Let's pretend that it's story time, and I'll tell a tale to you...
I’ll tell you a story of make believe
And all your dreams will come true
And when the story’s over, and when we reach the end,
You’ll live happily ever after, in the land of Let’s Pretend.
(Gene London, ca.1962, WCAU-TV children’s show, Philadelphia)
So your neighbor gets on your nerves, and one night you go over and burn his house to the ground. Of course, there are cameras everywhere on the block, and the police come to your house. And you say to them, “I’m not cooperating with your law-enforcement.“
They issue a warrant for your arrest, but you file a petition that they have no right to arrest you with the courts, and it drags on for years and years and years, until it finally reaches the state Supreme Court. After they rule against you, you say that they have no constitutional right to have you arrested. Law-enforcement just sits around and weighs the matter and thinks hard about what to do. Time goes by, all this becomes a distant past, everybody forgets about it, except of course, the aggrieved party, but… Hey, shit happens.
Well, as you know, that is not how it works. You would’ve been taken into custody that night, arraigned the next morning, most likely a high bail would be set, and people would have to raise money, or you would have to mortgage your house to be able to walk free until your imminent trial at which time you would be convicted of multiple counts including quite possibly attempted murder, and sent to jail for who knows how long. Because that’s how it works for ordinary citizens.
But if you’re someone like, say, Gym Jerkoff, rather than arresting and prosecuting you for not heeding a subpoena concerning an investigation into the violent overthrow of the United States government, they make you a committee chairman in the United States Congress.
The last words of the Pledge of Allegiance are “…and justice for all.” Not hardly.
As a coda to this post, I will add that during the whole post 9/11 insanity, when everyone was running around scared to death of the shadows, I would ask rhetorically: “Whatever happened to the ‘home of the brave’?“ People would look at me as though I were insane. I would reply to them that they were now afraid of the clerk at the 7-Eleven, who was ringing up their coffee in the morning, sounds like real macho stuff to me. And yeah, no one ever asked me to write a sequel to “how to Win friends and influence people”.
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