Amistad, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Judiciary, Independence, Social Contract, Independence
I have long wanted to see this film, and when it popped up
on our queue, the reluctant wife and I agreed to take a look. It is a Steven Spielberg film that, along
with Schindler’s List, is one of those films that you ought to see, but, that
said, do you really want to? It is
showing, in this case, in living color, how corrupt and brutal we can be. I also “ought” to see it because one of my
high school buddies was one of the film editors. When Spielberg said cut here, he did.
Much to our surprise, this film packs a powerful
contemporary message in Trump II’s America.
Yes, it is about slavery and the slave trade, yes, it is about a boat
full of Africans illegally enslaved and illegally transported. But mostly it is about the need for an
independent judiciary. Again and again,
the eleven year old Queen Isabella of Spain (Played by a very young Anna Paquin in a minor
role) is held up as being a more powerful ruler than our President, Martin Van
Buren, because Queen Isabella controls her courts while Van Buren does not, try
as he might.
At the time of this film, the transatlantic slave trade was
illegal, but slavery was alive and well in the United States. Slavery here would not be outlawed until the
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, after the civil war, the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 banned slavery entirely. Kentucky, near me, outlawed selling slaves
relatively early in the 1800s, but most of the legislative action up until the
civil war was granting exceptions to the law so that particular transactions
could take place.
The Amistad was a ship carrying Africans that had been
transferred from the illegal transatlantic ship Tecora to a local ship in
Havana, Cuba, a Spanish Colony. The Africans
commandeered the Amistad, sparing two crew members who agreed to take them back
to Africa, but those crew members instead steered them into American Waters,
where the ship was commandeered by the US Navy and taken to Boston, where a
series of Judicial proceedings took place.
The first trial was a criminal trial to determine if the Africans were
guilty of murdering most of the crew. As
the killings of the crew members took place in international waters, the court
decided it did not have jurisdiction.
But that left the matter of what to do with the Africans.
Queen Isabella supported the claim of the remaining crew
that the Africans were indeed slaves and belonged to the crew members and that
they were being ferried between Spanish colonies and should be returned. Martin Van Buren, both to support his
relationship with Spain, and to curry favor with Southern Voters, supported
this claim. But an abolitionist group
became concerned about the Africans.
They approached the retired president John Quincy Adams to defend them,
but he demurred, preferring to stay away from the issue of slavery and wanting
to remain in retirement. So, they hired
a local attorney, played by a young Matthew McConaughey
(who did a credible job, losing his Texas accent by the end of the movie); an
expert in property law which, much to the chagrin of the abolitionists, was
exactly what they needed when the court was considering the Africans to be
slaves.
The complicating factor here, is that the Africans did not
speak English. The attorney was able to
find an ex-slave who spoke the language of some of the slaves – the Africans
had broken into tribal groups in the group prison cell and Cinqué
(Djimon
Hounsou) became their spokesman (at least as portrayed in the
film). The attorney found a sympathetic
ear in the judge, so Van Buren changed judges, but that judge, too, was swayed
by the discovered documentation of the Africans having been illegally
transported from Africa, and released the Africans. Van Buren, again trying to hang onto the
South, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
At this point, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins)
finally agreed to get involved. He
argued the case before the Supreme Court.
Historically, he had 4 and ½ hours of opening arguments, and 4 hours in
his closing arguments. The filmed
version was more concise. It was also
what I would like to focus on in thinking about the film. In doing this, I am not addressing the brutal
(but also historically accurate) depiction of the middle passage from Africa to
the Americas. I am also not addressing
the issue of people as property - for that, see a discussion of James
Cone’s the Cross as the Lynching Tree.
The issue of an independent judiciary is both political and,
I will argue in a moment, intrapsychic.
Trump had the judiciary in his pocket when he arrived for his first term. As the
New York Times recently revealed, Chief Justice Roberts ushered in the era
of the shadow docket when he put the kibosh on Obama’s use of the EPA to reduce
the use of coal in electricity production and thereby blocked the transition to
renewable energy sources by 2030. After
that, Mitch McConnell oversaw the revamping of the federal judiciary including
the Supreme Court during Trump I, and the court has become a rubber stamp of
the more and more outlandish executive orders of Trump II. The No Kings marches are partly an objection
to Trump’s having achieved the position that Queen Isabella enjoyed – the court
that matters does not disagree with him, and will disagree with itself to
support him.
John Adams, in his closing statement, argued persuasively
that we need to remember the founding fathers.
The power of this statement was amplified in that one of those founding fathers
was his own Dad. These men, many of them
slaveholders, argued for the freedom of men.
He was reminding the justices of the principles that are the cornerstone
for a free country and the importance of following the law. In this case, even in a country that
continued to own and trade slaves internally, it was internationally illegal to
enslave and trans-oceanically transport slaves.
The rule of law supercedes the will of the majority – at least it used
to. Everyone, including the President,
was required to live within the confines of laws that were determined by
Congress, a body that was representing the people. The only exceptions are when Congress enacts
laws that violates the constitution and rights that are spelled out in that document. The People’s will, therefore, is at the heart
of the law. We have a social contract
not with a king who commands us, but with ourselves – or more closely – with
each other and with our better angels, as spelled out in the constitution, and
especially the amendments to it.
When we enter into a social contract, we agree to tame our instincts. Freud famously argued that this was the source of our discontent. Yes, we are less happy in the moment when our internal judge rules that this or that action is out of bounds because it simply is not allowed as part of being a member of society. Hopefully, we are also connected enough with the members of our society that we would not want to harm them. This higher form of moral functioning, one that is based in basic attachment, is not one that Freud had conceptual access to, but it should be something that we are evolving towards, individually, and as a state.
This week, the reluctant wife, who used to be a
member of the deep state, cohosted a meeting in our house of a group of
people meeting to discuss the ideals – the principles (not the policies) that
make us America. A central component of
that, in my mind, is that he, as citizens, enter into a social contract and, as
an essential element of that contract, no person is above the law. The question to the group was whether we have
outlived the ideals that were influential in founding the country. We may have done that in some areas, but this
movie helped me realize that the rule of law – and the independence of the
judiciary is not something that we can afford to give up. This is still, in my mind, an essential part
of being an American.
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