Mercifully for me, I’ve been too busy to obsess much about the state of the union or keep up with the state of the argument about how we “should” proceed with our prosecution of the Bush Administration crimes. I’ve been “doctoring” again in a couple of charity clinics; we got a nice grant from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation to extend our studies of Native American highways and byways; and tomorrow, I’m bar-b-queing for a hundred or so at our Spring Social on our little lake. All good stuff, but it doesn’t shut off my mind entirely.
I feel fairly clear about what not to do:
-
Do Nothing: To me, this is the worst option. What they did then becomes precedent. That’s totally unacceptable.
-
Put it behind us; Let it go; Move on; Look forward: The lesson of trauma in history and in psychology is that this never works. A way to say that is that if you put it behind you, you’re followed for all time. I once saw a man who had been in the German Army. Towards the end of the War, he’d been wounded so he was in a hospital in Berlin when the Russians marched into the city. He was taken to a village in the middle of Russia where he stayed as a permanent P.O.W. until the mid fifties. When he was finally released, he returned to Germany, but there was nothing there for him anymore. After a time in South America, he ended up selling Mercedes in Atlanta Georgia. In his early 70’s, he returned to Germany because an aunt was dying. As fate arranges things, she was in the same hospital that he’d been in in the War. So now, fifty years later, he was overwhelmed with all those things he had “put behind” him. He’s the one who gave me the line, “It followed me, all these years.” It never works and we shouldn’t even try it.
-
Prosecute the Bushies with a vengence [the Ken Starr method]: If we went with how I feel about what they did, we’d burn them at the stake. They weren’t just incompetent or bumbling, they were vigalantes – rewriting our laws on the fly. Their methods were barbaric and paranoid; their motives were criminal; and their results were atrocious. Their recurrent claims that “It worked” are both immaterial and dead wrong [see what I mean about how I feel?].
What is the point [besides blocking their misbehavior from becoming precedent]? I think the foremost point is to re-establish the rule of law – Civil Law, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Law. For years we’ve been saying that they are not “above the Law.” We need to make that charge stick.
My profession teaches that one can never really rise above one’s own subjectivity. In this case, I think that’s completely true. I couldn’t honestly serve on a jury that dealt with any of them. No matter what I said, what logic came out of my mouth, I know that the back of my mind would function like Attila the Hun or Ghengis Khan. So I don’t know how to assure that Lady Justice is blind in this case – and I worry that we might either do the same thing to them that they did to the prisoners at Gitmo, or let them walk because of their high office and to avoid embarassment. In fact, the way this is handled is extremely important – almost more important than the outcome. We are a nation of Laws, or at least we were. That’s what needs to be re-established above any other consideration…
Pay they must..