Traditional Texas

A day of contradictions in court

I know something just went out from me, but this is hot off the wire.

What is a tradition? And what is tradition?

“I remember,” is clearly the opening line of a reminiscence. It continues: “how we used to …” do whatever they used to do. My street used to be a connection between one part of the village and another. It wasn’t always. It used to run into a cul de sac, before the new houses were built beyond the level crossing, extending the road up to a new bridge over the railway, and the abolition of the crossing. All of this took place in the year 1955, not that I lived here in 1955, but the date, along with the cypher of Belgian National Railways, was cast into a feature brick in the parapet of that new bridge. And, if you’re sharp-eyed, the concrete poured in that year to extend the road up to the bridge is actually marked in the roadway in places—by a stick—with the year of construction.

But it isn’t any more. A connecting road, I mean. It is now again a cul de sac. This is a transition period, and the permanence of the no through road status is not yet set in tablets of concrete, so the change has not been cemented into place.

What that means for the unobservant (who fail to register the no through road sign erected where you come off the roundabout), the blithely confident (who see it but ignore it) and the ebulliently optimistic (“there will be some way round the obstacle, never fear”) is that there is as yet nowhere to turn round, except for the dentist’s parking area. One resident in the street has set up as a secondhand car dealer and gets regular visits from car transporter lorries. I think they think we don’t notice these things.

Anyway, used to is a modal verb in English (i.e. says something to qualify the act, without itself being an act) indicating a past habitual action that is no longer of application, and the operative word there is habitual. What people often do when they reminisce is deploy used to to show regularity, close affinity, association, familiarity, lived experience. Whilst the tendency would be, if one has done something once, to say, “I once …”, as soon as the tally becomes two, invariably it’s used to that is the more resorted-to expression, and the number of occasions between once and used to is therefore a flexible measure. It can sound like a lot but actually be very little, a bit like Roman feet and inches.

To recap: I once is used when you once did something but don’t know when, or the date is irrelevant. I used to: used when you did something more than once, but not every day. I always used to: you really have to have done it at least three times. Right. Then there’s a bit of a gap in the temporally situational descriptors, because the next one of any rhetorical worth is ancient.

And that is what these expressions have now become: they are no longer what the boring grammarian refers to as expressions of frequency in past time; they have rhetorical significance, and virtually no literal meaning. Tradition is a composed word, out of Latin, from trans-, meaning across, as in transport (carry across) or trans-Atlantic (across that ocean). The -dition comes from dare, to give. So a tradition is—traditionally—an act, practice or belief that is handed across the generations, from one to another. It’s something we do because our fathers did it and, more likely, also our forefathers. As a French word, it’s still used as legalese for delivery, handing over (of a deed).

My mother did many things that her own mother had taught her growing up. It would hardly be a tradition for her to do them, but it is more of one for me to do the same things, as taught to me by her, but stemming from my own grandmother. For all we know, however, had they had kids, Sweeney Todd and his wife might well have instructed them in the ways of dismembering a murder victim to mask the deed by making meat pies out of them. One has therefore to qualify the tradition with the word cherished (if it is supported) or some dismissive descriptive if it is to be reproved.

Generally the fact of being a tradition is not unremarkable. It points to a widespread change in habits, broadly acknowledged to have no formal commencement point but having gained in popularity over time. Perhaps the best such example is the German pagan habit of decorating trees (a symbol of fertility, like maypoles) around the end of the year, which became a fashion in Victorian England under the influence of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, and is now a formal part of Christmas celebrations in many countries where the pine tree is not even a native sort.

To be a tradition, an act has to be marked out as something of particular note from the period in which it arises: after all, if now were exactly the same as then, everything, and therefore nothing, would be traditional. Christmas trees are just one small example from that Victorian time that we still hold dear to. Sending small boys up chimneys may be fondly depicted in the movie Mary Poppins, but it’s no longer a cherished tradition. (Except that small boys are, in some parts of the world, no better off from the demise of that particular one.)

Two sons of Texas are today in the news. Whether one can rejoice in the Texan tradition that is its legal system, which has been handed down over generations since the state was welcomed into the Federal U.S. in 1845, is at least open to question. Texas had previously been part of Mexico (leading to complaints by Mexico to the U.S. about illegal American immigration into its then Coahuila y Tejas territory, wouldn’t you know it). To my European eyes, there is a flavour (to mix my metaphors) of traditional, Mesquite-grilled, 19th century justice to even modern Texas, and part of that is its adherence to the death penalty. It is by no means alone in its use of execution as punishment. It is questionable whether that fate offers any dissuasion to its criminal underworld. But today the news concerns the cases of Clinton Young and Robert Roberson, who are two of many thousands on death row in the United States and who have been dealt cruel blows by the Texan justice system’s tradition of doling out death sentences, sometimes seemingly without due consideration for the finality of its ruling compared to the less-than-inviolability of its verdict.

Today’s world vaunts such traditions as We don’t dial 911, the death penalty, retaliation and retribution by an uncaring public against an accused deemed of no consequence. They have justice in Texas, just as they have justice everywhere, if the measure of justice is the measure of the care invested by a legal system’s populace in the remedies that it delivers. Today, it delivered two extraordinarily surprise decisions.

On Robert Roberson III, convicted in 2003 of the murder of his two-year old daughter, his shock was, it seems, palpable. Within hours of the set time and after framing his mind in terms of his belief and love of God, he learned that his execution would not be proceeded with and he had been granted a reprieve of 30 days, as the tidal wave of indignation at the junk science on which his putative guilt was constructed made its way into the public’s awareness. This must surely bode for a happy outcome, for, if it is just a tug at his puppet strings in the hour of his greatest need for spiritual accompaniment, then Texas can heap cruelty upon the injustices already in its shameful catalogue.

On Clinton Young, the shock is the reverse: having been out on an ankle bracelet for two years when efforts by a Dutch lawyer secured his release from a 20-year stint on death row, he has been retried on the original charges, been found guilty and now been sentenced to life imprisonment. I’ve not read the judgment, but this is a crushing turn of fate for someone who has served two decades for crimes he denies and for which ostensible evidence is abundantly available pointing to another culprit. The trouble is, the other culprit is already doing 30 years of time in relation to the same facts. The new court has ruled (I paraphrase) We may have gotten the sentence a bit harsh for Young, but the conviction itself is secure. They must know. But in Texas’s endeavours to be what they might call efficient and fair, they have boxed themselves in: if the co-accused got 30 years on a plea bargain, and Young is the principal defendant, he has to get over 30 years (he is the principal defendant … because his co-accused fingered him). Life sounds about right. Except about is not exactly exact, and we’re not doling out dinner time’s potatoes here.

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot, the character Pozzo muses on the amount of happiness in the world being precisely offset by the amount of unhappiness in the world. When one person bursts out in tears, another will experience boundless joy. It seems that’s true, in Texas at least.

More on Robert Roberson III (left) here.

More on Clinton Young (right) here.

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