Scooter, Mueller, and Anthrax

It is all so eerily symmetrical.  No parody, satire, or screenplay can compete with the absurdity and plot twists of the daily news.  But, as with great entertainment, one must keep all the prior episodes in memory in order to appreciate today’s “reveal.”  Trump pardoned Scooter Libby today. Scooter was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, convicted in 2007 for perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements in the cover-up of Cheney et al.’s treasonous fabrications of casus belli for the 2003 Iraq invasion. Scooter was Cheney’s “fixer.” If this is an SAT test, the answer is ScooterLibby:DickCheney::MichaelCohen:DonaldTrump.  Presumably, Trump is looking to set a precedent in which a silent loyalist can remain a silent martyr in the confidence that he will be rewarded with a pardon.

Now suppose my previous post (Cheney, Anthrax, & FBI) is spot-on (as I reckon to be so) with respect to Cheney’s central role in the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.; Scooter would have been the point man, perhaps the only person with full knowledge.  I posited that the FBI bungled the “Amerithrax” investigation, and albeit for mostly wrong reasons, the right-wing propaganda machine is currently afire with the same accusation—because who was in charge of the FBI at that time and micromanaging the whole investigation?  Robert Mueller.  So, I find myself in ironic agreement with the right-wing screech-o-sphere in asserting that Robert Mueller did not exactly cover himself with glory during the anthrax investigation; most folk think the FBI got the wrong guy once, but I reckon they got it wrong twice, and the perpetrators got off scot-free.  Perhaps in 2001-2007, Mueller was an innocent who could not even imagine the anthrax mailings came from the upper reaches of the Executive Branch, their own bungled attempt to pin an attack-worthy crime on Saddam Hussein. I don’t know Mueller, but maybe he is more cynical these days:  fool me once shame on me; fool me twice, shame on you.  Or maybe it is simply that Trump’s crimes are of the conventional variety rooted in greed and narcissism, and the subordinate issues involve lies, money laundering, campaign violations, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and coverups of personal embarrassments.  During the anthrax investigation, the FBI was in entirely new technical and behavioral territory in their misbegotten investigation; they were “in over their heads.”  Now, along comes the tragicomic figure of Donald Trump, putting Mueller and the Justice Department again in the center of a storm, but one in which the suspected crimes are “in their wheelhouse” in terms of investigative expertise.  Mueller has been Special Counsel for less than a year, yet Trump supporters are anxious for interviews and subpoenas to end; the anthrax investigation was unresolved but closed after more than seven years. Oh, what a tangled drama.  I don’t know how (or if) it will end. But if I’m looking for a protagonist, a hero who falls in hubris and misfortune, then rises in wisdom and integrity, I’m rooting for Mueller.  I see no pathway for Trump to prove heroic, but this after all is a very weird story (surprise me, Donald).  Stay tuned, and keep in mind that you and your descendants are part of the same story, like it or not.

Follow-up on Fear and Guns

Most recently, I wrote about how fear divides us, and how it may be helpful to talk with one another about our fears. Fear is an essential part of the USA’s national discussion on guns and gun violence. I am familiar with guns and gun culture, having grown up on a Nebraska farm in the latter half of the 20^th century; but those who did not grow up with guns in a rural culture may be utterly mystified by the ferocity with which some regard their felt need for guns – lots of guns.

David Joy is an author who lives in the mountains of North Carolina. In the April 2, 2018 New York Times Magazine[i], he provides useful insight in his article “Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become.”

Here’s an excerpt of Joy’s lengthy and compelling article, a moment in which he observes and then reflects upon his girlfriend’s horror at an oblivious young man’s pointing a weapon at her in a gun store:

“… she just kept saying: “He was a kid. He looked like he should’ve been in high school. What does a kid need a rifle like that for? What does anybody need a rifle like that for?” And the truth was, I didn’t have an answer. The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields. I know the reasons my friends give for owning these weapons, and I know that their answers feel inadequate to me. I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.

            Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another. There’s no simple solution like pulling fear off the shelf. It’s an intangible thing. I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it. (boldface emphasis mine). I’m sure that part of why I carry is having a pistol put to my head when I was 14. I’m sure that part of it is having hidden behind walls while shots were fired. Maybe it’s a combination of those two things coupled with headlines and hysteria, the growing presence of mass shootings in American culture.

            I don’t like being in places where I can’t find the exits. I don’t like crowds and being surrounded by more people than I can keep my eyes on. For the most part nowadays, I stay at the house. When I have to leave, I slide my holster into my waistband before I put on my boots. When a book tour sends me out of North Carolina, 36 states honor the concealed-carry license in my wallet. Unlike a lot of those who carry, I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado. I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.”

       I too have had a gun put to my head, but my life has not been dominated by fear as Joy’s has been. It was early 1973, and I was asleep with my then-fiancée when I woke to a small-caliber gun pressed to my forehead. A drunken, heartsick, and otherwise pitiable young man had broken into the apartment, thinking this was where he would find she who had dumped him, along with the young man of her new affections. Gladly for me, my fiancée persuaded my would-be assassin he was in the wrong building, threatening to kill the wrong boyfriend. For my own part, I was in no good position to defend myself in words or actions, the barrel of the gun pressed to my brow. I suppose it was fear that I felt; certainly I recognized the possible imminence of my own death at the age of 21, and my heart raced. My would-be killer backed away and slinked outside into the darkness, threatening to shoot if I followed. He was never apprehended, at least not for that particular set of crimes.

What is the difference between unarmed me, who can handle guns and use one to dispatch an animal if necessary[ii], and the millions of David Joys, who find safety and comfort in having a gun persistently on their person, and at their bedside? A friend, more deeply informed than myself in realms of philosophy, recently labeled me a Stoic.[iii] Close enough. Of course I know what fear feels like; but it is not my nature or my practice to give “assent” to fear.[iv] My regular walks take me to wooded semi-wilderness and to downtown Baltimore, but I judge the probability of my needing a gun for self-defense (in a situation where the gun would be of use) to be approximately zero. I place my odds of winning an armed standoff with law enforcement or the US military to be exactly zero. I suppose all this (Stoicism or not) is akin to what I described as “Zen fearlessness” in my recent riff on Fear in America. I give David Joy great credit for identifying fear as his primary motivation for gun ownership.

I infer that fearful persons are not only too quick to give assent to their fears, but are very bad at assessing probabilities and statistics. I have long thought that high school curriculums should include a mandatory course in the life skills of everyday statistics and risk assessment. Too few people have the knowledge and cognitive tools to put their own fears into a rational and proportional perspective. Too many people are easily spooked by propaganda that intentionally excites fears of things too improbable to merit giving assent to that fear. Too many people have more fear of the supernatural (ghosts, zombies, Satan) than of things far more likely to kill them: smoking, automobile accidents, drugs,[v] a gun wielded by (depressed) self or by a relative.

If a small change in teaching curriculum may be helpful, it is not apparent to me that organized religion is much help at all: some of the most fearful people I know are zealous adherents of one or another religion.[vi] Religion, wrongly understood, negates both probability and logic; instead, supernatural forces of good and evil are imagined to determine human behavior. Within this understanding, it is deemed a futility to regulate weapons of any kind, because “evil” is inexorable whether or not a person has access to rapid-discharge guns, armor piercing bullets, shoulder-held missiles, grenades, or perhaps nuclear weapons. Instead of faith, too many people have belief. And fear. And therefore guns.

 

FOOTNOTES:

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[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/magazine/gun-culture-is-my-culture-and-i-fear-for-what-it-has-become.html

[ii] It turns out I’m thinking of getting a gun more effective than the pump air gun I’ve used to kill the occasional squirrel and even a raccoon. I recently found a deer on my property, pitiably suffering from a compound fracture of a rear femur, unable to get to its feet, struggling in pain and terror to get to safety. I might have been able to catch the full-grown doe and dispatch it with a knife (if I’d had a big enough and sharp enough knife on me), but the animal would have suffered even more before I finished. I had to call seven neighbors before I found one at home and in possession of a suitable gun.

[iii] Modern stoicism is the subject of blogs at https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/stoicism-101/   “The Stoics thought that (practical) ethics was the most important component of their philosophy: it was about how to live one’s life in the best possible way. However, they also believed that it is hard to develop a viable ethics without two other components: understanding how the world works, and appreciating the power and limits of human reasoning.”

[iv] ibid, “… Stoics taught to transform emotions in order to achieve inner calm. Emotions – of fear, or anger, or love, say – are instinctive human reactions to certain situations, and cannot be avoided. But the reflective mind can distance itself from the raw emotion and contemplate whether the emotion in question should (or should not) be given “assent,” i.e., should be appropriated and cultivated.”

[v] In another irony, lots of people are more afraid of marijuana than addictive prescribed drugs.

[vi] If the shoe fits, wear it. But if your religion helps provide you fearlessness uncoupled from zealous fantasies, great. As you’ll have noticed elsewhere, I am Quaker “by convincement” (discovery as an adult); it does not profess to being the one true religion, but I find it compatible with love, faith, knowledge, logic, wisdom, and (oh yes) Stoicism.