September 17, 2007
by James Rothenberg

One part injustice. One part hypocrisy. One part hope. Imagine this as the recipe that makes up our world, with the proportions free to change but with no part free to vanish. Injustice is a priori the product of a competitive world. Hypocrisy is the rational response to injustice by the strong. Hope is the irrational response to injustice by the weak.

The first part of the recipe, injustice, has a figurative anti-body in the Department of Justice (formalized in 1870). Its mission statement reads:

To enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. (emphasis added)

It is said the founding fathers, mindful of their recent experience with tyranny, wanted to protect the people from their government - not protect the government from the people. There was a rebellion over this, but today's establishment acts with such hubris that it appears they don't expect another.

The first line in the mission statement appears to place the state over the people. If this is so, and there are some areas where "to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior" would run counter to the "interests of the United States", we ought to see justice tilted toward the state in those cases where the primacy of the state is a matter of focus.

A proto-typical example is the case of the whistleblower. The kind of treatment a whistleblower receives when going up-ladder is reflective of the kind of "fair and impartial administration of justice" that the Department promises to "ensure". If a measure of a society's civilization can be seen in the way it treats its criminals, a mark of how just we are can be seen in the way we treat our whistleblowers.

Resistance to the whistleblower increases at each step up the ladder as the interests of the state come into conflict with the interests of the people (as represented by the whistleblower). The catchall trick about the "interests of the United States" is not that they are ill-defined, but that they are never defined, indoctrination in this area being so thorough as to preclude explanation.

Under this kind of cover, the silencing of whistleblowers spares many the "fair and impartial justice" (promised for all Americans) that might have befallen them had not the United States a compelling reason to defend itself (itself being that construct "instituted among Men, deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed").

As justification the state secrets privilege might be invoked. (State secrets, when looked at years later under declassification, reveal a banal combination of cunning, criminality, fantasy, and triviality.)

The silencing of whistleblowers further protects those who can still function for the state, and, issues of criminality aside, shields some from embarrassment (no little thing). But the optimum result (from the state's point of view) of the aggressive treatment of whistleblowers is that it demonstrates that the state is completely invulnerable to legal-based attacks of a "don't tread on me" variety.

An always timely example of the second part of the recipe, hypocrisy, is the way in which our government projects the military. We are to believe that our military is used solely for defensive purposes, and that all citizens benefit equally from such use. What if the government leveled with the people about what our military is really used for? Such an admission might take the following form:

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The history of man is one of struggle and survival. Until such time as men have lost or transcended their competitive desire for advantage, there will be those that have and those that take. Or, to put it another way, those that take and those that get taken. Would we rather get taken, or would we prefer to take? And so, with the aid of our military, we take, and this has brought us a prosperity that has made us the envy of the world. Behind every overseas market we secure, behind every snatch of foreign labor and capital, behind every entrée to a foreign resource lies the bargaining chip nonpareil, the US military. When this bargain is insufficient, we do not hesitate to demonstrate our will in a more tangible way (wink). If citizens do not share equally the benefits from our military expenditures, or have a stake in the country's prosperity, this is not the state's responsibility. Our citizens have advantage over those of every other country when and if it comes to a fight, and we will thwart their every attempt to rival our force.

The government does a much better job of projecting the military than this crude sample above. Why not tell people what they want to hear? That we are wise, just, temperate, and reticent to use force. It's so much easier to get people to go along that way. Cleaner.

There is another way to look at this though. The government may have secrets, but not with the American people. The messages put out to the people of this country are received as well by the world's people. Thus, the hypocrisy originally intended for local consumption, by dint of linked communication, gradually became gruel for the world to feed on.

Given our advanced-stage jingoism, Washington's home hypocrisy level may be set higher than necessary. We fail to recognize that the ubiquitous American flags we surround ourselves with are of the same order as those we mocked bearing images of Stalin, Mao, and Saddam. Never having been encouraged to think critically about our institutions, we remain in childlike awe of them. It is childlike insecurity that draws us to the power of the state. In un-asked for demonstration of fealty, large gatherings of people openly identify with state power. (What does an F-16 have to do with a sporting event? If it avoids crashing into the stadium, you get the result obtained in its absence.)        

It is by no means clear that the leveling admission above would be rejected by this population. In this sense, anti-militarists can be grateful to the government for sparing us this truth because hypocrisy presents a softer target than matter-of-factness.

And then there's always hope, so the saying goes. The third part of the recipe and the active state of most of the world's billions who suffer the injustices of poverty, oppression, prejudice, hunger, and thirst. Yet it is the part of which we can say the least precisely because of its irrationality, that is besides its forward thinking. (We don't hope for the past.) All hopers share an imperfect attachment to the present.

The world did not change that much on 9/11. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq got a new boss. Here the boss got tougher.

The future cannot be predicted. (The "futurist" of the group is the last one to guess wrong). There are possibilities, and the possibilities for justice exist in the many independence and social movements taking place in the world today. For now, we've got the old recipe.

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James Rothenberg [send him email] was born in 1939 and made his living as a professional golfer. His trade articles have appeared in USGA Golf Journal and PGA Magazine, as well as authoring the book, The Skeptical Golfer. In more recent years this skepticism led him into the field of social and political criticism, exchanging "making a living" for "living for making", that is, making the slightest dent in establishment hypocrisy and double standards.