A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

IT'S JUST THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS YOU'RE SURE OF, LIKE LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE: Two related items worth noting on the topic of Aaron Sorkin, Seer --

• As the AV Club's Amelie Gillette notes, this week's SNL debut contained a skit that's a complete ripoff of one from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip; and


• More seriously, I've talked before here of my huge admiration for the "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail" episode of The West Wing -- the second Big Block of Cheese Day, the visit from the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality and the main plot, of Sam Seaborn wrestling with his knowledge that a pardon-seeker's grandfather really was a spy.
  
  It's hard to read yesterday's article about Robert and Michael Meeropol accepting that their father, Julius Rosenberg, was a spy without thinking back to Sorkin. Growing up Jewish and looking at pictures of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, it was always easier to imagine that this meek little couple was the victim of Cold War hysteria (and Roy Cohn) than to believe they had betrayed atomic secrets. Easier to accept a McCarthyite conspiracy than to acknowledge that some Jews on the left were not loyal citizens.
  
  But a new confession from their father's co-conspirator and recently declassified grand jury testimony tell the latter tale, one which the Rosenbergs' sons now accept: Dad was a spy. He really did turn over confidential information to the Soviets, and even though as TPE reminds me other spies have done worse and not so suffered (Ames, Hanssen), he did commit a crime against the state, and if you're going to have a death penalty at all, it's for stuff like this.
  
  Now Ethel, on the other hand? I'm reminded (as I often am) of the line from Crimes and Misdemeanors, "I love him like a brother -- David Greenglass," because it's clear that Greenglass lied under oath to implicate his sister-in-law, whom the evidence suggests was not culpable in all this -- certainly not culpable to the extent that Mom merited a death sentence, and possibly not criminally at all. It was all about pressuring her to flip on suspected colleagues -- a bluff she called -- and the consequences were fatal.
  
  Treason is the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution (Art. III, sec 3), and there is perhaps no more obscure phrase in the Constitution than the one that instructs "no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood." This ended the British practice through which the descendants of an convict could be barred from inheriting either from the convict or from other relatives through him. Even for the worst criminals, our Constitution refuses to visit the sins of the father on the sons; each generation is free to chart its own destiny. Worth remembering on this 221st Constitution Day.