Editorial: The Wright decision
9 First, what are the facts? Serious historical study or serious fact-finding may be required. Extensive institutional analysis and critical self-examination may be needed. How did the...
...How could a church that taught and teaches that each of us is created in the image and likeness of God, for centuries treat the Jews with disdain, order their expulsion from Catholic countries, force their conversion, or sometimes torture and kill them as heretics...
...Recently, 125 workers started harvesting tomatoes at a new industrial greenhouse in Buffalo, built on the site of a former steel mill...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently went for the green...
...If so, it may end in sparking resentment and even dismissal of any wrongdoing...
...9 Third, what are the consequences of apologizing...
...By whom...
...Our ideas of good and evil are challenged when good and evil move out of the places we expect to find them, and we look for explanations: the ready availability of guns, television violence, abusive homes (though at this writing it isn't clear that either of the boys in custody came from such homes...
...We look for the specific thing that might make one or more of these factors unite to light a fuse, and we talk about prevention...
...and i know survivors of abusive homes who aren't about to start killing...
...What kind of intellectual and cultural dissonance was at work here...
...Businesses, government--local, state, and federal-community organizations, and environmentalists have decided to look again at these badlands and reclaim them for use...
...Of course the availability of guns has something to do with it, but thousands of boys in the Midwest and the South hunt and never use guns violently...
...In placing responsibility, wouldn't we have to understand why, for example, a people who had declared that all men are created equal, and fought a revolutionary war to uphold that belief, still allowed men and women to be bought and sold as chattel...
...Jobs mean housing and family stability: a greener future all round...
...Congress, if it went to work on the nation's history of slave trading, would do any better than the Vatican or the Smithsonian have done...
...No president, Democrat or Republican, can do the job he or she is elected to do if made the object of an open-ended criminal investigation that itself is virtually unaccountable to any other branch of government...
...This idea--that there is such a thing as something that endangers us spiritually to the point of seeking our destruction, that the demonic is more than a metaphor for what we don't like--is extremely unpopular these days...
...But one thing does seem clear...
...Several other aspects of Clinton's ongoing problems are also clearer in the wake of the Wright decision...
...millions of kids watch television and are consequently desensitized, but not that much...
...Private civil suits should be postponed until the officeholder finishes his or her elected term...
...Seed money of this sort attracts other money needed to revive the languishing tracts, which in turn creates new industries and businesses where they are most needed: in poor urban centers...
...Institutional analysis may be particularly difficult: bureaucracies are not organized to examine themselves, and when they do, defensiveness of the kind demonstrated in the Vatican's statement on the Shoah may be the result...
...Didn't the idea of demons enter our tradition from the Zoroastrians and other Eastern, nonJewish sources anyway...
...SEED MONEY The U.S...
...In the absence of any plausible evidence linking Clinton to criminal acts, the American public rightly continues to give him the benefit of the doubt...
...Finally, the independent prosecutor law must be rethought or allowed to expire...
...There is something that does not love humanity, that seeks to destroy us, and it will use whatever it can, flow through whatever little channel we allow...
...Among the other ideas that enter our tradition from non-Jewish sources is the Last Judgment...
...9 Second, why and how do these travesties happen...
...Fat chance...
...They are not contaminated enough to merit detoxification under the stringent criteria of the nation's Superfund...
...Is an apology, or demand for an apology, just another step in the construction of victim politics...
...But whatever Starr comes up with, the burden of proof should remain with him and with the Commonweal 6 April24, 1998 House Judiciary Committee that receives his report concerning the president...
...What evil was committed...
...After decades of neglect, however, something new is in the air...
...When that changed, owners sometimes chained the gates and fled...
...And aren't we looking at a kind of counter-God, and isn't that un-Christian, dualistic...
...Yet they are not "clean" enough to allay the fears of local government and potential investors over the costs of cleaning them up to meet present-day environmental standards, preclude potential future law suits, or overcome public skepticism about even setting foot on them again...
...Rumors abound concerning what charges Starr may finally bring against Lewinsky or Clinton and others...
...It is not even easy to figure out how an apology should be constructed...
...The decision, which implausibly argued that such suits would not be an undue distraction to presidents, should be reversed...
...Still, is it a good idea for HUD to get involved...
...But as the Jones case demonstrates, given the inherently political nature of anything touching on the presidency, it is as naive to presume a president's guilt as it is to believe his every protestation...
...For finally there is another task to be undertaken before an apology can be made...
...horror like the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, makes us sharply aware of how little we understand ourselves or what it means to be human...
...Judge Wright, a Republican appointed by President George Bush, ruled that even if Jones's allegations were true, such behavior, however crude, did not constitute sexual harassment under Arkansas law...
...They include old rail yards, steel mills, corner gas-station lots, and dry-cleaning shops...
...Financed and managed by right-wing groups whose transparent interest was in damaging Clinton politically, Jones sadly appears to have allowed herself to be as exploited by her advocates as she alleges she was by the then governor of Arkansas...
...It is not so easy to apologize...
...Eminently...
...and the accurate placing of responsibility, if that is in question...
...Then, there has to be a recognition and precise defining of the evil, if this is in doubt...
...Second, the Jones decision throws a harsh light on the fouryear, and so far essentially fruitless, investigation of Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr...
...In these cases, it is not just that great evils were perpetrated, but they went on and on and on, in the face of beliefs, teachings, and ideals that held strongly to the contrary...
...Should we (despite Jesus' Commonweal 7 April24, 1998...
...Does an apology imply, as Catholic tradition has it, "a firm purpose of amendment...
...Initially appointed to determine whether the president was responsible for any Whitewater-related crimes, Starr recently has piggy-backed his efforts to the Jones case...
...At this late date, Starr's foraging into Clinton's sex life seems desperate...
...New technologies have been developed that have effectively lowered cleanup costs...
...Moreover, Judge Wright's decision confirms the public's suspicion that, however morally flawed Clinton may be as a husband, the attempt to criminalize his private life is largely politically motivated...
...Those are some of the basic questions that need answering if there is to be true sorrow and true apology...
...In the United States, veterans' groups forced the closing of a 1995 Smithsonian Museum exhibition that raised questions about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...These parcels thrived in an era when industrial pollution was an accepted part of American life...
...Clinton may be guilty of lying under oath or obstruction of justice...
...At this juncture it is impossible to know how much truth, if any, there was in Jones's allegations concerning a vulgar sexual proposition...
...Moral claims on the part of current representatives of past victims should not be inflated but must be seen to be accurate and just...
...To reclaim and redevelop the nation's estimated 450,000 polluted "Brownfields," in February HUD proposed doubling the agency's current funding from $25 million to $50 million...
...THE WRIGHT DECISION In dismissing Paula Jones's sexual-harassment suit against President Bill Clinton before it went to trial, Judge Susan Webber Wright sounded a note of clarity amidst the din of accusations surrounding the president...
...Today, Brownfields are eyesores and no man's lands...
...President Clinton's apology in Rwanda did not seem to account for the problem of regretting hundreds of thousands of deaths while knowing that American policy still would not risk one American life to prevent such a slaughter...
...It is almost always caricatured: little red guys with tails and horns and pitchforks, do we believe in that...
...How did the now-contested practice come about, and how did it persist in the presence of ideas or beliefs to the contrary...
...In turning to the murky questions surrounding Clinton's sexual behavior, Starr has resorted to highly questionable tactics--including forcing the mother of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's alleged paramour, to testify under oath about her daughter as well as subpoenaing records of Lewinsky's book purchases--and further undermined his own credibility...
...Environmental groups that once blocked recertification have gotten practical and agreed to a sliding scale on the "degree of purity" needed to relicense such sites...
...his methods chilling...
...Attention must be paid to the possible consequences of an apology...
...Why did a people, who believed in equal protection under the law, insist that escaped slaves be returned to their owners...
...Do we think that the U.S...
...First, last year's Supreme Court ruling allowing Jones to bring suit against Clinton is an open invitation for politically motivated attacks against any sitting president...
...The meaninglessness of it, the stupidity, the thought that this could happen to any of our children at any minute all of it terrifies--and our search for an explanation is a kind of nervous gabbing...
...Most are located in urban areas...
...Brownfields are mildly to moderately polluted forfner industrial sites that sit idle across the American landscape...
...According to HUD, the $50 million it plans to spend this year on Brownfields will leverage an additional $200 million in loans and loan grants, generating 28,000 jobs...
...And state legislatures have written new statutes that, while enforcing adequate environmental principles, protect the public and shield investors from unexpected future costs, if the cleanup has followed rigid state-approved plans...
...And why...
...The spuriousness of Jones's case was long noted by commentators familiar with sexual harassment law and not necessarily sympathetic to Clinton...
...The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded more than 120 grants to municipalities to rehabilitate Brownfields...
...Given the president's unique role in the American constitutional system, impeachment should remain the mechanism for holding a president accountable to the law...
...And aren't these kids sick, not demonic...
...But it is not wrong for all of us to consider how we might truly begin making amends for evils from which we benefit, though we did not commit them...
...This apology ends in being an empty gesture...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 8
