The Nature of Belief

So Colin Powell died, and among the inhabitants of our planet, for just a moment, there was one fewer cynical liars. Good.

Powell’s famed UN speech led directly to the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq–and the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Later, he lied about his lying, blaming it on bad intelligence.

Crapola. For the occasion today I looked up what I wrote as I watched his speech that morning 18+ years ago.

. . .

February 5, 2003

I’m dubious about Truth. People talk about it the most when they’re giving you it the least.

Our grasp of what is depends, most of all, on the quality of the narrative we read to ourselves. Truth is a characteristic of language, of rhetoric.

I tried to apply this insight, this morning, as I watched Colin Powell on the TV. Where was Truth in the Secretary’s speech to the UN?

The murky photos marked with damning arrows. The mysterious fragments of wiretapped conversation. These seemed like dimestore props for the familiar rhetorical devices of a deceiver: escalating hyperbole, breathless speculation, and using the accused’s denial as further evidence of his guilt.

Add to this Powell’s science-fair speech about what can be done with just a teaspoon of anthrax.

And then there was the truck-mounted chemical weapons laboratory. Hans Blix says there’s no evidence that such a thing exists, but of course Channel 4’s reporters were soon breaking in to refer to Powell’s computer-generated images of the mocked-up model as “photos.” We’re led to conclude that the trucks could be out there, because, you know, they could be moving ’em around, the sneaky devils, and they haven’t shown us that they don’t have one.

I did sense, within all this foofahrah, bits of narrative that did ring True. Did the Iraqis clean up a little before the inspectors arrived? Who doesn’t? Of course, you want to show the inspector a clean site with nothing on it. Otherwise they just hang around and ask a bunch of questions, making you late to get home for dinner and potentially embarassing you in front of the boss. Anyone who’s operated an corporation yard or a commercial kitchen can relate to that story. I thought that part was True.

Or the tape of the two guys talking over on the phone. It’s got a bad connection, and they’re trying to make sure they got the instructions straight. It could have been an Abbott and Costello routine. So that seemed True as well.

Maybe these guys’ job is part of an evil plot to blow up the world. What I heard was, whatever they’re doing on the tapes or in the satellite photos, they’re doing it in the same confused chaos we all descend into every working day. That confusion and chaos and earnestness sounded real, and it contrasted, in my mind, with the ridiculous artifice of the U.S. Secretary of State.

I served on a jury 35 years ago, in New York City. The defendants were white cops, and a Black man had died in their custody.

The cops were charged with evidence tampering and official misconduct, and we voted unanimously to convict each of them for both felonies.

Many years later, I searched for the case, and found the appellate court record. I wasn’t surprised to see the conviction overturned–because I believed then, and believe now, that the whole criminal justice system is set up to protect cops who violate the law and abuse their public duty. Even so, I was upset by the appellate judges’ rationale.

The case was cut-and-dried. The patrolman, Hansen, had admitted the facts before a grand jury. There was some wrangling over whether we could receive the grand jury records, and once that was resolved, the case was closed, in my view. We spent some time deliberating over whether Hansen–who watched Compas, his supervisor, hide a shoelace that matched the ligature mark on Leonard Jones’ neck–had tampered with evidence simply by keeping his mouth shut about what he’d seen. Once that was resolved, we were ready to report our verdict.

The trial was plenty dramatic, though. The night Leonard Jones died, Compas and Hansen called their captain at home. Compas had just taken an internal exam and was freaked that this would screw up his chances for a promotion. So he was lying his ass off to the captain, and when the captain testified in court, he was still incensed about it. Maybe even more so because Compas accidentally left the phone of the hook after the call and inadvertently recorded himself and the other on-duty cops getting their phony story straight.

It turned out that the Assistant DA had flipped Hansen only after suggesting that the ligature mark on Leonard Jones’ neck matched the leather strap on Hansen’s nightstick. Then Hansen suddenly remembered about the shoelace.

And I thoroughly remember the Assistant DA’s summation. It was passionate, stirring, beautiful to see. However, it didn’t have any effect on our deliberations, which were entirely about “proper construction of the statute.” The appellate court concurred, essentially, with what we figured out in the jury room.

Here’s what pisses me off: The appellate court judges could see, as clearly as the jurors, that the facts of the case were cut-and-dried and the jury had no choice but to convict. No choice–unless, of course, we allowed ourselves to be swayed by the defense lawyer’s argument that the cops were really good guys just trying to do their jobs. In other words, we jurors should overturn the case the DA built based on the facts, because juries should support incompetent and dishonest cops just because they are cops. We didn’t do that, because–as we agreed unanimously after deliberating there in the jury room–it would be wrong to do so.

What I remember most clearly, all these years later, is the Assistant DA looking at us earnestly and saying, just as is recited in the appellate court’s decision:

“After all, who is Leonard Jones? He is just some skel, so nobody cares about him. So it is OK to cover up what happened to him. So his family has no right to know the circumstances of his death.” “[Defendants] don’t care what right the public has to know about a prisoner’s death in police custody, and [defendants] don’t care about Leonard Jones’ family’s right to know.” “It’s just Leonard Jones, it is just some skel, just some bum from the Port Authority. What difference does it make?”

The appellate judges Kupferman, Asch, Rosenberger, Ellerin, and Smith should have known, or maybe did know, that the Assistant DA wasn’t talking just about the cops, she was talking about the whole damned system, including them.

Has there ever been a time when one’s facility for dividing truth from BS has been more needed–and yet more difficult to do? My daily sorting through spam exercises it; my news aggregator and Facebook challenge it even more.
The deliberate lying and misleading–in the service of taking your money or infecting your computer, or obtaining your political support–is annoying, even painful, and it’s all too easy to just hate on it.
At the same time, I think we all admire, secretly or not, a good prank or hoax, when it’s funny and it’s especially when it’s directed at someone, or many someones, whose beliefs and behavior are over the top.
And I’ve done it from time to time myself, but never as effectively as this guy.

My 7th grade band teacher, Mr. Preble, was a slim and elegant man. In retrospect, I can see that he was enormously patient, and we tested that patience considerably.

I liked him right up until the time he made a comparison–a comparison I found insufferably arrogant–between the pop music we liked and the classical music he wanted to teach us about. His point, as I recall, was that while pop music was almost invariably about young romance, classical music evoked a refined and subtle reflection on many aspects of the human experience…

I interrupted him there, and not politely. “It depends on what you listen to,” I said. “Pop songs are about all kinds of things.” Mr. Preble and I couldn’t be friends after that.

If my objection was true in 1969, it was even more true a decade later. While I like a love song or a broken-hearted song as much as the next fan, I was still hanging on to my conviction that there were more important and revolutionary things to be found in lyrics and liner notes and in the rhythm and noise. Something is happening here, but you don’t what it is, do you Mr. Jones?

So in the late 70s I found myself defending my view all over again, this time with older colleagues in my Marxist-Leninist collective. Their tastes had moved on from their early appreciation of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and had ended up in that 1970s place where one’s music was no longer an expression of alienation or revolt but had become mellow background for getting an after-work Rocky Mountain High– which is to say, it could be about romance, or not about romance, but it really didn’t need to be about anything at all.

And then, amazingly, the alienation and revolt came back to rock ‘n roll, this time fueled by Thatcherism. I loved the Sex Pistols and the Clash and most of all I loved the Gang of Four, whose music had things to say about social theory that were considerably more profound (and profoundly Marxist) than what I was getting from the collective’s study group.

Some young hangers-on recruited me into a Marxist-Leninist wannabe punk rock band–we called ourselves the Prols–and I learned how to play drums, sort of. One night Ricky, our leader and guitarist, told us Gang of Four was going to be playing at Hurrahs and we were all going together.

Which brings me to this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the current New Yorker. She gets the Gang of Four’s contributions to the funk/punk genre mostly right, I think, and she includes a vignette from that show, along with a link to omigod, video:

When Gang of Four came to New York in 1979 and performed at Hurrah, they did a version of “Damaged Goods,” which was already enough of an underground hit that the audience sang along to most of it.

Well, we were singing along to it, all of our bandmembers there in the mosh pit, because we wanted to make that sound and sensibility part of our own. Besides, the lyrics could have been written about my unrequited love for the girl I’d followed out to New York two years earlier:

Damaged goods
Send them back
I can’t work, I can’t achieve
Send me back
Open the till
Give me the change you said would do me good
Refund the cost
You said you’re cheap but you’re too much

Which of course actually is about young romance, but what Mr. Preble wasn’t getting about rock ‘n roll is that it’s always all about young romance, but it’s also about rage and alienation and a burning desire to turn the world upside down. When it’s not about some other aspect of human experience.
Or as the Gang of Four’s lyricist, Jon King, put it in a slightly later song, “Why Theory”

Each day seems like a natural fact.
And what we think, changes how we act.

The Gang of Four’s leader and guitarist, Andy Gill, died Feb. 2 of pneumonia. He was just three years older than me.

This news less surprising than it looks.

“Regulatory capture” isn’t just about avoiding regulation entirely; more often, it is a way that industry leaders (and occasionally, savvy upstarts) tailor entry requirements to give their own business an advantage over their competitors.

This can go either way, and the same business may find it to their economic advantage to lobby for more or less or different regulations in different times and different circumstances.

My guess is that that Facebook’s main concern is that the EU regs align with their own plans and innovations and not those of current or potential competitors.

Savvy regulators can use that competition to the public’s benefit, by lining up support from companies that stand to gain from needed regulatory initiatives.