A new development in Jena’s courts aims to balance the scales, if not with legal correction, then with cash.

Scrofulous sage Samuel Johnson remarked that “patriotism is the last bastion of the scoundrel”, and in the case of the Jena Six controversy, this is made abundantly clear. What was, by all indications, an example of an over-zealous and somewhat draconian District Attorney hurling the book at repeat offenders became a tale of misunderstood unfortunates provoked into setting themselves up as targets for tacit modern racism. Through the glinting glass of an American psyche all too ready to prove its vigilance over civil rights was still keen, the obvious was obscured by the political. Politicians in the sunset of their race-based platforms’ power like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton could again look like fresh patriots. And, in due course, the offenders became seen as the victims, and the victim became irrelevant.

Irrelevant, that is, until the victim resorted to the last bastion for victims who politics and media have failed: A civil lawsuit.

JENA, La. — The family of a white student allegedly beaten by six black classmates in rural Louisiana has filed a civil lawsuit against the teens’ parents, the adult teens, an additional student and the local school board.

The suit names the attackers as the “Jena Six” students — Bell, Bryant Purvis, Robert Bailey Jr., Carwin Jones, Theo Shaw and a juvenile — as well as a second juvenile.

Law enforcement officials have not named the second juvenile as one of the attackers.

“Petitioners show that Justin was singled out by Mychal, Bryant, Robert, Carwin, Theodore (and the two juveniles), and that the malicious and willful attack of Justin was of such extreme nature so as to require emergency medical care and treatment for the harm inflicted by the attack, and resulting in extensive and permanently disabling injuries,” the lawsuit states.

The beating was preceded by racial incidents, including three white students hanging nooses from a tree.

The civil suit was filed Thursday. The lawsuit alleges that the LaSalle Parish School Board, through its employees, was not adequately supervising students or maintaining discipline.

That last accusation - against the School Board - is as clear as the swinging nooses earlier referenced.

For those not initiated into the details of the Jena case, the nooses mentioned sparked a series of interracial fights. The LaSalle response was to call in the bombastic District Attorney J. Walter Reed to address the school. Take note of Reed, as if there is any single cause for Jena going from a shrug-worthy story of racial tension to a national incident where the assailants become the martyrs, it’s him.

Reed “addressed” the students by threatening them with vicious legal action. Then followed what the newspapers usually stash down at the end of any article about Jena, if print at all, which was a series of assaults inspired by and involving one of the Jena Six - Robert Bailey, Jr. Eventually Junior’s rascally behavior reached a grim head as he and his five famous cohorts jumped Justin Barker.

It might have all still fizzled away had not Reed made good on his promise. Acting on the vow he made to the assembly at LaSalle’s school, Reed threw the book at the Six. He stuck to his guns despite community protest, keeping the charges harsh - “assault with intent” - and the poor-weather patriots of the burned out civil rights movement smelled blood in the water.

Next thing you know, two of the six kids who ambushed and gang-beat another kid were being honored at the BET awards.

Quite a few aspects of this case are offensive, and not just because it shows how pathetic civil rights activism has become - as ignores issues like the actual epidemic racism of our prison system - but because of the basis of its outrage. If Reed and Reed alone was its target, that would be different. But by making the Six out as pathetic victims worthy of being honored, it accepts the notion that they are so bestial that they can’t be blamed for the most craven violent action - the nooses drove them to it. And to that, I have to wonder, are they serious? We have to hold minorities to a lesser standard of behavior because they can’t control their emotions enough to not break the law?

That’s a long way from the philosophy brilliantly outlined in “Letters From A Birmingham Jail”.

But if emotionalism is going to be the mettle of the day, not high-minded idealism, then Barker’s suit may prove two can play at that game: After all, with a weepy Louisiana jury counting the stitches in his head, punitive damages can climb mighty high.

Opponents of the Obama campaign, namely the ascendant Mitt Romney, today fostered another distortion akin to the one I earlier reported afflicting Mayor Giuliani. However, unlike the distortion of Giuliani’s quote, which was a petty move to fear-monger against a reasoned argument, the assault on Obama’s statements were monstrous on many levels. They also inspire a reflection on political discourse and will that, like my previous post, brings to mind a work of classic literature - Voltaire’s “Candide”.

The smear on Obama is particularly ugly because it raises the spectre of puritanical thought and distrust of government that makes America stand out among the countries of the West. First employed by Alan Keyes in 2004, the assertion of Mr. Romney is that Obama pushed through a law in Illinois that called for sex-education for kindergarteners. Mr. Romney’s response was a strident:

“How much sex education is age appropriate for a 5-year-old? In my mind, zero is the right number,”

Not a small number of distortions are present this recent salvo from Romney. Each are likely worthy of a post on this blog. But since this matter stirred larger and ponderous issues, I’ll iterate in brief:

First, Obama was chairman of a panel that had been tasked for a review of the state curriculum, something every state does from time to time - he did not champion some law from its infancy in left field to victory.

Secondly, victory was not had. The state-ordained committee’s legislation did not pass.

Thirdly, the legislation did not call for any specific program for kindergarteners, but only stated that education about sex would no longer be restricted, as it was by law, to 6-12 grade. In fact, the only part that specifically applied to younger children and that would have had personal resonance with Obama - who claims family members who were victims of pedophilic abuse - was that younger kids should be educated about what kind of touching is appropriate and inappropriate. Thanks to no laws restricting such education, unlike Illinois had and still has, children in numerous states are visited by law-enforcement personnel who tell them about this. The contentious piece of legislation would have lifted restriction on that and seen it implemented. And finally, the legislation specifically stated that all sex-education should be ” ‘age and developmentally appropriate’ and based on the latest scientific studies”.

Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Romney himself supported such law. The Massachusetts state board of education put into law in 1999 that:

By the end of grade five, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Health Curriculum aims for children to be able to: (1) identify “the components, functions, and processes of the reproductive system,” (2) identify “the physical changes as related to the reproductive system during puberty,” (3) define “sexual orientation using the correct terminology (such as heterosexual, and gay and lesbian)” and (4) recognize “that diet, exercise, rest, and avoidance of risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and other substance use contribute to the health of a mother and fetus.”

Romney did not oversee that law’s implementation, but did nothing to affect it save to provide more support and funding for “abstinence” birth control. As anyone who grew up can tell you, being told you should not have sex is not the foolproof way to prevent it.

This assault was classless, crass and sickeningly false. It also played on parents’ basic and timeless fears that their children would be out of their control. These fears are exacerbated in America, which has had more terror about social programs and the socialists that support them than any other country in the West since the demolition of fascism. And once the nonsensical twisting of the Illinois law’s actual intent is dispensed with, it is this disturbing aspect of the nation’s character that is left to be addressed. The alarmism over the Illinois law is refined down to the question of why governing bodies like the state board of health, the state board of education, and the school districts, decide what to teach children at all. The question is one of where the line between the home and the community at large is drawn, why, and to what value?

Namely, is the government that is best the one that governs least?

Health rates and crime rates in more socialized countries are less than in America. Perhaps there is a connection to the provisions that the more socialized governments grant to the needy and disadvantages. Yet the history of social programs, at least anecdotally, suggests that whenever we do attempt to affect a positive with governance, we create a grim collateral cost.

I have two friends who attempted to enlist the aid of child protection services - one in Canada, one here in America - to protect children, and in both cases the results were disastrous. The perpetrators were not punished. The people who brought the issue to child services were, and heinously. The children remained abused without recourse.

Foster home programs in Rhode Island are ailing, with horror stories of children moved from one abusive foster family to the next becoming practically common. Though Rhode Island has suffered recent cutbacks to the program funding, these abuses occured over years. And there is no reason to suspect things are much different outside of Rhode Island.

And for the country that, among the West, “governs least”, we have the highest prison population in the world. Yes, you heard right, in the world. In absolute terms and per capita, we lead all the nations, including such notoriously draconian countries as Russia and China. Considering the effect on a person’s life - especially the devastation to their career - that results from incarceration, this is a grievous problem.

Consequently, Conservatives advocate for less government. The oft-heard excuse for cutting funding to programs, shaving away laws that would clarify education and services, and slashing regulations on industry is that government simply does not work. That anyone disagrees with the assertion that government is disfunctional I often find laughable, as people seem to hold government by standards that assume it should be more functional than any corporation. And so many Conservatives call for less social welfare, less aid to underprivileged groups, less funding for government sponsored programs, less alliances - in essence, less government.

Except there is a disturbing disjunction in their attitude and their policy. They not only assume government to be disfunctional; it is a foundation of their political platform. Yet when matters like incarceration, like privacy, like abortion, like physician-assisted suicide, and like defense strategy arise, this concern about disfunction becomes irrelevant. No matter that incarceration is the very definition of government repression - we need stronger sentencing at the same time we need less funding to care for and protect the incarcerated. No matter that privacy is a fundamental right in liberal democracies like America - it has to be dispensed with to keep our families safe. No matter that unavailability of abortion often produces an unexpected economic burden - keep cutting funding to welfare mothers, social services; keep condemning teen mothers as harlots who failed to listen up at their abstinence only classes; make sure they are brought into this world, then do damn all to help them fit.

The ultimate disjunction is defense strategy. Up until the era of Reagan, being conservative was hand in hand with an isolating or, at least, cost-effective, reluctant foreign policy. Now the Conservative line is aggressive, supporting notions like unilateral action and pre-emptive warfare and dismantling of alliances that were unheard of since the time of James K. Polk. And yet this strikes me as strange considering that the central tenet of Conservatism is that the government should not tell people what to do. More than a matter of plain principal that the state should not bully people, government intervention is clumsy, callous and inefficient. Given this, why then do Conservatives eagerly advocate thrusting government on other nations?

Why, if we cannot govern our own people, do we find it either moral or cost effective to govern another? Why, if we should not tell families when they should explain that babies don’t come from the stork, should we tell a people of faith that they cannot include too many references to the Koran in their Constitution? Why, if we have such an abhorrent prison population, do we think we can and should tell people how a civil society gets along - instructing them at the barrel of a gun?

Whether it is motorcycle helmet laws or restrictions on gun ownership, Conservatives advocate telling government to leave them alone. But when it comes to drug laws or stepping in to lay American men and women’s lives down for monetary and strategic interests abroad, it becomes perfectly acceptable to tell other people what to do. Is it because they believe that the people we force into submission are less advanced, less intelligent, or so incapable of deciding their own political will that they need to be told what to think and do, whereas we do not? Can they not see that the laws, like in Massachusetts, that set benchmarks for their children’s sex education are predicated on that very notion?

On the other side, liberals argue that “it takes a village” to raise a child, and take a similar view of the globe. They often stand for international institutions and for invention on moral grounds in conflicts, as in the Balkans in the 90s. And yet, for every Balkans, there is a Rwanda, a Mogadishu, a Haiti - some vile episode in failed or flawed interventionism. Barack Obama recently said in a Foreign Affairs article that we need to force the UN Humans Rights Council to have more integrity in who it censures, citing that it has eight times condemned Israel and yet has not condemned nations like Cuba and Myanmar. Yet how much integrity does America show the world when he just today said that concern over a genocide in Iraq is not cause enough to remain there in force?

Obama sounded just like a Conservative talking about how welfare doesn’t work when you consider cost-assessment when he said:

Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea,”

Whenever strategic defense commitments become costly, Democrats seem inclined to leave them. They say they simply do not work. It is the same argument, with the same sound evidence and same numbers and same philosophy that Conservatives happily apply to domestic government welfare services.

In Voltaire’s “Candide”, the sunny Dr. Pangloss often consoles Candide during the grostesque hardships they suffer that things could be worse - that they are living in “the best of all possible worlds”. A professor mine once joked that the best of his all possible worlds would be a President who taxes like a Conservative and wages war like a Democrat. He liked his money. By comparison, the Libertarian Party likes, above all else, their appreciation of freedoms. They stand by that they do not want government to tell them what to do, nor to waste money and blood trying to tell other countries what to do - with welfare or warfare.

In the end, I believe one’s principles come down to the same thing government’s hamhanded, high-idealled actions do - individuals and their experiences.

Of the two friends I mentioned earlier who called out for social services to protect children and suffered to achieve futility, one was fond of gutting the Bush administration over its cuts in spending on government programs. When I argued the inefficiency of many of those programs, she would say of the families in poverty and being bankrupted by everything from health care costs to simple cost of living, “you just can’t see that and do nothing.”

The other looks at Iraq, and despite all the horrible cost and turmoil in the conduct of the war, is resolute that we should stay. She sees the possibility - the likelihood - of ethnic cleansing, and tells me, “you just can’t see that and do nothing.”

Hopefully, somewhere in the middle, good intentions will meet flawed action, and together we will achieve the best of all possible worlds.