UniBrow

Rule No. 20:

The gestures of the body must be suited to the discourse you are upon.

Comments on the daily declensions of official Washington do not as a rule turn up here at UniBrow. Your humble servant has neither the interest, the energy, nor the stockpiles of Prozac he would require for this. But I can’t resist a few remarks about the flag-desecration issue, which boiled up into an acrid spume this week just as it has every year for the past god knows how many running. Look at The Federalist Papers for an example of how our national leaders, some of them anyway, reasoned with us once upon a time. Look at Wednesday’s New York Times to see how they do it now.

On Tuesday the U.S. Senate defeated, by just one vote, a bill that would have sent a proposed constitutional amendment outlawing flag desecration to the state legislatures for ratification. Now when I say the bill lost by one vote, understand that it required a two-thirds and not just a simple majority to pass. (And keep in mind that the bill reached the Senate only because it had already passed the House.) So it failed because only–only!–66 senators out of 100 voted for it. Fifty-two Republicans and 14 Democrats, members one and all of ”the world’s greatest deliberative body”–men and women who have sworn an oath to protect and preserve the Constitution–rose punctually on Tuesday afternoon, eager to foul and vandalize an ingenious and still revolutionary national charter by imposing on it a Twenty-Eighth Amendment that would invalidate its First. Many of them surely know better than to believe such a bill is Constitutional, and I imagine a number of the Spineless Sixty-Six would have voted against it if given the chance to do so in a sterile, consequence-free environment. But they needed their names attached to a yes vote on the flag bill as a prophylactic against the mindless attacks on their patriotism that they know will otherwise greet them in the fall congressional elections. I mean, what do you expect from these people? Courage? Reason? Articulacy? And Hillary Clinton’s name–even though she voted against the bill–ought to have a star next to it on this roster of upper-chamber invertebrates. Clinton introduced her own measure, ostensibly a compromise, that would also have criminalized flag desecration, though without amending the Constitution. As though that makes any difference to the free-speech issue at the heart of this whole embarrassing annual ritual of flag worship. Clinton’s bill failed also (64-36), and I’m very glad to say so–not because it clears my afternoon for an Old Glory bonfire but because outlawing flag desecration, whether by statute or by debauching the Constitution itself, treats a political symbol as a holy relic and codifies an already prohibited abridgement of free speech (which is to say, as court after court has said, that it’s unconstitutional).

But flag desecration isn’t speech, you say. It’s an act. As the recently departed Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist put it, flag desecration is “no essential part of any exposition of ideas”; it’s “the equivalent of an inarticulate grunt or roar that, it seems fair to say, is most likely to be indulged in not to express any particular idea, but to antagonize others.” This is beautiful–as though a statement must achieve some minimum of expository development to qualify for protection under the Constitution, or deserves protection only if its primary goal is something other than antagonism. Flag desecration is both act and speech at the same time, indivisibly. It’s speech that manifests itself through an act. Take the example of flag burning, the form of desecration most people have in mind when they discuss or contemplate this issue. Simply consider the fact that when any branch of the military disposes of a flag that has worn threadbare or become tattered, it does so by burning it. So it can’t be that burning a flag is per se offensive. You can burn a flag out of reverence for the United States; you can burn one out of hatred for it. The difference between the two instances isn’t the act itself, therefore, but the sentiment, the message, the item of speech that the act is expressing. Political statements are involved in both cases–one of those statements would be endorsed, the other despised, by most of us. Which is of course irrelevant. You don’t have to like what the flag burner is doing–that is, what he’s saying when he torches a flag. You can speak out against it all day long. But you can’t outlaw it if the First Amendment is to mean anything at all.

“Old Glory lost today,” the repellent Bill Frist said after the vote on Tuesday, according to the New York Times. Of course the opposite is true. Old Glory won, though by the slimmest of margins.

I’ll stop after one more minor thing. A few people have reminded me recently that UniBrow bills itself, up at the top there, as offering a mix of highbrow and lowbrow fare, and that I’ve been light on the lowbrow for a while. Sorry about that. I’ll try to make amends. This report on the vision and discourse of your Congressional representatives will have to do in the meantime.

Rule No. 19:

Let your countenance be pleasant, but in serious matters somewhat grave.

From here forward, each of my posts on the Federalist will link to the full text of the paper under review, the better to facilitate reader inspection of the primary documents and to encourage dialogue with such as may find my analysis wanting. I’d have done this sooner, but it didn’t occur to me until recently to look for a website loaded with the text of all the papers. I have now located one. I can’t vouch for its complete accuracy, but I’m reasonably confident considering it’s operated by Yale–the law school, I should say, not the manufacturer (since 1840) of reliable locks, latchkeys, deadbolts, and a selection of doorknobs and handles that comfortably assimilate security and ornamental grace to the contours of the hand. So here’s the text of No. 7, to which we now turn.

This paper can be dealt with briefly, since by focusing on the strictly internal causes and effects of self-destructive factionalism under a confederation versus a Union it only augments the arguments of the preceding few. Possession of as yet unpopulated lands is the first danger that Hamilton deals with. There had remained to this point large swaths of unsettled territory in the United States, much if not all of it the focus of disputed claims between states. These territories would constitute, Hamilton writes, ”an ample theater of hostile pretensions, without any umpire or common judge to interpose between the contending parties.”

Commercial rivalries between the states, or confederacies, would be more fraught and cutthroat without Union, and more apt to render commercially weaker states “tributary” to the stronger, thus offending against “habits of intercourse, on the basis of equal privileges, to which we have been accustomed since the earliest settlement of the country.” Each state, as we’ve had occasion to note before, would be in effect an independent nation and would prosecute its economic policies accordingly. But the prior history of fraternal cooperation among the states would make these ”justifiable act of independent sovereignties” seem like unjustifiable ”injuries.” Trade regulations between the states would be flouted when expediency dictated; this ”would naturally lead to outrages, and these to reprisals and wars.”

A third source of friction would be the Union’s public debt–namely, the difficulty of finding a scheme of apportionment suitable to all states, and one that, in ensuing years, would not become a larger burden for some states than others. States that later find their share of the debt difficult to bear would inevitably petition the richer ones for relief, and these wealthier states would just as naturally refuse. The overburdened states would surrender to the temptation of withholding their payments, or they would fall delinquent for any number of other reasons–one of which I can’t resist giving verbatim as I suspect it will hit home with anyone who has ever felt the mercenary pinch of credit-card debt: ”the reluctance with which men commonly part with money for purposes that have outlived the exigencies which produced them, and interfere with the supply of immediate wants.” (A point for the Federalist side–wouldn’t you say, Providian customers?) He adds:

There is, perhaps, nothing more likely to disturb the tranquillity of nations than their being bound to mutual contributions for any common object that does not yield an equal and coincident benefit. For it is an observation, as true as it is trite, that there is nothing men differ so readily about as the payment of money.

Finally, there is the friction that will stem from laws enacted by states that violate private contracts. Considerable tension had already arisen between Rhode Island and Connecticut from just this source, Hamilton writes–though I wish he had given a few more details about this one because I’m not sure exactly what he means. I’m going to have to trust him about the likely occurrence of such conflicts and the special dangers they would pose in the absence of Union, and that makes me uncomfortable. It cuts against my whole M.O. I sure as hell didn’t trust my way to this pinnacle of American cultural criticism.

I don’t think I need to say anything more about this one. It’s the same sort of argument we’ve seen in the preceding several papers–the use of historical precedents to illuminate the way ahead–and I see nothing else remarkable in the way of rhetorical technique. With No. 8 the focus shifts slightly, as Hamilton imagines the situation of war between the disunited states.   

Rule No. 18:

Read no letters, books, or papers in company; but when there is a necessity for the doing of it, you must ask leave. Come not near the books or writings of another so as to read them or give your opinion of them unasked; also look not nigh when another is writing a letter.

Just a brief comment on this one: My girlfriend, who is if anything too thoroughly conversant with Washington’s rules of civility, counts this one her favorite. We should notice that it’s actually two rules–one about asking others for permission to read in their presence, another about keeping one’s nose out of the reading material or written documents of other people–and I should say that it’s really only the first part that my funny valentine is thinking of when she celebrates good old No. 18. The reason of course is that I trespass against this hoary taboo every damned day of my life. And while it’s clear to me that the first rule is the sole reason she names No. 18 her favorite, it’s also clear to me that she knows instinctively–such is the occult power of Rule No. 18–that the best way to enforce the first rule is to violate the second.

In a recent speech to a booksellers convention, John Updike worried about the threatened extinction of the printed book in the age of omnivorous digitization. He was reacting to a recent New York Times Magazine article by Kevin Kelly, “senior maverick” (if you please) at Wired magazine, who welcomes the day when all written knowledge is digitized, and “books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page” that can then ”be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. … — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information.” For Updike–and I’m with him–the reduction of all writing to a “huge, virtually infinite wordstream” consisting of ”teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship” is a disgusting prospect. The written word loses not only its “intimacy” in such a state of things, Updike says, but also its “accountability.”

Go here to read Updike’s speech. When you’re done, go here to see James Wood hold Updike accountable for Terrorist.

Rule No. 17:

Be no flatterer; neither play with any that delights not to be played with.

Just in case you were in a good mood today, here’s a depressing AP story about the Cobb County, Ga., school board’s efforts to oppose the teaching of evolution in district schools. The school board was ordered last year by a court to remove the stickers it had been placing on science textbooks–disclaimers describing evolution as “a theory, not a fact”–but a federal appeals court has now sent the case back to the district court for another look, saying the lower court neglected to adjudicate the specific question of whether the school board’s action was “religiously neutral.” So it’s not settled yet.

But do enjoy this glimpse of the custodians of public education in Cobb County, Ga.   

It had been the school’s policy since 1995 to tear out chapters on evolution from science textbooks out of “respect for the family teachings of a significant number of Cobb County citizens,” according to Thursday’s opinion. But, in the spring of 2002, when the school district selected a new biology book that contained 101 pages on evolution, school officials decided to affix a disclaimer sticker instead of removing the section.

More details, including links to the court documents, can be found here.

Rule No. 16:

Do not puff up the cheeks; loll not out the tongue, rub the hands, or beard, thrust out the lips, or bite them, or keep the lips too open or close.