Fatal Overreach

Writing and talking about Michael Brown, whom police officer Darren Wilson killed on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, people have a tendency to leave out one of two details: Either that he had just committed a robbery or that he was unarmed. Wilson's critics describe Michael as an unarmed teenager. Wilson's advocates say robbery suspect. It's harder to argue that Michael is an innocent victim if you mention that he was the criminal suspect about whom Darren had just heard from his dispatcher. Saying Darren's innocent is a harder sell if you acknowledge that Michael wasn't carrying a deadly weapon.

Put the two together, and you get "unarmed robbery suspect." Google it and see how few hits you get. There's too much ambiguity in the phrase given the emotional freight that's being conveyed by the preponderance of the commentary about the case. We're naturally tempted to overlook gray areas while using a narrative to prove a larger point. It's especially in the nature of politicians, pundits, and interest groups to turn those caught in tragedies such as Michael's and his grieving family's into object lessons. But Darren Wilson didn't deserve to be indicted because of the existence of institutional racism. By the same token, he doesn't deserve to be absolved just because most police officers do the best they can under difficult conditions while running the risk of being turned into scapegoats for broad inequities and injustices for which virtually none of them is individually responsible.

At the core of our common life is the principle that a person suspected of committing a crime is judged strictly by the facts. In this case, after an a violent struggle over Wilson's weapon in his car, Michael fled and then turned and lunged toward Wilson. Was the officer expected or entitled to shoot him? That would seem to be a question that any number of police academy instructors should be able to answer.  If I were writing the rule book, I'd be inclined to say, "Do whatever you can to avoid discharging your weapon until you see that the suspect is armed." Of course I've never been in such a situation myself. The experts, many of whom have been, disagree with me. Wilson probably shouldn't have confronted Michael while he was still seated in his cruiser. He should've made sure he had access to mace or a Taser before trying to detain Michael.

But once the confrontation reached the street, even the New York Times called Wilson's use of deadly force "standard police procedure." If that's really the case, it's hard to second-guess the Ferguson grand jury. If Wilson had been tried, he probably would've been acquitted. Michael's advocates might have been less outraged by an unfavorable jury verdict than they were by the grand jury's decision. But again, the facts of the case, not the motive of managing public moods and opinions, are supposed to govern whether someone is charged or convicted.

Still, I'm troubled by something that Wilson claimed in his interview with ABC News: That he saw Michael reach inside his waistband. The youngster had no weapon. Pretending to go for one while moving toward an armed officer whom you've already assaulted would be tantamount to committing suicide.

So we should consider another possibility. In the ABC interview, Wilson said he wouldn't have done anything different. It would be reckless to say otherwise with a federal civil rights lawsuit pending. But a normal person would be prone to anguished second thoughts, wondering if his ten shots were justifiable. The St. Louis County DA claims that those who testified that Michael raised his hands over his head in a gesture of surrender were misremembering, their imaginations stimulated by their anguish at the tragedy of his death. It seems more likely that Darren similarly imagined Michael's threatening gesture than that the college-bound young man committed suicide by cop.

By speculating as I have, I'm not accusing Wilson of lying. Just of having a heart in pain.

Denial From Day One

Karl Rove's talking point for Republicans is to treat Barack Obama respectfully to woo millions who voted for him in 2008. That requires a new narrative in which Republicans treated him respectfully when he was elected. But who can deny the truth of this New York Times editorial this morning?:

Mitt Romney wrapped the most important speech of his life, for Thursday night’s session of his convention, around an extraordinary reinvention of history — that his party rallied behind President Obama when he won in 2008, hoping that he would succeed. “That president was not the choice of our party,” he said. “We are a good and generous people who are united by so much more than divides us.”

The truth, rarely heard this week in Tampa, Fla., is that the Republicans charted a course of denial and obstruction from the day Mr. Obama was inaugurated, determined to deny him a second term by denying him any achievement, no matter the cost to the economy or American security — even if it meant holding the nation’s credit rating hostage to a narrow partisan agenda.

If You Love Your Country, Pay For Content

As newspapers struggle to find a financial model to replace display and classified ads, they've had to cut editorial staffs to the bone. Some stories aren't getting covered as well as before or covered at all. Believing the prevailing digital ethos, readers think they're entitled to get the news for free, as though good reporting sprang immaculately from Google's servers or gifted journalists would get themselves trained and then risk their lives in Kabul strictly as volunteers. It's also the fault of publishers failing to anticipate the change and of the old model itself, where revenue from department store ads was used to underwrite coverage of city hall, the Supreme Court, and power shifts in Beijing.

Someday internet advertising may generate the same revenue that print did. Until then, the responsible reading citizen must learn to pay for the production of professional editorial content the same way she pays for dry cleaning, groceries, and legal advice. Without trained reporters and editors, we're guaranteed to suffer more abuses of power. Cable TV zealots and the Starbucks-based hackosphere will fill the vacuum left by facts with twice their weight in opinions. Our media will be deaf, blind, and insufferably loud.

One recent example of the indispensability of old-fashioned journalism. At 9 a.m. this morning in New York City, someone opened fire. I heard about it on the radio and checked Huffington Post, but there were few details. So I went to the New York Times on my iPhone (for which I gladly pay a monthly fee) and found this article, posted within four hours of the event. Written with precision and terse eloquence, it's a masterpiece of team reporting, an everyday example of the fine but dying art of good newspapering, painstaking and often dangerous work that no one will or should have to do for free:

[The suspect] lived on the third floor of a six-story walk-up on East 82nd Street for about 18 months, said Guillermo Suarez, 72, the super of the building.

Every morning he had the same routine. He would leave the apartment between 7:30 and 8 a.m., say good morning and head to the McDonald’s on Third Avenue and 84th Street.

After about 20 minutes, he would come back carrying a McDonald’s bag. He would nearly always wear the same thing — a tannish brown suit, sometimes with a tie. Then he would generally stay in the apartment the rest of the day.

He did the same thing on Friday morning, but this time he did not come back.

If you love your country, and if you really want to know what's going on in the world, pay for content.

Ryan's Hope

When is an issue not an issue? In the New York Times, Michael Cooper and Dalia Sussman report:

The Romney-Ryan proposal to reshape Medicare by giving future beneficiaries fixed amounts of money to buy health coverage is deeply unpopular in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, according to new polls that found that more likely voters in each state trust President Obama to handle Medicare.

And yet they report:

The race appears to have tightened a bit in both Florida and Wisconsin in recent weeks. In Florida and Wisconsin, where Mr. Obama had led Mr. Romney by six percentage points in polls conducted before the selection of Mr. Ryan, the race is essentially tied.

Romney And The Death Of Peace

The New York Times profiles Mitt Romney's chief adviser on the Middle East, Dan Senor, who inspired Romney's statements about Israelis' cultural superiority in comparison to Palestinians. Romney has made similar statements about other neighboring peoples, such as Americans and Mexicans.

During Romney's visit to Israel, he failed to mention the Palestinians or the peace process in what was dubbed a major foreign policy address. Senor may have been behind that astonishing development as well. Senor told reporters that if there's to be a two-state deal, Palestinians would have to drop their demand for a right of return. The Bush and Obama administrations favored letting Israel and the Palestinian Authority work the issue out during negotiations.

Obama's peace initiative was prematurely hobbled by his and the Palestinians' insistence that Israel suspend West Bank settlement expansion as a precondition for recommencing direct talks. While the president's tactics left something to be desired, he was at least trying to be an honest broker, putting pressure on both sides in keeping with the policies of his recent predecessors. All in for Israel, Romney has no such instincts and intentions. For today's Republicans, empathy for the underdog Palestinians and the nuances of an ancient struggle with plenty of error on both sides have evidently run their course.

Of course the Romney-Senor position -- at least as politically unsustainable for Palestinians as the settlement demand was for Israel -- may be just another sop to U.S. Jewish voters. Let's hope so. As Romney administration policy, it would probably doom the peace process. In that case, having just so fulsomely praised Israel's commitment to democracy, Romney and Senor would need to have a secret plan for figuring out how Israel could continue to call itself a democracy with two million disenfranchised Arabs living under indefinite military occupation.

Clash Of Civilizations? What Civilization?

Adam Nossiter reports in the New York Times:

Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali stoned a couple to death after accusing them of having children outside of marriage, a local official who was one of several hundred witnesses to the killings said Monday.

The official said the bearded Islamists, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, brought the couple into the center of the town of Aguelhok from about 12 miles away in the countryside. The young man and woman were forced into holes about four feet deep, with their heads protruding, and then stoned to death at about 5 a.m. Sunday, the official said.

“They put them into the holes, and then they started throwing big rocks, until they were dead,” the official said, speaking by satellite phone from the remote desert town near the Algerian border.

“It was horrible,” he said, noting that the woman had moaned and cried out and that her partner had yelled something indistinct during the attack. “It was inhuman. They killed them like they were animals.”

Obama's Naivete

David D. Kirkpatrick cuts the president too much slack:

[Barack Obama] could not have guessed that the demand for Arab democracy would instead become one of his presidency’s greatest foreign policy challenges, forcing whoever wins the November election to confront tough trade offs between American values and interests.

The popular uprisings that have swept the region since Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo have upended an authoritarian order that was largely congenial to the United States. While they may have brought Arab nations closer than ever to fulfilling of the promise of self-determination that has echoed through the speeches of American presidents since Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War, they have also imperiled crucial American allies, empowered antagonistic Islamists, and unleashed sectarian animosities that threaten to drag the whole region toward chaos.

Of course he could have guessed, and he would have if he hadn't been naive and inexperienced. His democracy- and freedom-loving predecessors stuck with Arab (and global) authoritarians whenever their policies served U.S. interests. One of the realities of leading the world's greatest democracy is that the American people elect leaders for their sake and not the sake of the people of Egypt, Libya, or Russia. It's not a mistake Richard Nixon would have made.

Mickey Mouse Municipality?

Last Tuesday's unrest in Anaheim, which has suffered five fatal officer-involved shootings this year, has attracted the attention of Jennifer Medina at the New York Times:

These shootings have exposed deep fury in a city that is better known as being home to the happiest place on earth. About 1,000 demonstrators showed up at a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, leading to outbreaks of violence and two dozen arrests.

The police were bracing for more protests over the weekend and said they had adopted a zero-tolerance stance against any city code violations, like loitering.

In this largely working-class city of more than 340,000 people, the divisions are as varied as they are deep. While more than half of the city is Latino, only three Latinos have ever been elected to the City Council. But the rift is as much about class as it is about race.

For many activists, the blame lies with the City Council, whose members are primarily from eastern hills on the city’s edge, the wealthiest and least populated part of town. They complain that the Council has focused exclusively on development in the resort area at the expense of the city’s poor neighborhoods.

The photo by the AP's Damian Dovarganes shows the mother of shooting victim Manuel Diaz, Genevieve Huizar, who movingly pleaded for calm this week.

Sally Forth

Sally Ride's sister, Bear, described Sally's partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy, as a member of the family and added:

The pancreatic cancer community is going to be absolutely thrilled that there's now this advocate that they didn't know about. And I hope the GLBT community feels the same. I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.

Andrew Sullivan thinks the astronaut, who was fiercely protective of her privacy, should've spoken up sooner:

Her achievements as a woman and as a scientist and as an astronaut and as a brilliant, principled investigator of NASA's screw-ups will always stand, and vastly outshine any flaws. But the truth remains: she had a chance to expand people's horizons and young lesbians' hope and self-esteem, and she chose not to.

In fairness to Dr. Ride, she also kept her illness secret from family and friends for 17 months. But she made no secret of one of the focal points of her life after NASA, the empowerment of young women. From her New York Times obit this morning:

In 2003, Dr. Ride told The Times that stereotypes still persisted about girls and science and math — for example the idea that girls had less ability or interest in those subjects, or would be unpopular if they excelled in them. She thought peer pressure, especially in middle school, began driving girls away from the sciences, so she continued to set up science programs all over the country meant to appeal to girls — science festivals, science camps, science clubs — to help them find mentors, role models and one another.

Times reporter Denise Grady put her reference to Ride's partner near the end of the story, where survivors' names usually go. One assumes it was her and O'Shaughnessy's wish to come out that way, elegantly, simply, as though it were no big deal, which, someday soon, it won't be. Could she have done more to spotlight being a pioneer for lesbians as well as women? Reading her obit, I felt this great American had done enough for her country. Godspeed, Sally Ride!

Uncomfortably One

Maggie Shipstead on mayhem at the modern American wedding:

I wonder...if the freewheeling merriment isn’t...rooted in a kind of doomsday solidarity. Binding yourself to another person with the intention of fidelity and the hope of lasting happiness is a daredevil leap of faith, and perhaps the momentum of nuptial risk-taking is contagious, inspiring guests to throw caution to the wind at the table or the bar or in bed. My friends’ weddings have been joyful and optimistic, but we’ve heard so many ominous statistics about the divorce rate that these days a distant rumble of anxiety can be heard at even the most determinedly perfect celebrations.

As a pastor, I experience weddings (also funerals, actually) as blessed foreshadowings of the perfect unity with one another and all creation from which and to which God has summoned us. For an hour or two,we may give ourselves permission to ignore the world's alienation and suffering, all the score-keeping and -settling of our lives, and imagine how God wants us to be and live. That's enough to make anyone go nuts.

Monday Afternoon Bike Rides For The People

While extolling the virtues of idleness to highly educated and compensated persons who are likely to find his New York Times post, writer Tim Kreider does offer a passing dollop of empathy for the really working class -- those with backbreaking and sometimes multiple poorly-paid jobs who aren't busy so much as exhausted and dispirited. No question we should all do fewer e-mails while on vacation in Hawaii or during our Alaskan cruise. But by large his is a prescription available only to those who wish to be members of a healthier ruling class. What dockworker, domestic, paralegal, or flight attendant wouldn't love Tim Kreider's life? Sounds good to me:

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

You Think?

Headline on Kindle version of this New York Times article: "Jobs Numbers Could Affect Presidential Race."

Beit El Than Nothing

While we were in the Holy Land last week -- around the time I saw this sign on the Jericho-Jerusalem highway pointing both to Ramallah, the Palestinians' headquarters, and Beit El, an Israeli settlement on the occupied West Bank that's one of the thorns in the Palestinians' side -- there was a similarly ambiguous development in the Middle East peace process. A few dozen Israeli families peacefully vacated buildings in a Beit El neighborhood called Ulpana that the country's high court had deemed illegal (good news). Then the government announced it was adding 350 residences to other settlements, including 300 in Beit El itself (which sounds like bad news, since it adds up to a net increase in West Bank settlers). The New York Times reported:

[W]hile Palestinians and their supporters saw the court ruling as a moral victory, the practical result is an expansion of the settlement enterprise. Several experts said the agreement further diminishes the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and some saw the deal as a sign that [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu was leaning toward a unilateral rather than bilateral approach to the issue, with Israel essentially defining the borders of a future Palestinian state.

On Sunday, the justices relented a bit and said the illegal buildings didn't have to be demolished until November. That's Israel (and often democracy) for you -- one step forward, .95 or 1.05 of a step back. No matter when the homes are demolished, the Ulpana operation is scant cause for optimism. Getting Beit El's 5,600 residents to leave as part of a two-state settlement would probably not go as smoothly. Most are orthodox Jews, including many Russian emigres, who consider their home part of greater Israel. The site's association with the great patriarch Jacob would make things especially complicated on the day the IDF was sent to roust the townspeople.

But a little bit more good news is that there are settlements, and there are settlements, as we St. John's pilgrims learned on June 24 at the Holy Land Hotel in east Jerusalem during a thoughtful talk by Ophir Yarden, an Israeli veteran, self-described religious Zionist, and peace activist who teaches at BYU's Jerusalem Center.

To get us started, Yarden surveyed the vast Talmudic landscape of Israeli opinion on security and the peace process, helping us understand that there's a legitimate-sounding response to every opinion and nostrum offered by foreign visitors who've been watching the news or reading the paper and decide we've figured it all out. He especially stressed taking care about our terminology. When someone mentioned the controversial separation wall, which we'd seen the day before at Bethlehem, he reminded us that forbidding Berlin Wall-like structures comprise just five percent of the barrier dividing Israel from the West Bank. Security fence, he said, would be a less-provocative description, since its construction (if not all of Israel's opportunistic choices about its location) seemed justifiable as a security measure during the second intifada in 2000-04.

On the other side of the debate are Israeli hawks who oppose current U.S. policy, which calls for Israel to return to its 1967 borders with land swaps. Fretting that pre-June 1967 Israel was only a little more than nine miles wide at its narrowest point, critics claim the Obama administration and Palestinians want to impose indefensible "Auschwitz borders" on Israel -- failing to acknowledge, Yarden noted, that she capably defended the same borders in 1967's Six-Day War, when Israel won the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

As for the settlements, Yarden insists that they haven't yet doomed the two-state solution. He said that most settlers aren't religious zealots clinging to their birthright in Hebron or the rock where Jacob purportedly laid his head the night he dreamed about his ladder. Of the settlement population of 500,000, about 70% actually live in the suburbs of Jerusalem, many having been attracted not by ghostly voices of the patriarchs but the lure of cheaper, government-subsidized housing. Yarden said that if these 350,000 want their homes to stay in Israel, all Israel has to do is give up 1% of its territory elsewhere along the border.

The problem is that many of the remaining 150,000 live in communities like Beit El that are deeper in the West Bank, often complicate the geographical integrity of Palestine, and in some cases shelter residents who might not leave peaceably. Know all that, this pilgrim -- still taking care not to take sides -- hopes that Israel will stop building and expanding settlements and the Palestinians will stop saying no.

Hardball

Nixon's just a .277-batting DH on the all-Watergate team at the New York Times (where it must've been a slow day at the sports desk).

Faith And Minds Alive

What a wonderful time to be a Christian, and an Episcopalian. Above is a fascinating hour-long conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Then my Nixon buddy Paul Matulic pointed out this Slate exchange between Douthat and William Saletan as well as the fact that the New York Times turned to an Episcopal priest, Randall Balmer, to review Douthat's book:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Buff And Holy

The Rev. Dr. Amy Richter, bodybuilder and Episcopal priest, reflects on the learning-edge issue of women's ordination from the perspective of spirit, head, and body:

[S]omehow, despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.

A parishioner told me that he thought I was a great priest, but that if I became pregnant, it would be too weird for him to see me at the altar. Merely holding hands with my husband, even when I am not in clerical clothes, has elicited the comment “Can you do that? I mean, in public?” Another parishioner told me I was too petite to be a priest. I’m 5-10. I have never been called “petite.” I think he meant “female.”

What about when a priest wears a bikini? What if she complicates the picture by having sizable biceps or well-defined lats? Can “buff” and “holy” go together? “Ripped” and “reverend”? If the “reverend” is a woman?

Hat tip to Tom Tierney

Can't Get There From Here

Conservative Republicans don't want Mitt Romney to tack to the center. Neither does the White House.

Levon Helm, 1940-2012

From Jon Pareles elegant New York Times obit:

Mr. Helm gave his drums a muffled, bottom-heavy sound that placed them in the foundation of the arrangements, and his tom-toms were tuned so that their pitch would bend downward as the tone faded. But his playing didn’t call attention to himself. Three bass-drum thumps at the beginning of one of the Band’s anthems, “The Weight,“ were all that he needed to establish the song’s gravity. His playing served the song. In “The Shape I’m In," he juxtaposed Memphis soul, New Orleans rumba and military tattoo. But though it was tersely responsive to the music, the drumming also had an improvisational feel.

In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and sometimes within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time.

You Think?

Headline on the New York Times' lead article Saturday morning (Kindle edition): "Failed North Korean Launching a Setback for Kim Jong-in."

Apple Loses. Amazon And Consumers Win.

A couple of years ago, we learned that Steve Jobs' Apple had colluded with publishers to undercut Amazon's bid for galactic domination of the e-book market, which it was quickly gaining by charging $10 for bestsellers and most every other title. Apple hoped to get a quick and dirty piece of the action for the iPad and its own bookstore. Instead it got the attention of the Justice Department, which sued Apple and five big publishers for blatant price-fixing.

Rather than celebrating this victory for the consumer, David Streitfeld of the New York Times is worried about Amazon's clout:

[P]ublishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

“Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,” said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. “Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.”

If Amazon's 60% of all e-book sales can really be called a monopoly, Amazon earned it by brilliantly parlaying its dominance of mail-order books sales into a launching pad for the Kindle. If it was willing to take a loss on a $10 e-book sale (based on what it was paying publishers for resale rights) to encourage readers to buy Kindles, that was literally its own business. But the media appear to be buying the publishers' complaints that they couldn't make money on $10 e-books and that the price undercut the perceived value of text. The oil companies need to find reporters this credulous. We need higher prices to spur our exploration efforts! Only by paying more for gas will people appreciate the preciousness of this scarce resource!

Besides, I agree with Matthew Yglesias, who wonders how you don't make money on a $10 file download. If publishers can't, they need to streamline their business, which began to happen with recorded music after Apple figured out how to sell $10 downloads to people who'd been paying $18 for CDs. Apple used its wits to help the consumer get more affordable music and to spur restructuring of an arteriosclerotic industry. Apple then turned around and tried to stop Amazon from making text more affordable in precisely the same way. This week both companies got what they deserved.