Casting Stones

Southern chef Paula Deen’s attitudes about race, as expressed in a court deposition, are offensive to most of us, but there’s something not right about all the commercial entities associated with her heading for the exits.

Certainly, a celebrity with backward views should be called out on them. But hey, this woman, after all the discussion about her “empire,” is a chef. She writes cookbooks. She’s on TV. What do her views on race have to do with cooking?

Those interested in karma should have been satisfied enough to learn that a guru of what many consider to be unhealthy cooking should be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But at least that has a relationship to what she does for a living. Do you think the lily-livered corporations that are now throwing her under the bus are all doing so simply out of moral outrage, and that their own bottom lines had nothing to do with it?

A few years ago, a city councilman in a Southern California town near where I lived came under fire for a term he used during a meeting. As I recall, the council was talking about the use of gasoline-powered leaf blowers by the overwhelmingly Latino population of gardeners. The councilman, again as I recall, was trying to point out that these gardeners needed these devices in their jobs -- but he used the term “wetback” in talking about his own gardener. The thing was, this council member was an older man, and he didn’t use the word as a slur at all. For him, in his woeful ignorance, it was simply a term of description. He should have known better -- but he didn’t.

Nevertheless, local racial activists, as well as many from L.A., descended on the town and hounded the councilman into resignation. Even the gardener who had worked for this fellow for many years tried to defend him, but to no avail.

If we applied the same principle to the work of the late Dr. William Shockley, we might not be using any of the electronic devices that interconnect us today. Dr. Shockley expressed notoriously unorthodox and offensive views about race – but he was the inventor of the transistor, the basis of the modern semiconductor industry.

Hitler is credited with making German trains run on time and building the autobahns. Should good Germans be walking to work?

Paula Deen herself made a tearful apology on TV, saying that she hoped anyone who had never used a racial slur would cast a stone at her and kill her, paraphrasing the famous Bible story. You may or may not accept the apology or even believe it was genuine.

Maybe mercy and compassion just don’t work in this case. She should have known better, and at least kept her backward views to herself.

But shouldn’t punishments fit crimes?

So You Think You Know This Court

We can’t be blamed if our heads are spinning – even though it may not be in the same direction for everyone.

Not 24 hours ago, the U.S. Supreme Court was being panned for its decision to throw out key provisions of the Voting Rights Act – a move interpreted by many as a blow to equality. Now today, the Court majority has thrown out key provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), declaring it unconstitutional. In addition, the Court left standing a lower court opinion blocking Proposition 8, though only on what amounts to a technicality. The decisions open the door to same-sex marriage in states that have approved it.

Fittingly, both of these Supreme Court rulings have the biggest impact in California. Like that state, the Court has a major fault running through it, and occasionally, it shakes big-time – and we try to predict that tectonic shift at our peril. Maybe it’s all about Justice Anthony Kennedy, the traditional swing vote – but no matter. Personally, I think we’re better off having a fractured Court. A monolithic one would seem more stable, but this way, none of us can stay happy – or unhappy – for very long.

With regard to the rulings themselves, they’re a hint that we have either evolved (like the President) to a higher spiritual plane, or we’re heading to the other place in a handbasket -- you pick. But as I have said often in this space, if a certain percentage of all mammals have homosexual preferences, why should human beings be any different? And isn’t making quick judgments about the rightness or wrongness of human sexual proclivities -- or who is entitled to love whom -- a little silly anyway? We shouldn't need a court to tell us that.

I Don't Care Where He Is

Edward Snowden, the former contractor who is credited with pulling the veil off of PRISM, the massive federal surveillance program, is in Moscow at this writing, reportedly asking Ecuador for asylum.

Hero or traitor, he picks some strange places to escape U.S. charges: Hong Kong (China) and now Moscow. He reportedly considered Cuba and Venezuela. Perhaps since Julian Assange was able to hide in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Snowden figured he’d find some refuge in that South American country.

Those who think he’s a traitor would no doubt prefer to see him in the confined spaces of an American prison, but his other choices aren’t so great. If I were choosing places to live, Hong Kong, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador would probably not be high on the list. He can never again set foot in the United States or a country that’s too friendly with us if he wants to avoid capture. Those who want to see him paying a price for his misdeed might take some comfort from the fact that he will always have to be looking over his shoulder. As for Julian Assange, BTW, I don’t see the Ecuadorean embassy listed among London’s five-star hotels. Plus, he can’t use any free tickets to those West End shows.

It may be easy for others to conclude that Snowden is a hero, but heroes don’t always get an immediate ticker-tape parade.  We’ve only recently gotten close to the concept of honoring our own service members who fought in unpopular wars. Heroism usually requires a price of some kind, which Mr. Snowden is already paying.

Personally, I would prefer we spend as little time and money as possible on this fellow. And perhaps we’ll be a little more careful before we hire government contractors in the future.

One piece of advice, though, Ed: If I were you, I’d be careful to avoid open spaces. With this administration’s penchant for using drones, well, a round of golf might be a really bad idea right now.

Way Too Little, Way Too Late

Now that the infamous “red line” has been crossed – the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons on civilians, President Obama has decided that the United States should supply arms to the Syrian rebels. As I noted to friends yesterday, we seem to have a talent for finding the deepest part of the quicksand and stepping in it – or to be more accurate, sticking our toe in it to see if we can avoid getting sucked in.

All this is still officially pretty vague. According to reports, though, the arms we will supply to the Syrian rebels aren’t necessarily the ones they want: heavy weapons or those to shoot down aircraft.  Senator John McCain, long a hawk on this issue, believes we have to do more, including enforcing a no-fly zone.

The Assad regime has used chemical weapons on four separate occasions, according to our intelligence, killing up to 150 people. That’s awful. But it begs the question of why we didn’t care about the 100,000 or so others who have already died by more conventional means. As if the earlier atrocities committed by the regime were somehow acceptable.

So what is our goal here? Do we want to help the Syrian rebels win, or not? Will these measures really level the playing field? Continuing that analogy, leveling the playing field, at this stage, doesn’t stop the game, and if there is a winner, there’s little likelihood it’s going to be our friend.

I think our real objective should be – or should have been – knocking out or securing the chemical weapons to prevent their use – though perhaps they’ve been scattered to the point where we can’t get to them now.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. If we’re going to change the balance in Syria, there has to be a commitment to do it. I still contend there was a point at which we could have intervened in this conflict early on and accomplished something without having to really go to war. But at this moment, Americans don’t have the stomach for the measures that seem necessary. It’s just too late to play catch-up.

Hero/Leaker Worship

Wherever he is now, there’s no question that Edward Snowden, who revealed the existence of the massive PRISM data-gathering program (or metadata, or whatever that’s called) is the most famous man on the planet – but is he a hero?

Personally, I’m not sure I’m ready to see him fitted him for a red cape quite yet. I actually had a Facebook friend who said Snowden should be compared to patriots who won the United States its independence from Britain. Really? Didn’t he violate a secrecy oath? I’m also a little bothered by the fact that he fled to Hong Kong – a little too close to China for my taste. And it has been pointed out that there were existing channels for whistleblowing, that the world stage wasn’t necessary.

Fine. Perhaps he could have used existing channels, but it might have been a long time before any of us actually heard the whistle. This way, we all heard it instantly.

Maybe I should be outraged at the existence of this kind of program. I’m not. It may even be a good idea in some respects. But do we deserve to know about it and to have a debate about it? Absolutely!

There are a couple of things that bother me about it, aside from the concept of surveillance (that word is troublesome, only because it implies someone’s actually looking at all this data at all times – that’s not happening). But I heard the feds are building a zillion-dollar facility somewhere to house all of this stuff  – a home for the “haystacks” in which the security folks would look for “needles” when learning of a terrorist threat. How many such facilities will be necessary going forward? Second, why is a 29-year-old contractor with no college degree given access to top secret information – and paid $200,000 a year? How many more Snowdens are we relying on to keep our secrets (and some secrets have to be kept)? Now that we know what we’re paying for, are we getting our money’s worth?

As I’ve said before, the average American can’t get too upset about privacy loss when he’s willing to sell his soul to the digital devil after seeing an online deal for a $100 flat-screen TV.

In my view, the only thing that’s really going to protect us from government abuse is SUNLIGHT. Snowden did us a favor. He ripped the black curtain off the window – but he didn’t exactly topple the Berlin Wall. Before he ascends into heaven – or descends to the other place – we all have something to discuss first.

Out of the Barn 2

The nightly cable new outrage festival was in full swing last night amid reports by the Washington Post and The Guardian that federal agencies had “back doors” into the servers of Silicon Valley companies to spy on Americans, ostensibly for collecting information on us to protect us against terrorism. I’d like to be able to tell you I’m surprised, but am not, and can only get outraged up to a point.

The story, of course, is bad news for the Obama administration, and casts the President himself as something of a hypocrite. While campaigning for office, he was critical of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, but the Post report reveals that he certainly can’t pretend he’s a champion of privacy.

While the government’s PRISM program is intended as a national security tool and is supposed to make us feel safer, in many respects it does exactly the opposite. If the government can collect information on all of us for national security reasons, the obvious fear is, suppose at some point down the road, the government decides to use this capability for other reasons?

That said, the civil libertarians can burst their blood vessels about big government, but they and the rest of us don’t get nearly as exercised about the data mining that’s already going on by the private corporations we all connect or deal with and what’s being done with that information about us. There is just as much potential for harm, if not more.

We do have to ask ourselves about our own complicity in all of this. Most of us carry devices that report exactly where we are at all times. Every time we use the Internet to look something up – maybe on a site we wouldn’t care to have others know we visited – that visit is being logged someplace, and presumably could come back to bite us later on.

And, I just can’t wait to hear the screams after private aerial drones go into widespread use. We’d better start thinking about getting ourselves fitted for lead-foil suits.

Although the Post story doesn’t surprise me, I certainly recognize the beneficial effect of investigative reporting like this. More than a year ago, I observed here that the privacy horse had long since left the barn. There may not be a lot we can do about that, but at least some entity is telling us where the horse is headed. And though it may be inconvenient, we still have a fundamental individual choice about whether we go along for the ride.

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The Wrong Questions

Last night, I caught myself asking, “Why Oklahoma City? What did they do to anybody?"

The area was hit with tornadoes only two weeks after the community of Moore was devastated by a twister. One of the tornadoes that affected the region last night was reported in Moore, though it was only a shadow of the earlier version. Even so, it was a tornado, and it was Moore. Last night’s destruction over the general area was widespread.

When you ask a question like, “Why them?” you are heading down the road preacher Pat Robertson wants you to travel – do you really want to go there? He has answered such questions, of course, by saying that disasters are visited upon areas that deserve it because of some pervading pattern of immorality, like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible.

But by those standards, parts of both coasts of the United States, including the place I’m living in, should have long since broken off and sunk into the sea – but I’m still here. And when you think of hotbeds of immorality, well, Oklahoma isn’t the first place that comes to mind.

So if you can’t think of a reason that God visits catastrophes on places like Oklahoma City, then you’re led to another question: Does God send such things? If he (she) doesn’t, who does?

The ultimate and most disturbing question is: If such awful things are allowed to happen to good people, is there a God at all? I would bet there is more than one person in Moore asking that question this morning – and most of us probably wouldn’t blame them.

We yearn to have such questions answered, and over time, we realize that nobody, least of all the Pat Robertsons of the world, can answer them for us. Peace is only achieved when we can answer them for ourselves – or when we can agree to stop asking those questions and move on to more important ones.

The only real progress comes in the answer to this: What are you going to do about it? That’s also a question that requires an individual answer, and answering that one is how we grow. Perhaps we can give God credit for helping us do that. Or not.

We don’t all grow the same way. It may be momentarily inspiring to see those people on TV standing in front of their flattened homes, telling reporters how they’re not discouraged and how they plan to rebuild in the same place. But for others, the answer may be, “I’m outta here!”

In the great scheme of things, of course, there is no “outta here” – if you live in the Plains and decide to leave, you’re simply trading in tornadoes for something else: hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, wildfires or combinations of all of them. Building somewhere else isn’t going to keep s**t from happening to us.

It’s what we build after it happens to us that matters. It’s not about simply replacing a physical structure or possessions. It’s about whether tragedy can be transformed into a solid foundation for building a new life. That’s the question we should be trying to answer.

But if at this moment you’re standing in front of your flattened home, and you don’t feel like coming up with the answer right this minute to inspire the rest of us, well, far be it from me to judge you for it.