"What [we] need, and what [we] feel [we] need, is a quality of mind that will help [us] to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within [ourselves]. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination." C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959, <http://www.lclark.edu/~goldman/socimagination.html> (Feb. 13, 2008).
Nine years ago yesterday (Feb. 12, 1999) the President of the United States was acquitted by the U.S. Senate, on the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice under which the House of Representatives had previously impeached him. In the odd workings of historical memory, we are likely to remember the mark of impeachment on that president's record, yet forget the subsequent acquittal.
This semester our sociology class at the 200 level is looking at "contemporary social issues" from a sociological perspective. One of the challenges in sociology is that to study society, we need to learn to look at things that are very close to us, about which we might have deeply rooted opinions and beliefs; the aim of a sociological approach is not to abandon such opinions and beliefs, but to learn instead to find the tools and resources to understand what is right around us, without simply coming to some pre-drawn conclusions based on our preferences, beliefs and unexamined assumptions.
One issue that has come up recenlty that offers a study in the complexities of such a challenge--and the complexity of social issues--is that of the impeachment of President George Bush and of Vice President Richard Cheney. Of course, in fact, they haven't been impeached, and are not being impeached. But there is a movement of concerned citizens and legislators to persuade the U.S. Congress to do so. And this situation alone should serve as a powerful current-event learning moment for anyone attempting to learn about political and social forces and processes of our contemporary society.
There is the very idea of impeachment itself, through which society was brought in the late 1990's during the Clinton Administration. It is not a process we have seen often enough to be absolutely clear about in our understanding. "Impeach" and "convict" for example seem to stick together in our consciousness; similarly, "indict" and "impeach" (as processes, if not as concepts) seem to exist as completely separate entities--like magnets repelling one another with their like-charges. See discussion of impeachment process and history here.
There is also the current "social fact" of impeachment (to use a concept from the sociologist Emile Durkheim); it is a fact that some individuals and groups are currently attempting to engage the political system to move toward impeachment of the President. The facts of this "social fact" are themselves interesting, including the details about the members of congress attempting to bring this process about, the several hundred-thousand signature petition from citizens calling for the process, the political activists now going on a hunger strike to persuade the process forward, the self-identified "progressive" members of congress who seem unfazed and unmoved by their colleagues and constiutents.
There is in fact a stark contrast taking shape, between the 'liberal' leadership in congress who at the very least ignore, if not dismiss calls for impeachment (even the process of opening hearing to determine if there are any serious grounds to call the President on potential "high crimes and misdemeanors) and pockets of grassroots movements both in congress and in state and local governments pressing for the process to move forward. Several state and local governments around the country for example have formally voted to call for the impeachment of the President and the Vice President; at the same time, those 'progressive' members of congress who control the process seem oddly hesitant to give the issue serious public consideration.
Another aspect of the issue that is an interesting 'social fact' in all of this is how the whole question is treated (or not) by the main media outlets through which most people get their views of the world. For such a seemingly important question in fact, these outlets are relatively silent. And this in itself raises key questions about how such media themselves play the roles of filtering if not shaping perceptions of what is happening in the world around us.
One final note: A state legislator from New Hampshire, 87 year old Betty Hall, has in the past few days decided to join the example of members of the group "Code Pink," in going on a fast to persuade Rep. John Conyers to open hearings in Congress on impeachment. From a social scientific point of view at least one question comes to mind-- when someone like Cesar Chavez (or Martin Luther King, or Mohandas Gandhi, Dorothy Day or Rosa Parks) first entered into something like a boycott or hunger strike in order to influence others' consciences and actions, how were they understood or portrayed while in the midst of things ('crazies,' 'manipulative,' 'irresponsible,' 'fringe kooks,' 'naive idealists,' etc.) as compared to the way they were/are remembered later for their purported courage, integrity and 'prophetic witness'? Just in relation to the dynamics of how such perceptions grow, one might wonder for example if M.L. King were still alive today, and acting to end the war in Iraq, would we still have the idealized attitudes toward him that we have otherwise embedded in the lore of his current national holiday?
Sociology aims to help us study and understand what is very close to us. It is a challenge but the social reality of things like impeachment are now among the things we are surrounded by. We can choose to look at them deeply, or turn to things less controversial, less "politically charged," and maybe in the process lose touch with some of the deepest social currents of the era we are now experiencing. To recall the concept of C. Wright Mills, this is as much a time as any for us to learn deeply about the currents of our present era, to engage in and develop the "sociological imagination" in order to understand effectively the world that now shapes us and calls for our engagement.
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