bin Laden is dead. It is the day after. Now what?

As I went to bed last night, I realized that I had to redo the mental script I had for my classes--some of the students might want to discuss the bin Laden-related events, while some might not care.  Then the question of whether I had a pedagogical responsibility to treat this as a learning opportunity as well.  If a learning opportunity, then what were the lessons to focus on?  How would I then go about discussing those lessons?

Teaching, as I see it, is nothing but editorial decisions everyday.  We select and present materials to students. We interpret the data in the manner in which we prefer--even when we try our best to be impartial, and leave our ideological preferences at home.

As I was driving to work, I figured out a game plan.  My formal teaching/learning moment would be to highlight the importance of understanding of geography.  That we understand that location matters, and the location-related relationships matter.  So, I would use maps of the Indian Subcontinent to tell a story of sorts. But tell a story in a way that draws questions.

However, I wanted to do that as a wrap-up after inviting comments from the students.  But then how would I broach the subject?  I figured I didn't have to worry about this--I was confident that at least a couple of students would jump on this topic even before I got to the computer in the classroom.

It turned out exactly that way. "T" loudly remarked that he wanted to discuss the current events and not our regularly scheduled topics.  "What happened, man?" I asked him with a smile.  "T" said "about last night, and Osama."  And thus we discussed the events. For 45 minutes. Including recalling where we were on that fateful 9/11. "T" asked whether it was ok to publicly celebrate--apparently a few had expressed displeasure at the celebrations.  "Go ahead and celebrate" I told him. "Bin Laden has killed tens of thousands, including thousands of Muslims" I added.

At the end, I reminded the class that all politics aside, we owe a thanks to the military.  I asked those who had served to stand so that we could thank them. One stood. We clapped. And then I asked all those with friends and families who have served in the military to stand. With the exception of a couple of students, the entire class stood up.

And, with that we took a break, and then I did my spiel on geography, location, and relationships. At the end of it all, we had only 20 minutes out of the 110-minute session to talk about resources, which was the topic for the day.

As the students were exiting, "T" paused for a second and said, "thanks for allowing us to talk about this for more than half the class time."  

I wonder whether the students know that I hate violence. I hate wars. I have never touched a gun in my life. Not even a bullet. I hope that I will never, ever, touch any of those killing machines.  A friend, "P," when I told him about these views a few years ago, thought it was a noble to goal to set for oneself--to not ever go anywhere near those weapons of destruction. He should know--he is a Vietnam veteran!

But, does it matter whether or not students know what my personal preferences are?  I tell you, teaching is immensely tougher than what it seems from the outside.

I am glad though that Osama bin Laden is gone. Capturing him, then trying him in a regular court--not one of those Guantanamo circus cages--would have been my preferred option. While I hate the death penalty, I recognize that it is legal in this country.  Bin Laden would have been sentenced to death after the due process.


So, it is now the day after. It is not as if we now revert to the halcyon days of September 10, 2001.  There is simply no there there. But, there are a few things I hope Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans will start thinking about. Such as the ones that Dahlia Lithwick writes about:

About all we can say with certainty is this: We tortured. We live in a world in which we must contend with information obtained by torture. We now need to decide whether we want to continue to live that way. Writers from ideological backgrounds as diverse as Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat argue that it is time to return to the paradigm abandoned after 9/11. Let's put the 9/11 attacks and the existential threat it created behind us. With Bin Laden's death, let's simply agree that the objectives of the Bush administration's massive anti-terror campaign have finally been achieved, and that the time for extra-legal, extra-judicial government programs—from torture, to illegal surveillance, to indefinite detention, to secret trials, to nontrials, to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay—has now passed. There will be no better marker for the end of this era. There will be no better time to inform the world that our flirtation with a system of shadow-laws was merely situational and that the situation now is over. ...

The "war on terror" language was always metaphorical, I realize, but it unloosed a very real Pandora's box of injustice on a nation that prides itself on its notions of fairness. That makes the highly symbolic death of Bin Laden an apt time—perhaps the last apt time—to ask whether this state of affairs is to be temporary or permanent. If President Obama truly believes, as he said last night, that justice has finally been done, he should use this opportunity to restore the central role of the rule of law in achieving justice in the future.

And, can we please start complete withdrawal of the military from Afghanistan? And not get all too entangled in Libya?  And reduce defense spending so that we can provide better social safety nets?

As the month draws to a close, I will have yet another learning opportunity--"Memorial Day."  But, I don't do any talking in class for that--like in the years past, all I have to do is update my slides of images of Oregon's soldiers who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A very quiet automated slide-show for ten minutes. That always leaves me drained, emotionally and physically.

It is Kagan, not Diane Wood, for the Supremes :(

I would have voted for Diane Wood to replace the retiring Stevens.
Kagan?
Even Bill Clinton, who forever tried to appease everybody, nominated Ginsburg to the court--despite all her overt association with ACLU that, unfortunately, the "liberty loving" right tends to despise. (Yes, I am proud to be a card-carrying member of the ACLU!)

As one would expect, Glenn Greenwald is, well, not happy with the Kagan nomination; this opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest of his commentary (this guy is way too sharp!):

Nothing is a better fit for this White House than a blank slate, institution-loyal, seemingly principle-free careerist who spent the last 15 months as the Obama administration's lawyer vigorously defending every one of his assertions of extremely broad executive authority.  The Obama administration is filled to the brim with exactly such individuals -- as is reflected by its actions and policies -- and this is just one more to add to the pile.  The fact that she'll be replacing someone like John Paul Stevens and likely sitting on the Supreme Court for the next three decades or so makes it much more consequential than most, but it is not a departure from the standard Obama approach.

Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate, explains why Kagan makes everybody nervous:

With no judicial record to pore over, and some of the wonkiest law-review articles ever penned to her credit, Kagan has mastered the fine art of nearly perfect ideological inscrutability. Even Jeffrey Toobin, her law school study partner, has virtually no idea what she really believes.

How could such a track record be possible for somebody who will end up interpreting the Constitution for the rest of us?  I have no idea, and it is bizarre. Lithwick writes:

It's not at all clear from her record whether Kagan will someday prove to be the Jurist for the Little Guy or the Judge Who Bridged the Partisan Divide. There is ample evidence in her professional and academic record that she has ably managed to do both at different times, depending on the professional position she held and whose views she was representing. We will hear a good many testimonials in the coming weeks that Kagan has the heart of a progressive lion and the political skills of a diplomat. What remains to be seen is whether she will put the former to service in the interest of the latter—or vice versa.

Quote (excerpt) for the day!

Hysterically funny, if only this weren't true!

New Hampshire state Rep. Nancy Elliott, at a recent state Judiciary Committee meeting on a proposal to repeal the state's same-sex marriage bill, described the issue of gay marriage as follows: "taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement." Rep. Elliott continued, irrelevantly, "and you have to think, I'm not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?" (Elliott has since apologized for the portion of her remarks in which she falsely claimed that because gay marriage had been legalized, New Hampshire's fifth-graders were being taught to have anal sex in the public schools.)

This is the best introduction, I have read in a long time, to an essay .... in this case, the essay is by my favorite legal issues commentator, Dahlia Lithwick, writing about Martha Nussbaum's book From Disgust to Humanity

Time and again, Nussbaum argues, societies have been able to move beyond their own politics of disgust to what she calls "the politics of humanity," once they have finally managed to see others as fully human, with human aspirations and desires.

I can relate to one of the examples of disgust cited there--that of untouchables in India.  My grandmothers grew up in a world where they believed that they ought not to even accidentally touch one, or be touched by one .... and, it was fantastic to watch them go through a transformation and they shed that thought.  It was wonderful in fact that the doctor who treated my grandmother--this was back in the late 1970s--when she was in the hospital was not a person whose physical touch would have been appreciated fifty years prior .... this doctor later was elected as a member of the Parliament as well.  With the other grandmother, the moment I knew she had let go of the old ways of thinking was when we were watching on television a movie (can't recall the name!) about the very caste issues--it featured a phenomenal actress, Sharada, who was a Meryl Streep in her own ways.  Somewhere along in the movie, I heard my grandmother comment very sympathetically towards the lower caste character.  That empathy for the lower caste character in a movie meant a lot to me ... I think this is the humanity that Nussbaum refers to ....

We might have our own biases--because of the contexts within which we grew up.  I suppose the key is what happens when we are presented with evidence to the contrary.  It is those folks who refuse to discard their biases who worry me--not any bias by itself. 

Our lost constitution: why nobody talks about it ...

As always, Dahlia Lithwick asks pointed questions:
Bill Clinton is a lawyer. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. Rep. Artur Davis is a lawyer. Michelle Obama is a lawyer. Chuck Schumer is a lawyer. Joe Biden is a lawyer. Ted Kennedy is a lawyer. I have heard virtually all of these people speak poignantly and passionately about the Constitution, the rule of law, and the outrages visited upon the Bill of Rights over the past eight years. Biden was prescient about the legal implications of what had been done at Abu Ghraib. Rep. Davis has been devastating on Guantanamo and torture on the House judiciary committee. When Ted Kennedy gets started on warrantless wiretapping and national-security letters and signing statements, there is nobody better. These are America's constitutional poet laureates. And yet Buchanan is right that almost every prime-time convention speaker has behaved as though President Bush's greatest crimes of the past eight years have involved lost jobs and climbing oil prices. On the streets of Denver, they are protesting Guantanamo, wiretapping, and water-boarding. But inside the hall, you'd think it was just another recession year.

Then she writes,
The great tragedy of the Bush administration was that it operated for years as though the Constitution was something nobody really cares about. The great crime of Denver may be that Democrats feel the same way.