Empathy Antipathy

It's so very Republican, isn't it? After all, if one understands the concept of empathy and actually has empathy for others one can't be a Republican much less a "Conservative" at least as defined in the last four or five decades.

Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the distress, pain, and the sting of injustice visited on others as if it were your own. Further, it is the ability to translate that understanding, that feeling into the will to prevent further distress for yourself and for the others with whom you empathize. Clearly that is a dangerous thing. If we have empathy we will want to do horrible things like improve treatment and conditions for whiny, special interest groups like wounded veterans. We might be moved to stop traditional practices like racial, ethnic and religious bigotry and even that great tradition of lynching. We might disrupt traditional families by insisting that women have a right to education, work outside the home and flee abuse by the men in their lives. No. Empathy is something that leads to the destruction of the world as it was meant to be.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh about Republicans, Conservatives and their thinly disguised cousins, Libertarians. They do have empathy. They have shown it when they've defended the six and seven figure bonuses to the financial whizzes who drove their companies into bankruptcy. They show it every day when they insist that we must remove onerous regulations that keep disease and poisons out of our food and drugs. They even show it when they seek to protect the populace from evil drugs like marajuana by insuring that those people whose pain and suffering it eases never get it. In short Republican, Conservative and Libertarian empathy knows on which side its proverbial bread is buttered. Right Wing empathy is always bought and paid for.

What the neo-fascists really rail against is empathy for the great many people whose lives are made worse while they forcefully protect their rich friends. Those rich friends are the ones who fund their campaigns and, when out of office, pay for their fellowships at the American Enterprise, Cato and Manhattan Institutes, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution or for their chairs at neo-fascist incubators like Pepperdine University.

If we get involved in empathy we would be rejecting the greatest of the neo-fascist prophetesses, Ayn Rand. The alleged philosophy of "Objectivism" is nothing but the apotheosis of an utter rejection of empathy. No. We can't have that. Atlas Shrugged is second only to the exerpts of The Bible that fundamentalists prefer (no Matthew 25 in those Bibles) as holy writ.

Let's take a famous example, the recently corrected travesty of Lilly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Lilly Ledbetter went to work for Goodyear in its Gadsden , Alabama plant in 1979. When she started working there she was recieving pay comparable to the men doing the same job and who had similar experience but over the years and unbeknownst to Ms. Ledbetter, a gap began to open. In 1997, on the verge of retiring she found that she was making $3,727 per month. That's a very nice pay check that I would have happily receieved. But at the same point the men doing her job were receiving a minimum of $4,286 per month and as much as $5,236 per month. There was ample evidence that Ms. Ledbetter's sex was the sole factor in the difference of roughly $500 to $1,500 per month reduction in pay. Goodyear had not only discriminated in Ms. Ledbetter's pay but had kept the information about that discrepancy secret for most of two decades.

So I think that most people would see Ms. Ledbetter's treatment as unfair. You wouldn't want your mother, daughter, sister or wife treated like that. However, if you're reaching that conclusion you are falling in to the dangerous role of a "fellow traveler" of empathy. You should thank whatever god to which you pray that there are five Supreme Court "Justices" who are Republican and Conservative enough to be utterly unaffected by empathy. Writing for his fellow protectors of business over labor, wealth over poverty and crime over justice, Samuel Alito threaded a very fine needle and rejected Ms. Ledbetter's argument. Sure she'd been victimized by Goodyear and sure that victimization represented illegal discrimination but Lilly Ledbetter hadn't filed suit soon enough.

Say what?

You see, Ms. Ledbetter's lawyers had argued that every time Goodyear cut a pay check for Ms. Ledbetter the company committed a distinct act of pay discrimination. The law included a limitations clause requiring that the discrimination claim be filed within 180 days of the act of discrimination. Judge Alito along with Antonin Scalia, Scalia's Houseboy, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy decided that argument was wrong. Goodyear had decided to discriminate against Ms. Ledbetter way back in the 1980s and though Goodyear had kept the fact secret and Ms. Ledbetter's typical human clairvoyance was somehow impaired she hadn't filed suit soon enough. A judicial wag of the finger went to Goodyear with a stern admonition to behave and Lilly Ledbetter got a simple, "Sorry. Go fuck off."

Now if Alito, Scalia, Thomas (included soley for completeness; not seriously), Roberts or Kennedy had succumbed to that dangerous empathy for Lilly Ledbetter all manner of evil would have flowed from the decision. Ms. Ledbetter would have recovered the back pay unfairly withheld from her with interest and damages for discrimination and the cost of the settlement might have been so great that Goodyear and even other companies might have decided that they'd better not do the same to their employees. In short, Goodyear would have gotten a lesson in the "personal responsibility" that Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians always insist is lacking in the poor who don't pay the bills for those Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians.

In 2008 Congress attempted to remedy this situation albeit too late for Ms. Ledbetter. But the Republicans in the Senate, also unaffected by empathy, filibustered the bill to death. Had it made its way through the Senate there is no doubt that George Bush, whose sole claim to empathy was his desire to limit the persecution and suffering of the noble Lewis "Scooter" Libby, would have vetoed the bill that President Obama has since signed.

So as we look for a Supreme Court appointment worthy of the title "Justice", watch out for that code word "empathy" and the horrors that it could visit on our nation. If there were a majority on the Supreme Court with empathy we might find all manner of horrible decisions coming down as some empath "legislates" from the bench. We might see decisions that hold mortgage originators responsible for defaults by home buyers whose incomes the originators inflated, foreclosures might be stopped in cases where the lenders lied about the terms of the loans or withheld information from the borrowers. Food processors who allowed their plants to use unsafe and unsanitary practices or introduced poisons into their products to boost profits might be held responsible for those acts. Even companies that illegally evade taxes might be called on to pay their fair share. The consequences for the Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians would be dire. Their sponsors might not have sufficient disposable income to finance their campaigns and the fellowships that keep them on the cable news networks in spite of their lack of anything relevant to say. William Kristol might disappear from view entirely.

So let us not fall into the trap of empathy. I certainly hope that the fundamentalist preachers will get on this anti-empathy bandwagon. Clearly it's an assault on Christianity whenever we get involved in something like empathy that boils down to an odious statement like, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bretheren, ye have done it unto me."

Part and Parsing: Why Antonin Scalia must be impeached.

In neo-fascist circles, Antonin Scalia is what passes for a major intellectual. I refuse to call him "Justice" Scalia because justice and Antonin Scalia don't belong in the same sentence. Like most ultra-right wing pseudo-intellectuals Scalia is well read but nothing that he's read penetrates the denser-than-a-black-hole certainty of his ideology. Mr. Scalia in interviews with Lesley Stahl and with the BBC has insisted that torture is not "cruel and unusual punishment". That terminology comes from, among other places, the 8th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution which reads in its entirety, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Mr. Scalia, being a "strict constructionist" and all, he obviously knows the language of the 8th Amendment. Since Mr. Scalia claims to be a legal scholar he obviously also knows the history that culminates in the 8th Amendment. He knows that it derives from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. He knows that the English Bill of Rights stems from nearly 400 years of almost constant civil war in England going back to the reign of Edward II. In those wars winners used such punishments as impaling their live opponents on stakes or drawing and quartering. Burning and beheading were also favorite forms of punishment. Of course, often as preparation for trial, what modern attorneys call the "discovery process", came torture, usually in forms that make water boarding look positively benign. Mr. Scalia's scholarship certainly includes reading in the history that led to the language of the 8th Amendment. Which is, of course, exactly the point. Mr. Scalia can read the history, read the records of the public debate leading to the 8th Amendment, read the entire history of the law's interpretation by our courts and have none of it penetrate his impenetrably black ideological certainty.

I do think that I understand Mr. Scalia's specious logic. I think he must be relying on a definition of punishment that beggars Bill Clinton's parsing of the word is. I believe that Mr. Scalia has convinced himself that punishment is something that follows adjudication. Since the people that we are and have been torturing over these last 7 years have not had an adjudication of their guilt or innocence, the torture is not, in Mr. Scalia's view, punishment per se. It may be cruel. It may be unusual, but absent an adjudication it cannot be punishment in the ideologocally benighted mind of Antonin Scalia.

In typical neo-fascist fashion, Mr. Scalia insists that what is sauce for the liberal goose can't even come close to the ultra-rightist gander. The Constitution which, as a "strict constructionist", Mr. Scalia believes does not enshrine a right to privacy does clearly enshrine a right to torture. He maintains this ideologically insane position despite the reading that clearly informs him that the right to privacy was of paramount concern to the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights while torture was anathema to them.

Mr. Scalia lacks what is losely referred to as a "judicial temperament". His refusal to recuse himself from the deliberations in Cheney v. USDC for the District of Columbia shows that his ideology and friendships override his legal judgment when it suits him just as did his vote in Bush v. Gore. But now he has gone beyond the pale. He has shown himself willing to embrace the kind of "judicial activism" (albeit from the far right) and "moral relativism" so decried by his fellow neo-fascists. Once more we see that the people most apt to wrap themselves in the flag are those with the least respect for the Constitution that flag represents.

I would hope that my fellow Democrats and anyone with even modest respect for our Constitution, for civil and human rights would stop the nonsensical pursuit of a bill of impeachment against Dubya and Cheney and put that energy into a bill of impeachment against Antonin Scalia who is a clear and present danger to the U. S. Constitution.