Breaking news doesn’t tell the whole story.
There have been flashpoints in the last seventy-two hours that suggest something important is happening in some of the ongoing issues of our times that make them part of the temper of our times: the legal issues about whether Donald Trump had tried to overthrow a presidential election, an issue only some three years old but destined to remain with us historically; the issue of the Israel Hamas War, which goes back to the creation of Israel since 1948 or if one cares to ever since Jews have been an irritant to others, which goes back for thousands of years; and the issue of American border immigration, which go back to the 1850’s when the Know Nothing Party originated in its rejection of Irish Immigration. The first two flashpoints do not upon analysis as being of significant importance and it is uncertain whether the third will be, which suggests that flashpoints don’t tell what is really going on, They are driven instead by the need for breaking news to fill up media hours rather than the contexts which explain the ongoing issues. Yes, the times are full of issues but the abundance of flashpoints is just the fluff to fill airtime.
The liberal cable news has been following every legal proceeding and court appearance of every one of the various civil and criminal trials with regard to ex-President Trump on the grounds that they are historic, unprecedented, and momentous in that they deal with the first ever attempt of a President to overthrow the legitimate transition of power from one President to the next, as is indeed tube case, amply documented in the Jan. 6tth Committee. The legal system moves slowly but inevitably to its conclusions: first a congressional investigation, then state and Department of Justice investigations, then indictments, and then trials, the most important of which are supposed to begin in the early spring of 2024. Then, this week, following close upon the Colorado decision to eliminate Trump as a candidate for a primary ballot because he had been an insurrectionist, there was the one sentence found by the U. S. Supreme Court that it would not fast track the appeal by Trump that he could not be prosecuted for his acts as President, an issue that has never arisen before. Commentators said that a delay would mean Trump would finally be put in the dock while the 2024 presidential election was going underway and people might have to vote before trial verdicts were rendered, which would make the election just additionally messy, a conflict between law and politics.
Looking at the context, however, makes the delay less of a problem, however commentators are so glued to the judicial process, perhaps because it provides some overt facts to recount while standing in front of the steps of a judicial building. First of all, justice so long delayed has already been denied. A criminal trial will be more than three years from Jan. 6th, 2021. How long does that have to take for justice to proceed? I am not talking about show trials or bull rings in Havana when Castro took over. I am merely talking about being expeditious while it remains relevant, part of its time rather than after when Trump ran again in earnest. But legal procedures are quite unwieldy and burdensome, full of delays and appeals and preparations, rather than getting to the heart of the matter and likely to get entwined with technicalities, such as whether a President is an officer of the United States according to the Fourteenth Amendment, as he most certainly is, because the Fourteenth Amendment lists various specific elective offices, such as Senator and elector, before giving a blanket naming of all offices in the government who took an oath, and that includes the President. Legalisms get in the way of substance, which is whether Trump was an insurrectionist.
Second of all, citizens do not have to wait on verdicts to decide whether Trump can be decided to have been an insurrectionist. The law can be used to decide whether he should be put in jail. That is a very high standard of proof. But voting is another matter. People can decide who to vote for because Trump has orange hair, or Ron Desantis doesn’t smile or because Jack Kennedy’s wife had smart clothes and that Richard Nixon on television had a five o’clock shadow. There is more than enough evidence for people to conclude on the basis of what has been available on the tape of what he said and did on Jan. 6tth for people to conclude they don’t want to give him another time not to take the helm of the nation. It is up to the people to decide, not the niceties of law, and his being a fishy customer is enough reason to disqualify someone as President, or for any other elective office, down to dogcatcher or member of the local school board. You don’t have to prove him a crook, just untrustworthy. But commentators, caught up on the legal entanglements, haven’t yet adjusted to the political framework as the final arbiter, even if Montesquieu and other Enlightenment figures were sure that a republic depended on the virtues of the populace to sustain it, and so was ever in jeopardy.
The Israel Hamas War has been going on for three months and is likely to create permanent changes in the relation between Israel and the world. It might be alienated from world opinion even more than is presently the case, a long time stain on its national identity for having killed so many Palestinian civilians, but maybe, having successfully defeated Hamas and replaced it with an Arab dominated regime, complete the job of regularizing relations between the Arab states and the Jewish state. That would be different from the previous policy of “mowing the lawn” with Gaza every few years to control Hamas incursions. Either substantially better or worse will result from the present war. The event that took place in the last twenty four hours was a report on CNN that showed that Israel was using blockbuster bombs, which covered football fields in diameter, to rain down on Gaza and so was the cause of many civilian casualties. One interpretation of that event is that despite the Israeli claims otherwise, they are engaged in indiscriminate bombing of civilians, something akin o genocide, and so to be condemned in the world arena.
A bit of context is useful. Blockbuster bombs were used in the last months of the Second World War against Germany and were also used by the United States against North Vietnam. Blockbuster bombs are not regarded as illegal weapons, as are poison gas. There is a military purpose in using them. They were thought to lead the underground tunnels in Gaza to collapse and so kill off Hamas fighters. Those bombs were used early on in the Israel Hamas War and seem now to have been abandoned because they were ineffective. The truth of the matter is that Israel has not yet been successful in expunging Hamas and letting it survive in power would lead to other attacks like the one that took place on Oct. 7th, which no Israeli government could abide however much the U S is being as patient as possible to allow Israel to work its will. Notice that the UN is all but a few in favor of a ceasefire but is unwilling to criticize Hamas for the atrocities on Oct 7th though those atrocities are regarded by international law as war crimes. So much for international law. So the CNN revelation is just jockeying for position in the leaning to one side or the other, cable channels thinking themselves objective in that they balance the death of Palestinian children with interviews with survivors of Oct. 7th, and so runs away from the issue of causes to the safer ground of saying war is hell.
A third crisis that is going on simultaneously with the other two is the problem of the large-scale influx of illegal immigrants across the southwestern American border. Trump and others make racist remarks about those people poisoning America, while Democrats, supporting Biden, want to regularize and control immigration so that the conditions are humane so as not, for example, to separate parents from children, and to distinguish those who are entering those who are escaping from prosecution from those who are entering the United States so as to improve their economic conditions. These issues have been constant ever since the Eisenhower era “Bracero” program whereby Mexicans were allowed into Texas to do farmwork for the season and then required to return south of the border. But, at the moment, the numbers have increased to ten thousand a day which is far higher than the normal porousness across national boundaries when, let us say, maybe a million people a year came into the United States. It is difficult to judge what people they are who crossover, in that some months are mostly families, and some months from far away such as Venezuela or the Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Why engage in such privation and danger only for economic advancement? Moreover, the immigrants have cell phones and pay off smugglers, which suggests that they are without any wealth and therefore desperate. Is it worth risking your children? I have not found good evidence about actual illegal immigrants though journalist inquiries say the people going north do so to get work and know what town in the United States to go to so that they can meet up with relatives.But ten thousand a day seems definitely a flashpoint rather than the inevitable ebb and flow of immigration.
The Biden Administration is no longer merely claiming to just be humane. They are making a claim that massive global migration is taking place for any number of reasons and that it is necessary to craft new laws to manage it, which was the argument made in the 1920’s to create immigration quotas at that time to limit European immigration to the United States. Politically however immigration is a hot button issue and the question is whether Democrats and Republicans can agree on terms of a new immigration law, Republicans wanting limited immigration and Democrats wanting more lenient laws. Both could agree on more technology and manpower and speedier dispositions through increasing border judges. The Republicans see this as a winnable election issue because Americans are increasingly distrustful of illegal immigrants, but Biden and his staff are much better at negotiating the fine points and might get the advantage in a final deal. Stay tuned to what will be proposed in the new year.
The reason media people run to a flashpoint is not just that they lack context. It is because they hope that a flashpoint will serve as a climax for the story that is being told and will thereby unravel the story, find its meaning, as in an Ibsen play, or else determine what will subsequently happen, Hamlet doomed once he kills Polonius. Maybe the next flashpoint will settle who are the bad guys, as might have been hoped with the Israeli use of blockbuster bombs; maybe the Colorado Supreme Court would finally lead to a judgment on the ex-President that a consensus of Americans might agree; and maybe high immigration figures this week would settle that immigration is in crisis. And if it doesn't, maybe the next flashpoint will. That is very different from the analyst who is not trying to tell a story but instead offers a trend or a situation, that defying story as the way to organize experience. The Irish Potato Famine was a story that yields to Malthusian conflicts between a trend for food production and a trend for population growth. Trends and situations imply inevitability while stories result from human choices and revelations. Trends and situations are inevitable, in the mind of formulas, while stories are the results of decisions made by people and gods. You can consider either or both valid but understand which kinds of constraints apply.