Fair Play

March is a month we are especially fond of, for a couple of reasons. It’s our birthday—four years old! No presents, please, we’re laying low this year—and it is also the month that we haul out the twelve-inch, black-and-white television in the office. Why? So we can attend to Minnesota’s secular high holidays, the State High School Hockey tournaments. We’d make the effort to attend the games in person, but we’re usually impeded by two other March traditions—the last snowstorm of the season, and the resulting heyday for the towing concessions in the city. This last tradition really irks us, as do all garden variety parking-related violations. Just the other day, we overstayed our welcome at a parking meter on Washington Avenue. The penalty was thirty-four dollars, and we hereby declare war on whatever city bureaucrat set this rapacious price. The only person who can be pleased with city parking policies and parking meters has to be the person counting all the money looted from the pockets of harried middle-managers and soccer moms just trying to pick up their dry cleaning. And the person who engineered parking meters that only take quarters and dollar coins? There is a special circle in hell reserved for that scoundrel.

Not that we’d ever wish to play God. God already has too many impersonators, and they generally make a mess of things. The continuing violence in the wake of the Mohammed comics in Europe and the East is deplorable on so many levels that we hardly know where to start. Closer to home, we can understand the anger of Christian conservatives who want to take this opportunity to condemn American newspapers for not having the spine to offend members of the world’s largest (and growing) faith. Free speech, they say, applies only to secular humanist tree-hugging supporters of the homosexual agenda. They can barely hide their disappointment at losing this opportunity to offer up a groin kick in the Clash of Civilizations.

Actually, there’s a much simpler explanation that should resonate in our bold new “ownership society”: Like the man always said, freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses. In explaining why U.S. newspapers weren’t, for the most part, republishing the comics in question, we admired the Strib’s Anders Gyllenhaal (isn’t that, um, a Danish name?) for his own sound logic. He said something along the Goldbloomian lines of “Just because we can print offensive and sacrilegious cartoons, doesn’t mean we should.” Hear, hear. We think the story has a Solomonic moral: He who would exercise free speech, and he who would eliminate it, can both learn the divine practice of restraint. If God knows how to do anything, it is to restrain Himself from intervening in human affairs.

But there is a larger and more troubling question here. If Islam forbids the reproduction of any human likeness, how does anyone know what Mohammed looked like? Anyway, between the press and the public, we naturally side with the press. One can make the reasonable argument that the role of comics and other sorts of op-ed material is to provoke public dialogue and controversy. It’s a good teaching moment, and Muslims are not off the hook. Listen up, Medieval Islamic World: It’s time you got used to the idea of free speech and civil dissent. Iran, go ahead and hold Holocaust comics contests and see what happens. How many Westerners, with or without religious ardor, are going to react by storming the Saudi Arabian embassy and fire bombing it? (None.) How many Jews will issue formal protests? (Most of them.) That’s modern civilization. Get used to it!

Fairness is a more noble, humane, and achievable goal than Absolute Truth, and if that confession puts our mortal souls in danger, we’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints. Which is why we felt bad about the Olympics this year, before the Olympics even started. Three American athletes were disqualified from participating in the games due to evidence that they’d indulged in artificial performance enhancers. We’ve not been among the shrillest, most self-righteous protestors when it comes to condemning doping in sports. It does, though, violate our basic sense of fair play, but more than that, it has ruined our natural, sunny optimism. Ultimately, the presence of steroids and similar results-by-injection most hurts the underdog, who can never make a surprising triumph without raising suspicions that he or she somehow cheated. When a middle-of-the-pack no-name suddenly crosses the line ahead of all the others, our first thought is a most uncharitable one.

Yes, guilty until proven innocent has become a troubling American standard, one we used to identify with our worst enemies. At some point within the last five years, we suddenly forgot a cornerstone of basic fairness and justice, and traded it for an uneasy trust in our Strong Father-Figure Government. President Bush and his cohorts have been arguing for years now that we need only to trust in their commitment to our safety and our best interests. It is astonishing to hear an American president not just admitting to and defending a practice of illegal warrantless eavesdropping, but also brazenly suggesting that it must continue indefinitely. (And to have a lap-dog congress that, rather than holding the lawbreaker accountable, would merely change the law. We’d like to try that strategy in court, as regards this parking ticket.)

It is the same approach, justified by the nebulous carte blanche of “war practices,” that allows our federal government to hold prisoners without charge, bail, lawyer, or any recourse whatsoever if they are suspected of terrorism. Is that fair? Well, would we be holding them if they weren’t obviously guilty? Essentially, our president wishes to do whatever he deems necessary in the execution of his office, without accountability from anyone anywhere. We are to trust a man who never really did settle on a good reason for starting a war in the center of the Middle East, who never did find weapons of mass destruction there, who allowed the illegal leak of the name of an undercover CIA agent, who couldn’t be bothered with the obliteration of an entire city on American soil, and who has not yet fired a wayward employee. He has had many opportunities to establish the trust he needs to realize his dream of absolute power without check. And how has he managed each of these opportunities? You be the judge. You’re fair minded, right?