CSotD: Undotted i’s, uncrossed t’s, unthinking heirs
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One of the rules around here is that an editorial cartoon is "live" until the artist publishes the next one, and that's good, because I've been pondering this Matt Bors cartoon for a couple of days.
He often makes me think, because, while there are cartoonists with whom I almost always agree and some with whom I almost always disagree, Bors and I are on the same overall philosophical track but have specific issues upon which we differ strongly.
This one had me stumped for a couple of days, and I'm not sure that's a good thing with a cartoon, which, after all, operates in a sort of haiku/bumper sticker/mayfly universe. Theoretically, it should produce either "wham!" or "meh" immediately, because the normal exposure is brief and ephemeral.
That is, it may be memorable, but even a classic-to-be needs to make its initial, immediate impact before the page is turned, because yesterday's web page is as dead and gone as yesterday's newspaper.
The fact that I kept wrestling with this one indicates that it didn't have that instantaneous impact, but also that it didn't fail to score a hit. I think the problem was that I was concentrating on the trees while Matt had drawn a forest.
It can be a tangled path from the general to the specific.
First Amendment and Second Amendment purists are generally at odds with each other, and in particular just for the reason Bors suggests: The Founders could not have anticipated every technological change that would come before the nation, including things like cameras and automatic weapons, and they should not have had to, yet you rarely if ever see anyone take a consistent stand on that basic, overarching issue.
The people who want limits on semi-automatic weapons are rarely the same ones who want limits on TV or the Internet. Each camp, it seems, goes "strict constructionist" on one amendment and "living-document" on the other.
Specifically, in the upskirts case, the court ruled that the law did not prohibit surreptitious photographs of underwear but specified nudity, and ruled reluctantly for the defendant, suggesting that lawmakers amend the statute, which they did.
Which I find interesting because it stretches the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy" more than the original law did, taking it from the home to the streets.
That is, anyone who goes to a nude beach has no reasonable expectation of privacy, but someone undressing in their own bedroom does. Forgetting to pull down the shades may be seen as similar to leaving your wallet on your car seat and failing to lock the door: Negligent, but not exculpatory for the person who takes advantage of your error.
Wearing clothes that cover certain parts of your body is a declaration of some expectation of privacy, even in public, which seems reasonable.
Which brings us to Matt's second panel and the issue of "stand your ground," because, if this person feels assaulted by someone taking a surreptitious photograph, does that open the door for that person to feel threatened by someone staring at him in what he perceives to be a hostile manner?
And then Matt's Founding Father raises the whole Fourth Amendment issue, which can also be argued on the level of "reasonable expectations," since, in terms of when a search warrant is required, the courts would clearly draw a distinction between pot plants in your cellar and a row of the stuff planted in your front yard.
My own take on electronic surveillance — aside from my pragmatic dismissal of it as futile due to the resulting mass — is that phone calls are made to a specific person and that even emails to a group assume a specific audience.
The fact that it's possible for someone else to access them is analogous to the issue of the woman who fails to draw her blinds: It may be a sign of naivete or negligence, but it doesn't excuse the person who exploits the vulnerability.
Now, if arguing those specific issues were the cartoon's only point, it would be petty.
But what I take away from it is a riposte both to various interpretations of the Bill of Rights by the courts and to the current spate of whining from the anarchist right in the form of complaints about laws that are longer and more detailed than the Constitution: "Such-and-such a law is X-number of words, but the Constitution is only Y-number of words."
Which I think is a niche argument specially crafted for people who can count but can't read.
The Bill of Rights is a statement of general principles. It is up to an intelligent society to understand and reflect those principles in the laws it frames, and to an intelligent court to interpret those laws along the general principles the Founders intended, not in terms of 18th century technology and mores, but in terms of overall political theory and philosophy.
Which means that we may, for the moment, be concerned with a man who contorts himself on the subway in such a way that he is able to violate a woman's reasonable expectation of privacy.
But we should be more concerned with those who go through even more grotesque contortions when it comes to intepretating the basic standards under which the nation was founded.
And, even though the Founders assumed a relatively literate and upscale electorate, I'm pretty sure they knew — in the wake of the Articles of Confederation debacle — that even that theoretically responsible demographic had its shortcomings.
Or, as the punchline puts it, "Good luck out there."
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