Kill'im, Arthur, kill'im!
No trumped up charge of this light brigade
When a youth clad in training suit and sneakers lumbers towards you down the footpath like a pregnant cow, with a bulge at his ankle, either he has mistaken the emission from his rear outlet and has more forces of land than air at his back, in which case you’d be well advised to deviate around him; or he is wearing a tag, in which case you’d be well advised to cross the road.
The electronic tag, which judicial systems use to chastise those guilty of misdemeanour but who are regarded as better off, for themselves and, indeed, for society, when kept outside a penitentiary institution, can, rather than serving as an object of reprimand, end up being brandished as a mark of honour: the wearer has completed a small step in his rite of passage towards thuggery.
Thuggery was a regular spectator sport with neighbours of ours when I was a youngster. They’d be woken in the night by screams from across the road and cries of “Kill’im, Arthur; kill’im!” As far as I can gather, Arthur never did kill’im, but his encourager was clearly of the mood that he should’ve done. There are now cries of “Kill’im” from America and, while I never knew the identity of him who’d incurred Arthur’s wrath, I do know the identity of him who’s incurred America’s.
Mr Donald Trump, when cited before New York’s high court to answer an accusation of sexual impropriety, proclaimed that he would favour attending his public hearing with manacles clasped around his wrists. His accuser might well have agreed, had there been any remote possibility of his repeating the offence whilst within the court’s precincts. However glad one might have been to see “at last” Mr Trump in chains, it goes without saying that doing so at his own behest would have been acquiescence in a public relations stunt on his part.
Already, for his next court appearance, his supporters and acolytes are offering a large bodyguard, said to be armed to the teeth with, not just vitriolic words but powerful firearms. I can’t see this resulting in a civil war, given that the demarcation between Confederate and Union States in 1861 was somewhat easier to define (with words like north and south) than that between “fors” and “againsts” of Mr Trump (albeit the “wife-beater” could be as distinct an identifying garment as culottes were in the French Rev.).
One vehement opponent of Mr Trump’s has voiced the view “I don’t see a future where he’s not incarcerated.” To which I replied:
“I don’t see a future where he’s not incarcerated” – by due process.
When we hack away at due process in order to get the right decision, we hack away at the very rule of law we accuse Mr Trump of having been so neglectful of. When we then come to stand ourselves before a court of law, accused, perchance erroneously, of a criminal charge, it is that rule of law that we will take as our crutch to demand true justice.
I cannot brook, no matter how well meaning and no matter how factually justified (a question, by the way, for the court of law and not me) the sentiment that he deserves it because someone might have had uneasy feelings about his presidency. That is how autocratic states operate, and America is fighting, right in this instant, to preserve democracy, and I’m right behind it, because America’s democracy is my democracy, across the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Your democracy is in a parlous state because polarisation has now driven political thinking to the edges of belief: the lack of belief in the institutions of democracy now leads all parties, Republican and Democratic alike, to cut to the chase, to get the right solution, come what may; and they may not do that. That is the solution of the Princes in the Tower, of southern mob lynchings and the lynching of gay men in Uganda. It is the mob rule of the mouse click. When we point, like Émile Zola, at injustice and utter our j’accuse-es, do we stop to consider how far we have descended into turpitude in order just to get things the way we want them? And, then, for how long?
We sit at the end of a see-saw, revelling in the opponent who, for an instant, flails on high in the air; surely, by now, we know that it’s only a matter of time before he descends to the terra firma, and we ourselves will be left flailing? The art of the see-saw is in fact to achieve perfect balance, and not to seek always the upper hand. When neither flails, that’s reconstruction. And a reconstruction is what is becoming urgent.
Another commentator is more measured: “[T]he guardrails that protected American democracy after the 2020 election — the courts, state election officials, military, and Justice Department — are stronger than before Trump tested them the first time,” adding, as a comment on the security nature of Mr Trump’s private papers collection, “Many Republicans consider national security the highest and most sacred goal of the Republic. A large number have served in the armed forces.”
To this I also replied.
There are some good judges in the US, I’m sure. But there are some bad judges in its Supreme Court. One who believes judges are above the law. And one who believes that he can’t understand an AO-10 declaration, whereas he can all too well understand complex legislation and SCOTUS precedents.
I have faith that the US courts system is just and right, on the whole; and that it is corrupt and corruptible, in places. But I don’t believe in capital punishment and I don’t believe in your Supreme Court. It is at best aleatory. And it should be constant.
And I don’t believe in mob justice. By either the NRA or Democratic mouse-click lynch-mobs, who yawp, like Whitman’s barbarian, for justice at any price. In democracies, we yawp for freedom of the guilty before unjust incarceration of the innocent. That’s why we have a presumption of innocence and a large threshold of proof facing the prosecution. Baying for someone’s scalp is not actually in the Constitution, is it?
Plato believed that democratic government was unworkable. So did Hobbes. In Leviathan, he described those who live in wartime as having a life that is nasty, brutal and short. He advocated autocracy. But he advocated an autocracy that is benevolent. Well, your opponents in the Republican camp believe that Mr Trump is benevolent. To them; and that is all, to them, that he needs to be benevolent unto.
I await 2024 with bated breath, to see how many turncoats there are in the Republican party, ex-service personnel or otherwise.