Amid Blather About Civility, Rights Are Lost

I’ve long since learned to expect little from an inaugural speech. It’s like looking for good prose on an insurance form. But President Clinton’s oozing bathos on Monday was so anfractuous in its oleosity that I began to pay attention. But when I tried to take notes, my pen slithered off the page, as if the paper had grease on it. All I could inscribe was a formula phrase about hope--I’m sure he said hope--not being in government but in ourselves. Are we in for four more years of this pap about the need for civility, for bipartisanship, for community, the three horsepersons of Clinton’s treacle-sodden apocalypse?

We don’t need civility. We need civilization, which is something far different. The ancient Greeks were civilized. They had fiery debates, which were far from civil. The Melian dialogue, put by the historian Thucydides in the mouths of the Melians and the Athenians about to overwhelm them, is one of the glories of the world. It is also an uncivil, harsh evocation of the political realities of imperial power.

“Bipartisanship” is another fraud word, which reminds me of the anthropologist Laura Nader’s brilliant phrase that skewers both civility and bipartisanship: “coercive harmony,” meaning the notion that if you don’t button your lip, don’t fall in behind “bipartisanship,” you are a nutty exceptionalist, best ignored or put onto a daily dose of Thorazine.

And how cozening a word is this “community,” with its agreeable intimations of the village, the meeting hall and the amiable ethic of all-for-one and one-for-all. But America is not a community. It is a nation encompassing faction, partisan interest, the powerful, the weak, the rich, the poor--with a future to be brokered out of the crucible of fierce antagonisms.

Clinton’s sloppy, tired phrases limp behind the reality of America like an obese Sunday jogger waddling down the road. He talks of challenges and of bridges, but the challenge of what? A bridge to where?

A couple of days before the inaugural, I spoke at a fund-raiser for Bear Lincoln, an Indian from the Round Valley reservation in Mendocino County facing death penalty charges arising out of an exchange of gunfire in 1995 that left two Indians and one sheriff’s deputy dead. The circumstances are hazy in the extreme and the capital charges against Lincoln entirely outrageous. But Round Valley has had its share of dreadful massacres of Indians.

At the fund-raiser, Tony Serra, Lincoln’s defense attorney, talked uncivilly, rudely, about the constitutional realities in America in 1997, which make it harder and harder for ordinary folk to be confident that they will find justice in the courtroom.

Serra began with the separation of powers. Gone. No longer do judges have discretion in sentencing. Mandatory guidelines tie their hands and force them to put someone away for 10 years who deserves a year at most. With prosecutors framing charges to fit the guidelines, denying bail and then recruiting an army of snitches rewarded with cash or reduced prison time, what chance have accused persons got if they have the rashness to plead innocent?

The last best hope of the accused, Serra said, is the jury, and here too constitutional rights are on their way to the scrap heap. Gov. Pete Wilson, malign in this as in all his political instincts, pushes for majority verdicts. The cornerstone of the jury system is first, the right to nullify or set the law aside if jurors’ consciences require it and second, the right of one juror to stand alone and prevail. Bring in majority verdicts--10-2, 9-3--and it’s all over.

The 4th Amendment, forbidding unreasonable searches and seizures? Virtually dead, Serra said. I know this well enough, since every fall California Highway Patrol officers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties stop and search every car or truck driven by persons they conceive, after a couple of glances, to be possibly involved in the marijuana business.

Step by step, we head into the police state, the most recent milestone being the incredible U.S. Supreme Court decision that sentencing judges can take into consideration charges on which a jury has found the accused innocent.

These are the uncivil realities of our time. There’s no bridge to anywhere but prison for many in America.

The president’s ooze finally stopped. In about 22 minutes, Clinton had said nothing. In the same time, Tony Serra had said everything. Good, indifferent, bad presidents we can survive. But to do so, we need the freedoms that are now being stolen away.