4 - The Michigan Daily - Friday, March 10, 2006 OPINION be 3irbiluual tig DoNN M. FRESARD Editor in Chief EMILY BEAM CHRISTOPHER ZBROZEK Editorial Page Editors ASHLEY DINGES Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com NOTABLE QUOTABLE How can we expect children to respect teachers on Monday morning, when they spend their weekends kill- ing cops?" - State Rep. Kathy Angerer (D-Dundee), speaking on Monday in support of a reso- lution supporting a boycott of the "25to Life" video game, in which players earn points for killing police officers, as reported on Tuesday by The Ann Arbor News. GEOFF SILVERSTEIN MISTER MAYoi0 AND fiRENDs I a' av 'L ligh a i Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their author. 01 'Crash'-ing America's benighted party IMRAN SYED DE1MAG:oGUEs DEBUNKED Perhaps this col- umn will irri- tate some of my fellow fans of cinema. That is unfortunate, but, as my editors here at the Daily have often told me, just because say- ing something bothers someone doesn't mean it shouldn't be said. A massive upset took place at last Sun- day's Academy Awards. I'm sure you've heard about it. No, no, I don't mean "The Chronicles of Narnia" taking down "Cin- derella Man" for "Best Achievement in Makeup" - I mean the other upset. Though "Crash" had its fair share of cham- pions, no one in his right mind (OK, no one except Roger Ebert) expected the controver- sial film to walk away with the best picture award over "Brokeback Mountain," or any other nominee for that matter. Yet "Crash" did win, leaving its filmmakers just as stunned as clearly sloshed presenter Jack Nicholson. First of all, let's get this nonsense about "Crash" not being a worthy pick out of the way. Every nominee was a worthy pick, but there can be only one winner. This being true, "Brokeback Mountain," "Munich" or any other nominee would have been a justi- fiable choice - just as "Crash" is. I loved "Crash," and I am the only writer I know who feels this way. I tried afterward to identify with what my "Brokeback"-loving friends must have been feeling. I guess I under- stand - it was probably a bit like I felt when "Shakespeare in Love" trumped "Saving Pri- vate Ryan" or when Bush v. Gore went to Bush. But detractors of "Crash" have it all wrong: Years from now, we will look back at this pick as one of the most courageous in Oscar history, and for good reason. The win does not embody, as most critics have argued, the Academy's failure to make a statement by giving the award to "Brokeback Mountain." Instead it is a brash statement from the Academy that even in the face of the conflict in the Middle East, censorship and homosexuality, racism is still America's most pressing issue. Many among us are uncomfortable even admitting that racism still exists in our America. The fact that minorities face unfair odds in even the most mundane of daily dealings is easy to turn a blind eye to. Even many subjects of discrimination have learned to live with it, because those who speak up are seen as manipulating circum- stances by playing the "race card." I suppose this is the reason so many peo- ple disliked "Crash." It makes racist atti- tudes seem universal, perhaps implying.that there are no good people in the world. Two black men grumble about always being ste- reotyped as hoodlums - before proceeding to carjack someone. They run over a Chinese guy, spit out every expletive in the Far-East book and then attempt to stuff his body into the back of a van - only to find it crammed with the now-revealed slave-trader's cargo. There are prejudices against those of the Middle East, Latin America and, of course, white people. "Crash" is overwhelming in the sheer volume of prejudices it manages to churn out in its 113 minutes. But does this invalidate what it has to say? The film challenges us to accept that racism is all around us and probably even within us. Those among us who claim to be open-minded should at least accept this as a possibility. Next, the film contends that our racial prejudices guide our everyday actions - unconsciously of course. This is harder to accept, if only because the film magnifies the nature and extent of these prejudices. Characters in "Crash" are will- ing to go as far as kill someone based on racism, something (I hope) none of us would do. The storylines, conflicts and outcomes are grossly exaggerated, but consider for a moment: To what effect? Films can never be a straight-out represen- tation of real life. If they were, the two gay cowboys would have had almost no chance of ever meeting. Life, in its most wonderful property, is completely random, embodying random spurts of unlikely moments, mak- ing them meaningful in ways we appreci- ate years later. In a two-hour film, this can never be accurately portrayed. (Anyone up for watching Truman Capote snore for two hours? He slept every night, after all ... ) Films are always biased in that they only show the moments they want to show, and we usually have no problem with this. "Crash" is contrived, overstated and blunt, to say the least. But is it so much so that the message is lost? The honest answer is no. By breaking down the big, scary real world into'just the events surrounding the subjects of one random car crash, the film shows the many forms racism in America takes, though obviously never at once. This selection by the Academy is not a cop- out; in many ways, going with "Brokeback" would have been the cop-out. "Brokeback" was clearly an easy choice for the largely liberal Academy, while racism has always been the most explosive issue in our society. Under fire, the Academy stood up and hon- ored a deserving work too hot for most to handle. In the future, we will be thankful. Syed can be reached at galad@umich.edu el Inventing precedent Activist courts take people's right to choose What Sept. 11 meant JESSE SINGAL STEM THE TIDE No State shall (...) deprive any per- son of life, liberty, or property, with- out due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdic- tion the equal protection of the laws. - Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution The 14th Amendment was rati- fied shortly after the Civil War to explicitly grant blacks citi- zenship and basic rights. Read the text a few times: It is simple, elegant and unambiguous. But in Roe v. Wade and similar cases, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the passage quoted above really means there is an inalienable right to privacy, and that no state can deprive any woman of an abortion, for any reason, ever. I've tried using my decoder ring and squinting really, really hard, but it's just not there. As most people already know, the Roe decision rendered most types of abortion invulnerable to the democratic process. Instead, unelected people in black robes with lifetime tenure and uncontestable power decided that they knew what was best and, without any grounding in law, imposed their beliefs on everyone else. I'd expect that from Iran, but in Ameri- ca, I prefer democracy. With a South Dakota law banning abortion set to climb up the judicial lad- der, hopefully the Supreme Court will correct its mistake and return legislative power to where it belongs - with the people and their elected representatives. As Justice Antonin Scalia regularly points out, Roe does not guarantee rights - it curtails them. Where there are no constitutional restraints, legislative power is in the hands of the people and their legislatures. If we believe something should be legal, we can convince the major- ity of our fellow citizens and make it legal. If we believe something is harmful and unethical, we can con- vince our fellow citizens to make it illegal. In effect, Roe takes away our right to choose. Furthermore, if we believe a concept is so fundamental that it should be enshrouded in the constitution, our founding fathers gave us a number of means to put it there (oddly enough, the amendment process doesn't mention a living con- stitution or penumbrae). My colleagues on the Daily's edi- torial board complain that the South Dakota law was legislated specifi- cally as a test, but I don't see the problem. These days, the constitu- tion doesn't mean what it says or say what it means, so how else are people to know what's in there? Furthermore, I don't hear any com- plaints about test cases such as the Brown v. Board of Education case that integrated schools. Assuming most people agree the Brown litigation was a positive thing, isn't it hypo- critical to then argue other test cases are unacceptable - ostensibly only because they fall outside a specific political ideology? When judges read what they want into the law, nobody wins. Bush v. Gore should not have been decided federally, but it was anyway. Simi- larly, a recent case decided that the Fifth Amendment - which allows private property to "be taken for public use" - actually allows gov- ernment to seize private property and give it to other private parties. Roe is just another example of judicial over- reach, and it should be overturned. Frank Manley is an LSA junior and a member of the Daily's editorial board. n Tuesday, Republican senators and the White House reached an agree- ment regarding the Bush administration's domestic spying pro- gram. It takes the form of bills that will "impose new over- sight but allow wiretapping without war- rants for up to 45 days," as The New York Times reported. Republican senators Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia Snowe (Maine), the two Senate Intelligence Committee members most critical of the administra- tion's actions, signed onto the agreement, which means there will now be no full investigation of the wiretapping program. Many feel the program was - and is - illegal, but this agreement takes us one step closer to having no one held accountable for that possibility. The Times also ran an editorial this week about Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to a lawsuit by the Associated Press, records from some of the hearings held there have been made public, which serves to reveal the identities of some of the detainees (a long-held administra- tion secret). It seems as though many of the people we are holding indefinitely and deny- ing due process have little or nothing to do with al Qaida or the Taliban; one Pakistani claimed to have been a chicken farmer when he was scooped up by U.S. forces in 2002. Our government continues to refuse to give prison- ers like Abdur Sayed Rahman access to the resources they would need to properly defend themselves against allegations of terrorism - prisoner rights guaranteed by both U.S. and international law. How did we get to this point? The key to understanding just where our government is headed dates back, as is so often the case, to Sept. 11. President Bush made it clear that the attacks changed everything; they marked not an isolated attack, but rather a massive para- digm shift with monumental implications for U.S. foreign policy and preparedness. This, more than anything, has been the central claim and motif of Bush's post-9/l1 presidency, and we as citizens have completely failed to criti- cally evaluate it. Thanks to our inability, even several years after the fact, to view Sept. 11 with any degree of perspective or depth, Bush, his administration and his party have been able to shamelessly exploit the attacks - from every imaginable angle, from sched- uling the Republican National Convention to coincide with the anniversary of the attacks to, as Peter Beinart reported in The New Republic, having top officials like for- mer Attorney General John Ashcroft and Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge make apparently false claims about possible attacks, even raising the terror level. And then, of course, there's the wiretap- ping, the torture and the illegal imprison- ment, all of which the administration has guarded with the utmost secrecy. And the war in Iraq, started by an administration filled with individuals (Dick Cheney, Don- ald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) who had been pushing for action against Iraq since long before Sept. 11,pturned out to have less to do with the fight against al Qaida than a Pakistani chicken farmer. President Bush is claiming Sept. 11 meant that it was time to completely overhaul our foreign policy, long-held standards of due process for prisoners, long-held standards regarding torture and several sorts of basic civil liberties. He is dead wrong. What Sept. 11 meant was that we needed to try to defeat al Qaida, improve our ability to defend against and respond to terror attacks at home and seek to understand the ideolo- gies that gave rise to those who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans. (Not, as Karl Rove so despicably put it, to give them "thera- py," but rather to understand the forces that motivated them and prevent it from happen- ing again.) Other than our dispersal of al Qaida, we have failed on every count. It's hard to make any argument involving Sept. 11 and overreaction - obviously, it was a singularly horrific event in American his- tory - but by failing to understand its true implications, and by letting Bush and his administration tell us what the day meant, we have endlessly multiplied the body count and failed to salvage anything from the rubble. 0 0 Singal can be reached at jsingal@umich.edu LETTER TO THE EDITOR Send all letters to the editor to tothedaily~michigandaily. corn. Faculty should help depressed students TO THE DAILY: and a substantial percentage of students identify their illness while in college. One in 10 will consider suicide at some point during their college career. as those made yesterday only serve to rein- force the isolation so many depressed stu- dents already experience. As the recent suicides on campus demon- I