Punching Nazis and brunching Nazis: what's a resister to do?

I weighed in on the debate about whether it was okay to punch Nazis in the face around the time that white supremacist Richard Spencer was cold-cocked while giving a sidewalk speech on the heels of his infamous "Hail, Trump!" moment during the president's inaugural festivities.

I said then, and I say now, that I thought it was a bad idea to encourage individuals to take the use of violent force into their own hands for any number of reasons. First and foremost was the recognition that force should only be used as a last resort in any situation. Indeed, the use of force should be an overt admission that peaceful remedies have been exhausted.

So far, the democratic process in this country is still alive, although, admittedly, not entirely well. It's certainly not so debilitated yet that we must turn to some sort of vigilante justice in order to accomplish political change. In spite of gerrymandering and voter suppression, we are still obligated to seek redress through the electoral process.

What troubled me most about the calls for punching out Nazis wherever one might find them was the utter naivete of the recommendation. The people who would have Nazis and others like them punched imagine that, when struck, they would simply fall to the ground and that will be the end of that. "Yay us," as they say.

But the reality is that the introduction of the use of force into an already heated situation is often the beginning of an escalating spiral of violence which may lead to a brawl and, if guns are drawn as they very well might in such circumstances, uncontrolled shooting into a crowd. The severe injury or even death of innocent passersby would be the price to pay for encouraging people to demonstrate their outrage with the use of their fists.

In addition, by implicitly deputizing anyone with a grievance with fascists to punch away, we are allowing that person to determine - only by their lights - who makes for a deserving target and what amount of violence they are permitted to apply in their quest for vigilante justice. Is this something we would really want?

Ethically speaking, when we advocate for a certain kind of behavior we are responsible for anticipating and weighing likely outcomes when others follow what they believe to be our well-considered advice. Crying out, "collateral damage," as the dust settles doesn't excuse us from responsibility for consequences that could have been easily foreseen and avoided. Blood that results from our encouragement for punching is, at least in part, on our hands.

This kind of analysis brings me to the consideration of the controversy of the day, the ethical question surrounding the decision not to serve high-level Trump administration officials, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at a restaurant.

The debate has been labeled one about incivility in public life, but I don't feel that that accurately characterizes all the behaviors under consideration. Perhaps the word does apply to aggressive badgering and in-your-face harassment. They are tantamount to acts of violence in my opinion.

Here I'd like to focus on the question of whether a personal choice to deny someone a commercial service constitutes uncivil behavior. To ground my position ethically, I would emphasize that I believe that your labor and your services are fundamentally yours to either offer or to withhold as you see fit. Any regard for personal autonomy demands as much.

(I'll note in passing that denying emergency services to anyone for political reasons would be ethically reprehensible. Suffice it to say, recognizing this, Geneva Conventions long ago mandated the appropriate medical care of enemy combatants.)

This does not mean that your deciding to withhold your labor is without consequences. Your boss could very well fire you for declining to do your job. Likewise, you could run afoul of laws on the books that require your business, if you run one, to serve people who are members of groups which have traditionally been discriminated against. Ironically, in this case, your act would be described as one of civil disobedience, although I feel a misguided one. That said, you could also suffer civil and criminal penalties as a result.

Now it's up to each of us to decide when to deny service to a party for what we consider morally objectionable behavior. Who else could make that decision? Some people may want to draw the line at serving a county commissioner who has voted for a property tax rate increase for example. That's their prerogative, although it probably means that finding long-standing gainful employment may be a struggle.

But sometimes the transgression of the service-requesting party is an affront to universally held human norms, for example participating in the implementation of a policy that forcibly separates children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border. As I have written elsewhere, this behavior is so egregious that it constitutes a crime against humanity, one which, I hope, will catch the attention of the International Court of Criminal Justice someday soon.

In these circumstances, your withholding service not only may be ethically permitted, it may be ethically recommended. This of course depends on one's personal situation, namely what the impact of such a decision might as a result of loss of employment. There may be mortgages to pay and mouths to feed, after all. We have a word for people who, after deliberation, are willing to take the hit demanded by such moral action; they are called heroes.

It's useful to recall that the people who led and participated in the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, were actually prosecuted for their "uncivil" behavior. They were accused of promoting a disruption of the public order, this for simply deciding how *not* to spend their own money. That boycott still serves as a prototype for how individuals can use their personal choices in the commercial sphere to effect social change.

I'll close by applying the consequence-based analysis I offered above to my argument here. Yes, indeed, I would encourage people to consider withholding their services from a person whom they believed was involved in a process that amounted to a moral crime.

And what about the consequences of encouraging this kind of behavior? One consequence would be salutary, leading, as in the case with the Red Hen restaurant that refused service to Sarah Sanders, to consultation between managers and employees about how to address important ethical questions of the day. That seems like a good thing to me. Of course, the rejected customer would have to go elsewhere for their meal. Perhaps they would even take the opportunity to reflect on what they had done to provoke the situation, although this is hardly something we could count on.

And finally, I'll say that I would welcome having the tables turned on me as far as such so-called uncivil acts go. I very well might find myself one day a prospective customer in a restaurant whose owner or employees find my positions on, say, LGBTQ rights or women's access to reproductive health care morally repugnant. How would I feel if I were turned away?

Honestly, I'd feel as though I had been done a favor. I'd feel as though I had been been prevented from giving my money to people who oppose the things I hold dear. I would thank the restaurant and its staff for letting me know where they stand and take my business elsewhere. With pleasure.

The tracks of their tears: a closer look at the replicant faces of Blade Runner 2049

“The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” — Book I, line 462 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Robert Fagles translation

Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) in Blade Runner 2049

[Here there be spoilers.]

Although it has been long established that non-human animal species exhibit displays of sorrow and grief, it still appears that humans are the only primate species which is capable of shedding tears. This is sometimes held out as a marker for our humanity, the way tool-making once was and the way complex language still is.

Now, I don’t buy into the idea that there is a defining behavior that sets humans apart from other animals. But I do believe that our ability to shed tears serves as an important signal of our humanity. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then tears provide a glimpse at that soul’s capacity to recognize the pain of others.

It is telling, therefore, that the only shedding of tears in Denis Villeneuve’s beautifully crafted new film, Blade Runner 2049, is done only by its non-human characters. These include, most notably, two synthetic human slaves known as replicants: the film’s protagonist an LAPD police detective K (Ryan Gosling), the blade runner of the film’s title, whose job it is to hunt down and “retire” rogue replicants, disobedient models from a bygone era; and Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) who serves the lethal girl Friday to the film’s arch-villain Niander Waller (Jared Leto) as well as K’s relentless adversary.

Advanced AIs, namely K’s digital companion Joi, also seem to be capable of the kind of deep personal connection that finds its expression in the welling of tears. As with the AI Samantha in the 2013 movie Her, Blade Runner 2049 challenges us to confront the question: at what point does digitally simulated emotion, designed with superb artifice and textured by the complexity of experience in the world, become the real thing. K, himself, struggles with this question even as Blade Runner 2049 comes to a close.

Yet it is the tears of the replicants that tell the tale at the heart of the new Blade Runner movie.

When we are introduced to K, he is on an assignment in the ecologically devastated wasteland that envelops LA, looking to retire an older model combat replicant. We see in K the embodiment of replicant sangfroid, cool and unfazed even in the aftermath of a harrowing hand-to-hand fight to the death with his “skinjob” target.

Level-headed and ever reserved, K is a careful observer of the non-synthetic humans around him, always calculating the correct response for any situation. He abides anti-replicant slurs without a hint of offense and even deftly handles a come-on from his police superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), whom he calls Madam. Although K and Madam enjoy a kind of illicit friendship, K’s reward for all his brilliant detective work is to be praised as a “good boy,” as though he were not much more than a well-behaved pet.

The main arc of the film is K’s struggle to deal with the emerging possibility that he has been womb-born and not simply a manufactured product of the Wallace Corporation like all other replicants. In his mind, being born would mean that he has a soul. It is this lack of a soul that deprives replicants of moral standing and makes them legitimate targets in K’s ethical universe.

The telltale change that indicates K’s transformation over the course of the film is in his relationship with his own memories. When asked to recall a memory from his early life early in the film, K is dismissive of the value of the question since such a memory is only an “implant,” a fictional story with which he has been equipped as part of the manufacturing process. But, as the film progresses, and as the reality of K’s seminal memory becomes more probable, a different person emerges. And the tears that he sheds as a response are the harbinger of his transformation.

But it is Luv’s struggle with her suppressed humanity and the tears she sheds as a result that speak to a deeper theme of the movie.

At first, it would be easy to dismiss Luv as not much more than Wallace’s diligent robotic henchwoman and to view the inevitable showdown between her and K as something like the duel between the newer model T-1000 and the older model terminator in the film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But in fact, Luv’s displays of arrogance, cunning, and wit make her the most human character in the film by far.

[I would add here that Sylvia Hoeks’s portrayal of Luv is what makes Blade Runner 2049 work as a film. It is the kind of performance that begs for a Best Supporting Actress award nomination.]

Early on in the film, we realize that Luv is somehow different when she has to stand by and witness the slaughter of a freshly manufactured replicant. Displeased with this failed replicant product, Wallace has taken a knife and gutted his creation. As Luv watches this horrible deed take place, she remains in place but sheds a tear, outward evidence of the pity and the rage that she is forced to contain within.

Luv’s trials points to what could be called the replicant’s torment: constrained by programming to obey the will of a heartless master, but never able to still an inner voice that cries out that what you are doing — or what you are seeing others do— is wrong.

This isn’t to say that Luv isn’t capable of acts of wanton cruelty — using rockets fired from an aerial drone she kills a dozen humans with casual nonchalance — but it makes sense that the anger she feels toward Wallace for making her commit unconscionable acts should find expression in her own brutality and petulant insistence of her own superiority.

Luv’s tears flow again in the film as she confronts Madam in her pursuit of K under orders from Wallace. Madam could well be Luv’s doppelganger; both have taken on the duty to maintain the order of the world by enforcing the wall that separates humans from replicants, and both unhappily endure the corrosive effects that this corrupt obligation has had on their souls, whether biological or synthetic. It is Luv’s recognition of herself in Madam that brings her to tears as she guts Madam with her knife after announcing the lie she might use to account for the killing to Wallace. It’s feels as though Luv is lying out loud to herself.

It is useful to consider a comparison of the film with the now three-deep Planet of the Apes franchise to look for broader meaning of this film. And it is not far-fetched to see Blade Runner 2049 as a sort of Dawn of the Planet of the Replicants. But this is not solely because of the insurrection against the established human order that it and its Dawn of the Planet of the Apes counterpart launch.

In both dystopian stories, humanity has pretty much run its sad moral course. The evidence is how humans fail to value the well-being of other sentient creatures: in the case of the Planet of the Apes series, it is the routine, inhumane treatment of fellow primate species; in the case of Blade Runner 2049, it is humanity’s casual disregard for the lives of their replicant slaves.

Ironically, in both stories, it is technology that both seals humanity’s fate and holds out hope for redemption of sorts. In the Planet of the Apes saga, through genetic engineering misadventure, humans end up handing dominion of the planet over to intelligent species of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. But in the process of losing control, humans give rise to the possibility of the reemergence of compassion in the world.

In Blade Runner 2049, technology also serves as the midwife for the birth of a successor race of synthetic human-like creatures. It is this successor race of replicants, though, which ultimately can redeem human sins by rediscovering the compassion we have lost. And it is their tears that tell us that hope for this redemption is still alive.

Don't count on impeaching Trump

Amid the chorus of calls this week for impeaching President Donald J. Trump, not enough attention is being paid to words of wisdom on the matter offered by none other than former president Gerald R. Ford.

Gerald Ford is not the most quotable of presidents. He is better known for his gaffes - take for example his claim during the 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter that "there is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration” - than for his stirring oratory.

That said, Ford was a seasoned political operator, who served as the Republican house minority leader for almost nine years before being tapped to replace disgraced Spiro Agnew as vice president of the United States. In that legislative capacity, in 1970 long before Watergate was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, Ford championed the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. It wasn’t Ford’s finest hour, to say the least.

The problem for Ford was that there wasn’t a lot of there there, as they say, when it came to identifying Douglas’s impeachable offenses. The U.S. Constitution is rather vague on the matter, saying only that civil officers may be removed for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." Ford, driven less by Douglas’s demonstrable crimes and more by resentment of his liberal opinions and Richard Nixon’s recent failed nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court, was undeterred, proclaiming on the House floor,

“An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

Now, Ford’s point was that the House was not constrained by actual legal statutes in determining whether to indict a sitting president. (Impeachment is an indictment by the House on charges that are forwarded to the Senate for trial.) But what makes Ford’s observation salient now, is that it cuts both ways: the House is also not obligated to consider a violation of law as an impeachable offense, either.

This fact underscores the ultimate futility in calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump at this point in time. I’m not saying that calling for Trump’s impeachment isn’t a useful tactic. Indeed, anything that keeps this president and this administration rattled and, as a result, frustrates their attempts to move forward with their damnable legislative program is a good idea. What I am saying is let’s not confuse a political tactic for a political strategy.

The mistake that the left made in the 2016 presidential election and continues to make to this day is believing that our outrage over Trump is somehow communicable. We imagine that if we can only get Republican lawmakers and their constituents to see how dangerous the guy is that they, in the country’s best interest, will join us in removing him from office. This isn’t going to happen.

The GOP leadership was entirely unfazed by the president’s firing of James Comey this week, with Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley, according to the New York Times, speaking for many of his colleagues when he scoffed at the furor on the left by saying, “suck it up and move on.” In their characteristically cynical way, the Republicans in the House and Senate have their eyes squarely on a government-busting legislative agenda, and they are not going to let the opportunity to enact it be side-tracked by a lengthy and tumultuous impeachment process. If you believe that appeals to their basic integrity will save the day, then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re living in an alternate reality.

And as far as most of their constituents go, we also need to disabuse ourselves of the notion that they will somehow come around to seeing the constitutional light. These people believe in their heart of hearts that all the clamor for impeachment is nothing more than a way to deprive them and their man of the fruits of a hard-fought electoral victory. And they believe, as does their leader, that all the talk about collusion with the Russians to influence the outcome of the November 2016 election is nothing more than sour grapes writ large. There will be no changing their minds in this regard.

The good news is that impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019 is a possibility, assuming that Democrats can claim a majority in the House in November 2018. Even without a majority, significant Democratic gains will frustrate GOP legislative efforts to ramrod their contemptible programs down our throats.

But this is not going to happen as a result of trying to convince the opposition that Donald Trump is a criminal deserving of impeachment. It’s going happen if we, instead, think strategically and direct our time, money, and resources into challenging voter ID laws, defending and extending access to the polls, targeting crucial, key elections, and encouraging people who are new voters or disillusioned ones to participate in the electoral process. This is how we win.