The Bangus Ultimatum

(Reprinted from The Man-Blog)

If there should be any reason why I like the Star Wars prequels, it’s probably because of the parallel “political” aspects of its storyline. As compelling as the tale of Anakin’s fall to the dark side may be, there is something especially tragic when an entire galaxy-spanning civilization slips from democracy to tyranny. It is a seduction all the more sweeter, and a loss far more devastating.

The lowdown (based on the movies, novels, and comic-books) I snarfed from a Wikipedia article:

Traditionally, the Chancellor could only serve two four-year terms, but Palpatine stayed in office much longer, due to the prolonged Separatist Crisis.

The crisis occurred when several of the Republic’s member Star Systems and organizations united in order to separate from the Republic. This unified organization became known as the Confederacy of Independent Systems. Tensions between the Republic and the Separatists eventually escalated into all-out war, and the conflicts that would later be known as the “Clone Wars” began (chronicled in Attack of the Clones).

The Senate granted Palpatine emergency powers to deal with the Separatist Confederacy in a motion introduced by Representative Jar Jar Binks. Palpatine’s first move, widely supported at the time, was to create a vast army of clone warriors to serve as the Republic’s fighting force against the Confederacy.

In the ensuing years, the Senate increasingly ceded its power to Palpatine, who became the war’s political Commander-in-Chief. Such actions were justified in the name of security, and eventually Palpatine did not need the approval of the Senate for many of his actions. Since the chancellor held a vast majority of supporters in Senate, this was considered a perfectly reasonable way to increase the wartime government’s efficiency.

…
At the conclusion of the Clone Wars, Palpatine addressed the Senate. First he related the story of the unsuccessful “assassination attempt” by the Jedi, and declared the Order to be enemies of the Republic. Then he announced that the Galactic Republic would become a Galactic Empire so strong as to never be threatened by outside forces again. The Chancellor, who by this time had been grotesquely disfigured (he claimed this was from the Jedi assassination attempt), proclaimed himself to be the first Emperor of the galaxy. Deluded by Palpatine’s charisma and skill (and perhaps also by his considerable Dark Side power), the majority of the Senate cheered him on loudly in approval, which provoked one of Senator Padmé Amidala’s most memorable lines: “So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause.” After so many millennia, the Galactic Republic had ceased to exist.

At the center of it all, of course, is Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine, the consummate politician, carefully pulling the right strings and playing both sides, all the while maintaining a veneer of integrity and compassion. Besides being such a devious sonofabitch, however, he had another advantage: War changed the galaxy’s socio-political environment (just as it had, according to the novels, darkened The Force itself.) People (and their representatives in the Senate) became more and more willing to surrender their rights in exchange for security (or the illussion thereof). All power eventually became concentrated in The Emperor, who Cannot Be Wrong, and can’t be held accountable to anyone. Of course, most of us know where that arrangement led to: homicidal maniacs blowing up a planet to smithereens without so much as a half-assed inquiry.

That is why I feel very very very very VERY concerned at all this talk of term extensions and more government power. Limited terms and limited powers ensure ultimate accountability to the people, that the feedback process that makes democracy fresh and viable remains operative. The promise of more prosperity, security (and stronger republics) in exchange for longer stays in office (and more expansive powers) is truly alluring, an easy way, but a slippery slope to the Dark Side. The true burden of a free people is vigilance, and we must never be remiss on our duties.

Well, just law school, actually. But we do have our share of witchcraft and wizardry. We have lingering ghosts and our share of dragons and dementors. Dark and difficult times lie ahead for me and my blockmates.

I’m currently reading and re-reading Duncan Kennedy’s “How Law Schools Fail”, which, unfortunately, doesn’t show up in Google. It’s an article in the Yale Law Review first published in 1970, describing the “malaise” of hostility, myopia, and apathy that polluted Yale Law back then. I might as well be reading about the UP College of Law in 2005: Professors and their arsenal of sadism, their unjustified disdain of subjects outside law. Students dividing into extremes of buying into the system or just settling into stasis. I hope to discuss the article further soon, if only to hold a mirror against the past three years of studying law school, and how it changed (or warped) me so.

I’m also a teacher now, in the UP CMC. I hope that I’ll never have to resort to dominance, to paternalism,to ridicule, to “icy indifference” to teach my lessons. I hope I never forget what the rule-readers and the bureaucrats fail to understand: that beyond the arbitrary walls and narrow categories they cling to, the wings of a thousand butterflies are beating, seeding the atmosphere with storms; that magic can still happen; that the human voice can never really be stilled.

(Something “scary” for Halloween)

So let’s suppose you have a girlfriend. And after being together for a while you let her into your place. She tends to be a bitch every now and then but the relationship’s gotten to a point where you can accept each other freely. Besides, she’s got a Long Term Plan for the both of you that’ll make things better in the future. She wants a Strong Relationship (TM) - prosperity and security for the both of you and your future children.

But then one day you come across tapes of herphone conversations with another guy. All this time she’s been screwing around your back! Granted, the tapes are from a tainted, shifty-eyed source who probably has his own agenda, but you can’t be mistaken about the fact that: 1) it was her talking and 2) something nasty was going on.

And so you confront her with this, fuming with anger, and what she does instead of moving out is ignore the issue like nothing happened and give you the silent treatment. She doesn’t even try to offer an explanation, but insists that she’s just too busy working on your Strong Relationship.

So your anger mounts, and although you’re not really a violent person you think of packing her clothes yourself and dragging her out of your home. But you’ve got to let her have her say first, and frustrated, you wait.

Weeks later she finally blurts out a response. She may have gotten “involved” with a guy (who has conveniently disappeared from the face of the planet), but it was only because she felt vulnerable at that time and thought other women wanted to take her place - so she responded pre-emptively. The rest of her half-assed apology is a slap in the face - a legal document that really gives nothing and just shores up future deniability.

She convinces you to give her due process, because even these things have rules. She must be allowed to prove her innocence. So her friends and your friends congregate for this purpose. It turns out that she’s bought off most of your friends too, and the inquiry stops over silly procedural chickenshit without the tapes and its contents ever being discussed. The whole thing turns out to be a farce. She never wanted the truth out: all she wanted was this mockery of a process, after which she can claim that she’s been tried and cleared and now that this craziness is over, the both of you can move on to develop your Strong Relationship.

You try to convince yourself this cannot be happening, and you scream to her face that without the truth, there is no relationship in the first place, and that you still want her out of your place and your life. She digs herself in. She’s willing to change the parameters of you relationship, turn it into a new system of caring, maybe even shorten her stay - but she’s not going to go without exit plan for herself. She’s willing to have a reconciliation, have a couple of bozo’s d an inquiry in a strictly confidential and non-binding fashion.

This won’t be enough, you tell her, and so you take to the streets and raise your fist to make your point. You expect her to at least understand. This was how you met her. This was how you raised her above yourself, not too long ago. Instead she goes freakin’ paranoid nuts. She claims that you and your friends are actually out to kill her, conspiring to grab her position. She makes you sleep in the sofa and makes you pay rent. And in the streets, she sics her dogs on you, and blasts you with water (a “calibrated response”) and bludgeons your head and utterly, irretrievably, breaks your heart. And now you’re lost and confused, wondering how things have gone so horribly wrong.

TO BE CONTINUED

Starting today I hope to post more regularly to the iBlog blog. Think of it as a buildup to generate buzz and inspire themes for iBlog Summit 2. I’m going to cover, well, blogging (Pinoys blogging in particular) as well as other intarwebby things and the inevitable overlap with social and legal issues. Here’s my first go at it, perfect for Halloween:

(Got this from boingboing) It’s something I’ve been waiting for: mainstream media at its most sensational, with its audience share threatened and its corporate sponsors reeling, lashes back at blogs. It turns out now that we are part of ” an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective”. Ouch.

A sidebar to the article then discusses how one can “fight back”. This includes:

BUILD A BLOG SWARM. Reach out to key bloggers and get them on your side. Lavish them with attention. Or cash.Earlier this year Marqui, a tiny Portland, Ore. software shop, began paying 21 bloggers $800 per month to post items about Marqui, while requiring them to disclose the payments. Marqui’s listings soared on Google from 2,000 to 250,000 results. Never mind that one blogger took the money and bashed a Marqui marketing strategy anyway.

BASH BACK. If you get attacked, dig up dirt on your assailant and feed it to sympathetic bloggers. Discredit him.

ATTACK THE HOST. Find some copyrighted text that a blogger has lifted from your Web site and threaten to sue his Internet service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That may prompt the ISP to shut him down. Or threaten to drag the host into a defamation suit against the blogger. The host isn’t liable but may skip the hassle and cut off the blogger’s access anyway. Also:Subpoena the host company, demanding the blogger’s name or Internet address.

SUE THE BLOGGER. If all else fails, you can sue your attacker for defamation, at the risk of getting mocked. You will have to chase him for years to collect damages. Settle for a court order forcing him to take down his material.

Now, the article is obviously trollbait, but it shows that we’re not all safe in our own little worlds. Outside the walls, people are sulking and plotting deep into the night. And it’s not like mainstream media and Big Money are the only ones looking for payback. Governments and administrations are out for blood (sometimes, more literally than figuratively). It reminds me of Dean Jorge Bocobo’s fears that something as apparently harmless as TouchGraph could be used on a blog “clampdown”. As blogging spreads and grows in influence, expect more flashpoints of conflict, maybe even full-scale Blog Wars.

The chronicles of the Anonymous Lawyer on “soulless, billable-hours-obsessed partners, the overworked BlackBerry-dependent associates and the wrecked families that are the dark underside of life at his large firm in Los Angeles” is just fiction, but I’m including it in the Lawyers and Law Students section of the sidebar, if only to give me and (and hopefully, the law students reading this blog) an early warning device (against—I don’t know really).

Scheherazade points out three lessons from all this:

1) the blog as a medium has an inherent credibility. 2) Humans in general, and lawyers in particular, are amazingly susceptible to status and heirarchy — Anonymous Lawyer’s appeal was the perception of access to honesty from the upper stratus of the standard professional heirarchy, and the delicious way the author could make explicit all the power struggles and displays of status and power within a law firm. Jeremy can convey that in beautiful, elegant turns of phrase. 3) The profession really is draining talent, energy, and enthusiasm from a huge hunk of lawyers, which is a travesty. Anonymous Lawyer was fiction, but too many people recognized themselves in the mirror Jeremy held up. It makes me really sad.

Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?
—Hamlet, 5. 1, William Shakespeare

The Paradox discusses the dilemma of studying to be a lawyer in a world that hates and fears us:

dammit, i’m a law student. i really wanna be a lawyer. and hell yeah, i am affected by how lawyers in general are insulted by degrading remarks. it’s so darn difficult to get into law school. and that’s barely the tip of the iceberg. studying has never been this… primal. survival of the fittest has never been this… acute. be a doctor and people call you a healer. be a lawyer and people call you a lean, mean, fighting… liar.

As an undergrad, and later as a programmer—I disliked lawyers. Obstructions to change. Sneaky bastards. Oily, double-speaking snakes. I had in my mind a stereotype formed by watching too much TV and reading too many cyberpunk novels. But then the Communications Decency Act landed, and I read a Wired feature on Eldred v. Ashcroft and the lawyer leading the petitioner’s team: Lawrence Lessig. I read about two worlds of code— the one running inside processors and the other enacted in legislatures, enmeshed in the social order—and the need to preserve our rights in both fronts. I saw through the stereotype and found lawyers I could like and respect. Eventually, I wanted to become just like them—so I went through all the trouble of getting into law school. Even then, I’d joke that therein starts my slippery slope into the Dark Side of The Force.

Thankfully, I’ve yet to be forced to cut my own path through the moral thicket that lies ahead. In class discussions, I’ve managed to put forward my positions. But discussions on morals are the equivalent of fire drills. Sure you can march straight now—but how do you know how you’ll act when the real thing kicks in?

Got a lawyer joke? How about good-lawyer stories? I promise to follow-up and trackback on your comments.