Something is seriously broken
Two items this morning should be clues to how around the bend and down the rabbit hole this country has traveled in recent years.
Brian Klaas (subscription req’d) posts about the lack of basic standards for elected officials. Looking at you, George Santos:
Much of the modern world has created what I call the broken pyramid of scrutiny. In principle, levels of scrutiny and accountability should increase as the potential to do catastrophic harm increases. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the more that you should be monitored to make sure that you’re not going to destroy the company, or bring down the government, from your perch at the top. The least powerful should face the least scrutiny; the most powerful the most oversight.
Instead, as I wrote in “Corruptible,” we do the opposite.
Santos would have been exposed as a fraud before being offered “any run-of-the-mill government job.” But not in Congress. Klass contrasts the training he had to go to volunteer as a tour guide at an English historical site:
In my spare time, I volunteer as a tour guide at a historic site in England. To be allowed to take tours, I had to spend six months learning about the site, pass two exams, spend hours clicking through a series of online training courses, and complete some checks regarding safeguarding.
And yet, there are literally zero requirements, zero checks, zero bits of required training for the US president, even though they are given control not of a tour group, but of enough nuclear weapons to kill all eight billion of us. (The same lack of requirements is true for members of Congress).
Put bluntly, there are more formal training and oversight requirements to become a volunteer tour guide than to become a member of Congress. Why do we accept that?
Companies monitor rank-and-file employees when they should be monitoring their executives.
One recent estimate by Eugene Soltes of Harvard suggests that white collar crime accounts for roughly $250 billion to $400 billion in losses or damages in the US each year, compared to $17 billion lost due to all property crime combined (burglaries, robberies, thefts, and arson). We’re watching the wrong people.
The system is upside down and inside out.
How about Americans’ fetish for carrying firearms?
Two days after a gunman killed 10 people at a Colorado grocery store, leaving many Americans on high alert, Rico Marley was arrested as he emerged from the bathroom at a Publix supermarket in Atlanta. He was wearing body armor and carrying six loaded weapons — four handguns in his jacket pockets, and in a guitar bag, a semiautomatic rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun.
Moments earlier, an Instacart delivery driver had alerted a store employee after seeing Mr. Marley in the bathroom, along with the AR-15-style rifle, which was propped against a wall. A grand jury indictment later described what had come next: “panic, terror and the evacuation of the Publix.”
Mr. Marley, then 22, was arrested without incident that day in March 2021. His lawyer, Charles Brant, noted that he had not made any threats or fired any shots, and had legally purchased his guns. Mr. Marley did not violate Georgia law, Mr. Brant said; he was “just being a person, doing what he had the right to do.”
Indeed, Mr. Marley’s arrest kicked off a long and as yet unresolved legal odyssey in which the criminal justice system waffled over what it could charge him with and whether to set him free. Clearly, visiting the grocery store with a trove of guns had frightened people. But was it illegal?
Because all but “three states allow for the open carry of handguns, long guns or both, and in many there is little the police can do.” And states legalized this why? Because we aspire to make American cities look more like Mogadishu?
We all know that as soon as black men start strutting around in body armor with semi-auto rifles, states will reconsider how much freedom to carry them everywhere is socially acceptable.