Bells said:
I do think his admitting to having allowed perjury on what appears to be multiple occasions and his not having informed the grand jury that those witnesses were lying is a huge breach and one that literally made a mockery of the law he is meant and obliged to adhere to as an attorney.
We're now seeing a quiet American phenomenon.
Okay, the thing is that we allegedly hate lawyers.
The exception, of course, is that an American does not hate his or her own lawyer.
"He may be a shark," we say with a wink to the next guy, "but at least he's my shark."
What we are about to see in re Mr. McCulloch is a society set aside its usual prejudice about lawyers while everyone runs around pretending to be one.
Without doing so, we would otherwise be at a point where everybody has to admit that McCulloch cooked himself as well as the case.
Okay, here's one:
You remember that one guy who was hollering, "Hear! Hear!" and celebrating the "inconvenient truth" of the grand jury?
Right. There will be a number of people who bought into that sort of talk; they have their own issues about racism to deal with, but they were taught this way and that and for just a moment it looked like things would be "right" in the world. And you won't know who all those people were, because some of them were at least smart enough to not go crowing in the town square. But this is the time when those folks are going to pull out everything in their li'l bag o'tricks because it's not
merely a dead black man, a police officer, and now a prosecutor on the line. Oh, no, this is far more important than that. This is about them being right or wrong and what that means because the one thing that is really, really, really important for the rest of us to recognize is that they are not racists. Because in the name of proving that they are not racists they will suddenly pretend to be very, very ignorant.
I can't say that's what our neighbor is on about, but it is also true that his posts at #
2↑,
5↑, and
7↑ show a curious naïveté that I wouldn't otherwise expect. Indeed, where his and my generations overlap culturally in general, I would expect him to know the answers to these questions. Whether he's radioplay
Untouchables, teleplay
Untouchables, or flowerplay older than I am, he's still of a time when police and prosecutors were fonts of principle in fiction, redefined downward by reality. He's facing a time when things are bad enough that part of the discourse involves attempting to redefine the police upward by reality, except it is a context of reality that is dragging them down.
And he's seen something that looks like this before. And it should not be happening in the twenty-first century.
When people revert to that sort of "How does this work, again?" the only real question is why. That answer will tell us how to answer the general inquiry.
And when I stop and think about it for a moment, part of what seems so unreal is that it is taking place in such plain view. It is almost as if, well, you know how sometimes one rages, "What does it take! What has to happen before people get it!" and, well, you find yourself blinking like a fool in the sunlight because the most difficult thing about describing what is going on is that everyone around you seems to have suddenly become
entirely unaware of things you damn well know they damn well knew yesterday? This is almost like Life having Will. You know, God. Because it's so damnably apparent right now that one can almost imagine that little tweak:
I wonder if they'll notice ... this.
We are well into the realm of farce. And that's the thing; there were plenty of ways to whitewash this already tarnished officer, and
this is the route they chose, to hold a public orgy of basic human cruelty and corruption right before our eyes. Bob McCulloch has exactly one path to redemption, and that would be at the press conference immediately after he is disbarred, when he steps up to the microphone and utters only one sentence.
And then between a quarter and a third of the country falls over laughing, and McCulloch shuffles off into history as a reviled figure, but at least he went and said it.
Mr. Fish, 30 November 2014