A Note To A Friend On Justified, The Extended Crime And Law Enforcemet Series

Just finished watching last season,

It may not be artistically the best extended dramatic television series.

I can see arguments for its flaws.

I can see how its violence, indiscriminate and plentiful and often throw away killings and many contrivances can count against it.

But, I’ll distinguish between best and favourite, and say it’s my very favourite extended tv series.  

I love how shot through it is with the characters, plot twists, themes, dialogue, voice, idiosyncrasies  and generally the spirit and artistic sensibility of Elmore Leonard. 

I love the scene in which Raylan Givens lends his fellow Marshall a battered paperback copy of George V. Higgins’s The Friends Of Eddie Coyle and tells him it’s so beat up because, he says, if he’s read the novel ten times that would be low. Elmore Leonard said George V. Higgins was his biggest literary influence, his master. I see Higgins’s books as literature. I’m starting to think some of Leonard’s novels are too. 

Another thing striking about the series is its fantastic sense of place, the mountains, valleys, hills and hollers of Appalachian Harlan County, Eastern Kentucky, its local colour, as evident in the characters, the language, rhythms and idioms of their speech—that’s simply magnificently done—its recreation of place and time and in the cinematography of the land. 

Tabling its ultimate aesthetic worth, I’d put it artistically over Breaking Bad, which I like but don’t love, and on a par with The Sopranos. 

Literary Criticism: Going By Feel: Huck Finn, The Merchant Of Venice

So we’re good then. 

You agree with me?

Glad to have helped.

Seriously, how does a difference like this end? How does one person get the other to change their mind? is it a matter of making specific arguments that then get assessed, accepted or refuted? Or is the whole thing mission impossible? When I reread the longer thing I may have sent you, then I became even more convinced that I have a unique insight that unlocks the whole meaning of the novel in light of its ending. And I got it writing an essay on Huck Finn for my class in American Lit taught by Ross LaBrie. He thought it was an original and stimulating insight.

But I can see the other way of looking at it. It reminds me of my dissatisfaction with The Merchant of Venice. The portrayal of Shylock is so strong, his plea for his dignity is so potent, his righteousness so apparent, his daughter such a bauble, those around him so flat and uninspiring, that the end’s prosecutorial skewering of him, the reduction of him to and the dispatching of him as, a low, wounded cur and the ending of blissful coming together—the hallmark of romantic comedy in Shakespeare—seems dramatically off and emotionally discordant, in sum a huge let down. My theory is that Shylock got away on Shakespeare and became a greater dramatic presence and force than Shakespeare intended. Ultimately the play doesn’t work.

Is that comparable to Huck Finn, them on the river reaching such transcendent heights, Huck condemning himself to Hell in helping Jim, such that the ending is a sad unsatisfying burlesque?

What can I tell you: I don’t think so for among the reasons I’ve said. 

But this is where I came in: no one gets convinced. We go by feel, hopefully informed feel, and agree or disagree. It’s an art not a science, is literary criticism. And done nicely, that’s a richness.

For Then Against Then Maybe For Again The Death Penalty

Where I am with this issue is as follows.

I began favoring death penalty for horrific crimes. In such cases, my thinking is, the retributive pillar of criminal sentencing—the others, rehabilitation, specific deterrence and general deterrence—overwhelms the others. It rightly channels the community’s rage by the most grave and awesome act, the death penalty, the act that shows the greatest reverence for life in its ultimate response to the extraordinarily shocking taking of innocent life.

I’ve kept to that rationale but have worried over mistakes and condemning to death innocent accused wrongly convicted. That worry has formed the basis of my opposition.

But of late my opposition is getting jiggly and wobbly. The reasons are: my shuddering anew at overwhelmingly brutal homicidal crimes; the improvement of forensic evidence like DNA leading to absolute certainty of guilt in some cases and generally to a lessening of error; and this—calculated death seems built into certain policy choices so that raising or lowering speed limits, for one example, are guaranteed to save or cost lives; so why not the same reasoning with the death penalty? If an innocent life is lost that’s the foreseeable cost of a desired policy. I feel there’s something wrong with this last argument, something ghoulish in fact, but I can’t put my finger on it.

In all of this, though, my view of the moral appropriateness of the death penalty, its deontological rightness, hasn’t wavered. 

Short Follow Up On Trump’s Responsibility, If Any, For US Violence

R:

.... While in any case we don’t know what confluence of forces are at work ( eg is it just mental illness), Trump gave license to bigots so he has to be partially responsible . To me, it’s like the thin skull plaintiff, and we all have to be accountable for the choices we make and actions we take...

 Me in response:

.... What licence though?

Is it like Trudeau’s social licence?

Both the fake bomb guy and Bowers seem like nut jobs: the first guy is a juice head with a long rap sheet whose family said he was getting nuttier and nuttier; the second guy, from the little I know about him and what he did, just has to be a wack job. 

So let’s say they both are off their nuts for the sake of argument. 

It’s seems to me soft to say Trump figures in to, bears *some* responsibility for, what they did. I heard the same argument when that guy in Montreal killed all those women. We all, the argument went, bore responsibility for creating a toxic time, a culture, filled with the hatred and exploitation and suppression of women. I didn’t buy that then, and I don’t buy the argument now. It’s now like saying Sanders has some responsibility for the guy who shot Scalise and others: he was a Bernie Bro. The Ds were and are volatile too, lighting fuses: the Rs were attacking women, going to kill them even, by being anti abortion; they were going to kill countable numbers of people by rolling back the ACA; they were going to mire people in more harsh and killing poverty by their roll back of entitlement programs. I didn’t buy that either. So, for me, the softness to me is that it’s easy to say that Trump has some responsibility but it’s impossible to give that accusation any hard substance...

The Question Of Trump’s Responsibility, If Any, For Recent US Violence

Ok, Trump didn’t pull the trigger.

But as president, i.e. by virtue of the office, he or any president is the flashpoint, the apotheosis, the apogee, if you like, of partisan estrangement.

Therefore, it’s incumbent on any president to calm waters, not go out of his way to roil things, not to cheer on violence, to set a calm tone since he does set a tone.

Therefore, of course while Trump isn’t to blame for what Bowers did, he is to blame precisely for stirring things up, for exacerbating division coupled with cheering on violence, and thus creating the environment in which these acts happen.

I don’t like this argument. 

It’s so that it would be better if Trump, when he has, doesn’t cheer on violence as in saying he likes Gianforte’s body slamming the reporter. And there were instances of him saying unfortunate things of that kind during the campaign. But, really, how many instances of that kind of talk have there been since November 8, 2016? What are they?

And as to what he says, it’s in his nature to fight back and to come on strong doing so. So given the unprecedented attack on him manifest in the militarily phrased  “resistance,” in the claim of his illegitimacy, in the felt need among many to bring Trump down by virtually any means, in those excusing Antifa, in the left’s practice and politics of vilification, in the  mainstream’s steady drumbeat opposition to Trump, in its incessant and obsessive harping and criticizing of him whatever he does, in the media’s twisting of facts and stories in trying to get him at every turn, I think it utterly pious not to give him his head in counter attack. 

This especially so when those opposed to him play their over the top part in the outrageous ginning up of partisan bitterness. Take for recent example, the D and others’ near to mass insanity in the attempt to beat back th confirmation of Kavanaugh including so easily going and going along with the story journalistically and politically that he’d spiked drinks and then ran trains on girls who drank thereof and got stupefied therefrom. 

And how does anyone isolate the things Trump has said that contribute to the toxicity within which these spates of violence occur from other things he’s said that don’t and what others in opposition to him are saying that apparently don’t?  

And how does anyone make out the concrete nexus between what he says and the  actions of those who are crazy so that a case can be made for Trump’s culpability?

And how does anyone distinguish among our moment’s toxicity and and the tone, strife and bitterness of previous times in which even worse acts and mass acts of violence took place?

So in sum, as I think about it now, I reject this argument. 

The Roots Of The Social Justice Demand For Substantive Equality

L.C. said:

Yes, I think the sort of positions these "social justice" types arrive at could and should be seen as a form of reductio ad absurdam that in themselves disprove the moral premise or claim or position that lead to them. The question then is, what was that fallacious premise/claim/position? The answer, obviously, is the premise that substantive equality of all is a valid, even compelling, moral goal. That answer in turn may stem, in part at least, from mistaken extrapolation from a couple of moral goals or ideals that are valid. First is the simple and old notion that sharing, helping, etc. is a positive good, though compulsory sharing is not, and may be a definite bad. Second is the more recent notion that institutionalized or systemic inequality, in the common forms of institutionalized class or caste, is bad, and should be abolished in the name of equality of status, or equality before the law, something quite different from institutionalized, legally compelled equality of substance. It still doesn't seem to me quite sufficient that these sorts of valid goals might have lead to the kinds of absurd conclusions we see so often from even prominent social justice figures like Rawls --  they seem to require something, if not more sinister, at least more significant, more commensurate, to explain them, and I'd suggest hubris, but on a large, even cosmic scale: they imagine that they can make nature herself bow to their conception of justice, and set right the universe. 

Social Justice v Common Law Justice

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/11/social-justice-versus-natural-justice/

Me, quoting from linked piece:

.... ....One unfortunate side effect of the focus on equality is that the scope of justice expanded greatly to encompass ever more areas of social life, pushing the boundaries of justice to the frontiers. After all, the realm of things that might be considered unfair because unequal is potentially unlimited. For instance, political philosophers like Philippe Van Parijs have worried about such trivial matters as whether surfers ought to be subsidized for what Ronald Dworkin calls expensive tastes, which they have blamelessly developed, yet unfairly bear the burden of financing. Or there is the issue raised by G. A. Cohen of whether one can support egalitarian policies while remaining wealthy oneself (e.g. as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford). And, most egregiously, Adam Swift asks: Can we be partial to our own children and remain faithful to the cause of social justice? Whatever its intellectual value, all of this talk renders justice bloated and abstract, too far removed from the moral concerns of ordinary people, and conceptually stretched beyond recognition. Sometime over the last few decades, justice, which Rawls describes as “the first virtue of social institutions,” became the only virtue of institutions....

L:

.... It's not that "all of this talk renders justice bloated and abstract", etc., it's that all of that talk is almost literally insane, as in nuttier than any fruitcake, and as a side effect, positively evil, the exact inverse of any notion of justice. See Harrison Bergeron, again. What it does do, all that talk, is reveal the absurdity of the whole idea of substantive equality as any kind of policy goal. Which is something at least...

Me:

.... The argument that the equality premise and desideratum of social justice demands that we don’t prefer our children over other children—what can that even mean in practice?—shows the absurd logical conclusions to which bloodless abstraction detached from ordinary lived experience can lead. That’s a big part of why Rogers stresses the role of emotion in our moral outlook and choices. 

I saw the guy, a philosophy prof natch, who wrote a book taking this line with respect to “equal treatment” of kids, interviewed and trying to make this case. What struck me, among other things, was that as a matter of sheer logic and starting from a certain premise, who could argue against him as a matter of abstracted reasoning? One would have to assert something like, “Well, they’re my kids. My kids! Of course I’m going to prefer them. Virtually by definition I am.” Hence, Rogers’s related focus—related to the role of emotion—on the vital importance of earthly groundedness in moral reasoning.

Parallel to that bloodlessness is what Rogers notes follows from Rawls’s view that achievement, what goes into achievement, is “morally neutral,” by which I take Rawls to mean achievement is essentially the product of life’s lottery. Rawls, therefore, says—I take it, assuming the cardinal value and necessity of equality in relation to living decently—equality must be given its due, which then leads him to want to ensure that the least among us have what we all have in living a decent life, which thus must mean, I again take it, massive redistribution, with personal achievement being morally incidental to that.

So, not for nothing does Rogers say that A Theory Of Justice helped spawn our latest iteration of social justice. 

Finally, at least for me finally for now, Rogers does a good job of giving meaning to social justice, noting its essential focus on wanting different institutions and overarching social and economic arrangements and deemphasizing the individual, and contrasting it with what I’d call common law justice with its premiums on existing fair processes and procedures, improving itself incrementally from within and resolving private disputes between citizens or between citizens and the state. 

(I don’t prefer his term “natural justice” for two reasons: it’s a common law term of art encapsulating the fundamentals of procedural fairness—right to a hearing, right to notice, right to confront your accusers, right of cross examination, right of disinterested adjudication, others; and it might get mashed up with notions of natural law.)...