Maybe John Roberts

I’ll admit, I was fooled at first.

John Roberts looks like a reasonable man. Oh, does he look reasonable. Read his opinions. He is the model of a modern enlightened logical jurist. Of course, his rulings always end up in favor of the corporations, the police, and the rich and powerful. But the lovely words he uses to get there!

He may be an intellectual giant compared to Clarence Thomas, but he will probably rule exactly the same way on every issue.

Roberts has stated to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he is “no ideologue”. That is about as close to perjury as you get. No– that is perjury. Roberts is either so seriously deluded that he cannot be considered fit for office, or a liar. I say, he is a liar.

[2022-05 Lawrence Tribe has done an excellent piece illustrating, among other things, how a Justice of the Supreme Court could earnestly believe that the mental framework and cultural affiliation of a justice could lead them to conclude that specific rulings on particular issues are “objective” because they congenial to that framework, when we know that the framework itself is the product of implicit bias.]

Mr. Roberts is an extremist, a radical, an authoritarian. Here is the best evidence, aside from all the rulings– I mean, all of his rulings– in favor of corporations and the police: Mr. Roberts was on a panel of judges that heard an appeal of the notorious french fry case from the city of Washington, Hedgepeth vs. Washington.

A 12-year-old girl entered a subway station with French fries. Contrary to the law, she ate a fry. A policeman saw her do this and arrested her. He made her put down the French fry and her backpack and lay down on her stomach. Then he hand-cuffed her.

We are talking about a 12-year-old girl here. Eating a French fry.  A big, burly, powerful policeman.   Handcuffs. I am not making this up.

We’re talking about an psycho adult police officer, who was supposedly trained in something or another. I mean that– psycho. Do you think it’s normal for an adult male to want to handcuff a 12-year-old girl for eating a French fry? Was he trained to assume that a 12-year-old girl could threaten him physically? Does a normal adult male make a strange 12-year-old girl lay face down on the floor while he handcuffs her so she won’t hurt him and flea from the charge of eating a french fry on a subway platform?

Just how many fugitive french fry eaters are there at any given time?

If you dare to defend Judge Roberts’ ruling in this case, it would be as hard for me to argue with you and it would be for me to argue against a Mormon or Scientologist or faith-healer or member of the NRA. You’ve lost your mind.

In detail: the ingenious Judge Roberts ruled that since the interests of the state are served by discouraging juvenile delinquency, the actions of the police were justified. The government may go around and force little girls to lay down on the pavement so they can be handcuffed for eating French fries on subway platforms. That might not seem nice, but that’s just too bad.

[That’s like saying that since the interests of the state are served by discouraging obesity the government may ban fast food outlets from serving French fries. You see, Roberts said that the state was interested in “discouraging juvenile delinquency”. He didn’t say that there was no constitutional requirement to arrest juvenile delinquents– unless it is is in the interests of the state, just as the constitution doesn’t require the government to fight obesity… unless…a state decides that can. March 2011]

There is no exception for common sense, sanity, reasonableness, humanity, compassion, or having a brain. It makes no difference that the girl was 12-years-old. It makes no difference that we live on a planet called Earth that is round and that revolves around the sun. Facts are facts.

That is the world Judge Roberts inhabits. That is a world that makes sense to him because the man, for all his cool, calm, detached manners, has no sensibility at all. He has absolutely no common sense, no humanity, and probably no human feeling. This is a man who grew up in a privileged, insulated environment, and who never in his entire life came face-to-face with the gritty reality of street crime and poverty. He clerked for rich white judges appointed by rich white politicians funded by rich white corporations. When he is confronted by a case of a poor black man who was beaten up by the police after he robbed someone because his family was starving– you never know, might happen–, he’s going to think, in the back of his tiny little brain, “why didn’t he just buy some food?”

You won’t find anything in his biography about military service, volunteerism, missionary activities, or travels to exotic locales. This is a guy who lives in Republican gingerbread houses with gingerbread nannies and gingerbread rules. Twelve-year old girls eating French fries bring disorder and confusion. But Roberts knows better than to say “we like locking up 12-year-old girls for eating French fries.” He can’t say that– it’s too bald and too real. So he says, twelve-year-old girls can become delinquents. Delinquents must be locked up.

Then he says, I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. I’m really very, very sorry. But the 12-year-old girl must be locked up in a police car and taken downtown and fingerprinted and photographed and detained. That is the kind of thing that is necessary to sustain Judge Roberts’ gingerbread world.

And all they talk about is abortion and voting rights and gay marriage. Even the Democrats.

The Republicans have so skewed the political debate in the U.S. that nobody even questioned the fact that Bush overtly declared that he was going to load the court with conservative partisans, as if that is how appointments to the Supreme Court should be made.

The fact is, abortion (and gun rights) have always been a red herring for conservative politics which is only and ever concerned with preserving the status, wealth, and privilege of propertied white men.

It’s a wedge issue.  The most convincing evidence of this?  Compare the rulings of the same judges (anti-abortion, pro-gun, pro-patriotism) with their rulings on corporate law, workers rights, unions, pensions, investment funds, corporate liability, and so on.  They are absolutely uniform.  Those are the rulings that really matter to Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republican toadstools.


It’s too late. Roberts will be confirmed. He won’t be the worst justice on the Supreme Court, but that’s only because of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

Sinful Pat Robertson

You may have noticed that little storm God sent to Louisiana and Mississippi. The message is clear. God is angry. He wants to punish someone for the grievous sin of blaspheming his holy name. That someone is Pat Robertson.

Just a few weeks ago, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Then he lied about calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and accused the mainstream media of taking him out of context and misquoting him.

But now it’s clear that Pat Robertson was the one who sinned. He advocated murder, which, according to the bible, is the same as actually committing the murder himself. Then he accused others of sin to cover up his own sin. So God sent Katrina to teach him a lesson.

Now, you may have noticed that Katrina didn’t actually do any harm to Pat Robertson but it did do a great deal of harm to a lot of innocent people in New Orleans and Biloxi and Mobile, and so on.

But that’s the way it is with God’s wrath. As Jerry Falwell pointed out, 9/11 was punishment for America’s acceptance and tolerance of homosexuals. It didn’t matter if none of the people in those buildings were actual homosexuals, just as it didn’t matter that none of the people in New Orleans waiting in their attics in water up to their collar-bones was actually Pat Robertson.

If you believe that sort of thing.


You are not sure if God really sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson? How would you know if I was wrong? You would pray about it, right, and God would tell you?

What if God told you that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ tradition of drunkenness and debauchery? What if God told me that it was punishment for Pat Robertson’s militancy? How do we know which is the real message from the real God?

Actually, maybe it’s not as hard as it looks. Just read the bible, especially the gospels. Then try to imagine that God would get more angry at a lot of poor black people who have been beat up and abused most of their lives than he would at a rich and powerful white preacher who, confronted with the problem of dwindling supplies of oil for America’s lavish lifestyle, advocates political assassination over conservation.  And confronted with the problems of racism and poverty and inequality, he would advocate reduced taxes for the rich?

Try to imagine Christ saying, “blessed are those who give tax deductions to investors and shareholders, and who reduce the liability of manufacturers for defects in their products, and whosoever provideth grants and incentives to profitable companies that they might exploit disasters for their own gain…”

You see?  God sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson.  I prayed about it and it’s true.

PR Advice for the Heterosexual Tom Cruise

You would think a big-time Hollywood actor would have a better understanding of PR than Tom Cruise.

Cruise appeared on the Oprah show a few weeks ago with Katie Holmes. He looked absolutely demented as he jumped around the stage proclaiming how hetero-sexual he was, and how Katie Holmes was just the girl for him, and how happy he was that she was hanging out with him, and how hot she was, and so on. I was just waiting for a band to kick in with “I’m Into Something Good”.

It was a truly weird moment in the history of nothing. Nothing. What else are we talking about here? An irrelevant talk-show hostess interviewing an irrelevant actor. Nothing.

If Cruise really wants to convince people that he is not gay, what he really needs is to get Katie married to someone else– say, John Travolta– and then be caught by a tabloid photographer leaving a motel room with Katie, trying to hide his face. Even better– he should attack the photographer and try to seize his camera. Then he should launch a lawsuit against any magazine that prints the pictures.

Alternatively, he could persuade a female former assistant or trainer or something to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit against him for sexual harassment. Then he could go on tv and firmly deny that he ever harassed this… this…. woman.

Then he could hire an escort service to call a tabloid and report that Tom Cruise was one of their favorite customers. Cruise could immediately call a press conference and deny it, repeatedly, insistently.

After a year or so, the woman can quietly drop the lawsuit, Tom pays her off, and everybody’s happy.

Learn from Hugh Grant. Hugh Grant was caught in 1995 attempting to solicit oral sex from a prostitute named Divine Brown on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He went on to become the hottest male film actor in the world, in films like “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Love Actually”, and “Brigit Jones”. Why? Because nobody thinks he’s gay anymore. Why would anyone have thought he was gay in the first place? For heaven’s sake– he’s an actor.

What if he had appeared on Oprah instead and announced to the world how much in love he was with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley? Love her, love her, love her! I really do! I love her lots. I love this WOMAN.

Come on. Admit it– you’d have started wondering if he was gay.

You’re welcome!

The Dubious Conviction of Scott Peterson: God Help You Behave “Appropriately” if Your Wife Ever Disappears

I have long believed that police often make up their minds about a suspect before really analyzing any evidence or logic, and that “police procedure” thereafter often consists of rounding up the evidence need to convict, rather than the evidence that shows who the guilty party is. That is why in so many cases– sometimes I think it must be nearly all of them– there is a jailhouse snitch.

I cannot believe than any judge nowadays even allows testimony from a jailhouse snitch. But then– I’m insane.

So in the May 23, 2005 issue of “People Magazine”, we have an exclusive inside story on how the prosecutors “got” Scott Peterson. You may have already noticed that they don’t talk in terms of “discovering the truth” or “finding the evidence” or “proof”. No. They got him.

It is rarely quite this transparent. Prosecutor Rick Distaso admitted– without shame– that he had a “gut feeling” right at the start. Okay– he thinks that’s because he’s got great intuition. How about if we call it prejudice instead? You can call it whatever you want, but what we have, right up front, is a prosecutor admitting that he made up his mind about the case immediately and thereafter was primarily interested in proving his “intuition” correct.

Not to mention that… well, for heaven’s sake– he had a “gut feelings” that the husband might be involved? Have you ever not had that feeling when encountering the homicide of a young wife?

The prosecutors observed that his phone call home from his fishing trip on the day Laci disappeared was unduly friendly and affectionate. That led them to suspect he murdered his wife. I can’t even imagine what they might have imagined he’d done if his phone call had been distant and matter-of-fact! Or what if he had called up and screamed, “you bitch– you forgot to pack my lunch! I hate you! When I get home, I’m gonna kill you!” Would the police now be saying, he almost threw us off with that phone call. What murderer calls up his wife and leaves a threat on her answering machine? Fortunately, we saw through that clever ruse…

What sealed it, of course, in a case utterly devoid of any physical evidence or proof, was the affair Scott was having with Amber Frey, who called the police when she saw Scott’s face on TV in connection with the disappearance of the wife she didn’t know he had. “It was the moment the cops were waiting for” reports People magazine, a little breathlessly. Again, I guess I’m the crazy one in the room.  You’ve never heard of men cheating on their wives before?  Did they all kill their wives?

Peterson went on TV and was interviewed by Diane Sawyer. It was clear to the police that he had lied to them, or he lied to Diane Sawyer, and an entire nation of vidiots who were just waiting with baited breath for the Michael Jackson story to break.  He denied that he was cheating on his wife.

That makes him stupid and irrational, but it still didn’t prove anything.

Laci’s body washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay on April 13. Police made much of the fact that this was the same body of water in which Scott Peterson went fishing. Imagine that. He actually went fishing in the nearest body of water.

The prosecution produced a pair of pliers that had a single hair in it that “might” have been Laci’s.

The prosecution implied that a life insurance policy that was two years old had been taken out just days before Laci’s disappearance.

Prosecutors admitted that they could barely keep from crying when Laci’s mother read an impact statement in court. But Scott did not react appropriately. The prosecution seems only dimly aware of the possibility that Scott Peterson might be a simple adulterer. By their logic, he was either a faithful husband or a murderer. He could not plausibly be an unfaithful husband whose wife was murdered by somebody else.

Now someone will try to tell me that all of this does not prove that he didn’t do it. Of course not. But nobody has any obligation to prove that he didn’t do it.

Considering the prosecution’s theory of how Scott Peterson allegedly killed his wife, it seems rather stunning that the evidence is so thin. Did he have a different boat that they didn’t know about? Did he perform a singularly magical act of sanitation afterwards, removing every trace, every hair, every drop of blood from his car and boat after murdering her and driving her 90 miles and putting her into a boat and navigating out into San Francisco Bay and dropping her body off?


Blink!

Your intuition is not always right.

Listen to you!

“An innocent man does not behave the way Scott did…” From a review of “Presumed Guilty…” on Amazon.com.

You are a liar and a scoundrel and you should never, ever be entrusted with any role whatsoever in the administration of justice anywhere on this earth. [2011-12-24]

Grey’s Atomic

Not sure why “Gray’s Anatomy” ever bothered with the hospital setting in the first place. Why not just have it among a bunch of nuclear physicists somewhere. They could fall in love, out of love, break each others’ hearts, romance each other while experimenting with atoms, and then, every once in a while, a bomb goes off and they kill a million people and one of them says, “you broke my heart. You never believed in me.”

Billy Graham’s Heart

The Billy Graham Organization just won a Minnesota Appeals court decision which allows it to fire a 30-year employee who was spied kissing a woman in the parking lot.

Sara Thorson started working for the Billy Graham Associates in 1971. She was the bulk-mail services coordinator.

In February 2002, two employees spotted her kissing another woman in the parking lot. Her supervisors were alerted. She was confronted and admitted that she was gay. They suspended her immediately and asked her to renounce her sinful lifestyle, repent, and come back to work.

They were prepared to forgive her for the sins she had committed, but she had to demonstrate a sincere desire to repent. I guess that’s a way to put it.

Sara Thorson decided that since her work had nothing to do with the direct ministry of the organization– only with the technical task of sending out bulk mail– she should be allowed to keep her job and her lover. A Minnesota appeals court denied her request.

It was reasonably clear, I think, from comments made by the original sponsors of Minnesota’s ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation, that their intent was to give religious organizations an exemption.

We presume that no other employee of this particular office was engaged in any apparent sinful activity at the time, or she or he would also have been fired, of course. But there’s no sin like sexual sin, so it’s conceivable that eagle-eyed employees were not on the lookout for hard-heartedness, for example, or materialism. Imagine, for example, if they had reported spying an employee climbing into a Hummer, or wearing a Rolex, or buying a gun, or eating too much too often.

Suppose Thorson’s supervisors had decided to be compassionate. They were not– no mistake about it. You have to be fairly brutal, in my opinion, to fire someone who has worked for you for more than 30 years because she kissed someone in a parking lot. You have to possess a remarkable mindset to be able to point at someone else and say, “you are the sinner.” You must be purged from our midst. You are not worthy of our company. You are going to hell and we’re not.

I’ll bet the two employees that spotted her were happy. I’ll bet it was the happiest day of their lives. Well, maybe not. Maybe they were a little sad. Maybe they even said, “we’re really sad about this. It’s heart-breaking to have to fire someone who has worked faithfully and diligently for you for 30 years.”

Okay, so let’s say they were sad. But I’ll bet they at least felt important.

Quagmire

The eerie thing about the Bush press conference on April 13 is how much he sounded like Lyndon Johnson. All the same arguments he made about staying in Viet Nam— no matter how grim it looked– are now presented by George W. Bush– in that same drawl– to justify staying in Iraq. He even has the beginnings of what some people used to call Johnson’s “shame-faced” expression.

You felt bad for Johnson (I did– a little) because it wasn’t through malice or greed that he got into Viet Nam. It was just plain stupidity.

That doesn’t mean Iraq is inevitably going to be like Viet Nam. I think it is fairly likely, but I’m not willing to give up entirely just yet.

But it does bring to mind a few interesting issues related to game theory.   What is game theory?  Suppose that you entered an auction in which you are required to pay even if you lose the bidding? At a certain point, you will realize that you are bidding more than the item is worth. But if you stop bidding, you get nothing. So you can’t stop.

In other words, suppose your soldiers are killed even if you don’t win the war? That’s what happened in Viet Nam. As the war progressed, the cost to the U.S. (in soldier’s lives) became higher and higher compared to the value of winning the war and stopping the spread of communism dead in it’s tracks. Therefore, the cost of losing the war also became higher and higher. Whereas the U.S. could have withdrawn relatively painlessly in 1963 (as John Kennedy seems to have intended), by 1965 the cost of withdrawing had become immense, and was growing larger by the moment. So Johnson felt he had no choice but to continue “bidding” it up. It took another eight years before Richard Nixon finally ended the bidding, and the U.S. lost the item (Viet Nam) and 55,000 lives.

So, if, in 1963, the U.S. public knew that it would cost 55,000 lives, they would probably have never tried to “purchase” the victory.

It would be hard to believe that the Bush White House is too stupid to realize that they are in precisely this kind of auction in Iraq. The more expensive the overthrow of Saddam becomes, the more unacceptable it will appear to be to withdraw. The more unacceptable it is to withdraw, the higher the U.S. must “bid”.

That doesn’t mean the U.S. should withdraw. Not necessarily. Not yet.

The U.S. could win this war. It could turn over political power to an Iraqi government at the end of June and establish a democracy in the heart of the middle east. All that oil will keep flowing for America’s SUV’s. Iraqi’s will start establishing new businesses and industries and enjoy the fruits of capitalism: new cars, wide-screen tv’s, personal computers, iPods… The country won’t be wracked by continuous civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds. There won’t be terrorists who perceive the democratic government to be a sell-out to the decadent west. Iran will mind it’s own business. Syria will block the border. Israel will be safe.

Or does that all seem rather unlikely to you now?

It is up to the American public, with an election coming up in November, to assess George Bush’s grip on events. Does the U.S. have a realistic chance of obtaining it’s objectives in Iraq? Or will it devolve into an endless cycle of violence, repression, retribution, and chaos?

I don’t think John Kerry has a viable alternative plan. That’s the nature of a quagmire. But Kerry will be hamstrung by circumstance. If he withdraws American troops, he leaves Iraq in the hands of violent, intolerant extremists, or, perhaps, civil war. If he stays, he may have to deal with increasing numbers of casualties and the inevitable comparisons with Viet Nam. I don’t see how Kerry can be a white knight on this issue. All the voters can do right now is punish the man who got them into this mess with an electoral defeat.

Nixon took over for Johnson in 1968. It took him 5 years before he could withdraw from Viet Nam, in 1973, with “peace with honor”. Shortly afterwards, South Viet Nam collapsed. Thirty years later, it’s easy to look back and see what should have been readily apparent at the time: all of the death and destruction of the Viet Nam War was for nothing.

The problem is that real U.S. objectives in Iraq are not the same as the objectives that appear to be at stake in public statements about the U.S. position. The U.S. claims that democracy and the freedom of the Iraqi people are at stake. I think that George Bush really believes it, but even George Bush’s friends admit he doesn’t think deeply about anything.

The problem is that the U.S. doesn’t really care about democracy or freedom in any other Arab dictatorship. The U.S. seems to smile fondly on the governments of Egypt and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and obviously has no interest in the victims of oppression in Sudan. So why does it care about it in Iraq? It doesn’t. The real objective, all along, was to depose Saddam, to punish him for having fought George Bush Sr. and for his arrogant refusal to allow the U.S. unfettered access to it’s alleged weapons laboratories, and, of course, to ensure a ready supply of cheap oil for the massive engine of the U.S. economy.

If these are the real stakes, the real thing that the U.S. is “bidding” on, it becomes clear that Iraq will not be free to choose, even in a supposedly free election, a government that is inimical to the interests of the United States. Any political party that declares itself to be opposed to U.S. interests in Iraq, will be declared to be an enemy of democracy, and will not be permitted to contest an election, even if a majority of Iraqi citizens appear to support it.

What the U.S. is doing right now, with it’s interim ruling council, is trying to ensure that the outcome of any future election will be to it’s liking, while appearing to represent the will of the majority of Iraqi citizens.

That may all be beside the point. The real question is, can the U.S. impose a democracy upon a nation that is unwilling to stand up for itself against the violent tactics of a minority of Islamic extremists? The general population of Iraq might prefer a democracy to an Islamic republic, but they don’t appear to be willing to fight for it. There are no demonstrations or rallies in support of the U.S., or the interim ruling council. The Iraqi policemen and soldiers the U.S. is training flee at the first sign of a mujahidin. There is no political party or leader with popular support to speak in favor of continued U.S. occupation. The members of the interim council that are friendly to the U.S. will be perceived to be stooges of the West, almost by definition.

It is fundamentally irrational for the U.S. to attempt to impose a democracy upon a nation that doesn’t want it badly enough to pay even a portion of it’s cost. If people are unwilling to fight for it now, why would they be willing to fight for it after the U.S. leaves and the Islamic fundamentalists have even more room to maneuver?

If the U.S. couldn’t plant democracy in Kuwait after liberating it from the first Iraqi invasion, why does it think it can plant democracy in Iraq? If our “friends”, the Saudis, have no inclination to hold democratic elections, why should Iraq?

If Libya now meets our standard of good world citizen….

It’s not going to happen. The U.S. can never leave. It’s going to get uglier and uglier as the U.S. is forced to aggressively defend itself against determined fanatical enemies.

My guess is that the U.S. will eventually begin to devise some kind of window-dressing, a strategy that would allow it to pull most of it’s soldiers out of Iraq without appearing to be surrendering the country to the forces of darkness and chaos. It may take five more years before they begin this process, and then another five years before it really gets under way. Some kind of Iraqi strong-man congenial to the U.S. will have to emerge, with the backing of the new Iraqi army. Radical Islamic movements will have to be violently repressed. Iran will grow interested.

Quagmire.

Shawshank Redemption

According the esteemed patrons of the Internet Movie Database, “The Shawshank Redemption”, story by Stephen King, directed by Frank Darabont (screenwriter of various Blob, Fly, and Young Indiana Jones sequels or prequels, before this profound “masterpiece”), is the second greatest film of all time. It is better than “Rashomon”, better than “Citizen Kane”, better than “The Third Man”, and even better than “The Seventh Seal”. It is better than “Taxi Driver” and “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate”. It is better than “Ran” and “Kagemusha”. It is better than “Rules of the Game” and “Dr. Strangelove”, and “City Lights” and “The General”.

It has always puzzled me that so many people thought so highly of it. Clearly, it doesn’t belong in the top ten no matter how much you like it. There is simply no way that this film is even nearly in a class with “Citizen Kane”, for example. It’s bizarre to even think so. I really believe that it is possible for reasonable, rational people to eventually reach agreement on that issue.

But is it even any good? A lot of people think so. Clearly, it’s not a terrible movie. In fact, the acting is very good, and the cinematography and editing are all fine. Even the music isn’t bad.

But I find the film annoying. It has this tone of deep understanding and complexity and poetic sensibilities.

I want to understand why I dislike a film that almost everybody else likes. Where did I go wrong? What did I miss? I watched it again and took notes.

Watching it over again did nothing to alter my perception of the film. Except that it is striking to me how well-acted the film is, and generally well-directed.

Herewith, why I think “Shawshank Redemption” is not a good film.

1. The plot is preposterous, right from the moment Dufresne unbelievably admits he sat in front of his wife’s lover’s house with a .38 pistol, drunk, but didn’t murder his wife or her lover. The fact that he might have done that– sit there drunk with a gun on his lap– isn’t the unbelievable part. In fact, that part is strangely believable. He changed his mind. No problem.

The unbelievable part is that he seems to believe the police had no reason to make him a suspect. Really. Why on earth would they think I was up to anything…. But he was clearly thinking of it. He clearly went there with a gun.

It would have been more compelling and believable if, instead of behaving like the righteous victim of an injustice, he behaved more like what he was, unlucky and stupid. And perhaps guilty of wishing his wife and her lover were dead, even if he didn’t actually do it.

And we are supposed to sympathize with this “innocent” man sent to jail unjustly. A man who gets drunk and takes a gun to his wife’s lover’s house, is not completely “innocent”, regardless of whether or not he actually committed the crime. But our arms are twisted: Dufresne is so pure and so fabulously, morally good, we are forced to buy into the movies’ own illusions: it is an outrage that this nice man, who looks like actor Tim Robbins, and who only speaks in a whisper, should be forced to have anal sex with people he doesn’t even know!

Think of all the black men wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they didn’t even think about doing.  “Shawshank Redemption” is an insult to all those men, and insult to the idea of injustice.

It goes further: Dufresne is not merely morally superior to the other prisoners and the guards– he is luckier. That’s when we know we’re being sold a bill of goods.

2. The district attorney argues in court as if a reasonable person might believe Dufresne’s story– that he didn’t do it, that he preposterously tossed his gun into the river on the way home instead. He feels he really has to convince that jury that this man should be a suspect. In fact, in real life, I think most people would snicker and find Dufresne’s story ridiculously unbelievable without prompting from the prosecutor. He owned a gun of the same type that killed his two-timing wife and he got drunk and he parked in front of the house but he didn’t kill her, and then he happened to toss his gun into the river– all on the same night someone else –with that same type of gun– for incomprehensible reasons– decided to murder his wife? The prosecution is not sure that jury will find this preposterous?

This is stupid writing.  Stephen King should be embarrassed at the preposterousness of this plot sequence.

We need a dose of “Chicago” here to introduce some people to reality. This is a classic Hollywood movie conceit, though: you, the viewer, know what a kind, decent, honest man Dufresne is, because we so many close-ups of his innocent face. Part of the emotional impact is due to the fact that you know he’s innocent. But the director chooses not to let you see Dufresne as the jury might see him: a bland, boring nobody who exploded one night when he caught his wife cheating on him.

But that would make Dufresne less of a victim of injustice, and more a victim of bad fortune and stupidity, so we are asked to believe that the jury was unreasonable in finding him guilty regardless. Why? Why? Why? I thought about this a lot, because this passage of the story is so… obtuse. And then I realized why. Because the audience isn’t going to be allowed to share the jury’s feelings about Dufresne’s explanation. That it’s preposterous. Because then we couldn’t feel quite as good about feeling bad.

3. I find this growing trend of actors whispering their lines really, really annoying. This is an early example. Dufresne is in court, not an elevator. He’s in a prison yard, not a closet. He’s in a bank, not phone booth. But he always whispers. It’s the Marlon Brando school of mannerist seriousness, a cheap effect, and a substitute for intonation, rhythm, and inflection. It’s an actor trying to look like a method actor without understanding that what made method acting so compelling was not the whispering and mumbling: it was the internalization of the character’s feelings. It was the shift away from meaning conveyed by dialogue to meaning conveyed by character, by body language, by personality.

I know actors think that whispering their lines seem to give them more emotional weight, but it always strikes me as phony. It’s an imitation of good actors without any understanding of what made them good (it wasn’t the mumbling).

And it must be difficult for the sound man when Dufresne talks to Red: Morgan Freeman generally talks in a normal tone, but Tim Robbins whispers all of his lines. They couldn’t possibly be in the same aural environment. Did the director ask for this, even though, in real life, we’d generally like to slap Robbins on the side of the head and make him speak up like a normal person would in the same circumstance?

4. Red (Morgan Freeman) can get you anything– even a bottle of brandy to celebrate your kid’s high school graduation. That’s the kind of prisoners that live in Shawshank: they only wish they had some brandy to celebrate their kids’ graduations. It speaks volumes about author Stephen King’s actual prison experience (none) that he believes in this old cliché– the resourceful, cranky, colorful scrounger who can get almost anything– which he probably adopted from “Stalag 17”.

5. One of the prisoners looks at the busload of new prisoners (including Dufresne) and remarks on what a sorry-looking bunch of maggots they are. There is nothing in the physical appearance of these men that explain why he would say that– unless you realize that this is just part of the colourful local ambience of the prison. In fact, the new prisoners look quite solid and strong. But it’s exactly the sort of thing the the film-maker thinks the viewer expects some hardened veteran to say at a bus load of new inmates, so it’s there. That is the heart of the problem of the whole movie: it’s a series of scenes the director and writer imagined the audience would believe. The action doesn’t really flow out of circumstance and character: it’s just a bunch of set pieces. Lord knows it doesn’t flow out of any first-hand experience of prisons or prisoners.  So, instead of revealing something to the audience, it reveals the audience to the story.

6. Red, who provides a good deal of narration to this story, comes off more like a soldier or mountain climber than someone who has spent 30 years among hardened criminals. His wizened, almost gentle description of how someone always cries the first night makes you think that he has the social sensitivities of a camp counselor.

I sometimes rewrite movies in my head to make them more interesting. So instead of that putrid chestnut, I have Red saying, “I love it when they cry. The sound of their wailing makes me feel like there’s some soul to this place, a great blues harmonica.”  Yes, I wrote that.  Stephen King: you’re welcome.

But he has the movie’s funniest line:

Andy: “Why do they call you Red?”
Red: “I don’t know. Must be because I’m Irish.”

It turns out that this line had been written on the assumption that a white, Irish actor would be playing the role of Red. When Morgan Freeman took over the role, they decided to keep it, and he delivers it straight up. So one of the very few examples of wit in the movie happened by accident.

7. At Dufresne’s first breakfast, other than the colorful allusions to sodomy, many of the prisoners come off as charmingly colorful and folksy. It’s a like a day at bible camp, and he’s hanging around with the bad kids who don’t sing along.

Now, it could be that Stephen King believes that we are the kind of society that locks up good people. In a post 9/11 world, yes, we certainly are. And in a culture that believes that 20 years in jail isn’t sufficient for possession of marijuana, yes, a lot of good people do get locked up. But part of the horror of that is the fact that we lock them up with the genuinely bad people. Did you happen to notice that there isn’t a single genuinely bad inmate in this movie? The only really bad person, in fact, is the warden. Now, I totally believe that it is possible that the warden might be a more evil bastard than any of the prisoners. I just have trouble with the idea that there’s not a single really bad person in the prison that might help you understand why the warden believes he has to be a prick.

8. Brooks, the librarian, threatens to kill a fellow inmate to avoid being released from prison. This is kind of absurd. No, not “kind of”– it is ridiculously absurd.

First of all, he wouldn’t just get to stay in prison: he would be charged and tried for the murder and, if convicted, could well end up in a different prison, which, given his sedentary disposition, would be as great a catastrophe as being freed. Brooks is not stupid– he’s gotta know this.

Secondly, it’s an insanely obtuse way to keep yourself in prison. All you have to do is hit a guard, or try to escape, or disobey orders, and you could get years added on to your sentence. But most significantly, it’s just plain dumb for a character like Brooks– another one of those lovable decent inmates– to want to murder someone just so he could stay in prison. The someone he tries to murder is Haywood, who is one of the “good” inmates. Might have had a subplot here if he had decided that he might as well murder one of the bad cons (here I go rewriting again) and do some good while he was achieving his goal of staying in prison. It’s also absurd to believe that if Brooks was serious about murdering the guy– and he must be, or there is no dramatic tension in the scene– that he would grab him, hold a knife to his throat, and then wait for Dufresne to come in from the yard to talk him out of it. Why on earth wouldn’t he just do it, if he was going to do it? Again, that would have been far more interesting. It would have been even more interesting to make it a more subtle mystery as why he did it. Let the wonder for a while. Let him reveal his motivations much later in the movie.

Reminds me of those movies in which the wild animal always rises up and growls before attacking. If any lions or bears actually did that in real life, they’d soon discover that most animals don’t wait around to be eaten.

Anyway, the real explanation for this scene is the same as the explanation for most of the other unbelievable moments in this film: it’s a set piece; it’s an idea that flows from the minds of the writer and director envisioning what the audience might like to see, and has no real basis in character or action.

9. When Red defends Brooks to the other cons, he tells them that in here, the prison, he is an important man. Out there, he’s nothing. But Brooks has been in prison for 50 years, and Red has been in prison for 20. You wonder how he can know anything about what will happen to Brooks on the outside. I’m not saying it’s not possible– just that it is presented stupidly. I wish Red had said something like, “you remember Pete? He was in prison 30 years. Got his parole. Two weeks later, he was back. I asked him why. He said it was too hard to live on the outside. Who do you think is waiting for you to help you start over after 50 years? He’s going to end up on the streets, in a soup kitchen, or worse…” Anything, but the simplistic pap we get in Shawshank.

10. Poor Brooks gets barely five minutes to go from prison librarian to parolee to roomer to grocery-bagger to suicide. That’s a lot of story compressed into a couple of dramatic images, but that’s how this movie works. You don’t need to actually deal with a compelling story line if you just take the shortcut right to suicide. We don’t learn nearly enough about why Brooks is that unhappy. He has a job and a place to stay and his freedom. It’s asking the audience to make a pretty big leap to believe that he is so disconsolate about this change in his circumstances that he would hang himself.

As I watched this sequence, I became frustrated. It was a potentially fascinating development. I wanted to see Brooks try to look up old friends or relatives– or children of relatives. He probably would have discovered they didn’t want much to do with an old man fresh out of a prison. I wanted to see how he got from the prison to the boarding house, how he interacted with people, how he found his way. The fact that he was able to get a job, bagging groceries, right away, is remarkable, and might be the most unrealistic part of the story. I’d like to see him discover that the social skills he learned in prison don’t work very well on the outside. Anything, please. Some development, some insight, some inspiration.

11. One of the phoniest scenes of all– all the inmates and guards stop everything to listen to the opera Dufresne puts out through the prison loud speakers. Every musical artist watching this film would think he had died and gone to heaven if such an event could have happened even at a concert of people who actually paid to come listen.

Now, this scene is very well directed. The over-head shots of the prison yard, the close-ups of the attentive faces, Dufresne with his feet up on a chair, the anxious warden trying to get back into the office. Beautiful. But it’s a fantasy, a dream. It’s phony.

I’m not saying the scene couldn’t have worked. It could have, if handled with even a modicum of respect for reality. The warden might have quickly realized that there is a fuse box somewhere, but maybe he had trouble identifying which fuse it is. More probably, the warden might have realized that the music is no real threat, especially if he played along with it. A more interesting possibility– if he made the inmates believe he was responsible for it and they turned their backs on it.

Instead, the warden starts yelling at Dufresne and pounding the door. Isn’t that exactly what you expected to see? That’s the problem with Shawshank. It gives you exactly what you expect, without any thought as to what it might or might not reveal about character. It is necessary, given the phoniness of the rest of the movie, for the warden to get upset, and angry, that the prisoners have somehow managed to raise their consciousness and improve their minds. That’s the kind of cliché “Shawshank” deals in. As the warden yells, “turn it off”, Dufresne turns it up. Not because that would be a believable thing for him to do (it isn’t- why wouldn’t he have turned it up at the start? He’s not hiding anything) but because it accentuates Dufresne’s defiant willfulness, his determination to be free, even in prison. It’s like one of these Greek masks that tell you if the character is happy or sad.

After serving two weeks in the hold, Andy returns to the lunch room. There is a spot waiting for him between Red and Haywood which is kind of funny because Haywood is surprised to see him. They always sit with one space between them, in case Andy is going to drop by? This kind of thoughtlessness permeates Shawshank.

In the shots of the yard as the prisoners listen to the music, notice how this was the only prison in the country in which blacks and whites seamlessly blended into social groups in the yard.

The inmates, especially Dufresne and Red, remain physically pretty even after years of brutal incarceration. Well, maybe it wasn’t as brutal as we thought.

12. Red listens to Andy discuss the warden’s investments and money-laundering schemes and warns him that all that money “leaves a paper trail”. It’s hard to believe that Red, in prison for 30 years and uneducated, would feel confident or wise making such a statement to an ex-banker. Better line: “My mistake was robbing people with a gun. I should have learned accounting instead.”

Given his background, isn’t it more likely that Red would believe that Andy is so smart, he will never be caught? But then, Red wouldn’t come off as quite so wise, would he?

13. You would think that people who’ve been in prison long enough would learn to stop saying, “he don’t look like a murderer.”

14. It’s tough for a writer. You want a character to be smart, so the reader admires him. But sometimes, you gotta make him damn stupid to advance the plot. So when a new inmate named Tommy hears about Dufresne’s crime and relates how a former room-mate at another prison named Blatch had claimed responsibility for it, Dufresne rushes to the warden to ask for his help in getting a new trial. He doesn’t contact his own lawyer– he goes to the warden. Dufresne–who is supposed to be pretty smart–apparently doesn’t know that the warden doesn’t have anything to do with criminal sentencing or verdicts. Dufresne doesn’t know that only a judge could release him? He doesn’t know how to contact his lawyer and arrange a visit? What on earth would make him think the Warden was the guy to go to with that information?

Then he has to be credulous enough to say he believes that Tommy’s testimony by itself would be enough to get him a new trial. What a quaint little world we are in here.

Then– it gets worse — he clumsily threatens to expose the Warden’s questionable financial activities. This is a man who apparently doesn’t know who has the keys, the guns, and the batons in this prison.

Remarkably, Red also takes the story at face value. You couldn’t find a more trusting group of people at a girl-scout convention. Here’s where we could have used some of Red’s alleged wisdom here: he should have told Dufresne he would have to do better than that to get a retrial. He should have told him the Warden won’t believe him or care.

Tommy passes his high school equivalency. At this point of the film, Dufresne is starting to accumulate messianic powers of healing and suffering.

The warden’s conversation with Tommy outside the prison wall is more than a little bizarre.

Then the warden threatens Dufresne with being taken out of his one-room “Hilton” and put into the regular prison population, the “sodomites”. But instead of doing that, he puts him into solitary for an additional month, then returns him to the same cell. Very convenient, since Andy is digging a tunnel in his cell.

15. Dufresne makes Red promise that, if he ever gets out, he will go to a hay field in Buxton with a long stone wall with an oak tree at the end of it. Sound specific enough for you? Especially when you haven’t been anywhere near that field in 20 years? And in this field, Red is supposed to look for a black volcanic rock. Piece of cake. In all this time, no farmer, or heavy rain, or kids, or animals, will have moved that rock or killed the oak tree.

Right after this conversation, the mother hen society of Shawshank holds a meeting because they are all concerned about Andy, because, Red says, he’s been talking funny. This really is the most amazing prison in the world It’s the kind of prison filled with kind, caring individuals, that you want to live in.

16. Why on earth waste your time trying to convince the viewer that Andy is thinking of hanging himself? It’s a cheap little trick that does nothing to advance anything in the movie. It’s not believable for a second.

17. The movie treats Andy’s escape after 20 years in Shawshank as a moral, physical, and spiritual victory. In real life, I would think 20 years in prison would still suck.

18. Andy uses a rock to crack into the sewer pipe, timing his blows to coincide with the thunder outside. But there is a crack of thunder when the lightening flashes, which isn’t right, of course, and then another crack when he whacks the pipe. What? So there are two thunder bolts– one with the flash, and one a few seconds later, because sound travels more slowly than light.

Andy crawled through 500 yards of sewage pipe to get out of the prison. Sewages produces gases that would probably have readily killed him. The sewage pipe ends up in a shallow creek. Shawshank prison dumped its raw, untreated sewage into an open creek? Okay– that’s probably quite possible. But the tunnel Andy carved through the wall of his cell looks like it’s about 12 feet deep. That is a strange wall. I imagine someone at this prison eventually got a brain and started to execute annual cell-checks, since it would take more than a few years to dig through a wall that thick without a jack-hammer.

19. When Andy comes out, it’s fairly obvious that Tim Robbins is splashing as much as possible for dramatic effect. It’s looks dramatic. And phony. Even phonier when he rips off his shirt and the light is so perfect and it looks so majestic and utterly preposterous and clichéish. He stretches out his arms– I’m free. This is a director that does not trust his audience for one split second. I just can’t help but think that a real person in that situation, free at last after twenty years, would look around very carefully to make sure nobody saw him.

20. It looks like the warden only realizes that he is being investigated for corruption when it appears in a headline of the local newspaper. You can even hear the sirens sound as he throws the paper down on his desk, so I guess the local District Attorney gets all his evidence from the newspapers as well, and this particular newspaper publishes potentially libelous stories without further investigation or giving the subject of the allegations the opportunity to comment.

21. The warden loads his pistol up with several bullets and then points it at the door as the police are trying to get in to arrest him. So, as a viewer, am I supposed to believe that warden had decided to shoot it out with the police? That’s plainly absurd, so the next event, the warden shooting himself, is more logical. But then, why did he put several bullets in? I guess you could argue that he maybe had some thoughts about fighting and then realized it was useless. Hmmm. Or was the director looking for another moment of cheap dramatic tension.

22. Red, after Dufresne’s escape, reminisces with his prison-mates about the stuff “Andy pulled”. They sound like a bunch of former college room-mates discussing some pranks.

23. It would have been endearing of the film-makers to acknowledge the role of exaggeration in these stories they now tell about Andy. But then, these are boy scouts. They never lie.

24. “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.” is unforgivable. Especially when he goes on to point out that the prison is now “..that much more drab and ugly when they’re gone.” The prison wasn’t drab and ugly when Andy was there? It was a fun place, filled with hi-jinks and good humor?

25. Red slams the parole board at his last hearing. He says “rehabilitation” is just a politician’s word, and he doesn’t know what it really means. He tells them to stop wasting his time. In the context of this movie, Red is absolutely right. Given that most of the inmates are portrayed as boy scouts, it’s hard to imagine any of them actually needing any rehabilitation. So Red can sit there and call it “bullshit” and the audience feels a deep surge of hostility for these bad people in suits who are keeping good people like distinguished actor Morgan Freeman in prison and forget about the fact that if he hadn’t asked for the meeting and applied for parole himself it would never have happened.

I think a lot about the fact that the same people who voted for politicians who passed laws that put people into real prisons for 20 or 30 years for relatively minor crimes, could watch this movie and feel really, really good about themselves.