And the {Scape}Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited.” (Leviticus 16:22)

Was Salem 1659 an aberration? How badly did the red scare harm our nation’s security? George Clooney has produced a spectacular allegory that explains why citizens must forever be vigilant if they want to live free, and that the  press must have backbone.

Clooney shows, as Miller showed previously in “The Crucible,” that in desperate times, citizens are depressingly predictable, and burn for short cuts and scapegoats. Mobs lynch scapegoats, or burn them at stakes, or torture them, intern them in camps, or simply blacklist them. Good people look the other way, rationalizing  desperate times make due process impossible. But when are times not desperate?

The press fears the mob, not wanting to be accused of obstructing, or being liberal, or biased in another way, or unpopular, or to lose subscriptions or advertisers. No press wants to be called a scapegoat lover, witch lover, commie lover, etc. This is how national tragedies occur. And when the press repeatedly forgets how it failed during a prior emergency, the cycle worsens.

“Good Night, And Good Luck,” brilliantly shows Edward R. Morrow’s fight against McCarthy. America faced the very real threat of the cold war and the nuclear arms race. However, unscrupulous McCarthy escalated risk, exploited fear, with highly sophisticated psychologic scapegoating.

The scapegoat originates in Leviticus 16.  The community projected its troubles ritually on a sacrificial goat that was driven off into the wilderness on Yom Kippur Day of Atonement. Psychologically, the community may have felt better, but blaming the scapegoat was a bit of witch doctoring that only prevented real solutions from being found.

McCarthy gained power by falsely accusing good men of being Communists. This prevented confrontation of real threats, and ultimately made a mockery of the entire problem. The scapegoating was counterproductive.

Murrow, with unflinching integrity, faced down McCarthy, his network, and his sponsors. Can anyone imagine that Murrow would not have outed the faulty intelligence that preceded the current war? Murrow, a decorated war correspondent, would never have allowed violations of the Geneva Convention.

Puritans of Salem, 1659 were every bit as terrified of witches as we are today of our adversaries. The population demanded due process be suspended.

However, if one is going to try and decide who is a good witch and who is a bad witch, one needs a definition of what a witch is. The same with the red scare. Being a card carrying-communist meant as little then as carrying an ACLU card now.

Ironically, the whole concept of law originated in of all places Iraq. Babylonian king Hammurabi in 1780 BC. He came up with the bedrock principle of the rule of law that the accused must always face his accuser. The Hammurabi law was an alternative to scapegoating. Abraham, who lived in Babylon at the time of Harmmurabi, is believed to have introduced these laws into Hebrew custom.

Hammurabi was clear. There must be due process. However, age after age somehow authority forgets this bedrock, we end up with an Inquisition, a crusade, a gulag, a concentration camp, a red scare or a witch trial.

Some claim a trade off between due process and national security is inevitable. They are dead wrong. Lack of due process always makes a society less safe. Without due process, the innocent will be locked up and the criminals will go free. To get tough on crime, we must be tough on due process. That way, we know that the truly guilty are punished. To get tough on terror, we must have scrupulous due process, and we must have probing intelligence that spares no one.

    Warning:  spoiler alert. If you have not seen Doubt, do not read further. The film contains a major plot twist, which is discussed in this Op- Ed.

The best (and last) line of the Pulitzer-prize winning play (turned Blockbuster film) Doubt exposes the moral squeeze on its main character Sister Aloysius. In a final and complete reversal of roles, the starch-collar, old school, Catholic nun reveals to her innocent protégé Sister James that she, the hard line absolutist, now has “doubts.”

What! Sister Aloysius, the ruler wielding, never-had-a-doubt-in-my-life dogmatic, now a doubting Thomas? To catch a pedophile, Aloysius told a lie. True Catholic dogma (or Kantian dogma, etc) would never allow such a lie, even to defeat evil. In the service of God, the nun finds herself forced into Machiavellian relativism. Does the end really justify the means?

Sr. Aloysius doubt encapsulates the last century of humanity’s doubt: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”, “What but design of darkness to appall?-If design govern in a thing so small.”

The nun abandons absolutism, violating her vow of obedience to the Church to catch the pedophile. When the hierarchy fails to act, she becomes prosecutor, judge and jury, stepping onto the slippery slope of moral relativism. If even Sister Aloysius cannot defend moral absolutes, can anyone? Then, how will we recognize evil? Can we stop evil without absolutes?

Seemingly, this film examines crisis in the Catholic Church. In reality, it speaks to the crisis in our world.

Doubt is a Rorschach test in the culture wars. What can we know, and when can we know it? Matthew Arnold wrote that faith is gone, and doubt now reigns supreme. Faith once girdled the earth like a sea, and “Sophocles long ago . . . Heard it on the Ægæan” But now “Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath”

Are there any boundaries? Aloysius “case” against the pedophile is mainly on intuition. Her “evidence” is more flimsy than the evidence of WMDs in Iraq. She may have gotten the right result, but if so, she was lucky.

History is filled with evildoers acting from fierce conviction:  Mullahs, witch-hunters, Inquisitors and suicide-bombers. More often than not, they all act from the conviction that they are protecting children. Aloysius states, “In the service of God, sometimes one must take a step away from God.” Aloysius even has the hubris to act before she knows evil has been done. She launches a pre-emptive Jihad based only on suspicion. Such Jihads will be wrong more often than they are right.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, we are all part of ignorant armies, clashing by night.  In the absence of true moral authority, must individuals take matters into their own hands? How do we avoid creating a world of vigilantes, if we apply the principle of Universality? There is no difference in using a lie to stop evil than using a lie to go to war.

When the leaders of moral standards break these standards, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed.

The worst villains do not appear. If the bishops had done their job and held evil accountable, it would not have fallen to Sr. Aloysius to launch her one-woman campaign.

Hell’s best-kept secret is that we create it for ourselves. Aloysius connived, threatened, and lied to get the pedophile removed from her parish, only to see him promoted. It is nothing but a Dantean existential nightmare.

Job sat surrounded by three friend, wondering why God allows evil. The relativistic devil serves for the amusement of God himself. Job’s story contradicts the rest of the Bible, a kind of minority report.

The author of Doubt is doubtless of the company of the devil. Clearly, the author relishes doubt, declaring doubt a part of the “bond” that links all huto man beings. The wisest men in history were those who knew they knew nothing. Universal doubt may have seemed like death to Matthew Arnold and Yeats, yet Socrates and Shakespeare reveled in doubt. The skeptics thought they had the upper hand, at least until Hitler. Then it became clear that relativists would not keep us safe from evil.

One wonders: are the doubters or the faithful more likely to inherit the earth? Possibly, we need both to make the world run.

Dostoevsky believed that punishment was essential to redemption of the human soul. Aloysius knows she is guilty of lying and breaking vows, but is not caught and not punished. Instead, she lives in frozen silence, without that most dear to her, her faith.

Aloysius no longer dwells in a world of precision and grandeur of divine justice. Now, she is in the relativistic company of Nietzsche, Kafka, Orwell and worse. Hamlet, and Aloysius lived in worlds “rotten,” full of secrecy, topsy-turvy and despair that they were born to set things aright. To be or not to be? It’s a legitimate question when you awake in a dark wood of doubt.

In the film’s final ironic twist, the seemingly simple-minded innocent protégé Sister James turns out to have the only durable faith of the characters. Sister James had wished for the certainty and ram-rod faith of Sister Aloysius.  But appearance is opposite of reality. It is left to James to comfort Aloysius on a frozen bench, in the winter of Sister Aloysius’s doubt and despair.

Is it easier to believe in the historical divinity of Mary Magdalene than the historical Jesus Christ? Does it matter?

After all, Tom Hanks says “the only thing that really matters is what you believe yourself.” The film’s heroine thinks for a minute, considers whether she might be Christ’s sole living descendant, puts her foot in the water, then realizes, no, she can’t walk on water. Drat, history got in the way.

History is more than bunk. Myth is important, but not all myths can be equally true. Truth, to be true, must be verifiable, or at least, it must be, in the phrase of Karl Popper, falsifiable.

Religious claims are indisputably most difficult. But two completely different sorts of religious truths exist: first, historical claims, and second, value claims. We cannot prove values, which are ultimately a matter of faith.

But historical claims can be verified or falsified. “Did King Solomon build a temple?” or “Did Mohammed raise an army?” or “Does the earth go around the sun?

Apologetics (both Christian and non-Christian) have wrestled with the search for a historical Christ for centuries. C.S. Lewis described in “Mere Christianity” what he called “the trilemma”: “Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. It follows that he was either a liar, a madman, or the Son of God.”

Bertrand Russell examined the trilemma and decided he was an atheist. Pascal considered roughly the trilemma and decided to wager to believe. But all realized that the historical existence of a divine Christ is historical claim that is either true or false.

But Dan Brown seems to put more credence in the divinity of Mary Magdalene than in the divinity of Christ.

What kind of paradox is this? Who would ever have heard of Magdalene if she had not been the follower of Christ?

More to the point, if Magdalene was a goddess, and Christ was not god, how could Magdalene find that Christ had left his tomb, and why would she proclaim he had risen? Was the goddess Magdalene defrauding humanity? Was she starting a false religion? Brown is asking us to believe and not to believe at the same time.

Some of my Christian friends have told me the Da Vinci code has strengthened their religious faith. What! The Da Vinci code postulates Christians have worshipped the wrong deity for 2,000 years. Essentially, Brown is claiming that traditional Christianity is a fraud, roughly equivalent to a form of devil worship.

You can understand how this has some people’s blood boiling. After all, a simple cartoon of another religious figure almost started a war recently. So, both the religious and non-religious may have a stake in the controversy.

The end of King Arthur’s grail quest, and all other grail quests from Indiana Jones to T.S. Eliot was the womb of Magdalene? Tosh.

It should be clear to atheists, Christians, and every one else that if Magdalene were a goddess, she would not have been  so easily fooled. The goddess could not allow Christians to persecute her true following. Why would a goddess reveal herself only to a small Priory of Sion? Shouldn’t salvation be for everyone, not just a few Gnostics?

Even conspiracy theorists ought to be suspicious of this conspiracy.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Brown’s book. The places, the paintings, the ideas are magnificent and fascinating. Brown loves to stir up a hornet’s nest, and I love hornet’s nests. I love the debate and the dispute..

But Brown should have also paid attention to the fundamentals of logic. There is such a thing as verifiable or falsifiable truth.

Yes, if a pointy-eared Vulcan had appeared, he would declare, “Dan Brown is not logical!”

Dante believed in both faith and reason. Dante declared true facts can never contradict true faith. Tragically, false faith has distorted the search for truth.
Reasonable people can belong to the spectrum of religions. However, the basis of the Christian religion is based in both faith and fact. Some of those facts can be verified or falsified.

Dostoevsky felt that true faith brought true human freedom. However, he also feared that distorted religion often led to Big Brother-like Grand Inquisitors. Gandhi saw the truth in all religions, honored his Hindu heritage, but at the same time rejected the atrocity of the Hindu caste system.

All religions now declare “Never forget.” People who declare that history is bunk would doom the world to repeat unspeakable atrocities.

Da Vinci code is a wonderful piece of fiction. But it is time for the billions of readers and devotees of the book and movie to understand the self-contradiction.

Surely, if we cannot prove the historical existence of Christ, we cannot prove the historical existence of Magdalene, nor of their offspring, nor of the Merovingian dynasty or any of the rest of it..

The true meaning of  Mona Lisa’s smile may be that things cannot be true and not true at the same time.

Perhaps logic is the ultimate Holy Grail for humankind.

69% of Americans in a 2004 Harris poll supported the death penalty. However, 0% would support the death penalty for the innocent accused.

Why then is the death penalty a hot-button in the culture wars? No one is deterred by the execution of innocents. Both conservatives and liberals must abhor the unbridled power of Big Brother to execute the innocent.

Every American needs to see the film “After Innocence,” depicting seven men found guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. They lived for years and decades on death row, could have been executed, but instead were found completely innocent.

Most wrongly convicted are minority and poor, but not all. Nick Yarris spent 23 years behind bars, some in brutal solitary confinement, forbidden even to speak, and on death row, for a murder he did not commit. DNA testing proved his innocence. Upon his release, he was given no money, no training, no therapy. And no apology.

Even a policeman and an Army sergeant can be wrongly convicted by brothers in blue. Scott Hornoff, a white former Rhode Island policeman, served 6 ½ years for murder and was freed only after the real killer confessed.

More than 175 wrongly convicted persons have been set free since 1992. A landmark Department of Justice study estimates a 5% failure rate in the U.S. justice system, suggesting as many as 100,000 falsely convicted prisoners. Other reports place the estimate as high as 10%.

Most shocking, innocents remain in prison for additional years due to mindless system brutality, even after iron-clad DNA exoneration. Prosecutors, embarrassed by exonerations, actually declare on film that “the finality of the system,” “closure for the victims” and “expediency” is more important than the actual guilt or innocence of the convicted.

Many prisoners are filmed counseled by psychologists to accept their guilt and move on. The goal of prison officials is to break the prisoners’ spirit. Shades of the “re-education room 101” where Winston Smith famously learned to “love Big Brother” in Orwell’s “1984.”

Growing up, we believed America’s justice was the envy of the entire world. Can we credibly preach human rights and democracy while torture is part of not just our system in Guantanamo, but also in New York? Can faulty middle east intelligence surprise us when we cannot discover (let alone correct) the errors of our own police departments?

To paraphrase George Bailey, not “every heel” (or every evil-doer) is overseas working with the enemy.

“The Exonerated,” a predecessor to “After Innocence,” has already shown the powerful possibilities of art based on fact bringing social justice.  Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan Ryan saw a special performance in Dec. 2002, and was so moved that he commuted the sentences of 171 inmates on death row.

New balance is needed in our popular culture. Americans love “lock ‘em up, throw away the key, make my day, Hasta la vista,” films. But can we handle the truth? Should we presume people are “scumbags” before being proved innocent? Can we forgive the brutal police of NYPD Blue because they appear to get results? In reality, our constitution and due process work better than short cuts. Due process keeps citizens safer, as well as protect rights.

Years ago, popular culture icon Perry Mason freed the innocent. “The Fugitive” ran from the awesome power of the state to find the true killer.

When Court TV shows heroes cutting corners, Americans believe justice in the end is done. But how would we feel about a cop threatening “make my day” to an innocent? Or NYPD Blue’s Sipowicz  “putting a beating”  to torture an innocent to confess falsely?

Could any innocent look down the barrel of Dirty Harry’s 44 Magnum without falsely confessing?

Was Andy Dufresne from the “Shawshank Redemption” pure fantasy? Was the Jim Crowe-wrongly convicted Tom Robinson from “To Kill a Mockingbird” ancient history?

What is rare is the courage of the real-life Andy Dufresnes. The exonerated are really fighting for the rest of us. No one can feel safe in a society that convicts innocents. For every person wrongly convicted, an actual criminal goes free to terrorize other citizens. Tony Soprano remains free while Dufresnes is framed. Enron criminals manufacture the California energy crisis and remain jail free while Tom Robinson hangs himself. Famed criminal justice reformer Frank Serpico should have been made NYPD chief instead of being exiled.

No one wants to fear the knock on the door, “After Innocence,” shows the exonerated are a unique resource in improving our system to make prosecutions more just and our society more safe.

The time has come not just for a moratorium on capital punishment, but also for a moratorium on this corner of the culture war.  Until we can be sure that the system is error-free, both conservatives and liberals must agree that the innocent have a right to life, and must not be put to death.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/5th-Annual-Whistleblower-C-by-James-Murtagh-110831-261.html

Corporate crime films- from Silkwood, to Serpico, the Insider, and SiCKO- focus on the victims, and underdogs overcoming corruption. They are David versus Goliath films. But whoever tells the inside story of the Goliaths?

Surely, Goliath didn’t think of himself as a monster. He saw himself as a tragic soldier, serving his own god, and his family, unfairly defeated by a tiny man with a slingshot. What makes the giant “scurvy spiders” of industry tick? How do good people go bad and sink to corporate crime? In George Clooney’s new film, Michael Clayton we see a giant company’s lawyers close up under siege.

In an inverse of Erin Brockovich, U/North, the film’s corporate Goliath, is caught red-handed in multi-billion dollar environmental catastrophe, killing hundreds of persons. As events spin out of control, lawyers and officers of U/North sweat bullets, and unblinkingly, this film shows the people behind the disaster. They are just people, with mortgages and families, and must overcome their circumstances to rise above the evil they have slipped into.

“I am Shiva, God of Death,” declares a key defense lawyer as he cracks under the stress and guilt, going manic. So, U/North calls in groups of fixers; some semi-legitimate, such as Michael Clayton; but other a strictly black ops paramilitary team. Every move, every phone call, is being monitored by the black ops team that will do whatever it takes. Clayton declares he is a janitor, and that “The truth can be adjusted,” updating Orwell’s doublethink, the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously. Clayton apparently believed at the film’s beginning that “Ignorance is Bliss,” and “Freedom is Slavery.”

“Will someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Most wrenching and fascinating is the U/North top legal ace cryptically ordering the death of the manic lawyer-turned-whistleblower. But the silk-stocking legal ace can’t bring herself to say the actual words needed to order the killing. Through her desperation, she manages to convey that she wants the killers to “proceed.”

The U/North counsel never has a moment of peace after. Like a corporate Lady MacBeth, she is never able to wash off the damned spot. The murder leads to more murder attempts, and events spiral out of control until the end. Her moment of redemption is impossible, it appears, until she is finally caught.

The suffering of tyrants has been the subject of great tragedy from Sophocles to Shakespeare. How do corporate tyrants live with their guilty consciences? In this film, guilt leads one lawyer to a madness that was greater than the truth. Guilt leads other lawyers to murder and cover-up. Guilt led Michael Clayton initially to complicity, to gambling, to other vice, but finally led him to do the right thing and expose the corporate culture of cover-up and murder.

“Corruption is why we win” declared a character in George Clooney’s related film, Syriana. Some officers relish in wrongdoing. Others simply accept the banality of evil as a fact of corporate life. Most characters just appear to slip into it. Few want to accept any responsibility.

Corporate legal aces are the cream of our society. Top lawyers have the finest educations, finest backgrounds, and finest things that can be had in life. What leads to their downfall? What leads some to become Tom Hagen and some to be Matlock? Why did Goliath become Goliath? We need our best and brightest to work to end global warming instead of working for Enron. We need our best reporters to live up to the ideals of Edward R. Murrow, as portrayed in Clooney’s Good Night, Good Luck. We must reject double think.

Indeed, corporations, not government, may be Big Brother. Beyond dispute, lawyers have been at the center of the great scandals and cover-ups of our times. Understanding the descent of great legal minds into morass is one of our society’s great tasks.

Shiva, the ancient double-faced Hindu deity, is both destroyer and life-giver, is a perfect symbol of a the two sides of corporate crime.

A funny thing besets Harry Potter on the way to Hogwarts this year. He not only has to battle evil. He has to battle the banality of evil. More importantly, he introduces his viewers to a whole new realm of ideas.

Orwell is the real unseen ghost of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”. Hogwarts becomes ruled by, a mindless 1984-like bureaucracy, where Ignorance is Bliss, Slavery is the Freedom, and War is Peace. A cold war descends, graying newly bleak walls with Stalinist-type propaganda. The news media becomes a mouthpiece for the corrupt establishment, creating perfect soil for the real evil, Lord Voldemort, to prepare a blitzkrieg. Sure, all wizards and witches are equal, but some are more equal.

The delusional, self-righteous McCarthyite leader of the Ministry of Magic ignores facts, apparently believing he is divinely inspired. Sound familiar? No doubt, future wizards and witches will write term papers on why England slept as the storm gathered.

Even witches conduct witch trials, it appears. Harry has to appear before a rigged kangaroo court that gives him less due process than Salem gave witches. Harry is exonerated at the last minute, but it is clear the witches and wizards persecute their own much more effectively than normal humans (muggles).

The hidebound in-fighting Kafkaesque establishment preserves its own petty perks and even if they have to torture and or attempt murder students. They ignore the inconvenient truths their world faces. They are, to paraphrase Al Gore and Winston Churchill, passing from an era of procrastination to a time of consequences.

Take the magic out of learning and magic? Only J.K. Rowling could turn such a fiendish feat. Rowling is the genius who brought children to delight in reading, and to re-envision school as a sanctuary, where well scrubbed kids might delight in their old-school ties and don’s gowns. But, in an incredible turn, everything is flipped, nothing can be taken at face value, and the children learn more important lessons, including: freedom isn’t fee.

Even allies lie to you, possibly to protect you, possibly for a greater good, or because are being themselves used, or possibly for darker reason. Harry enjoys his first kiss, but moments later the girl betrays him Mata Hari-like to the Gestapo-like headmistress. But the girl had been forced to betray him with truth potion. Was the truth potion given by a man trying to help or hurt Harry?

Harry Potter studies more spycraft that witchcraft. The film has the feel of John le Carré, with double and triple agents aching to come in from the cold, some after decades of apparent deep undercover work. True allegiances are deeply hidden. Where lays the ultimate allegiance of Severus Snape? Is Dumbledore a master strategist who could even outwit George Smiley? Harry-and we- do not know who is the puppet and who is the puppetmaster. The final installment of the series is one of the most anticipated in the history of the written word.

Characters who commit atrocities are not necessarily evil. Seemingly bad acts may be a ruse to infiltrate cells of much worst baddies bent on Hogwarts destruction..A good man go to the gulag (Azkaban) just to burrow his way into the graces of a terrorist cell. Something slouches toward Hogwarts waiting to be born, and the conflicted Harry rues that ever he was born to set things right.

Harry Potter meets the bad, the good, and the ugly, encountering philosophies of Hegel, Kant, John Stuart Mills, Nietsche, De Cartes, and Feminism, as he explores his Brave New World. Mortality, and the idea of fates worse than death, are explored in great depth. “I think, therefore I can do something to improve my world.” Harry at his best ask, so why should the change in the world not start with me?

This is a new delightfully complex Potter. Harry Potter helped children worldwide to love reading. Now, ever so quietly, and insidiously, Rowling weaves in advanced philosophy, human freedom, religion, and ethics. Young viewers sop up new lessons possibly without realizing. Even better, they are discussing and debating these ideas with their friends, in a whole new domino effect. In short, Rowling may kindle a rebirth in critical thinking, just as she kindled her original boom in reading.

Rowling’s spell over young readers delivers her most valuable message: “Distrust authority- all authority.”

As Harry Potter himself says:

“Let the rebellion begin.”