Cowboy Confessional

Did Adam Smith prophesize Barack Obama?

Having recently stood over Smith’s grave while pondering his enduring observations on the mechanics of society and economy, I grew weary. In recent days I sensed an obnoxious divergence between Smith’s elegant understanding of how people prosper and how it takes authoritarian control to make them poor.

My buddy and stand-up philosopher Ralph Seifert coined the phrase “the fatal attraction to flawed ideas” to describe how political theorists refuse to abandon plans that are obvious flops. No sane person can call America’s ‘war on drugs’ a success. Nor would anyone assassinated this morning in Mexico by a cartel enforcer. Yet politicians – and to a lesser degree the public – still support failed attempts to control the supply of narcotics and jailing people who possess dope for recreational brain obliteration.

The essence of this insanity is the beauty of a perceived ‘perfect system.’ Many maniacal men look upon God’s gray world and have visions of how things ought to be, believing that government should be the anvil upon which their utopia is forged. What most people forget is that the metal being hammered is their neighbors.

It is this attachment to grandiose visions that drive policy in mere democracies. Where the tyranny of the majority exists, someone with a Grand Plan will attempt to establish it through government power. Flaws in the plan’s details or even in the fundamental vision are not impediments to the exercise of omnipotence. That is the nature of power and why it corrupts. People vested with power and who have a systematic approach to fixing perceived inequities and inefficiencies will grab the hammer of government and attempt to pond people into components that fulfill their perfect vision.

Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations wrote about such critters. A couple of hundred years back Smith saw in other countries what we have seen in European democracies, and what is tenaciously trying to entrench itself in America. Smith wrote:

The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

Charles Darwin and Adam Smith saw the same beauty in complex systems that by nature are self correcting. On the opposite extreme is Obama, infected with his own divine conceit of a grand design. Like all ‘fatal attractions to flawed ideas’ the Obama unified theory of social management will eventually collapse under its own structural infirmities. Sadly many people will suffer as part of an idealized system eerily reminiscent of Pol Pot’s. Like a pure breed dog that has genetic weaknesses, Obama’s inbred economy will suffer slowly and die young.

Give me a healthy mutt over a pure breed pooch any day.

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Lexicographers must be laughing aloud.

When battlefield bums captured in Afghanistan were dropped on the western shores of Cuba, there were rumors of torture. Back then little specific information was released concerning the treatment of the Guantánamo gang, yet insinuated was that prisoners were being mistreated and that ‘torture’ was being practiced.

This caught my attention because the media tossed the term ‘torture’ about with characteristic abandon. You would think that people who use words to earn their daily grub might take the same care of their tools that an auto mechanic does with his. Sadly modern reporters seem to be one step removed from journalist and two steps from literate.

Back then – in 2002 – I decided to have the definition of ‘torture’ logged firmly in my cranium before opening my mouth. I did not want to be mistaken for a reporter. I checked no fewer than five dictionaries, include several online versions of prominent commercial lexicons. All five had the same central definition of ‘torture’, though the big joke is that some of the online dictionaries have been edited in the last six years to broaden the term.

torture, n. Infliction of severe physical pain or discomfort

The key stanza in that abbreviated tune is “severe physical pain”. Note that no word is wasted. To be torture the recipient must:

a) Experience pain
b) It must be physical pain, not emotional stress or psychological trauma
c) It must be severe as in ‘Please Allah, let me die now’

This presents a problem to the Obama administration and to any reporter sober enough to find a dictionary. Both groups have prattled on with wild-eyed horror about America inflicting torture upon detainees on the beaches of Guantánamo. A Senate Armed Services Committee report listed the enhanced interrogation techniques that the media, partisan politicians and plebiscites alike have called ‘torture.’

Sleep depravation: Severe = no, physical = no, pain = no

Slamming into a flexible wall: Severe = no, physical = yes, pain = maybe

Waterboarding: Severe = maybe, physical = no but scary, pain = no

Hooding and scaring with dogs: Hell, in downtown Oakland hoods are considered a fashion statement and pit bulls are pets

For a book-in-progress I recently interviewed the owners for San Francisco’s Citadel, a BDSM basement for the town’s whip-n-chain hobbyists. Those people know torture. Perhaps our Guantánamo guests should be sent to San Francisco’s SOMO district for R&R&BDSM.

The short and bitter sweet of it is that this list of American actions doesn’t even come close to the proper and enduring definition of torture. We can have a civil debate on if these interrogation techniques should be used, but no sane discussion is possible if people and reporters don’t use simple nouns correctly.

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You can almost feel Internet cables connected to constitutional law clusters buzzing.

Justice Souter has barely announced his retirement and already the pundits, politicos and prognosticators have leapt to the keyboards, predicting how the judicial bull chips will fall. Activist on the right predict Obama will nominate a hard leftist who views the Constitution as a minor impediment to centralized power. Left-of-center court watchers believe the same thing and actively pray for it.

Some say it won’t make a difference because such a candidate would merely replace one steaming bowl of fetid judicial excrement with another.

I’ll admit I don’t have a complete accounting of Justice Souter’s misdeeds, but two rulings acknowledge that his respect for the express written will of the American people lies somewhere below his feet. America’s list of enumerated rights includes those that The People held holy and denied government the authority to restrict. Yet in two glaring instances Souter sought to redefine the clear and well documented intent of The People, wresting away from individuals the means of self determination and giving unto the government the power to control the masses.

Souter joined the bare majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London. This case granted government the power to take away a person’s property and give it to another entity, in this case a corporation. The People in their Fifth Amendment said unto the government “nor shall private property be taken for public use.” Souter and his sidekicks went on at length about the disjointed and immaterial concept of “public purpose” and how an allegedly benign and benevolent government should have the power to redistribute real estate for the calculated social improvement of a region.

In other words take away your home and give it to a corporation that promises to pay more taxes than you do.

Last year Souter was on the losing side of a decision, arguing in the Heller case that the phrase “the right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” meant that the right should be infringed. As with the Kelo case, arguments against clearly stated and individually reserved rights were suffocated in the type of language only lawyers can utter with straight faces.

Though Souter silently dissented in these cases, his vote counted and showed a predilection for power and not for the privileges and immunities of individuals (i.e., you). Obama could nominate Mussolini’s ghost to replace Souter and the vote tally on individual rights cases would unlikely be altered. The only open question is if outvoted Senate Republican’s will bother uttering the phrase “strict constitutionalist” during confirmation hearings or perceive it to be an utter waste of breath.

Perhaps they simply will avoid inhaling the aroma from the new steaming bowl of fetid judicial excrement.

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