Sister Artemis

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Month: July 2009

  • Goodbye, Walter Cronkite

    19 July 2009

    I grew up with Walter Cronkite.  I imagine a lot of kids in the sixties and seventies did.  He ate dinner with us during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and was the calm voice connecting our household with the rather scary events in the world at large.

    Walter Cronkite died Friday.  Though his voice hasn’t been in my life for years, it came to mind instantly when I started seeing reports of his health , and his likely passing, in the last few days.

    Good luck on the next journey, Mr. Cronkite.  Thanks for everything.

  • The Confirmation Hearings

    18 July 2009

    I’ve been watching government hearings most of my life.  It started back in the Nixon era with the Watergate hearings, and along with the rest of my family, I remain glued to the TV as much as possible, gleaning what I could from the probing questions and careful, cagey answers unfolding over the hours.

    Since that time, it’s mostly been Senate confirmation hearings of the cabinet nominees, potential Supreme Court justices, and the like.  Hearings tend to be ponderous — perhaps even outright boring — but for some reason they interest me, even when it’s just to catch highlights.  But I perhaps have never been so devoted to following hearings (at least, not since Watergate) as I have been over the last few days, as I’ve tuned in to Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate hearings for confirmation to Supreme Court Justice.  At this writing I’ve watched pretty much every moment of the first three days, and snippets of day 4, and I will undoubtedly catch up on what I’ve missed this weekend.

    Why, one might ask?  I certainly have asked myself that question.

    Well, my original intent was to tune in, here and there through the days, to see how the Republican and Democratic philosophies of governance and justice played out.  Well, to be fair, I thought what the Senators would reveal is how they wished to "market" their philosophies, how they wished us to view their perspectives.

    I got that, and more, from the hearings.  Though I agree with many journalists who’ve said that Sotomayor didn’t really reveal much to us about what she thinks of the burning issues of our day, she did indeed reveal a lot about how she thinks the law should be approached by judges.  And in the process, I received a basic lesson in how the Supremes must approach cases, given their job description.

    If I understand things more or less correctly, it is a rare moment when an appeals judge or a justice of the Supreme Court is faced with a simple "right or wrong" question about the basis for a case.  They aren’t asked to decide "did this guy commit murder?" or "is this indeed the woman who robbed the bank?"  Instead, they must decide whether those who charged the accused, or those who defended them, or those who judged them at lower levels of the court, have acted in accordance with already-decided laws, and of course most importantly, with the Constitution of the United States.  Frustrating thing, justice.  Someone might have indeed committed murder, or robbed a bank, but if the people charged with bringing them to court screw up and don’t follow the law, the case is no good, and the appeals court or Supreme Courts may overturn lower rulings if they see the rules haven’t been followed.  The judges and justices of the higher level courts do this not to piss us off, but because that is their charged duty.  Their job seems rarely involved actually deciding the big issue itself.

    This aspect of the Supreme Court — that they decide whether law has been applied correctly, not the case itself — was perhaps already obvious to others, but I’d never really thought about it.

    In any case, the Senators repeatedly asked Sotomayor to share her absolute opinions on issues like abortion, self-defense, gun rights, gay marriage and so on.  If she has them, she keeps them private, for the most part.  In pretty much every case, she refused to provide a direct answer about a particular issue, on the basis that she couldn’t give an opinion in the abstract, and on a number of these more controversial issues, refused because those very issues were likely to come before the Supreme Court and any opining done at the hearing could be used to infer a prejudiced view one way or the other.

    On the other hand, she was quite eloquent in describing the details of cases and decisions she’d had in front of her (and which were decided and not pending appeal).  This provided strange contrast with her cautiously evasive answers to the issue questions.  I, by the way, think was was smart to do so, because there was at least some direct, detailed discussion to balance out the repeated "I can’t answer that in the abstract" and "I can’t comment on that because it may come before me."  Though case-specific, I did understand her approach to law from her answers:  she strict about looking at precedent and constitutional law, doesn’t believe in judges creating new interpretations without a damn good cause, and considers her cases… well… case by case.  In other words, exactly what we want in a person sitting on the Supreme Court.

    Much was made of the "wise latina" statement, and there a few other annoying themes that the more conservative Senators drilled her on.  But the essence of her careful responses revealed her, I think, to be a careful and cautious judge, one who considers the cases before her methodically, and with great deference to those who’ve shaped the law before her — the Founders, the Congress and state legislatures, and the judges who’ve decided past cases.

    I was impressed.  I was impressed that she never showed a moment of irritation, though I noted the many pauses she took after yet another Senator’s question on something gone over numerous times before.  Early in the hearings, I imagined that she was most likely assembling her careful reply.  Later on, I wondered if her focus was on trying to say the same damn thing in a different way just to avoid sounding like a broken record.  She seemed patient, and considered her answers carefully, and yet opened up a different aspect of her personality when she laughed with the Senators over a quip here, a baseball or Perry Mason reference there.

    A test of my impression from the hearings:  If I were party to a case that came before her, I might wonder whether she would decide in my favor — I am not so convinced that she is entirely liberal in her outlook.  However, wouldn’t doubt that she would look at my case carefully, and only apply the law to the case, not her personal view on the situation.

    Essentially, what I gleaned was that Sotomayor will be a Justice we can trust to honor the Constitution.

  • Hello world! … or, Why am I here?

    17 July 2009

    Why am I here?  Not in the metaphysical sense, but rather in the “why blog?” sense.

    One can, after all, simply keep a diary, private and free-form.  But putting something potentially in the public eye, even if nary a soul ever views it, puts useful constraints on writing.

    You have to watch your words — not so much to avoid offending, but in order to articulate your thoughts clearly.  I admit it, this has a rather selfish root:  writing for the public in order to clarify my own thoughts, purely for my own benefit.  But it is an effective way to force myself to make better sense, to express myself better.

    I find a comparison from my college days.  I was requested, at a couple of different points, to keep an academic journal, a collection of reflections on what I was reading, hearing, seeing, doing with my college studies.  My professors read through this journal a couple of times through the quarter, so while it was quite a personal reflection on my academic experience, I had to present my ideas in such a way that (a) my professors could understand what I was writing about, and (2) the reader wouldn’t be offended by my thoughts.  That is, I wouldn’t write in my journal something like a scathing rant on the professor who would be reading it, or report on my hot and heavy night with a fellow student in gratuitous detail.

    Now, at the same time, I kept a very personal diary, which did reflect some on my schooling, but was more focused on my personal relationships, my toddler, the movies and music I discovered, my bitches and moans about life.  This collection I wouldn’t share with a soul, containing as it did the typical embarrassing rants and scattered musings of most diaries.

    A couple of notes on the form of these two very different journals:

    My personal diary was kept long-hand — I didn’t yet own a computer (this was 1984, after all, and I was a poverty-level single parent at the time).  In later years, I’ve kept my personal journals on the computer, and don’t even bother printing the pages out anymore, but back then this wasn’t an option.  My journals from those years are filled with almost illegible scrawl, many scribbles, and sometimes notes in the margins.

    I wrote my academic journal on the college’s mainframe computer, sitting in the terminal room (a bit morbid of a title, I always thought) at round tables in front of black-n-green monochrome screens, without even a word processor to work in (we used some kind of program-writing program in lieu of the real thing).  I did this at my own option, partly to learn how to use a computer, and partly because of my atrocious handwriting.  I also let myself go back and edit these journals, both for spelling and grammar, and also to ensure that I was expressing myself clearly, or perhaps to expand on something that, upon reflection, I hadn’t explored fully in my journal.

    To allow editing was a big difference in my mind between the journals.  My personal diary, with its scribbles and addendum and margin notes, showed where I had changed my mind about content or composition.  The printouts from the computer terminal (on a clacking dot-matrix printer so loud that it was corralled along with the other printers in its very own glassed in room) revealed nothing of any edits or reconsiderations I’d gone through in constructing the journal entry.  It felt like cheating.

    The other difference between the two journals was in terms of shorthand references.  In a private diary, one can write “and it really bugged me because of that time at my sister’s house,” and there is no need to explain what happened “that time” or why it relates.  When you are your own audience, you already have all the reference points.

    In a journal to be read by others, such offhand references aren’t helpful unless explained, and in the process of explaining, not only is the point made more clear to both reader and writer, but you tend to reveal false links, poor logic, and badly thought out connections between the events in our lives.  Sometimes, you know, you can link up things for very poor reasons – like thinking your Aunt has hated you for decades, when really she was just scowling that time because of the bad potato salad your mom made (that’s fictional, btw) – and writing these things out occasionally forces you to face the reality that maybe there was some other explanation for the thing you were just so sure about.

    Keeping these two types of journals simultaneously was an interesting experience.  And keeping those academic journals has led to attempting blogs, another form of written expression which you willingly put in front of another’s eye — more personal than journalism, but more public, and hopefully articulate, than a private diary needs to be.

    Which leads me to here.

    I have been intensely interested in the U.S. political scene since the 2008 election season.  I find myself watching, and commenting on in my own mind, all kinds of issues as they arise in the the news, and that leads to wanting to express myself on political and social issues for the first time in a decade or more.  For others, that expression might come through poetry or painting, but for me it’s writing out my thoughts.

    And because these thoughts are issue-centered, I don’t so much want to just blather on about whatever is pissing me off (or inspiring me) at the moment, I want to informally dissect what I am stirred by.  Hence the desire to write, not just for myself, but for an unknown and most likely imaginary audience, in order to force myself to avoid the shorthand of references to unexplained experiences, or the lazyness of ranting.  Not to diss ranting.  I may do it here.  Sometimes it’s necessary, and almost always cathartic.

    Anyway, this blog is starting up right at the end of the Senate hearings for Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the the Supreme Court.  Issues of law, the Constitution, and race are prominent right now, as they have been since the election.  I hope to start there, but we’ll see what crops up between this post and the next time I have a chance to write.

    Here’s to new ventures, and clarity of expression!

    –Sister Artemis

  • About the Election Collection

    About the Election Collection

    July 25, 2009

    Welcome!

    I created this collection for two reasons:

    … to provide myself a single place where I could locate all the election stuff I keep wanting to refer back to.  Some of it’s bookmarked on my pages in StumbleUpon, or YouTube, or on my own computer, but I didn’t have one location for all of it.  I wrote, on the original site where I created the collection, that I wanted to:

    … provide friends with links and web finds I’ve come across, mostly in the course of the 2008 presidential race. After the race… well, who knows.  But in the meantime, it will be an easy way to share with you the things that have tickled my fancy, made me chuckle or groan, or shed some light on a topic important to me.In any case, for the time being, I’ll be adding links to my “Politics” page, with most recent finds at the top.

    –Sister Artemis
    October 16th, 2008