You have heard the phrase. It is, from a messaging perspective, a pretty good one. It is brief, succinct, and can mean just about anything you would like it to mean, with the last line having a word that rhymes with “sea,” since “Ocean” wouldn’t work. We are a little disorganized, since that is not exactly what we promised to write about, which was a sum of the SCOTUS decisions that closed out this year’s Decision Season. It is all not about the decisions, which were interesting, but more related to the messaging about them which are intended to cause reactions quite disassociated from the ostensible issue.

It is like the slogan being used to accuse people in a coastal state of genocide at the moment. We make no assertions about why it is being said, since there are some strong opinions held about it we don’t claim to understand. For example, If you said the body of flowing water was called the “Mississippi,” and the ocean into which it eventually deposits the moisture was called the “Atlantic,” or “Pacific,” you could make a strong case about other things having absolutely no bearing on either bodies of water. Or the various lands between them. You know what we could say of the east and west of that whole thing.

So, you can see why Splash was sitting at the picnic table with two full pages about the complexities of a matter regarding whether a Chief Executive can be held personally liable for decisions made while in office- or at least some of the official ones- and why that is emotional, and the nature of Lawfare that harnesses the complexities of the legal system to make it a weapon useful for partisan purposes to change the law itself without much external discussion. Saves time, when you are convinced you are correct.

That naturally led to a discussion of the nature of Free Speech, what constitutes the Public Square, and the impact of a new technology in the Internet age that actually provides access to information making the old small space in front of the vilage market into a pervasive domain that stretches…well, “from the river, whichever one, to whatever sea.”

We will try to be free in discussion about it. The fight, of course, is not about freedom, per se. It is rather about the ability of some people to change “disagreement” into “criminal behavior.” That is an efficient use of power.

We are generally in favor of untrammeled freedom. We enjoy ours, and would prefer not to see it diminished. We support reasonable disagreement on all sorts of things, short of blows. We also understand blows are sometimes necessary, even though the consequences can be undesirable. We are generally opposed to the imposition of restrictions on saying what we think, but even more opposed to the proliferation of “approved” streams of information. Like the rivers and seas we are not sure which ones we are talking about.

So, we think what the Court Decision affecting one of the Presidential candidates was actually not about official acts but rather about attempting to hinder his campaign, right or wrong. That in turn seems to have little to do with the actual case, but about a direction, right or wrong, river or sea. And depending on which one we are talking about. The case seemed a little like an attempt to influence an election in progress rather than a Constitutional issue about personal responsibility for official acts, though that is one of the unintended consequences we have not spent much time discussing.

For the record, we are opposed to our own government participating in the process of selecting who runs it. Theoretically, that is reserved to “We the People,” a phrase we have been hearing a lot this Holiday week. We like the way we were taught to understand it a while back when the definitions of things were not under constant change by people we haven’t met.

There is much more to talk about, of course, and Splash is waving around a page or two on each of the other seven or eight major decisions that affect us all. We don’t have time for that this morning, and can argue about it in the Public Square the rest of the day. The question is if we can figure out which square it is, and what road to take to get to it to have a reasonable discussion.

Which is maybe what this is all about, you know?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com