &c., I find Jefferson's routine comforting, and something worth aspiring toward. It is representative of the "simpler life" that has long since been commodified, smartly packaged and marketed to post-industrial consumers in ways that confound our very ability to realize this condition. It may be worth considering the establishment of routines that we don't feel the need to escape from when the corporate masters let us off our leashes every now and again. It's not easy, obviously, but the operative word is "hard" in Jefferson's characterization of "the habits of a hard student."

And so I'm left to wonder whether this electronic pressure release valve will become a habit, and I guess in writing this I've challenged myself to make it so. While I doubt I'll write every day, I'll strive for some rhythmic regularity, and try to develop myself in the process. Like so many bloggers who've started with high hopes, like so many resolutions of fitness and gym memberships that have lapsed as a result of the basic inability to establish the habit of engagement, my first move is optimistic.

Here It Comes.

I didn't plan on blogging this evening, or ever for that matter. I was simply posting a response to my friend Joe's offhand comment about Regis Philbin (www.redroachpress.blogspot.com). This seemingly inconsequential exchange has brought me here, as I had to register with the site to post my editorial bombination. As such, here is "Navigation By Dead Reckoning." Look away!