Love Your Enemies

Nikiforos Lytras, Antigone in front of the dead Polynices (1865)

From the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Your Head Trucker feels old and weary, and not up to writing a lengthy, well-polished post today, so I will just throw out some thoughts and leave it up to you fellas to connect the dots, if they mean anything to you.

It's a gray, drizzly day here in Texas, where last night, several counties away from me, tornadoes destroyed a subdivision, killing or injuring scores of people. Which seems only to be expected somehow, in a week when the news has been brimful of scandal, crime, murder, outrage, and every kind of horrible mayhem. Too much to take in, and far too much to dwell on: it seems the veneer of civilization is worn through in many places, and the ugly, bloody, barbaric core is bleeding out. I suppose awful things have always been happening somewhere, to someone, every day of mankind's existence on this planet; but whereas news used to travel slowly and partially, now it comes roaring at you in living color at all hours of the night and day. Too much to bear. All one can do is look away, and occupy the mind with puttering around the house, and tending one's own narrow garden.

As much as I applaud the recent advances for gay rights and marriage equality that I often feature here in the Blue Truck, I also have to say that I can hardly help despairing for the future of the world, and to be honest, I am glad that whenever it is my time to depart from it, I will leave behind no posterity to worry about. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," Yeats wrote a hundred years ago, and it is even truer now than it was then.

At nearly 60 years of age, few illusions about human nature are left to me; with time and experience, one comes to see people for who and what they really are, not what they pretend to be. It is particularly discouraging to see that the great mass of supposedly civilized Western people - the great majority of them at least nominally Christian - are all in a headlong rush to the worst excesses of barbarism. It feels that way, anyhow.  My second-grade teacher got it exactly right one day, fifty years ago, when she asked why a bunch of us little boys were all stepping on one another's shoes in the cafeteria line. "Well, he did it to me, so I did it to the other boy," was the repeated answer to her question. Summing up her inquest with a wry face and a disapproving shake of the head, she exclaimed, "Monkey see, monkey do."

Man is an imitative creature. You become what you think about, what you idolize, what you adore - which may be something quite different from what you say you do. And it seems to me that nearly everyone is doing their damnedest to behave just like characters in a low-class, scrum-bum reality show nowadays. Hence the decline of manners, of civility, of literacy and of reason. Of course, I have to remind myself that the worst examples are not necessarily representative of the whole in any group, but - "Monkey see, monkey do."

Continued after the jump

You Have the Right to Remain Silent . . .

Now a howl of anguish is going up among some conservative Congressmen over the so-called "intrusion" of a federal judge on the interrogation of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  Last week, early on, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-So. Car.) called for the Tsarnaev brothers, once apprehended, to be held as "enemy combatants" under the Patriot Act and tried by a military tribunal.

However, the Obama Administration decided - quite rightly, your Head Trucker believes - to prosecute Dzokhar, an American citizen, in the usual way through the civilian court system.  And it behooves us all to pay attention to this discussion about civil rights.  Listen to what Judge Napolitano, himself a conservative, has to say about the matter on Fox News:



Why should you care? Because next time it could easily be your ass on the line. As witness what happened to that Elvis impersonator over in Mississippi whom the feds swooped down on last week:

Now mailing poisoned letters to the President is an act of terrorism. Supposing instead of having access to an attorney, who quickly procured a dismissal of charges, Elvis had instead been scooped up from his house, hauled off to Guantanamo, and thrown into some dark hellhole there? Far away from all eyes, out of earshot, without attorney, family, friends, or anyone to help him. And you see how easily it very well could have been you, bud: someone you pissed off online who wanted revenge, or just a careless statement by a friend, relative, or neighbor, and bingo! You're busted. It does happen. All the time.

That's exactly why our English forebears invented such concepts as habeas corpus and trial by jury in open court, to name but two: to ensure that if the cops do make a mistake - and they make plenty, being only human beings, after all - that you won't have to suffer for their mistake.

In this particular bombing case, regardless of what Tsarnaev's mom says about it all being just a big hoax with paint instead of blood, I do think it very likely that the cops got the right man - and he happens to be an American citizen. But it's important to ensure, in fact demand, that he be accorded all the rights that the Constitution guarantees to each of us. Just the same as you would want to be treated. Because that's how the system works. If we let the cops start picking and choosing on their own who gets to be treated fairly and who doesn't - then we will very soon have a police state, where anyone can be arrested at any time and held incommunicado for years, if not for life, at the mere whim of a cop or official. And that's a place you really don't want to go.

Watch this eye-opening, but very entertaining presentation by a law school professor about your civil rights when questioned by police. Pay attention - this is good stuff to know.

Note: I apologize for the spacing errors between paragraphs, caused in some mysterious way whenever I add more than one video to a blog post. Nothing I've tried fixes it. Oh the wonders of technology!

Manhunt in Boston

Photo of the two men the FBI says planted the bombs that killed three and
maimed or wounded dozens at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
The black-hatted Suspect #1 is now dead, and white-hatted Suspect #2
is at large, the subject of an intense search in the Boston area.

Friday, 5:30 a.m. - The wheels of justice are turning swiftly in Boston. Overnight, two law enforcement officers have been shot, one fatally, and one of the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings is dead, with the other being tracked by a massive manhunt in the suburbs of the city.

Authorites have ordered residents in those areas to stay indoors, businesses have likewise been ordered not to open, and the entire Boston transit system has been shut down across all of Boston - something completely unprecedented. I'm sure the news is all over cable TV, but for folks like your Head Trucker, who doesn't have cable (by choice) and for my overseas truckbuddies, here are a couple of good sources for news, frequently updated, which I've been following all night as the story has progressed:

NBC news videos

The Guardian's live blog (A sign of the times - a British newspaper has some of the most up-to-date info on an American crime scene)

Boston.com, the online presence of the Boston Globe, also updates its main story from time to time, but overnight not as quickly as the other two.

I hope they catch Suspect #2 shortly, and no police officers or innocent bystanders get hurt.


Update, 6:45 a.m., Texas time - The two suspects are said to be brothers originally from the Chechnya region of Russia, but have lived in the Boston area with their family since 2002. WTF??


Update, 6:00 p.m. - After sleeping all day, woke up to find the suspect is still at large - how, with so many thousands of cops and troops combing the area? The whole of Boston has been locked down all day until finally about the time I woke up, the Governor said people could go out and about again. I can't second-guess the cops but I wonder if shutting down an entire metropolitan area was really necessary for one 19-year-old on the run - even with a gun and a bomb.

But just now, there's been another volley of gunfire in Watertown, so I'm watching the live NBC report as cops and paramedics swarm on a location there. Hope they have the little bastard and can bring an end to all this fear and worry.

This week's New Yorker cover by Eric Drooker is well done:

6:30 p.m. - NBC reports suspect has been found in a boat, apparently in someone's back yard. Helicopter view confirms he is moving, not dead. Cops waiting around for something, not sure what. This is too much like a Hollywood movie - I'm sure somebody in California is writing a new screenplay right now, you know they will make a million billion on the film when they get it made. Calling Ben Affleck, Matt Damon.

7:45 p.m. - NBC reports wounded, bloody suspect has been taken alive, no police hurt, medic called for, cheers going up on the sidewalks of Watertown. A peaceful end to this terrible week, thanks be to God. Now the doctors can mend him, the cops can interrogate him, the courts can try him. And then, I sincerely hope, the hangman will swing him high.

8:45 p.m. - Governor Duval, Mayor Menino, police chiefs, FBI head agent, U. S. Attorney, others give news conference. Suspect is in serious condition at Massachusetts General, the huge regional hospital Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Ecstatic crowds applauded and cheered police, firefighters, troops, paramedics, etc., as they left the area following the suspect's capture. I'm sure all my fellow Americans feel relieved and proud too. Way to go, Boston!

For the historical record, Rachel sums up the happenings of the last two days:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Adam Gopnik reflects on this week's events in the New Yorker:

Surprises surely await us as we go on, but an intuitive scenario—in which an older brother who had struggled with the promise and disillusion of American life and turned to extremist Islam for comfort, dominated and seduced a younger brother not born or made for violence—seemed plausible. But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism” alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists. And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative. I happened to be in London on 7/7—a far more deadly and frightening terrorist attack—and by 7 P.M. on that horrible day, with the terrorists still at large (they were dead already, but no one knew that) the red double-decker buses were rolling and the traffic was turning and life, though hardly normal, was determinedly going on. The decision to shut down Boston, though doubtless made in good faith and from honest anxiety, seemed like an undue surrender to the power of the terrorist act—as did, indeed, the readiness to turn over the entire attention of the nation to a violent, scary, tragic, lurid but, in the larger scheme of things, ultimately small threat to the public peace. The toxic combination of round-the-clock cable television—does anyone now recall the killer of Gianni Versace, who claimed exactly the same kind of attention then as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did today?—and an already exaggerated sense of the risk of terrorism turned a horrible story of maiming and death and cruelty into a national epic of fear. What terrorists want is to terrify people; Americans always oblige.

Saturday, 7:20 p.m. - Massachusetts State Police have released this amazing (to a non-techie like your Head Trucker) photo of the boat that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding in, taken by a heat-imaging camera in a police helicopter.  Unfuckingbelievable.