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NEWS & LETTERS, July-August 2010
The 'yap and howl' of justice
Clarence Darrow once said, I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose. For my part, I don't believe in justice because I don't believe in God. Based on what religion has wrought, I'm sure we would all have been better off believing in Mother Goose than either God or justice. Especially as justice, like God, is little more than a household pet of the State and the court its church.
As Raoul Vaneigem spelled out years ago: "Justice, dignity, nobility, freedom...these words that yap and howl, are they anything other than household pets whose masters have calmly awaited their homecoming since the time when heroic lackeys won the right to walk them on the streets? To use them is to forget that they are the ballast that enables power to rise out of reach."
Once in the grasp of justice, I can assure you the howling never ceases, echoing through the courts and prisons of the predator state of America.
The way people misinterpret the meaning of justice, you would think it was a well-kept secret that its root word, the Latin jus, means sacred formula or religious ritual. It is no accident the courthouse for the U.S. Supreme Court looks like a Roman temple, and the quasi-religious ritual that is justice has nothing to do with fairness in determining right from wrong. It is simply a formula to punish and impress people with the power of the state, replete with all the trappings of state power, including the black robes of medieval priests and a quarter of a million plus volumes of law!
Who really knows what's in all those volumes? Yet, many people go to court relying on this law to obtain justice, which they mistakenly assume to be the proverbial American "fair shake," only to be confounded by justice's founding principle as expressed in the Spanish colonial aphorism "the law is to be obeyed not followed." All the law will ever give you is justice, and justice is exactly what you should never want. Audre Lorde had a point when she stated, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
A court today is little better than a Klan meeting except the robes are not white and there are no burning crosses. There is, however, a Bible you can swear on!
Another commonly held belief is that you only get as much justice as you can afford to buy. This is not true, as the goal is to buy your way out of the justice system, as any truly wealthy person could tell you. Depending on how much money has changed hands, the black-robed priest-executioners known as judges will twist the law in order to obtain the results paid for. A judge, Baron Parke, actually admitted as much when he said his greatest joy was to write "an opinion in which by reasoning with strict legal concepts, I arrive at a result no lay person could conceivably have anticipated." As in ancient Rome the wealthy and the powerful in the U.S., and the world, are never held accountable by justice. In fact, quite the opposite. Because of justice we have state leaders who are notoriously unpunished criminals, thieves, and mass murderers; and corporations that have more rights and power than citizens, including a global license to loot and pillage.
Yet, I continually hear the whine for justice, even from the pages of this paper, when justice is the last thing any sane person should want. I've been in prison the past 12 years courtesy of justice, so it's certainly the last thing I want. I'm certain all those persons who got justice and were sent to rot in prison for years, until finally exonerated by DNA testing, never wanted it once they got it. Particularly those exonerated post mortem!
So much for the myth of being innocent until proven guilty! The cold hard fact of justice is that you are guilty upon arrest and can never be proven innocent at trial. The best you can hope for is a finding of "not guilty," and ex-prisoners quickly learn that finding is no proof of innocence, as the courts are quick to point out when they sue for wrongful imprisonment.
No person should ever want justice, any more than they should want to die, go to heaven and live in a city of gold with a bunch of winged harp-players, a la John Bunyan and St. John the Crazy. Roman justice was as U.S. justice is, a formula for ignoring its own precept, Patere legem quam ipse tulisti (Submit to the laws you have yourself made). This, my friends, is justice well served! None for me, thank you, but I will have a little of that injustice if you don't mind.
--Rand W. Gould, C-187131
Pine River Correctional Facility
320 N. Hubbard St., St. Louis, MI 48880
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