Scarborough, North York, Missisauga, Etobicoke. You won't find these places on an old map of Ontario; they are recent developments, centerless and placeless. My AAA road atlas is undecided on whether they are cities with identifiable populations. For a time they were regarded as such by official list-makers, but now I am told they have been mercifully absorbed into the Toronto they surround. "We're all Torontoans now," said the friendly old man at the hot-dog stand. "It saves us money -- all one police force and fire department." He didn't add "school system," though no doubt those have been melted and fused together too. Apparently the loss of local governance was nothing to mourn.
Not that there are many locales to be governed. My mind turns to that loss as I consider the retirement of Justice O'Connor, one of the nine archons of our archonate. We were once a great people (with great flaws, unquestionably), in love with liberty. We were political, in the old sense of that word: that is, we believed that most matters were to be taken care of by the people who scratched together their own community -- their polis. If that meant elbow-rubbing and name-calling and even brawling over an easement or a statue in the park or a textbook in the school, that was all right with us. We were under no illusion that fights would always be fair. You win a few, and you lose a few; and in any case, you have to live with your opponents down the street. But it was free.
It is wrong, I think, to say that every little issue in our common life has been politicized. The fact is, every little issue has been removed from the legitimate realm of the community, the polis, and has been elevated to the status of something to be decided from on high. This withering of a common, local civic life has been going on for quite some time, but the Supreme Court has assisted in the destruction, and Justice O'Connor has played a large role in that assistance. The Court seems to be animated by a fear of the political: a fear that people will be arguing somewhere, their tempers hot, and coming to conclusions that some among them may abhor. So the Court steps in to help. You can have men coming together to drink or watch sports, or even for sexual congress, but not for public affairs -- so the civic-minded Rotary and Jaycees and Kiwanis had to admit women; and thus, as my friend David Pence mordantly remarks, the Court declared unconstitutional the very sort of group that wrote the Constitution in the first place! You can protest at an abortion clinic, but only if you stay fifty feet away, or sixty feet, or something else utterly arbitrary. You can give money to your favorite political candidate, but only before a certain deadline. You can post the Ten Commandments on the wall of the Congress, so long as you tacitly acknowledge that they don't mean anything. The Court then finds rationales for its decisions ex post facto: in the case of the Rotary Club, a constitutional provision was found to require that accommodations (hotels, restaurants, infirmaries) be open to all the public, and then the Rotary was declared to be in some clever fashion similar to a hotel, a restaurant, or an infirmary. And should folks grow testy about the decisions rendered, as in the matter of abortion, the Court in the person of Justice O'Connor will wag their wise fingers and advise us to eat our peas. It is as if a granny found two boys fighting in a schoolyard, enforced a mutually disappointing compromise, with little reason for it beyond her own predilection, and then scolded them, telling them to be quiet. Citizens must be seen and not heard.
But a fight that is deferred grows embittered, and you lose the chance to have it out with the opponent, and even to forge those fine friendships and cross-alliances that often result from a good fight. The de-politicization of America has stamped out a lot of local fights, to transfer them to the national stage, where they have assumed the ferocity of a war. It is dismaying to think that the President has been demoted, in part, to the status of an Italian premier, whose main function is to choose the real head of state: in our case, the archons who will direct every niggling detail of our social lives. Experts on sex they are, too. They offer us not peace, but anaesthesis.
Someday, when people feel again that hunger for freedom and not childish license, and when they learn once more that reasoned argument is not the same as the mercurial dallying with minutiae; and when they see that the most important province of the political does not even rise to the level of a law, but concerns the customs and celebrations and mutual expectations of a community, a polis; in that day of politics and not tyrannics, we will have a lot to answer for. History will be severe with Justice O'Connor.
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