Why I Blog

Andrew Sullivan, the former New Republic editor-turned blogger, once wrote an essay entitled "Why I Blog." I read it in The Atlantic Monthly a year or so ago.

Tonight, those three words - why I blog - popped into my head in a rather unexpected setting: deep in the prolix text of Hermann Hesse's strange novel The Glass Bead Game, first published in 1943.

The protagonist, Joseph Knecht, who has risen to be the head of a quasi-monastic order of cultural elites, is concerned about the tendency of many in the order to avoid engagement with the messy, conflict-prone realities of history. He offers the following statement as a counterweight to those who would retreat from the world in order to keep themselves pure.

"No noble and exalted life exists without knowledge of devils and demons, and without continual struggle against them."

Plenty of devils and demons have populated the pages of this blog during its 21-month existence. And they will likely continue to do so. Just today, I heard tell of a 2-year-old toddler killed by an 11-year-old babysitter in Georgia; a woman whose intelligence bordered on mental retardation executed in Virginia; documented cases of prosecutorial misconduct in Iowa; and on down the line.

Angels and demons was a Dan Brown novel - a voyeuristic fantasy. The devils and demons above are all too real, and they are only the tip of the iceberg in a world crying out in pain.

My struggle against such demons is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. I'm not a police officer, a corrections officer, a probation officer, or any of the other first-line reponders. I'm merely a commentator. But I strive, in my own way, to reorient the intellectual structure of the debate in America about what criminal justice policies we should employ.

More specifically, I aim to make not solely a religious case, but also a practical one, for America to free itself from the ideological blinders that have warped our policies in recent years. Of course, this will not be easy. Yet one must try. To quote Spinoza, beautiful things are as difficult as they are rare.

Funding the Justice System

My Minnesota attorney license fee just went up to help pay for the court system. For months, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty — he of the “no new taxes" pledge but a thousand by-any-other-name fees — had been trying to cut the budget for an already-strapped court system. By all accounts, he initially wanted to do it by as much as ten percent.

The plot thickened, however, when the former law partner he had appointed as chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court strenuously opposed the proposed cuts. The battle was fully joined when the heavily Democratic legislature also opposed the governor. The result was a hard-fought donnybrook of a type surely not envisioned by Montesquieu and other Enlightenment thinkers when they speculated about the supposed advantages of separation of powers among equal branches of government.

After much gamesmanship and give and take about who would “budge on the budget,” on May 18 the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a compromise court funding plan as part of an omnibus public safety appropriations bill. Under the deal, the courts will take “only” a one percent overall funding hit, as long as they increase numerous filing fees and tack a new public defender fee on attorney licenses.

Politics is of course the art of the possible, and avoiding more drastic cuts is a relief, given the governor’s stance. But as the president of the state bar put it, it’s not as if happy days are here again. Indeed, one might well ask, as the chief state public defender did, shouldn’t the justice system be funded out of general revenue rather than users’ fees and surcharges on attorneys? It seems to undercut the ideal of equal justice when the system itself is not funded equally by all.

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,” Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said in a speech in 1904. But that was long before Grover Norquist and the self-styled Taxpayers’ League. A century later, we struggle mightily to maintain what we once took for granted.