Sorrow and the mundane
Last week was a busy week for me. I was doing lots of highly technical tasks related to my research. It was a bit boring, but stuff that I believe is intellectually important. And I was in the thrill of the hunt, in the bubble, lost in my little technical details.
So it was a shock when I emerged from my bubble to find that Congress had really done it: they had officially given the president the power to imprison whomever he wants, for as long as he deems proper, before trying them in a military tribunal that has only minimal consideration for the rights of the defendant. There seems to be some disagreement about what exactly this means for citizens, but it’s clear that for millions of legal immigrants into the United States, the right to petition for the writ of habeas corpus is gone.
In my own little prosperous corner of the country, Harvard Square, the thousands of foreign scholars all chuckle nervously in their beers. “It’s not like it’ll affect us,” they say, “just a handful of terrorists, and maybe a few unlikely Arab men wrongly picked up.” Maybe. Maybe we’ll look back on this a few decades the way we look back on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII- an aberration that didn’t infect the rest of the body politic. But often- not always but often- a precedent like this spreads. I worry that in a few decades we will come to define all those that question the government’s tactics in the war on terrorism as enemy combatants. Once the logical line of habeas corpus is gone, the boundary between those within the rule and those beyond the pale grows fuzzy indeed.
And yet life in Harvard Square goes on. We keep racking our brains about research, keep being scholars. During lunch, we leave the computers behind and sit in the gorgeous fall sun. Somehow it seems wrong that something so symbolically charged could be lost, and yet the flow of things move on. There’s a human desire, as Shakespeare well understand, for big events to resound throughout: Caesar’s death was foretold by freak omens and lightening. Instead, all is quiet once you turn off CNN.
So it was a shock when I emerged from my bubble to find that Congress had really done it: they had officially given the president the power to imprison whomever he wants, for as long as he deems proper, before trying them in a military tribunal that has only minimal consideration for the rights of the defendant. There seems to be some disagreement about what exactly this means for citizens, but it’s clear that for millions of legal immigrants into the United States, the right to petition for the writ of habeas corpus is gone.
In my own little prosperous corner of the country, Harvard Square, the thousands of foreign scholars all chuckle nervously in their beers. “It’s not like it’ll affect us,” they say, “just a handful of terrorists, and maybe a few unlikely Arab men wrongly picked up.” Maybe. Maybe we’ll look back on this a few decades the way we look back on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII- an aberration that didn’t infect the rest of the body politic. But often- not always but often- a precedent like this spreads. I worry that in a few decades we will come to define all those that question the government’s tactics in the war on terrorism as enemy combatants. Once the logical line of habeas corpus is gone, the boundary between those within the rule and those beyond the pale grows fuzzy indeed.
And yet life in Harvard Square goes on. We keep racking our brains about research, keep being scholars. During lunch, we leave the computers behind and sit in the gorgeous fall sun. Somehow it seems wrong that something so symbolically charged could be lost, and yet the flow of things move on. There’s a human desire, as Shakespeare well understand, for big events to resound throughout: Caesar’s death was foretold by freak omens and lightening. Instead, all is quiet once you turn off CNN.
