Nicholas Lemann and Judith Shulevitz
Dear Nick,
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StumbleUponNone of the above. Today being the day after Labor Day, my policy recommendation is, pay prison guards more, a lot more. Ever read Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing? Me neither--I only read The New Yorker excerpt, which I found on his Web site in case you haven't. But what he calls the "care, custody, and control" of violent offenders sure sounds like foul, thankless, degrading work, a daily battery of direct physical assaults and indirect attacks by way of spit, shit, and cum. Conover perversely, though not unpersuasively, blames the get-tough-on-criminals attitude of the 1990s for making guards' jobs so hard. He says the elimination of federal funding for prison education gave inmates more time and reason to cultivate acts of defiance, particularly African-American inmates, who see themselves as political prisoners anyway. But the job of prison guard can't ever have been very pleasant, and I have a strange respect for men able to retain enough compassion in the face of institutionalized brutality to respond humanely to a man in pain. So they mistook him for a visitor! That's partly, as you say, because they thought their responsibility ended at the prison walls, but in some small part it is also because their first instinct was to be compassionate rather than suspicious. Now they're going to get in trouble for it.
This leads me to the story that got my attention today, which wasn't in the New York Times. I mean, the outline of the story was in the Times, but at least in our edition of it the key details were left out. I heard them on NPR this morning while driving home very, very cautiously from the car rental agency, a fact I'll explain to our readers in a minute. The story was about the latest suicide bomber in Jerusalem, who killed himself and wounded 12 other people earlier today. According to NPR and CNN (I looked it up when I got home), the man was an Arab dressed as an Orthodox Jew, with a yarmulke, black coat, and beard. Israeli citizens spotted him almost instantly as an impostor and notified the police, who stopped him to check his papers, whereupon he detonated the bomb. By the current depressing standards of the Middle East, this is a happy story, since the man was apparently headed for a much more crowded part of town and no one died except him.
My point is this: In Israel, unlike in the United States, people don't have the luxury of allowing there to be a disjuncture in their society's juncture points. The suicide bomber tried to pass himself off as someone he wasn't--exploiting our natural confusion about context, you might say-- but the paranoid Israelis saw right through it. After all, this is a world where Arab groups pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers handsomely for their acts of martyrdom (another story I didn't see in the Times--I read it the other day in the Daily News, which lifted it from an Israeli paper). I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a world so oppressively monitored, surveilled, checked and double-checked and triple-checked, and yet besieged anyway by daily random acts of murder. I feel bad for the Israelis but am glad to live in the sloppy old U.S. of A.
The reason I focused on that story, aside from, you know, being the daughter of diehard Zionists and generally worried about Israel, is that I had death and its randomness very much on my mind, having all but wrecked the car yesterday. (Hence the rental agency.) My fault, of course, as I told the cops and insurance agency, for letting the dog ride in the front seat, so that she could leap into my arms and cause me to swerve and run into a parked car. My first reaction after it happened was relief so overwhelming I had to pee--at not being hurt, of course, but also because catastrophe had struck and it hadn't killed me, though it did do a number on our car, their car, and our future insurance rates. If you've ever read any tabloid stories you know that living in a peaceful American suburb like ours, where nothing ever happens, is a sure prelude to disaster. I figure that having something sort of terrible occur means I'm safe for the time being from the Terence M. Brewers and suicide bombers of the world.
Love,
Judith
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Reader Comments From The Fray
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Don't like restaurants? Then let's discuss home cooking, and get some ideas for tonight's dinner, in this thread here. One of the cooks, Will Allen, has this to say elsewhere (context not really important, but he had been accused of pre-judging people): "I nearly always allow someone to clearly display their banal, wooden-headed, nature before denouncing it." There was an interesting thread on prison officers, the word 'perversely', and insults, starting here. Everyone was in cheerful mood in the Fray: Ex-Fed was able to start joke threads here and here (warning: this one was considered tasteless by another poster.) Ex-Fed also proposed marriage to one of the Breakfast Tablers, here: we're being a little circumspect because this involved being rude about the other BT-er. And there was a fan letter from Zeitguy to Judith Shulevitz here.]
If there's anything "unique" about American society, it's the amazing extent of our ability to think that we're somehow different from every other civilization in history. Maybe it's because our particular culture has only been around for a few hundred years, in a land where we are cut off almost completely from the ancient civilizations that have been around significantly longer. I don't know. But bored, whiny rich people? That's nothing new
--Mangar
(To reply, click here.)
It's not the self-pity that bothers me so much, though it's bad enough, but the truculence and righteous indignation and desire to grind the faces of the poor it seems to lead to.
To put it another way--what, exactly, are the rich and powerful so pissed off about? What is it that they want that they're not getting? 100% of the wealth instead of a mere 90%?
--Kassandra
(To reply, click here.)
(9/5)