COVER -> RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT
ELIAN - On the morning of Easter Sunday the newspapers were dominated by two pictures, one of a gun, very close to Elian Gonzalez but pointed at his - what shall we say? - captor, the other, more posed, of the boy restored to his father. There was a third picture, rather less often published, of President Castro at the Sugar Mill, commemorating the repulsing of the Bay of Pigs attack. He was standing between a tank and a poster sized picture of the child. One can disregard the warm words of Castro and his people after US officials seized Elian and restored him to his father pending further proceedings; had the ruling gone the other way there would have been nothing but abuse; it was not the general process that was being respected but the particular outcome.
What puzzles external observers like myself about the Gonzalez affair, over and above the excessive coverage on which I've previously commented, is that so many people could have got everything so wrong.
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Whole communities and interest groups felt justified in throwing away all the carefully constructed statutes and rulings on family law, on custody and on the interests of the child. Elian's captors claim that they were "negotiating" with Janet Reno's officials when the house was stormed. On what basis should they have been allowed to negotiate? How would it be if all of us in disagreement with a court ruling felt able to ignore it and then feel entitled to negotiate an outcome with officials?
Coincidentally, as this was gong on, I was reading a rather depressing account of the last decades of Byzantium when both Christian and Muslim rulers used their children as diplomatic pawns. On the surface the idea looked so bizarre, so distant from our common understanding of what is decent, but it is not so strange, so distant after all. Elian was a pawn in a diplomatic game.
The only way that we can salvage anything useful from this savage, cynical piece of theatre is to reaffirm the rights of the child and, by extension, the rights of the individual, to be protected from the arbitrary self-interest of political calculation.
The problem with mistaking justice for one's favoured outcome, the problem of favouring mob rule over the rule of law, is that you might be the manipulator one day, you might be the demagogue, but next day you may be laid low, cast out. Then you can only hope that you are treated more decently, more legally, than you treated others.
In a society based on pure mutuality there is nothing to fear; but no society is purely mutual. There are good and bad people, there are activists and parasites. It is one of the moral burdens of the public spirited that they must inevitably be treated more badly than they treat others. That is the necessary sacrifice that guarantees the preservation of law against the mob. The Elian case shows that the forces of order and disorder are much more evenly balanced than any society would want for its own comfort and safety.
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