LAND
OF THE FREE OR HOME OF THE MEEK?
Duncan
Campbell and Michael Ellison
Reprinted
from The
Guardian, Wednesday December 29, 1999
The campaign
for the US presidency is concentrating the minds of electors on how
far they are willing to let government at all levels encroach on their
lives. The authoritarian v libertarian contest is dividing society on
issues from sex to gun laws.
Authority
Walk. Don't
walk. No skateboarding. No smoking. No roller-blading. No alcoholic
beverages beyond this point. No parking. Right lane must turn right.
Seat belt law enforced. Speed limit enforced by air. Armed response.
Report weapons on campus. No soliciting. Please wait to be seated. Walk.
Don't Walk.
The average
American's day is now so heavily circumscribed by instructions and commands,
some backed by law or even by private firepower, that citizens must
often question whether the land of the free is still a home for the
brave or merely for people meekly willing to be told how to do everything
from crossing the street to taking a seat in an empty restaurant.
Perhaps
no single measure introduced this decade in the United States better
symbolises the desire for an orderly society than the 1994 "three-strikes"
law, voted in by California's electorate after a young girl was murdered
by a man who had already committed two violent crimes. The law was sold
to the voters on the basis that it would remove from society those who
were violent and dangerous by imposing a mandatory sentence of 25 years
to life for a third serious crime.
The latest
published FBI figures - showing an 8% drop in violent crime in the US
in 1998 and a 7% drop in homicides - might appear to vindicate the policy.
The national homicide rate has fallen to 6.3 per 100,000: that was the
rate in 1967 at the start of the crime explosion. The number of adult
arrests fell by 4% and juvenile arrests by 8%.
However,
a study published earlier this month by Franklin Zimring of the University
of California at Berkeley indicates that the three-strikes law has had
little effect on violent crime, even though nearly 50,000 people have
been jailed in California since it was introduced. The survey showed
that the numbers of crimes committed by those facing a third strike
dropped by only 1%. According to Professor Zimring's report, the drop
in crime started in 1991, well before the three-strikes law. Yet by
the end of next year a quarter of the Californian prison population
of 165,000 is likely to be made up of people jailed under the three-strikes
rule.
The national
prison population will top 2m next year, at a cost to the nation of
$35bn (£22bn) and with 45 of the 50 state prison systems operating at
or above capacity.
It is fear,
according to Elizabeth Schroeder of the American Civil Liberties Union
of Southern California, that is fuelling what her group sees as a boom
in authoritarianism.
"At federal
and state level there is an increase in politicians both proposing and
enacting more authoritarian laws," she said. "The primary reason is
that Americans are very concerned about public safety although crime
in every age group is decreasing."
Most Americans,
she added, have not "made the connection between the economy and crime.
In lean times, crime goes up but it's not something that ordinary voters
think about."
Among the
laws that she believed pointed to an increase in authoritarianism was
the use of injunctions to stop suspected gang members from meeting on
the streets.
Some commentators
have claimed that the growth in "political correctness" is also a sign
of US authoritarianism.
Rightwing
broadcaster Rush Limbaugh has called it "the greatest threat to the
first amendment [freedom of speech] in our history", while political
correctness has been described by the conservative commentator David
Horowitz as "an ideological virus as deadly as Aids".
In a recent
book entitled The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner argued that many of
the conservatives whipping up opposition to political correctness "eagerly
support restraints on a range of behaviour from flag-burning to homoerotic
art.
"Much in
the way their forebears had used the epithet 'communist' a few decades
earlier, conservatives of the 1990s accused their enemies of being PC".
Professor Glassner saw the media coverage devoted to the subject as
a sign of how successful a small, well-funded group of rightwing commentators
had been in generating panic about a problem that did not exist. Before
1991, the phrase had barely been used in the nation's media. In 1997,
it was in common use.
Libertarians
see an increased corporate authoritarianism in the use of drug testing
by private companies: about 46% of companies now require employees to
submit to tests either as a requirement for getting the job or on a
random basis.
But nowhere
is the clash more apparent than in the "war" on drugs, especially in
California.
Here,
gun-wielding marijuana growers demand that the state should leave them
alone; police officers fine jay-walkers just round the corner from crack
dealers at work; and cigarette smoking at times seems to be regarded
as one step above child abuse on the scale of social unacceptability.
Liberty
All the
usual liberal suspects are up there on stage at New York's city hall,
reaffirming the rights of Americans to freedom of expression. The celebrity
enemies of censorship - Lou Reed at his most grim, the singer Joan Osbourne
at her most earnest, Christopher Reeve in his wheelchair and the actor
Billy Baldwin in his underwear - have been corralled to read from and
perform once-banned books and music.
With tickets
between $50 (£31) and $1,000, lending support to the cause does not
come cheap, but no more does the principle they are protecting.
The celebrities
are there to defend the first amendment, a 45-word statement drawn up
two centuries ago: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
These are
the well-meaning words that enshrine freedom in the United States -
and allow black racists to harangue passers-by in the otherwise sanitised
environs of Times Square while white racists demonstrate at city hall.
New York
mayor Rudi Giuliani tried to stop both, as he does with anything he
finds offensive.
But invariably
the courts rule against him and in favour of freedom of expression,
even when it is being employed with the intention of curtailing the
civil rights of others. New York remains a liberal city where couples
can visit the members-only Le Trapeze Club to have sex with any number
of consenting partners, or watch pornography on television every night.
But the
testbed for much social change in the US is Oregon. The state was among
the first to decriminalise marijuana and accept its use in medicine;
abortion was legalised there years before the supreme court followed
in 1973; and five years ago its electors made Oregon the first place
in the country to approve doctor-assisted suicide. Fifteen terminally
ill people were helped to die in the state last year, the first full
12-month period of the law's operation. If two doctors agree a patient
has fewer than six months to live, he or she can have lethal drugs prescribed
- but not administered - by doctors.
Maine is
expected to give voters their say on the same issue in a referendum
next year, despite a bill under considera tion by congress that would
halt assisted suicides by making it illegal to use federally controlled
drugs to end lives.
Maine is
also the most recent state to vote for the medical use of marijuana,
following Oregon, Alaska, Arizona, California, Washington and Nevada.
The drug,
it is argued, can alleviate the pain and nausea associated with Aids,
cancer, multiple sclerosis, and glaucoma; about 200,000 people in the
US are thought to use it for medical reasons.
"If we're
going to keep people alive and manage their pain, we need access to
all the drugs available to do that," said Donald Murphy, a legislator
in Maryland who is trying to change the state's law to allow certain
patients to smoke marijuana. "Like anything else, there could be abuses,
but we need to err on the side of patients."
Doctors,
however, can be prosecuted under federal law for prescribing marijuana
and the only way patients can stay legal is by growing their own.
Ira Glasser,
executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "One
vision is of a nation committed to fairness, freedom of expression,
equality and keeping the government out of our private lives. "In contrast,
others have put forward a puritan vision that contemplates using the
law, and the police powers of the state, to control the personal details
of our private lives. It is, ultimately, a struggle between freedom
and authoritarianism."
These are
by no means always matters of life or death, unlike the freedom under
the constitution to carry guns. Today there are 200m guns in a nation
of 272m people, more than 34,000 of whom are shot dead each year.
"The gun
has become close to a sacred object, revered by many as the essence
of American life," said Robert Jay Lifton, a professor at New York's
City University.
In the
seven years to last April there were 235 violent deaths associated with
schools in the US, 77% of them caused by guns. Then in April itself,
two teenagers sauntered into their school in middle-class Littleton,
Colorado, and shot dead 13 people before committing suicide - the biggest
US classroom massacre ever. The murders shocked people out of the matter-of-fact
reaction usually given to gun killings by a society all too accustomed
to them.
The senate
agreed firearms restrictions - though only on the casting vote of Vice-president
Al Gore. But the measure failed in the house of representatives in the
face of opposition from the National Rifle Association. In fact, gun
sales rose as enthusiasts pre-empted the tougher rules that never materialised.
©
Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 1999
