Rights vs. lives

By SKIP MENDLER

Let’s face it: every once in a while, an entire country can go, well, crazy. The People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, say. Nazi Germany. Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Imperial Japan.

Or, it might just get a little maladjusted for a while, a little neurotic, mildly self-destructive but not entirely suicidal or psychotic. The United States during the McCarthy era, for example. Various Central American countries during the 1980s.

So, ever since the 9/11 attacks, I’ve been on the lookout for incipient war psychosis—not just the normal jingoism and patriotic fervor that accompany the beginning of any military escapade, mind you, but a kind of deeply rooted, widespread mental malfunction that would manifest itself on the street level, in the eyes and actions of all citizens, of the type that—taken to its furthest extreme—can result in witch-hunts, pogroms and lynchings.

I’m proud and relieved to say that we’ve avoided that so far. George W. Bush, to his credit, did not declare martial law immediately after 9/11, though he probably could have done so with the approval of most of the American people. And while the debate between pro- and anti-Bush voices has turned acerbic and bitter, the debate has not been entirely squelched. There are no neighborhood Committees on the Present Danger checking up on everyone and maintaining ideological purity, no squadrons of brown-shirts marching through town, no mysterious disappearances of dissidents in the middle of the night.

So why do things like the wiretapping controversy and the USA PATRIOT Act raise such hackles?

For one thing, I think people are aware of just how easy it is for reasonable levels of surveillance to become unreasonable, and how strong the temptation must be to abuse such power. But for another, I think we sense a fundamental contradiction at the root of the surveillance question.

To expose that contradiction, let me pose the following question: would you be willing, as a red-blooded, patriotic American, to give up your life to defend the rights of your family, friends and fellow citizens if it became necessary? Or to help spread those rights around the world, so that others may enjoy them? Let’s see hands.

Ah, yes, I thought so; all the hands go up, as well they should. This is, after all, the sacrifice we expect the members of our armed forces to be prepared to make every day; we should be no less prepared than they are.

So what does this tell us? It tells us that for most of us, our rights are actually more important than our lives.

But what is the rationale presented for giving extraordinary, extralegal, unaccountable powers to the President, powers that might be easily abused for personal or political purposes? So that he can protect our lives. That means that, according to this rationale, our lives are more important than our rights—exactly the opposite of what we’ve established above.

Hence the contradiction, and hence also one of the hedges that we have against sliding into the kind of national psychosis referred to earlier.

Take a look at the Presidential oath of office. What is the President obligated to protect? Does it say “protect and defend the lives, or material interests, of some or all of the people of the United States?” No. It says “protect and defend the Constitution.”

As we enter into the discussion that we are about to have with ourselves, let us remember that it is not just about whether George Bush has overstepped his Constitutional limits. It is about whether we still hold our rights as paramount. It is also about whether we will allow the threats against us to rob us not of our lives but worse—of our identity, our collective sanity, and indeed our very soul as a nation.