Eureka (2)

Daisy Buchanan, by Nicki Greenberg.

Tom Junod culminates his extraordinary and passionate series of Esquire essays on the Lethal Presidency with a proposed debate question that won't get asked and if it were wouldn't get answered tonight:

"President Obama, just over a year ago an American drone killed a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Despite your personal involvement in America's targeted killing programs, you have never acknowledged nor addressed the circumstances of his death. How do you justify such secrecy under the United States Constitution and do you, Governor Romney, also believe that such secrecy is justified?"

I have a quibble with it that may be more than a quibble (full disclosure: it's related to my desire to feel happy when I vote for Obama next week, which I don't hide): Why is it that the crime here, or whatever it is, is assumed to be worse, constitutionally, when the bomb lands on a US citizen than otherwise? I mean, I understand why it makes us sick that the kid was only 16 when he was murdered, but why does it matter that he was an American? Aren't the Pakistani and Afghan and Yemeni kids murdered too? Do only Americans have rights under the US Constitution?

Because there's a certain feeling running around that this is the case: that it's OK to deny foreigners, or at least undocumented foreigners, medical care or schooling or driver's licenses, for example. In an Arizona-type law, the Fourth Amendment is suspended for anybody even suspected of being undocumented (being undocumented isn't a crime, so there isn't any probable cause for searching), and I think the Fifth as well: if a cop says, "Show me your papers," you can't very well reply that your lawyer says you don't have to. And US citizens now actually have, by edict of the Supreme Court, habeas corpus rights that noncitizens don't.

Legally, that's the way the cookie crumbles, but morally I think it is objectionable, and it seems like a poor interpretation of the Constitution as well. It trivializes these rights that we're all so proud of to say that they are in fact club privileges, restricted to those humans in possession of a certain piece of paper, whether it's Yaser Hamdi, who the government was forced to release from Guantánamo (saving face, they made him renounce his citizenship and sent him to his parents' homeland of Saudi Arabia) or Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, who was droned to death in spite of his passport. To me, the passport doesn't mean a fucking thing next to the fact that he was just sixteen and a thing swept out from nowhere, from out of the sky, to kill him.

By the same token, however, it lets Obama to a degree off the hook. Because the Greenwaldish, legalist case against Obama ("He violated the Constitution!") hinges on the passport; if the passport doesn't matter, then killing Abdulrahman is just careless, it's what commanders-in-chief do—

they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made

—and it's the way of the world. Not that that's ever acceptable, but à la guerre comme à la guerre, we can live (and die) with it. Are you going to not vote for Roosevelt in 1944, or Lincoln in 1864? They were responsible for terrible things, things that bring shame on the entire human race. And of course we would vote for them—they're as good as it gets. And Obama the Lethal President is good enough in just that way and maybe a good bit better, anxious to make himself less and less careless, very earnest about reducing "collateral damage", i.e. careless murder, and working on it (though apparently unable to do so in Pakistan, where it's the CIA's drone force and not his).

Careless Maria. Illustration by Justin H. Howard, ca. 1870.

Maria was a careless child,
And grieved her friends by this:
Where’er she went,
Her clothes were rent,
Her hat and bonnet spoiled,
A careless little miss.

Her gloves and mits were often lost,
Her tippet sadly soiled;
You might have seen
Where she had been,
For toys all round were tossed,
O what a careless child.

One day her uncle bought a toy,
That round and round would twirl,
But when he found
The littered ground,
He said, I don’t tee-totums buy
For such a careless girl.