Perps Get Theirs; We Get Ours: James Carroll on Law and Order
Cambridge, Mass.: Near Harvard Yard 12/3/09
Schadenfreude! Schadenfreude!! I’ve been singing that to myself for weeks.
My favorite German word scans perfectly into the opening bars of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Joy in the pain or fall of the mighty – the Murdochtroids, Strauss-Kahn – is about all that’s been fun this summer for those of a progressive bent.
James Carroll, the eminent journalist and memoirist, reminds us in his Boston Globe column Monday that schadenfreude – a word he doesn’t use – is a debased, albeit very human, joy. In fact, it’s soul-destroying, society-destroying.
Carroll begins by crticising the collusion in publicising cases between law enforcement agents and the press – a corruption, I suspect, as old and smelly as the earliest newsprint wrapping dead fish.
Its most recent embodiment is the ‘perp walk’ which Carroll aptly describes as:
…the ritual whereby law enforcement collaborates with explosive media coverage – a broad public seemingly invited to take “cannibalistic” pleasure in the humiliation of one who has yet to be convicted. A puritanical condemnation, combining the speculation, rumor, and guesses in which pundits trade, can simultaneously transform the condemned into an object of rampant titillation, especially when the matter is sex. For the proud and the powerful, the perp walk, replayed in endless loops on cable and over social networks, can be a grotesque form of punishment that obliterates the presumption of innocence.
(The man I credit with the popularisation of the perp walk was Rudy Giuliani, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (New York City) under President Reagan (1983-89). Enough said.)
Carroll strolls from the perp walk to the courtroom:
Dramas of the court define the mythic center of the public imagination – the never-ending reruns of “Law & Order’’ being the most obvious case in point. In the courtroom, the betrayal of virtue is reckoned with, but the legal forum’s very ubiquity as a cultural holy-of-holies suggests that far more is being dealt with than the miscreant behavior of marginal characters.
Pawlet, Vermont: Town Hall 10/11/09
From the time I was five, I was in and out of courthouses. Their rooms held no mysteries for me – except the courtrooms. I have seen many holy places and shrines that affected me less than the most ordinary courtroom. Still.
And, the more one learns about how they came to be in Anglo-American society, the more sacred they become.
In this cause, I can’t recommend more highly Geoffrey Robertson’s The Tyrannicide Brief. As he reveals, much of what we regard as a defendant’s rights – the right to know the evidence against him/her, the right to counsel – were invented for the trial of King Charles I. The trials of the mighty can change society.
But Carroll makes a different point:
The cases of great figures cut down to size function as civic morality tales because, however good most people are most of the time, temptation is universal. Lust, greed, ambition, envy, fear – choose one. Or three. Every human must navigate the triple labyrinth of animal impulse, rational awareness, and moral choice. No one is immune from the recognition to which St. Paul came: “For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7: 19) It takes nothing away from the gravity of criminal acts, or the unacceptability of the exploitation by the powerful of the weak, to see in the courtroom contest between truth and deceit a process that implicates observers as well as antagonists.
Cambridge, Mass.: Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Freed Slave's Headstone 3/6/10
It is that collective complicity for good or ill, for right or wrong, I think overwhelms me in courtrooms. I first saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible performed in the round. The arrangement kept me from separating myself from the judge and townspeople driving toward the horrible executions of the witches.
But the public search for the tie between choice and consequence, which is, after all, the meaning of both morality and law, goes to deeper questions. How does character shape action? Do we get what we deserve? We imagine that those who are well known are somehow unlike us, that fame and wealth and power are instruments of control over destiny. When we obsess about their foibles, follies, accidents, crimes, and tragedies, we are working to let go of illusions about ourselves. Fallibility, contingency, foolishness, self-deceit – welcome to the human condition. What alone redeems it, and makes it noble, is the truth, which, despite the oath, is never whole, always mixed. Therefore the story is unending. That is why – duhn-duhn! – we never get enough of law and order.
I assumed when I first read the column that ‘law and order’ was a typo, lacking initial caps and quotation marks. I’m not so certain now. I sense irony in Carroll’s last sentence. We want what we ourselves ensure we’ll never have.
Note
I’ve collected quotations from what I read for nearly 20 years. No one has contributed more to my archive than James Carroll. His challenging weekly column is a major reason I continue to buy The Boston Globe every day.
Comments
Comment from Tom Welsh
Time 2011/07/13 at 07:49
Living in the age of legalistic accountability with its overproclaimed, limited, external transparency, I often wonder that I miss an age of personal responsibility with its open, internalised accountability and required commitment to mend my ways!
Comment from Peter Kinder
Time 2011/07/13 at 09:02
Having just passed through ‘security’ at the Albany Airport, I’m feeling external invisibility and a transporter beam might make travel tolerable again.
Comment from Pat Colt
Time 2011/07/13 at 10:15
Peter,
A number of things are swirling thru my head. I have just read “Why the west reules…for now” by Ian Morris. It is a must read. In it he says that when societies develop certain advantages they invest the surplus in babies, are forced to expand until a collapse occurs which is started by climate change, new diseases, invasions from mongols, or internal strife. He says that the depth of the collapse is in proportion to the hieght the society had achieved previously.
America has a form of government that historically has allowed us to rule ourselves without the amount of coercion that existed in other great empires (perhaps the civil war was an exception to that thought). We were also able to maintain more fluidity in society than others were able to do which gave us both the appearance and reality of more “fairness” than existed in England, Rome, or other great powers.
Our system of government requires that there be a middle ground on issues that meets the needs and is accord with the values of the majority of the people. Once again slavery had no meaningful middle ground and was a deal breaking exception. It now appears that there a a number of issues that threaten our ability to govern ourselves without coercion. Abortion, the role of religion (christianity, and even the idea that a very high degree of difference between rich and poor is desirable appear to be issues with no meaningful middle ground. These issues tear at the fabric of society and ultimately lead to its breakup.
The current logjam in Washington reflects exactly the conflict that I feel about our situation. Day after day I pass a government construction site where there are about 22 people employed. Every time I go by I count the number of people who are doing something positive. The number never exceeds eight at one time. My military experience and my experience in DOD research and development confirm that the government is full of waste and gives no thought to how hard it was to earn the dollars they spend so badly. On the other hand I see the immense and growing gap between rich and poor, the blatant affirmation that corporations are people in the eyes of the law, the domination of our government by wealth and I think we need more strength in Washington.
Not a happy time..
Pat
Comment from Peter Hunt
Time 2011/07/13 at 13:17
The media is so heavily involved in the side to “non- accountability” that their privileges should be revoked. the problem is what would replace them to support a well informed public capable of voting in a meaningful and reflective manner.
The internet holds some promise but then again the issue of validating the material is beyond the capability of the individual on anything but a very limited basis.
The press/media is now an active instrument of the Government. Lets be flat their issuances are saturated with propaganda. All under the rubric of if you want access do not promulgate things that ” would not be helpful”. In short, go along with out thinking or be cut off.
Want evidence just look at how long the NYTimes held back the story of domestic unauthorized wire tapping. Read the WP op-ed statement of the ex head of the CIA on the control they exercise on the publishers/editors. To Quote” We wouldn’t be doing our job if we did not”
Then there is the pervasive issue of prosecutorial discretion and so called “selective prosecution” by the DOJ. Don’t rock the boat on potential big contributors. Again is short. ” We are for sale” and wives with brief cases of cash can visit the President and their husbands are given pardons to return fro Switzerland.
As to the Congress. Take it from one who spent many years there, they too are now up for sale and when shielded by the media and DOJ near to invulnerable to replacement.
It sure isn’t integrity, intelligence or public concern that keeps them there and growing richer every term.
Middle class be damned. Earn your privileges and pay to keep them. The Senators are now all millionaires and the house following suit. Tax hikes forget it. A new and less boisterous form of slavery and perhaps a revolution to follow.
Get a “secret” clearance and you future is near to guaranteed — if you follow the rules.
Recovery to a working and believable stability is going to be painful and full of surprises, I fear.
Comment from Marcy Murninghan
Time 2011/07/13 at 17:36
Somehow my Facebook “Like” indicators aren’t working, but consider this multiple instead.
I agree that Carroll is a fine writer, and his Monday columns are a thorough treat, one that lingers. His recent piece on Whitey Bulger, how it exemplified the “last act in an American Irish tragedy”, was yet another example of his extraordinary ability to place current events within a social context riven with moral ambiguities and historical precedent.
My sense is that the more powerless people feel, the more they turn to entertainment as diversion. The celebritification (!) of wrong-doing not only brings out the worst of our own baser instincts, but continues to relegate us to as spectators in our own historical decline, like Romans in the arena–yet without the cachet.
Marcy.
Comment from Mary Gerster
Time 2011/07/13 at 17:57
not being in Boston I don’t read James Carroll’s columns but have loved his books. The perp walk seems a uniquely american entertainment among “civilized” society and as much as I admit I loved seeing the arrogant French lothario disgraced it happens to innocent folks as well ( I admit I think he is guilty as charged) It is a form of entertainment and creates a smugness in “regular’ folk. As to Congress and the Senate I cannot bear to listen any more to justification for NOT closing tax loopholes for wealthy Americans and businesses from those whose guy added $4 trillion to the debt without a peep from the now “enlightened” what a world. Peter love reading the comments as they do provide hope of intelligent life out there Mary
Facebook Comments