(as i struggle for clarity on this situation, it seems this philosophical approach may be as close as we can get to the truth. – promoted by eli_beckerman)
by Jason Pramas (Staff), Dec-06-10
* OMB Editorial
A few days ago, I watched Chuck Turner get thrown off of the Boston City Council by a near-unanimous vote of his peers as I took photographs of the sad scene for Open Media Boston. The fact that he got shown the door that day surprised no one. One had only to look at the stony faces of most of the councilors as Turner made his final defiant speech to them to know that he was definitely going down. The feds were handing his political head to them on a silver platter. And there was no way they were going to pass up that opportunity. They had the eight votes they needed – even if the more progressive councilors didn’t vote yes. And that was that.
Councilor Charles Yancey did a fine job trying to defend Turner on procedural grounds – convincingly demonstrating that the council had no authority to expel the democratically-elected Turner under the council rules. And pointing out that no councilor in the long and nasty history of the Boston City Council had ever been expelled in such a fashion before. Of course, virtually none of those other councilors were black – but we’ll sidle past that ugly fact for the purposes of this editorial.
After about a half hour of wrangling, Council President Michael Ross made clear that he was having none of it, and the vote went forward. And that would have been that, even for this publication, if a couple of councilors had chosen to hold their tongues. But shortly before the vote, Councilor Felix Arroyo and Councilor Ayanna Pressley both got up and gave speeches.
Arroyo went first. He talked about how great Turner was and how much he respected him. Then he sat down. Astute observers noticed that Arroyo assiduously avoided saying which way he was going to vote. The audience started getting nervous at that point. Turner’s supporters generally assumed both Arroyo and Pressley would either vote for Turner or abstain from voting despite some of the puzzling self-exculpatory language they were hearing from Arroyo.
After all, Turner had done a lot for both of them personally and for the communities they represented. Both were councilors of color in a city that has had damn few to this day. In fact, Pressley is the first African-American woman to be elected to the council. Both come from “tough” (to use the opaque language in Pressley’s own bio) neighborhoods. They know what’s what, right? So why, supporters figured, would they do anything other than the right thing and back their friend? Why indeed?
That question was answered in surprising fashion a few minutes later. Shocked noises burst from the crowd as Pressley started her talk and said that she was going to vote against Turner – before continuing on and making remarks similar to Arroyo’s. Not long after, the crowd exploded with anger when Arroyo and Pressley both cast their votes to expel Turner from the council … their outrage rising to crescendos of opprobrium and damping down when Ross banged his gavel and Turner raised his hand to calm them – only to rise up again.
Most of the councilors beat a hasty retreat to their offices immediately after the vote, and close to 200 Turner supporters made their way out into the City Hall atrium – chanting impromptu slogans – and proceeded down the central staircase and out the front door where most of them congregated and held furious impromptu confabs. Turner appeared, people swarmed him with handshakes and hugs as the mainstream media circled like vultures waiting to tear some last chunks off the carcass of a political career they helped destroy.
After the sound and fury died down, everyone returned home. Here at Open Media Boston, staff reporter David Goodman contacted both Arroyo and Pressley to ask them why they voted against Turner. Pressley has not yet responded to the request – and has said little in public to anyone on the matter as far as we have seen. But Arroyo did. We ran a story on his response. Arroyo told OMB that he “believes a Council member convicted of a felony should have to start over; in other words, leave office and face the public in an election.”
OK, fair enough. Now here’s what I think.
One of the things I like to read and think about is existentialist philosophy. In my study of existentialism, I am drawn to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. So as I sat there at City Hall taking pictures of the spectacle (and I mean that term in its situationist sense for all you philosophy fans out there) of the vote on Turner’s expulsion, I thought to myself “Arroyo and Pressley are acting in bad faith.”
Bad faith is one of the core concepts of Sartre’s existentialist thought. Huge numbers of words have been written by Sartre, his defenders and his critics on this one idea; so I’m hardly going to do full justice to it here, but I’ll try to give you all a very basic idea of what it means, and why I think it’s relevant to this discussion.
In Sartrean existentialism, people are radically free to make any number of choices in any situation. Each person is an intelligence that acts for itself. But each person is surrounded by other people. Other “for-itselfs.” So each person, in a variety of ways, also acts for others. These others have an effect on the actions of each person because they can do things that help or hurt the person. So when making a decision on a course of action, each person – despite being radically free – tends to factor these others into their choice.
In order to get a consistent beneficial reaction from these other people, each person takes on roles that they act out for different periods of time … sometimes for their whole lives.
Sartre observed that people often make excuses about decisions they make by saying their decisions are constrained by the role they are playing in life at that moment. But at some level, he argues, even if they are only dimly aware of it, these people are making conscious decisions to do what they do. Decisions that only they can make as radically free beings. To deny that reality and that freedom in any one of a number of ways is to act in bad faith.
So here’s how this relates to the situation at hand.
I believe that Arroyo and Pressley were playing their roles as “Boston City Councilors” in voting to expel Turner. They had the freedom to do the opposite and consciously chose not to do so.
So, if what they said about Turner in their speeches before the expulsion vote was true, then they are acting in bad faith. If what they said was a lie, they are also acting in bad faith.
That is to say, either they both were honest about really liking Turner, and screwed him because it became convenient to do so. Or else they really don’t like Turner and used him until it was no longer convenient to pretend otherwise.
I assume the former in both Arroyo’s and Pressley’s cases. But either way, such bad faith is problematic. Radical freedom implies radical responsibility, as the existentialist saying goes. Responsibility for ones own actions, and for the things one says about ones own actions.
This responsibility includes the awareness that ones actions have an effect on the lives of all other people in some way. Especially the people directly connected to you. This understanding demonstrates why existentialism is a humanist philosophy – and why it is generally a philosophy of the left-wing.
And that’s why it was especially disturbing for me to see two progressive politicians – one of whom, Arroyo, I’ve been friendly with for years – act in bad faith. I expected better of Arroyo and Pressley. Many other people – who did a lot to get them elected – did too.
They failed us by not supporting Turner at a critical moment. And they did it quite consciously. Which makes me wonder if they’re going to fail us in the future in other critical situations. If they are going to choose expedience over principle. If they are going to do what’s right for themselves as councilors, over what’s right for the communities they represent. Because that’s how I view what they did this time around.
So I would strongly recommend that Arroyo and Pressley put a lot of thought into figuring out how they’re going to save their reputations with their constituents – and then put positive action behind that thought. Especially with the progressive activists who are largely responsible for putting them into office. Many of whom – uninformed mainstream media representations aside – were in the audience at the vote to expel Turner. Such people have long memories on certain matters. And from the perspective of high philosophy or street level morality, Arroyo and Pressley didn’t do the right thing in failing to support Turner.
And people will remember that. At the polls. In the next election.
As well they should.
Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston
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While I certainly don’t agree with every assumption and conclusion, I wanted to point people to Michael’s response to this piece about Chuck on Blue Mass Group.
I think he quite elegantly speaks to the higher purpose that we need to defend — the impropriety of that exchange of bills which appears to have been documented, and which Councilor Turner has not convincingly explained — at the same time we make noise about the stinking hypocrisy and resist the dangerous implications of the political assassination.
We are in the political fight of our lives, and yet we don’t even know or understand the sides or the stakes. We will be forced through the wringer, asked to shred our morals and our values just to get out alive. We will be tricked into making heroes out of people on payrolls (could Julian Assange be such a decoy?) only to find out later they were serving some other purpose. We will be duped into turning on each other out of fear and suspicion. We know the FBI mastered this in the past, and the movements they took down were far stronger than what we’ve got today.
I can only pray that Paul Hawken’s picture of a planetary immune response and a vast, decentralized, undefined global movement is coming to life. That WikiLeaks represents the tip of that iceberg. And that as various people have claimed, the internet was created out of the need to protect the biosphere (note the 4:45 mark of the linked video). These kinds of statements seem crazy in isolation, and more so several years back. But the more you hear it from people of different backgrounds, with different politics, and different standing in the global economy, the more it rings true. And it gives new meaning to this post from this call to action:
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Jason was not the alone at the special meeting of the Council obviously. I came away from it with some different observations and conclusions.
In particular about Ayanna Pressley and Felix Arroyo’s remarks, to me they acted neither in bad faith nor confined by some Councilor role. While eight other Councilors maintained implacable, expressionless faces, those two stood and dealt both intellectually and emotionally with the proposed expulsion.
In other corners, Charles Yancey and Michael Ross did in fact play roles. Each was a parliamentarian as well as Councilor. Neither showed the stuff of Pressley or Arroyo.
Oddly enough, it was quickly clear that the two protégés of Chuck Turner had prepared their remarks individually, but they delivered in essence very similar speeches. Each had written the statement, but neither had to read it, only refreshing the mind to continue. Doing that also seemed to give them some emotional breathing space.
To me, the key theme to each speech was that they had learned candor and courage from Turner, by example and verbal instruction. Each said the lessons included never running from the hard decision or avoiding the necessary action.
Many Turner supporters in the gallery were not at all attuned to the anguish of Arroyo, then Pressley. In particular, when she faced him a few feet away in the adjacent seat to confess her respect and love, and then say she intended to vote for his removal, the catcalls of the supporters…along with promises to remove her in 2011…were the opposite of Turner’s expression. He clearly believed her and from my seat directly facing him, he appeared proud.
Truth be told, the two at-large Councilors of color are most at risk from backlash. They both are quite bright and knew this coming into the room. Disagree with their vote or not, it took some guts for them to first speak to Turner, the whole Council and the public, and then to vote yes.
I would say there were eight Councilors, not counting the President, who played their nominal role during the meeting. Ayanna Pressley and Felix Arroyo were not among them.
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In fact, Sartre wrote a 500 or so page book called Critique of Dialectical Reason to reconcile Existentialism with Marxism. (You could also call it a 500 page apology for actually-existing socialism, but then that’s real mean)
Pramas’ essay and its conclusion depend on the people of Boston understanding Arroyo’s and Pressley’s actions as being dishonest at face-value. Most of the people who read Sartre in Greater Boston don’t vote in Boston…
But the point is, I don’t know how clear or apparent the injustice or the betrayal is to those outside the immediate circle of people who know and support Turner. The larger questions of the FBI’s selective prosecutions and targeting of activists critical of them may touch a nerve but its not hard for it to lost in the minutia, details, and procedures involved in an individual case.
The prison and military industrial complexes, institutional racism, and the de-facto bribery and extortion of our current electoral system, yes these could very well be on people’s minds. But like most other things its easier to look at issues in terms of individual actions and their rightness or wrongness. And this narrow picture feeds into a political environment inhospitable to principle.
The concept of bad faith could just as easily be thrown at Turner if one were to isolate this case from the rest of his career and myopically ask “why, why, why?”. So its not the framework I would use in this instance.
No, if you had to pick a Communist Frenchman’s ideas you might as well go with Althusser, and look at the structural factors and ideological apparatuses that condemn resistance to be crushed. How individual elected officials are part of an overall system that they cannot by themselves struggle against. But you’d still be left with college students, academics, and suburbanites arguing in cafes…
My real hope, and I am beginning to see it with Chuck’s joint appearance with an FBI targeted anti-war activist in Boston for a community forum, is that criticism of our wars, to our criminal “justice” system, and to the politics of influence and pay-to-pay can become issues of real popular weight and mobilization. It may take a long time, but it needs doing.
Otherwise the FBI and cowardly politicians will get away with it.
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My comments are about the role of race in the decision to expel Chuck from the City Council.
Chuck was asked to resign by the Mayor and most certainly a lot of others that wanted Chuck to make it “easy”. The question is “easy” for whom? Chuck doesn’t do “easy”. Everything becomes a teachable moment-an opportunity to learn, grow and evolve.
To his credit, Charles Yancey got it right. He was there to support Chuck and help get the truth out. He spoke very well at the rally in front of Chuck’s office the day after the verdict came down. (Councilors Arroyo and Presley were not present.) He spoke well and voted right the day the Council expelled Chuck.
Yes, it was a painful decision for Councilors Arroyo and Presley, and no question there were consequences either way.
They had to choose, and they chose to betray Chuck, the people of his district, the community, and to the cause of justice.
Councilor Arroyo said that everybody makes mistakes (What the hell does that mean?) and Councilor Pressley said that she didn’t like what the FBI had done, but what can she do–she is only a member of the City Council. The fact that the FBI and the InJustice Dept were guilty of setting Chuck up in order to remove someone who had a history of telling the truth about them, supporting others who had been unfairly prosecuted, etc. were not part of their “heartfelt” testimony.
The audience at the City Council were absolutely correct in condemning their betrayal. Councilors Arroyo and Pressley chose to play the roles of Judas to Jesus and Brutus to Caesar!
Except for Councilor Ross, who as President of the Council, played a role before and during the meeting. The role that he played was that of a parliamentarian. The other “white” Councilors only said one word each during the meeting — “YES” to expel Chuck. They did not need to say anything else; Councilors Arroyo and Presley took them off their hook. How can anyone condemn them for their votes? All they have to do is to say is that they voted the same way as Arroyo and Presley. They owe these 2 councilors big time, and Judas and Brutus know it.
The entire white racist establishment owes a lot to these 2 councilors — the Mayor, the Boston Globe, the FBI/Injustice Department, etc.
Imagine for a moment that they had “done the right thing”. Chuck couldn’t vote, but the 4 Councilors of Color would have been united. There would have been an entirely different dynamic. The Councilors of Color would have been telling a common story. The “White” Councilors would have had to stand up and taken the heat. It would have been interesting.
Councilors Arroyo and Pressley chose to betray Chuck; the white-racist establishment owes them big time.
Mike Heichman