Taking Back Our State?

    News reports say former governor Jim Hunt has convened a group to discuss "an alternative vision" for North Carolina. Let's hope they'll want to counteract the serial disgrace that began with the election of Gov. Pat McCrory and legislators widely beholden to a wealthy, right-wing ideologue.
    Charlotte Mayor McCrory was a thoughtful and even-handed public servant. Governor McCrory has baffled his friends, appalled his critics and saddened both. His political style has been long on parroting doctrinaire slogans. As the state's chief executive, he has displayed a startling capacity for connivance and double-talk.
    Treated early in his tenure to vocal dismay, McCrory lashed out. He decried "scare tactics" from "the extreme left."  Welcome to today's North Carolina. If you exercise a citizen's right to speak up, your own governor gives you the back of his hand.
    Meanwhile, under iron control by Republicans, the legislature indulged the notion that might makes right. Lawmakers whooped through abortion restrictions and a high-tech poll tax. They have tainted the state's distinguished university with partisan politics.
    The list of dismal particulars goes on.  And while we might disagree on this specific or that one, they are alike in the spirit of their affront to principled governance: They are fundamentally out of tune with the long manifest public temperament of this state.
    North Carolina has comfortably hosted conservative political ideas and progressive ones, too.  Our best leaders have honored a sleeves up, pragmatic ethic of tending to essential knitting in the broad public interest.
    The offense of our current leaders is regrettably simple. In imposing a stark, partisan lockstep on North Carolina, the governor and the legislature have functioned in  contempt of their obligation to serve all the people.
    Possibly, they have produced an especially significant result. They may have coalesced in the public mind the sort of resonating idea that supports a successful brand. In ironic justice, the brand would belong to their opponents.
    Attorney General Roy Cooper embraced it as he put his own hat in the gubernatorial ring:
    "North Carolina is better than this."
 
 

Who Does Our Killing?

    The Charleston massacre and the trial of the Colorado theater shooter have put me back in an old quandary While I am against the death penalty, I recognize that it is widely favored by people whose conscience is every bit as good as mine.
    To my ear, their arguments begin roughly this way:
     Claims that the death penalty lacks general deterrent impact are not persuasive. Yes, yes, studies say this and studies say that. But they depend on an inherently implausible notion. They purport to put a yardstick on nothingness -- to measure how often unknown persons have made unknown, inner decisions against committing a crime, with the result that nothing happened.
    And clearly, the death penalty deters the people upon whom it is visited. We can be sure that they will never repeat the crime of which they were convicted.  Recidivism will not be a problem.
    This view finds nourishment in a larger concern that our criminal justice system is a screen door against wind.  While the concern can be overblown by hotheads and political opportunists,  it is not without merit. The courts and the jails should reliably keep dangerous people off the street. They do not.
    A crusty old friend of mine would here advance one more argument:  Society should not shrink from saying that some people are just bad actors and deserve what they get.
    My friend had strong opinions and a vivid vocabulary. He liked to say we should be careful not to get so open-minded that our brains fall out. But on the matter of criminal penalties, he did have a point. Punishments have a societal value. We define our community in the rules we make. It is not merely appropriate for society to articulate ultimate prohibitions. It is important.
     Stacked against the ultimate penalty of death are familiar assertions, all true: It is capriciously applied. It falls more heavily on minorities and the poor. Innocents may be convicted.
    My own opposition is intractably simple. I try to imagine pushing the needle or flipping the switch with my own hand. I can't do it. If killing is wrong, we do not make it less wrong by hiring others to do it for us.
    The trial of the Charleston shooter is yet to come. The trial of the Colorado monster already tests our patience and our nerve. There is no doubt of his guilt. And yet the process wears on at a huge cost of time and money.
    Defense attorneys might counter that in defending the culprit they are defending the system. Whatever penalty may be levied at the end of the process, it is important to reach the end by respecting our own rules. It is important that we not be a mob.
 
 

 

 

About An Empty Man

    Once I knew a man who was a model of cheerful cynicism.
    The cheer was genuine. He liked his job and his home life. He enjoyed his fellow human beings.  He had a lively sense of humor.
    The cynicism also was genuine.  He knew all the angles and answers.  He was confident that he discerned every motive, every attitude in others. Life was a long contest for comfort and advantage. That was about it.
    At the time I felt a little sorry for him. I thought a part of him must be, despite his cheer, not really  happy. With the perspective of years, I've decided I was off the mark. I think a part of him was simply vacant.
    He had no capacity for reverence. By this I do not mean religious sensibility. I mean that he could view a great painting with interest but never with awe.  He could look at the stars without a twinge of wonder. He was numb to the difference between fun and joy.
     I thought I glimpsed his profile in an essay by the late anthropologist Loren Eiseley.  He worried that 20th Century western culture was trivializing the human spirit. He feared the result could be imagined as a new category of homo sapiens. He called it Asphalt Man.
    I leave the term to imply what it will to others. I am not competent to elaborate on Dr. Eiseley's elegant thinking. In  my own imagination, Asphalt Man takes several forms. Some of them annoy only me. Some amount to more -- and worse.
    I hear his voice in politicians who set out to meddle with great universities. This is happening in my state among others. Politically connected policymakers have trimmed liberal arts programs deemed to be under-used. During subsequent controversy, one policymaker was quoted as saying, "We are capitalists.  We have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."
    What to say of a statement that is at once so silly and so revealing? We should begin with first principles:  Education curricula are supposed to shape students, not vice versa.
    People now in control of our legislature want a turn toward job preparation in the university's mission. The talk of supply and demand is window dressing for a sharp change in policy. And it is a dodge past the truth that, had mere marketplace utility been their guide, great universities would not now be great.
    My state has a history of systemic rural poverty. In levying and spending the taxes to build the university, leaders of yesteryear wanted to offer their constituents a path of escape from life behind a mule. And they wanted graduates equipped to do more than earn a buck. They knew that fine minds are as likely to be born into plowboys as anywhere else. They hoped graduates would build an economy, but they knew graduates would -- for better or worse -- build a society.
    They would not have wanted their university to produce Asphalt Man. They would have recognized in him the heart of my former friend's cynicism: He valued only what he himself could understand. This was not merely an attitude. For him it was an ethic. Anything beyond his personal ken was not worth knowing.
    He would have sniffed that programs of arts and letters were about frilly and superfluous notions.  But in fact they are about the inner light that makes the human species unique.
    Dr. Eiseley feared that Asphalt Man was capable of pawning treasures to improve the roads.
    I fear that leaders in my state are offering to prove him right.