a_reasonable_man

I saw Oppenheimer the other day. I found it absorbing—a three-hour movie that seemed much shorter. I won’t write a review, but I have some reflections.

I feel as if I have family connections to the story of J Robert Oppenheimer. They date, I suppose, to 1945-46, my dad’s senior year at the University of New Hampshire, when he decided to become a nuclear physicist. He was partly inspired to do so because at that moment, physics was exciting, front-page news. The Bomb was being hailed as the technological wonder that had Brought The Boys Home, and Oppenheimer, as its architect, was being hailed as a national hero. Dad even started smoking a pipe at this time, in part because Oppenheimer did—and because Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, and Enrico Fermi did as well. (Fortunately for Dad’s health, he eventually quit smoking.) In 1954, the same year the government revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, Dad was awarded his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue. Like nearly all other U.S. physicists, he was outraged by what the government had done to Oppenheimer, whom he saw as a martyr to McCarthyism and militarism. Over the course of Dad’s career, he got to know most of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, many of them directly with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. In 1959, when he joined the faculty at MIT, many of these men became his colleagues.

This is why, in the 1960s, we had a cat we named “Oppie” (a regal black and white shorthair). It’s also why, in 1980, when the BBC dramatized Oppenheimer’s story in a miniseries, with Sam Waterston in the title role, my family made a point to watch it.

The new movie gives several physicists my father knew significant roles (e.g., Isador Rabi is an important secondary character), but the physicists that he knew best, at MIT, are not mentioned or are background characters. Dad was good friends, for example, with Phil Morrison. In 1945, Phil was the guy who drove the plutonium core to the Trinity Test site in the back of his car, and then he helped arm the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (later, he became a champion of nuclear non-proliferation). In the movie, he is played by a young actor named Harrison Gilbertson, but I don’t recall that Gilberston gets to speak a single line.

Despite this, I can say, as someone who grew up with physics lore, that I was pleased to see it scattered through the movie. Probably my favorite of these “Easter eggs” comes from a non-historical scene: Oppenheimer, in the throes of working on the Bomb, travels unannounced from Los Alamos to Princeton to consult with Einstein about a critical calculation. The encounter is key to the screenplay (it is referred to in the final scene of the film), but it never happened, and for many reasons could never have happened. Nonetheless, I liked that when Oppenheimer finds Einstein, Einstein is taking a walk with Kurt Gödel—something that the historical Einstein did in fact do almost daily at the Institute for Advanced Study. I see no reason for the filmmakers to include Gödel in their movie except to delight the nerdy. Yet I think the film missed an opportunity for similar nerdy delight by failing to show Richard Feynman, at Los Alamos, pull a practical joke. Feynman is in fact a character in the film, played by Jack Quaid, but like the Morrison character, he is in the background and (as I recall) speaks no lines.

What I came away with from the movie, however, was something I did not expect. I found myself thinking about Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

Why did I connect a movie about the Arab Revolt to one about the Manhattan Project? Obviously, both films are male-dominated historical epics, best seen on big screens, and in each, the protagonist is played by a slender actor of Irish descent, impossibly blue eyes, and impossibly high cheekbones. Yet just as obviously, Lawrence is an action movie, mostly set outdoors, that offers a mostly linear narrative of events, while Oppenheimer focuses on interpersonal drama, is mostly set indoors, and offers a non-linear narrative, weaving together different threads of story taking place in different years. Oppenheimer is also a more visually elaborate movie than Lawrence, with scenes shot in black and white as well as in color, and with a few dreamlike, surreal sequences representing Oppenheimer’s thoughts and feelings. Moreover, Oppenheimer, unlike Lawrence, gives its hero a nemesis (the businessman/bureaucrat Lewis Strauss), around whom a large part of the story is framed.

Nonetheless, I kept seeing deep parallels between the films. In both, the protagonist (T.E. Lawrence/ Oppenheimer), is presented as brilliant, charismatic, and idealistic, but complicated and morally flawed. In both, he leads a group of heroes (Arab warriors/nuclear physicists) into the desert (Arabian/New Mexican) during a world war (First/Second), where they accomplish astonishing things and help his imperial nation (Britain/U.S.) achieve victory. In both, the protagonist becomes a media star and politically influential. Yet his wartime achievements are marred by the taking of innocent lives, and eventually his own political leaders betray the ideals for which he had professed, at least, to fight (although in both movies, the sincerity of his professions is called into question). He is eventually pushed aside as no longer politically useful. In the end, he realizes that while he has succeeded in changing the world, it is not for the better.

So I don’t think a comparison of this new epic to that classic one is implausible. In fact, if a theater could set aside enough time to pair Lawrence, a three-and-a-half-hour movie, with Oppenheimer, a three-hour one, I think that would be a very thought-provoking double feature.

We've been hearing a lot about a wall lately, so I find myself thinking about walls. When a wall becomes a ruin, we grow fascinated by it, as with Hadrian's Wall, or even sentimental about it, as when we come across a tumbledown stone wall in the New Hampshire woods, reminding us of forgotten farms. The few cities that retain their ancient fortifications--usually, only because the local government lacked the funds to take them down when everyone else was doing it--are now often designated "world heritage sites" and have become major tourist destinations. The most famous ancient wall, of course, is the Great Wall of China, celebrated by the Chinese Communist government as a symbol of national greatness. Millions visit it annually.

But when these walls were actually in use, they were not loved. They may have been big, but they were never called "beautiful." The Great Wall itself, for most of Chinese history, was considered a symbol of the cruelty of Qin Shi Huan, the first Chinese emperor. Building the wall was seen as of a piece with his many other tyrannical acts, such as burning the books of philosophers who questioned his claims of godlike authority and burying 460 scholars alive. He supposedly conscripted hundreds of thousands of workers to build his wall. They toiled without pay. Many died. One of the legendary heroines of China is Lady Meng Jiang, whose husband was conscripted as a wall builder. He was taken away, and she did not hear from him for months. With winter coming on, she went looking for him, to bring him warm clothes. When after a long and difficult journey, she reached the wall, and finally found people who knew her husband, she was told he was dead. She is supposed to have wept so bitterly part of the wall crumbled, revealing his bones.

I've stood on the remains of the Great Wall a couple of times. I've also seen the most famous modern wall, the one in Berlin. I've passed through its fearsome checkpoints when it was still in use and visited it not long after it "fell." I walked freely across ground where I would have been shot months earlier. Although the wall was now useless, much of it was still standing. The West Berlin side had long been covered with colorful graffiti protesting its existence, but by the time I got there, much the color had been chipped away by souvenir-seekers. The side of the wall facing the "German Democratic Republic," meanwhile, had always been plain grey. The East German police had made sure it stayed spotlessly grim. Yet the tourist demand for graffiti-covered wall bits was now high. Enterprising Roma children were spray-painting parts of the eastern side, chipping off fragments, and selling them in small plastic bags for a few marks. I bought one. I still have it somewhere.

I said goodbye to a house in New Hampshire today that has been part of my life for forty-three years. It was a large summer cottage, with two floors and a bead board interior, that when I first saw it, was about six decades old, and still had a heavy, black, party-line dial phone hanging from the wall. I spent many July and August weekends there with my family, and the old family friends who then owned it. It has a big screen porch overlooking a lake framed by forested hills. On Independence Day, the neighbors would shoot their store-bought fireworks over the water.

My parents have owned the house for almost fifteen years and have been trying to sell it for the past three. They finally have a buyer, and sale will close in a few days. The buyer has not said he will tear the house down, but he hasn't said he won't, either.

The family friends who owned it, Seymour and Harriett, are now dead. They were grand, larger-than-life New Yorkers--Seymour from Brooklyn, Harriett, the Bronx--but left behind few traces. I went up to the New Hampshire house with my 92-year-old father to collect a few of these remaining fragments.

There was the sjoelbak board that Seymour and Harriett brought back from a year in Holland (my brother and I learned the game on that board, and my brother became skilled at it); there were a few of Harriett's large collection of frog figurines (she had studied biology and once worked on frogs), and some of the pieces of carved beef bone Seymour made to amuse himself in retirement (he was skilled with his hands). Seymour had been a botanist by profession, and I found a short shelf of botanical guide books. I took a few of them--ones that I don't think I could easily find elsewhere, like W.C. Muenscher, Keys to Woody Plants (Fourth ed., published by the author, Ithica, NY, 1936), and Joseph Illick, Common Trees of Michigan (American Tree Association of Washington, DC, 1927).

Seymour and Harriett had lived in Michigan, where Seymour got his Ph.D. at Ann Arbor. There, they befriended my mother, a young grad student in biology shaking the dust of east Texas off her feet. Later, they all went together to Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, where my mother met my father. Now my mother is 89, in rehab hospital, and cannot walk, and my father is in the process of re-fitting their home outside Boston so she can live there again.

Today, the neighbors were ice fishing on the lake. At least six had little huts out there. The cottage of course had no heat. By the time my father and I started the drive home, my feet were like icicles.

Outside the main entrance of Mass General Hospital stand a couple of multi-story parking garages. Going past them, you sometimes hear birds making a ruckus. At first, I thought they were actual birds. Yesterday, I realized they were recordings of birds, broadcast every few minutes from speakers mounted on an exterior wall. They must be a kind of "No Roosting" sign--the auditory equivalent of a plastic owl. What kind of calls were they, I wondered? Hawk?

Just inside the MGH entrance stood an elderly volunteer behind a desk. I decided to interpret his mandate to provide "Information" expansively and ask him.

He actually had the answer. The calls were of pigeons and seagulls being "eaten by predators."

In other words, you enter the hospital listening to small dinosaurs scream in terror. Really, is this conducive to healing?

President Trump can't "end" birthright citizenship with an executive order. I'm rather shocked that some in the media have discussed this as if he could actually do it. He can't, but he might try. If he did, it would have bad consequences. That is, if we, the people, let it.


1. When people think about ending birthright citizenship, they seem to have in mind stripping citizenship from children, both of whose parents are undocumented immigrants. This would be a massive undertaking, with immense consequences. In 2016, 1.3 million children born the United States were living with parents whose immigration status was undocumented. Stripping them of their citizenship, if it could be done, would affect the lives of many millions. Yet if the citizenship of these children is questioned, then so would the citizenship of other Americans. One group would be children with one parent of undocumented status. Using the 2016 figures, this would raise the number of children affected to 4 million. And what about the children of undocumented parents who are now adults? Who knows how many parents and spouses, college and graduate students, business owners, professionals, veterans, celebrities, and even elected officials, are birthright citizens with at least one undocumented parent? Then there would be the problem of the children of adults stripped of their citizenship. If someone born in the United States is determined never to have been a citizen, are that person's children no longer citizens? What about their children? How far back do you go? Finally, some commentators have suggested that Trump's order would affect not only the children of undocumented immigrants, but the children of all foreign residents of the United States who have not declared their intention to be citizens, such as those holding visas and green cards. If that’s the case, and the children of people with only one such parent are affected, then President Obama would be stripped of his citizenship, because his father was here on a student visa. This may seem like a reductio ad adsurdum argument, but once you start to unwind birthright citizenship, where do you stop? How do you stop?


2. Do the U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants actually pose a threat to the U.S.? Those who insist they do seem to imagine them as all as criminal freeloaders, a stereotype which has been widely debunked. (They also, of course, imagine them as brown-skinned and Spanish-speaking, although there are probably at least as many children of undocumented Chinese and European immigrants as of undocumented Mexicans.) Until very recently, very few people seemed to think that granting birthright citizenship to the children of all immigrants was a problem. It has been the American norm for over a century, at least. The pejorative term "anchor baby" became popular only about a dozen years ago. The term refers to undocumented immigrants who allegedly have children in the U.S. in order to stay here. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: undocumented immigrants have children here because they have decided to stay. Even now, according to polls, most Americans think the "Dreamers," who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, should not be deported, but should allowed a path to citizenship. I can't believe most Americans support a far more radical proposal, of stripping fellow Americans of citizenship. Most Americans, quite rightly, would reject it as contrary to American values.


3. What would Trump's executive order look like? It would have to take the form of an instruction to federal departments and agencies no longer to regard as citizens, any children of undocumented immigrants (and perhaps also, of visa and green card holders). Such an order would be, of course, a nightmare to administer. It would require federal officials, and state and local officials who follow their lead, to confirm the parentage of many millions of people, on a case-by-case basis, in order to determine the validity of everything from passports to veterans benefits to scholarships to marriage licenses to prison sentences. No doubt, the order would be executed in a discriminatory way, according to the whims and prejudices of the administrators; the children of undocumented Mexicans would probably be targeted, but probably not the children of undocumented Chinese, and certainly not the children of undocumented immigrants from Ireland or Israel. The order would, among many other things, cause massive social disruption, even chaos; cost taxpayers billions of dollars; and set up numberless conflicts between federal, state, and local governments. Not that the order would actually take effect, because as soon as it was issued, people would ask for federal court injunctions to block it, and the courts would immediately comply.


4. Courts would block the order for obvious reasons. The definition of citizenship is established by the Fourteenth Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Meanwhile, Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, gives Congress the power to establish "an uniform Rule of Naturalization." The Constitution nowhere gives the President unilateral authority to establish the terms of citizenship. Not even Presidents who have claimed extraordinary executive powers in wartime have claimed they could do this. When President Obama created the DACA program, all he did was temporarily alter how certain immigration laws were enforced. For this, Republicans accused him of dangerous usurpation of executive power, although no court has so far agreed. Obama never, however, came close to claiming he could grant the "Dreamers" citizenship. Only Congress can do that. Although Trump claims legal "experts" tell him he has the right to act, no court, not even a right leaning one, would uphold this position.


5. Trump would no doubt claim that all he is doing is making federal officials follow a "correct" interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The claim would rest on an argument advanced in recent years by certain right-wing activists and scholars, who argue that the Fourteenth Amendment does not, in fact, grant birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, and possibly not even to the children of legal resident aliens. Those who make this argument usually focus on the phrase in the amendment, that only persons born "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States become citizens. Undocumented immigrants, so the argument goes, are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, because they never legally renounced allegiance to another country. Supporters of this view argue that this was the original intent of the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment. They have dug up some statements made in the Congressional debates over the amendment, in 1868, some of which can be interpreted as saying that only the children of those "fully"; under U.S. jurisdiction, such as immigrants who have declared their intent to be U.S. citizens, would become citizens. This argument, however, is very weak and is not accepted by the large majority of historians or legal scholars.


6. a. I don't believe that constitutional interpretation stops at determining "original intent," but I do think original intent should be taken into consideration. Yet trying to determine the "original intent" of the Fourteenth Amendment from the congressional debates over it, is a very difficult exercise. The debates were complicated, and participants said a lot of contradictory things (recorded in the Congressional Globe, the predecessor to the Congressional Record).
b. Certain things, however, are pretty clear. One is that the supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment intended it to end one variety of "illegal alienship"--that of free black people. Simply freeing enslaved people had not made them citizens, because the prevailing legal tradition in the U.S. until the Civil War had been to regard non-white residents as aliens. The Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court (1857), which held that only white people could be citizens, was an expression of this dominant tradition. Most whites in both the North and South believed blacks never would be citizens and supported the idea of colonizing or deporting all free black people back to Africa. (Abraham Lincoln himself only stopped publicly supporting colonization when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.) Many free blacks in the antebellum era lived in a shadowy legal netherworld very much like that of "illegal aliens" today. Enslaved people who escaped their owners, for example, and lived as free people in the North, lived in constant fear of arrest and rendition under federal fugitive slave laws. Meanwhile, Virginia had laws requiring that all enslaved people manumitted by their masters had to leave the state after six months. Hundreds of thousands of manumitted black Virginians nonetheless continued to live in the state in violation of these laws, under constant threat of deportation. A number of western states, meanwhile, such as Kansas and Oregon, had provisions in their state constitutions banning black settlement. Any black settlers were living in those states did so illegally. Emancipation, coupled with the Fourteenth Amendment. eliminated this entire category of "illegal alien."
c. Although the authors of the amendment were not primarily focused on immigrants, some of them clearly recognized its impact on the children of immigrants. For example, they pointed out that the children of Chinese immigrants would become citizens.
d. When the authors added the "under the jurisdiction" exception, they had one group of people clearly in mind: the children of foreign officials residing in the United States, such as diplomats. These children would not become citizens. They were not thinking about undocumented immigrants, a category that did not yet exist.
c. In the mid-nineteenth century, the U.S. had almost open borders (for that matter, a number of states allowed non-citizens to vote). Immigration policy, such as it was, was set at the state level, because people did not think Congress had the constitutional authority to regulate immigration, which is not among its enumerated powers. (Ironically, most people today who insist we must always strictly follow the original intent of the Founders also seem to favor strict immigration laws, even though there is no clear evidence that the Founders intended Congress to have the power to enact immigration laws.) Only in 1875 did the Supreme Court rule that immigration policy was a federal matter (Chy Lung v. Freeman); only in the 1880s did Congress enact the first immigration restriction laws; only in 1891, did the federal government fully take over the administration of immigration (Ellis Island was established the following year). Unlawful entry into the country was not made a crime under federal law until 1929. Resident aliens did no have to register with the United States until 1940, when the green card was invented.
c. Owing to Trump's announcement, the important Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) is in the news, as it should be. The Court ruled that Wong was a citizen of the United States because he had been born in California, even though his parents were "subjects of the Emperor of China," who had never expressed interest in becoming citizens. I've heard the argument made that the precedent of this case only applies to the children of legal aliens, but I don't see how this is so. The legal status of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century was constantly called into question. The first immigration law ever enacted by Congress was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880, and Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark seems to have been reacting against it.
c. Yet Wong Kim Ark is not the most important precedent regarding birthright citizenship. The most important precedent is the uniform practice of the nation ever since. All children born in this country, unless their parents are foreign diplomats or agents, have for 120 years been regarded as citizens. The weight of a few words from 1868 against this overwhelming fact, is small indeed.


7. Trump may actually want his executive order is to be legally challenged, so he can appeal to the Supreme Court, and make his case before its right-leaning majority. His thinking might be that even if the Justices don't accept his argument about executive power, they could rule that the Fourteenth Amendment does not cover undocumented immigrants, or overturn the Wong Kim Ark precedent. I very much doubt, however, the Court would take so drastic a step as to strip citizenship from millions, and produce the massive legal chaos I have already described, especially if the vote were 5-4. The public blow-back would be massive. The authority of Court would be severely damaged. The Justices surely know this.


8. On the other hand, the Court might kick the question to Congress. That is, there could be a 5-4 split, in which the four liberal Justices would rule that any restriction of birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, while right-leaning majority would rule that Congress should decide. Sen. Lindsay Graham may be anticipating this; I heard that he has introduced legislation to restrict birthright citizenship. As restricting birthright citizenship is an unpopular idea, however, outside certain elements of the Republican base, and the obstacles involved in putting such a policy into effect are so large, I don't think even a Republican Congress would vote for it.


9. Yet even if the Courts overrule Trump, and Congress declines to act, Trump will have succeeded in bringing radical ideas into the political mainstream. The point would be to rally his supporters, while increasing the fear under which immigrants currently live, perhaps intimidating those who are citizens so that they do not try to vote. His action would produce more bullying of immigrant children in schools; more anti-immigrant discrimination; more anti-immigrant hate crimes. Here is where activism counts. Here is where protest, and speaking out, and acts of ally-ship, large and small, all count. Here is where voting counts. The ultimate arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution, as every serious commentator on the subject has always conceded, is not the Supreme Court, Congress, or the President, but the American people, acting in their sovereign capacity. We give the Constitution life and meaning. Ultimately, we are the protectors of the rights of immigrants and their American children.

The other day I went to hear a splendid BSO performance of Mahler's massive Third Symphony, and all the way home from the concert found myself humming Tom Lehrer's "Alma."