On her program (2/13) Rachel Maddow talked to Timothy Snyder specifically about how to support people who do the right thing and so take damage from authorities who wanted them to do something else. I'm one of those. I turned in a boy whom I suspected was being sexually molested and caused the school to pay out a lot of money for his counselling. (No one went to the law.) At a nursing home I found a wheel-chair bound woman weeping in the hallways and asked what happened. The big male intern had gotten angry with her in her room, yelling and throwing things around. I turned him in and he was fired. Everyone was angry because they said the woman was just whiny and making it up and they needed that big strong guy.
I lasted two months at a small town school because there were two "demographics" -- girls who intended to run the place, encouraged by the female principal, and boys who "acted out" all the time. It turned out that the boys were mad as hell, exploited by coach and town who wanted a winning football team. I wasn't fired. I quit. No other potential teacher would take that job. I didn't fight, I didn't talk about it, I protected myself by disappearing. That was probably wrong. Both sets of kids suffered but didn't really know what was going on. Neither could the town figure it out.
This sort of thing is very mixed, but it is present wherever there are humans. I'm not bragging that I was better than others, but sometimes I was -- marginally. The cowboy art business is full of swindles and pretences. The cowboy mythic grandeur and heroism in literature translates into all sorts of deceptions. Shortly after my bio of Bob Scriver was accepted for publication, the editors got into a pickle and left for a different startup publishing entity. They wanted me to break my contract and go with them to the new outfit. I didn't. Since this was a little shady, they wanted me to swear I would keep the matter secret. I didn't. No one cared or even knew. The book was quietly kept off the shelves. "Bronze, Inside and Out."
There are a lot more instances of society not caring, not approving, ignoring lawful obligations because they cost money or aren't convenient. So Maddow, terrier that she is, interviewed Timothy Snyder, the Yale prof who wrote a little book called "On Tyranny", and asked him what can be done to help whistleblowers and others who stand up for justice, the Rule of Law, and honor. One of his answers surprised me. He said, "We must romanticize the people who do the right thing." We have made heroes out of mafia and criminals. ("Godfather", "Breaking Bad") That's pretty obvious.
Models of doing what is right are created by "Presentation," a philosophical concept sort of word. but also a practical advertising strategy. What does it LOOK like? Presentation was never mentioned in the brilliant ethics class taught by Don Browning at U of Chicago. He's deceased. His books survive. He talked about making ethical decisions according to principle, to secular laws, to church rules, and in imitation of heroes. I suppose that's what we're talking about here: strong examples of people to imitate. So liberals are impressed by the tall, grave, articulate Schiff, and conservatives are impressed by wealth demonstrated in naive ways -- bigger, gold-plated -- even if owned by clowns.
We've had decades of deconstruction and debunking and mostly coping by mockery and denial. But also advertising, a construct that is presented on the basis of attraction rather than reality. Two forces have been our unacknowledged moral guides: what everyone else within proximity is doing and what "our" people have always done. Certainly schools and churches are run that way and their reward is diminishing members and shrinking budgets. New ones have not formed.
Maddow says her dilemma in the middle of these stand-and-be-fired cases is that she would like to interview on air the people who in the past have quietly quit and left out of conscience, but she knows that anyone who gets out of step will be punished for it. They will be mocked, hounded, and possibly even prosecuted. So how do we even know they exist? Impressive numbers of people, some of them very valuable, have left government in the last couple of years. Probably they had enough prestige to survive. Maybe not.
I went back to Maddow Blog to see if I were getting things right and saw that Snyder was talking about a system of "friends/enemies" which is IMHO biological. Birds and bugs will attack and try to eliminate the unusual. So will humans. It is smart for the white crow to lay low.
But Snyder didn't quite say that. He says it is important to "glamourize" the system of Rule of Law, and we do that, though in our times I haven't heard the stories about the origin when the King was forced to accept the Rule of Law instead of using armies to change borders and demand taxes. The bloody consequences of ruling by power and supposed virtue have now been confined to the oil countries, but there are people who want it to come back here. Ghettoes, displacement and incarceration have taught huge populations that system. The interface with polite society that is civil policing has become more like "owned" military.
People who live or have lived on reservations, esp. the big ones like Blackfeet or Navajo, know about the chaos when at least two systems of keeping order clash and the public safety net is insufficient. What happens is a lack of business, which requires consistency and dependability, and a lack of safety, even to the point of murders. Everything is personal reputation, power families, and being able to read and respond to crisis. Money is never really tracked and large chunks disappear. No one local is willing to fight for the Rule of Law because the lack of system is an advantage for the strongest people.
So when the Stone prosecutors withdrew from the case or even quit, the consequences were bigger than their personal lives. For one thing some people quietly looked at the past several years and saw that Trump through Barr had been meddling all along. Darkness may protect the honorable but it also protects people who don't like the Rule of Law. How do we glamourize it?
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