Category: Justice

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The Noble Charlton and His Festive Murder Weapons

Charlton Heston, who played Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s pompous and boring “10 Commandments” has just been elected President of the National Rifle Association.

Charlton Heston claims he was a liberal back in the 1950’s and early 60’s. He was in favor of the civil rights movement. Then it all got out of hand he became an arch-conservative. The NRA hopes the luster of Moses will revive the somewhat sagging fortunes of the NRA, which has lost more than 500,000 members in the past two years.

The NRA only has about 2.5 million members, yet they virtually dictate U.S. policy in regard to gun regulation, because they have the big bucks.  The general population has no regard for the NRA but– here’s the key– Republican Primary voters do.  Once you win the primary, you tone down your virulent pro-death views and act as if you’re a moderate.

The NRA fought tooth and nail against Clinton’s efforts to ban the importation of assault rifles.

I’m not going to waste my time making a case against virtually unrestricted gun sales, which the NRA advocates. Only an idiot would believe we are safer if everyone has a gun than if no one has a gun. Shall I repeat it? Yes, it sounds harsh, but sometimes you have to call a spade a spade: only an idiot would believe that we are safer if everyone has a gun than if no one has a gun.

John Sayles recently produced a brilliant movie (“Men with Guns”) that dramatizes better than almost any other what the meaning of a gun is. If Jesus were here today, I think he would say something like “anyone who buys a gun has already committed murder in his heart”.

That said, I am not totally unsympathetic to those who buy a hand-gun out of fear and keep it next to the bed. The truth is, American’s have made their bed: they have made guns readily available to everyone. They have created a sick, ultra-competitive, violent society, and now they have to deal with it. American culture constantly hammers home the message that if you are poor or unemployed or on welfare, you are a valueless parasite and a worthless human being. I sometimes think they will never solve the gun problem– it’s too late.

But the politicization of gun control can be changed.

A few years ago, a man came home to his house, heard a noise in a closet, flung the door open and shot whoever was in there. It turned out to be his own daughter, who died in his arms.

Well, hey, anybody can make a mistake. What bothers me about this case, however, is the fact that the man was never even charged with careless use of a firearm. Similarly, a Japanese student was shot to death when he walked up someone’s driveway to ask for directions to a party. You could, maybe, argue that it wasn’t quite the same thing as first degree murder, but the killer was not even charged with negligence. What if he had run him over instead, while drunk or drugged? Do people actually believe that such negligence is more criminal than firing a handgun at a stranger walking up your driveway before you have the slightest idea of what he wants?

The most offensive irony of all this is the large number of fundamentalist Christians who support these insane gun laws and yet call themselves “pro-life”.

“Moses” should take a few tablets himself and start rereading his scriptures. Or did I miss the verses where Jesus tells his disciples to travel light, preach the good news to the poor, and pack a .45.

The satirical Arrogant Worms had it right:

“Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun?.
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun?
No one would ever get shot,
’cause everybody would have a gun
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun…”

The sad part is that some people would take those lyrics seriously.

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Evita the Movie: Rewriting History, Because I’m Worth It!

Most people going to see the movie version of EVITA or renting the video for a snuggly Friday night probably never listened to the original recording by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and are even less likely to have seen one of the early stage productions. What percentage only saw the movie? It’s hard to say– the movie was not a great success. But let’s make a conservative guess: 70%?

That’s the percentage of people who will get a slightly different picture of EVITA than the ones who heard the original recording or saw an early stage production (the newer stage productions are likely to be modeled on the movie version). The original was based fairly closely on the known historical facts about the life of Eva Duarte Peron, who rocketed to fame and power in Argentina in the 1930’s and 40’s and then died very young, of cancer, at the height of her influence, on July 26, 1952. The picture of Evita, as drawn in the original, is somewhat ambivalent. If she is admirable in any sense, she is admirable only for her remarkable ability to rise from almost nothing to one of the most powerful women in the world. But the original EVITA also makes it clear that the way she accomplished this feat was by whoring herself up the rungs of a ladder of influential men. And once she was married to the top dog in the military, Colonel Juan Peron, she became co-responsible for one of the most brutal and repressive regimes ever to rule Argentina. Snubbed by the aristocracy, she extrapolated bundles of money from everyone–including the labour unions– for her celebrated “Foundation Eva Peron”, and distributed unknown amounts (no books were kept) to the poor. Without a doubt, most of the money went into her own pockets, and to pay for jewels and dresses and her extravagant lifestyle as unofficial queen. It was a little like the Ontario lotteries, except that the lotteries steal from the poor instead of the rich. Eva stocked government officialdom with her relatives and cronies and severely punished any newspapers (including La Prensa) that dared to print critical commentary about her or her husband.

Now, I don’t mean to brag, or maybe I do, but not many of the people sitting in the movie theatres watching the Madonna version of EVITA know every single word of every song in the original. I do. And I immediately noticed many significant changes to the lyrics. Furthermore, I noticed a distinct trend. All of the changes functioned to improve the image of Evita herself. One of many examples: when an aristocrat observes that “statesmanship is more than entertaining peasants”, in the original, Evita snarls, “We shall see, little man!” In other words, yes, statesmanship is merely a matter of entertaining peasants. In the movie version, this line is given to a minor character. The result leaves open the possibility that Eva was more far-sighted than that.

The most disgusting change–because it is so patently self-serving–is the assignment of the beautiful aria, Another Suitcase in Another Hall, to Evita herself, when it was originally performed by Peron’s young mistress after Evita gave her the boot. This aria (remember, this is not a musical, but an opera, in spite of what the movie promoters tell you), had an important function in the original. It followed Evita’s initial seduction of Peron, during which she portrayed herself as a humble, innocent girl, who was so overwhelmed with Peron’s goodness and charm that she couldn’t help but throw herself at his feet. Then she nastily tosses Peron’s 14-year-old mistress out into the streets. The mistress sings a very plaintiff, introspective song about her dismal prospects. Interestingly– and in sharp contrast to Evita– she claims to be hard on the outside but confesses that, in her heart, she is devastated.

Time and time again, I’ve said that I don’t care/
that I’m immune to gloom/
That I’m hard, through and through/
But every time it matters, all my words desert me/
so anyone can hurt me/
and they do

In the original, you feel a twinge of your heartstrings for this poor, vulnerable girl. And your perception of Eva’s heartlessness and ruthlessness is enlarged. The contrast with the scheming Eva makes it plain that her seduction of Juan Peron is nothing more than a ploy to whore herself up another rung of the ladder.

In the movie version, Evita herself sings this song! This is a little like rewriting THE SOUND OF MUSIC and taking “Do Re Me” away from Julie Andrews and giving it to one of the Nazis. What a fun-loving, charming guy!

The reason for the change is obvious, and no, it’s not quite as sinister as you might think. Though the Peronista’s are still a force to be reckoned with in Argentina, I don’t think their reach extends all the way to Hollywood. No, it’s more banal than that. It’s Madonna’s Evita-like ego.

Madonna didn’t just get asked to do this picture: her representatives played an active role in getting her part, and, indeed, in getting the movie made (the property has been around for years but no-one was able to put the package together until recently). Strings were pulled. Everybody knows that the most captivating song in the show is the little aria sung by Peron’s mistress. Well, Madonna wanted that song for herself, and if she had to revise history a little in order to get it: so be it. In fact, all the other little changes also seem calculated to present Eva as less of a conniving slut and more like a poor girl who was merely ambitious and clever. As a result, many people will leave the theatre thinking that Eva Peron may have been a little rough around the edges, but maybe she was genuinely in love with Juan Peron, and maybe she really cared about the poor and dispossessed, and maybe her death was a real tragedy because Argentina was deprived of her gossamer presence as a result of it.

And you know, when you think about it, there are a lot of parallels with Madonna’s life. After all, hasn’t she been accused of the same things that Eva was accused of? Didn’t Madonna exploit her sex for money and power? And wasn’t Madonna reviled by some critics who didn’t really appreciate how sweet and vulnerable she really was, inside? And thus that obnoxious song they added, to ensure airplay for a “new” release: “You Must Love Me”. That’s all the poor girl wanted: to be loved.

The truth is that Peron was a Hitlerite and a fascist (Argentina was Germany’s very last ally), and Eva was a little dominatrix who abused her husband’s office for pure personal gain. The tragic results of her ascendancy to power–violence and social and economic instability–were still felt up until the 1970’s. The idea that she really wasn’t so bad is not a harmless delusion. When Bill Clinton talks about teaching Saddam Hussein a lesson, and when Jesse Helms spouts off about Castro, and when Le Pen in France denounces foreigners, and when Bouchard talks about “humiliation”, we are hearing echoes of the same demagogic impulses. EVITA could have done us all a favour by showing us, unflinchingly, just how attractive an evil political philosophy can make itself.

By the way, as a movie, EVITA isn’t great either, though it’s not as bad as some reviewers have decreed. And Madonna’s performance is relatively faultless: the girl does have a set of pipes. But there are too many moments where the singers don’t really know what to do with themselves. See Jesus Christ Superstar for an example of what they could be doing.

One last note: when is someone going to do an opera based on the story of Eva’s corpse? It was embalmed remarkably well and apparently remained quite life-like for years afterwards. It was stolen by the government when it feared Juan Peron would use it to regain political power, after he was turfed in 1955. After years of chaos, Peron was invited to return and he did so, but only after her corpse, which had been hidden in a crypt in Italy, was returned to him. He kept it on a living room table and his third wife, Isabel, (Eva was wife #2) dusted it every day for him, when she wasn’t occupied with her duties as vice-president! Isabel, eventually achieved what even Eva had not been able to achieve: the Vice-Presidency. In July 1974, upon the death of her husband, she became President of Argentina.

Her administration was an unmitigated disaster, as Eva’s likely would have been.

So how about it, composers?

Update 2009

Updated January 16, 2009

The real “Evita” in action, leading a rally (left).

Not the first revision… when introduced in Europe, the musical was controversial — did it glorify a woman associated with Fascism? When brought to America by producer Hal Prince, the authors (Rice and Webber) apparently agreed to develop a character based on Che Guevara to “balance” the role of Eva. He tells the audience what to think… a bad development artistically, if not morally. You can hear it in his songs– let me frame it for you, so you understand just how bad she is. Or good. Or both.

Still, the best lines in the show are Che’s reaction to the monumental funeral of Evita: “Oh what a circus, oh what a show….”

On the other hand… keep in mind that in the process of extorting millions of dollars from workers, the rich, and corporations to give to the poor (in a manner that suggested to them that they were personal gifts from Eva’s own pockets), Eva was merely practicing a form of socialism that benefited families and individuals who managed to come into her orbit. The actual numbers helped probably pale in comparison to the numbers helped by, say, an increase in the minimum wage, which applies to everyone, regardless of whether they have the opportunity to personally thank Evita. It’s a bit like a socialist lottery. In this context, it’s hard to have any sympathy for the upper classes who thought that politics was more than “entertaining peasants”.

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The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

*

Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.

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Instant Insanity

These are just a few of the items that convince me that our society is going insane at an increasingly rapid pace.

1. The Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Whoever-else-you-want-to-add scandal in the U.S. The self-proclaimed most powerful nation in the world allows its leader to be handcuffed by the most idiotic court case in the history of the U.S. Right now, they are arguing over whether or not Clinton looked “sternly” at Paula Jones, and may have held the door shut for a “split second” after making sexual advances to her. These people– Kenneth Starr, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, the media, are INSANE. Hatch in particular should get an Oscar. There he sits, with a straight face, shamelessly wringing his hands about how tragic and awful that the president had sexual urges— while knowing full well that the entire scandal has become nothing more than a conservative putsch. The media collaborates in a black comedy of farcical proportions, pretending that this is all serious, important stuff. What do these men say privately after the camera is turned off? They must cover their faces and laugh like banshees… “I can’t believe they’re still swallowing this stuff.”

2. Kevin Weber, who stole–let me get this right– FOUR chocolate chip cookies from a restaurant in California, will serve 26 Years to Life in prison for the offense. I am not kidding. 26 years to Life!! At a cost of at least $35K a year, California taxpayers are going to put out about $1 million dollars to convince themselves that they’re really a lot safer now that Kevin Weber is off the streets. This is INSANE.

The first time I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn’t. He lived in California at the time he wrote it. Weber is 34. The judge in the case had a chance to review the sentence after the Supreme Court ruled that judges still had some discretion in sentencing under a 3 strikes law. The judge insisted that society is served by this monumentally stupid decision. Yes, MONUMENTALLY STUPID. It makes you want to throw yourself off a cliff. Especially since the media is far more interested in whether or not Bill Clinton looked “sternly” or merely “firmly” at Paula Jones, before opening the door for her to leave his hotel room, than whether some people’s lives are pointlessly destroyed by idiotic laws..

3. A lot of research has been done on Repressed Memory Syndrome lately. It is now very apparent to any reasonable person that no such thing exists. We don’t know for sure if some of the alleged sexual abuse that people claim to have “recovered” memories of really occurred. But where we do know that such abuse (or other trauma) took place, researchers can’t seem to find anybody who can’t remember it. In other words, there are no scientific, rational grounds for believing that such a thing as repressed memory exists, and there never have been such grounds. Nevertheless, dozens of innocent people continue to rot in jail because some prosecutors and police forces refuse to admit they were wrong. [added July 2004] In other words, where there is relatively indisputable evidence that sexual abuse did take place, you would think that a percentage of these victims would have no memory of the events. That is not the case. In every case that we know about, the victims do have a continuously existing memory of it. I’m very interested in reading about it if someone has evidence otherwise.

4. After Mary Kay Letourneau got sentenced to seven years in jail for having sex with a minor (her student, in grade school), and bearing his child, she went and did it again. And now, once again, she is pregnant with his child.

5. Latrell Sprewell, a basketball player, physically attacks his coach, twice. An arbitrator has just ruled that he shouldn’t lose his job, or his $17 million salary, because of his modest indiscretion. Meanwhile, Mo Vaughn, a ball player for the Boston Red Sox, gets off after refusing a breathalyzer test. And don’t you think for one minute that you will get treated differently just because you’re not a rich famous ballplayer!

6. The last time trouble started with the Serbs, the Europeans kind of stood around and talked and talked while tens of thousands of Bosnians were “cleansed”, tortured, raped, and murdered. So trouble starts with these same Serbs in Kosovo, which is 90% populated by Albanians. What does the EU do? Wring it’s hands some more, talk, and talk, and talk, and hope that nothing awful happens. After Bosnia, it is hard to believe that anyone is going to do anything to stop the slaughter.

7. A woman in Hamilton Ontario is suing the hospital that safely delivered her twin babies because it failed to provide a “pain-free” birth. At one point, in between deliveries, she demanded that the doctor stop the process unless she could eliminate the pain she was feeling. Why are taxpayers subsidizing this insanity? Why didn’t the judge toss this one out on it’s ear within the first five minutes? [July 2004: The judge did eventually toss it out.]

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The New Economy

On a grand scale, there’s a lot of strange things about our economy.

We thought we abolished slavery in the 1800’s, but if you define slavery as enforced servitude, who among us is not a slave? Could you quit your job tomorrow? You would lose everything you own. You would be cast out into the streets. You would sleep on a park bench and eat from a dumpster, or starve or die of some contagious disease.

Perhaps you feel that prosperity liberates you. We have more material possessions than any slave ever had. On the other hand, slaves lived much shorter lives than we do. They worked for 15 or 20 years, in exchange for food and a place to sleep. We work for 40 or 50 years. If we are so much better off than slaves, why do we work so long?

I’m joking of course. Slaves worked longer hours and didn’t get paid vacations. They didn’t have tv or cars or stereos and they couldn’t send their children to ballet school. So we are better off than slaves.

Still, I find it sadly ironic that we really have about as little choice as the slaves did about how we spend our days. Our society produces immense piles of goods. If you want an immense pile of goods, who is going to stop you? Suppose, however, that instead of a VCR, indoor plumbing, a car, boat, lawnmower, stereo, and digital camera… suppose all you wanted was food and shelter. You should be able to work for one or two days a week, live in a non-descript, unfurnished apartment, and do as you please the other five days. Could you do it?

Your expenses would come to at least $500.00 a month for the apartment alone. Food would probably be about $400.00 a month. So, you would have to be earning about $1,000.00 a month or $12,000.00 a year or $250.00 a week just to get by. Can you do that on a part-time salary? I don’t think so. The trouble is that the well-paying jobs are tied to full-time activities. The part-time jobs don’t pay nearly as well.

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Alan Eagleson’s Friends

I was, in my youth, somewhat of an enthusiast for Marxism. Our society seemed to me to be based on greed and corruption, and I thought a good dose of Marxism would solve a lot of social ills. Of course, I knew that the Soviet Union was an oppressive, unjust society. I just didn’t think the Soviet Union represented Marxism any more than I thought the United States represented Christianity. In each case, the high ideals of the state religion was propounded but the actual practice was ruthlessly materialistic. Nowadays, I suppose I could be called a liberal.

There are days when I miss the idea of overthrowing the established order. Like today, when I read in the Toronto Star about Alan Eagleson’s friends.

Alan Eagleson has been charged with more than 44 counts of fraud committed since 1994, when he was head of the National Hockey League Players Association. Among other things, he stole money from players he represented and he colluded with the owners to keep player salaries low.

Some players now say they did kind of wonder about why their union leader was spending so much time on the owner’s yachts. They did, did they?

There is not much dispute about his guilt: Eagleson has admitted to some of the charges, and has been sentenced to 18 months so far, of which he will probably serve six. He is presently serving his time in Mimico Correctional Centre.

The Law Society of Upper Canada, hilariously, is now trying to decide whether or not Eagleson has engaged in conduct “unbecoming a barrister or a solicitor”! Like what? Did he donate some of the proceeds of his fraud to a charity?

In the same article, the Toronto Star reports that Mike Gillis, a former Boston Bruin, sued Eagleson successfully in 1996 for $40,000, part of a disability payment which Eagleson had swiped from him. Gillis was awarded $570,000 but Eagleson has appealed. The trouble is that almost all of that money is going to go to Gillis’ lawyers. Conduct unbecoming? Eagleson is a crook precisely because he behaves like a lawyer.

Look at this system! A man is owed $40,000 by a lawyer. The lawyer refuses to pay. Is he arrested? No, hell he’s a lawyer! So the victim of the fraud has no recourse but to go to court. The judge says, you can’t represent yourself– get yourself a…. lawyer! So the victim hires another lawyer to get his money back. But he can’t afford to pay this lawyer, you see, because he lost his money to the first lawyer. So the second lawyer says, no sweat, we’ll sue for what he owes you and for what you will owe me!

Now, you might observe that Mike Gillis, having been enlightened as to the courageous, unselfish, righteous needs of his own lawyers, has the solution. This solution is carefully suggested and facilitated by his lawyers: he sues Eagleson not only for the $40,000 he is owed, but for an additional $500,000 to pay his lawyers. The lawyer says, “I’ll help you get back your $40,000 and while we’ve got him down, I’ll rob him blind.” The man doesn’t care because it won’t come out of his pocket. So the system “works”.

Everybody’s happy, right? Consider Eagleson’s lawyer. Does he mind? Hell, no. He will charge Eagleson at least $500,000 himself, to spare him from having to pay out $40,000! But if he does a lousy job and loses the lawsuit, does he give the $500,000 back? Now, don’t laugh yourself silly. If he was going to do that, would he have advised him to fight the lawsuit in the first place, knowing it would cost a lot more than any possible out of court settlement would cost?

The truth is that this system is insane. It is absolutely, totally, completely, irrevocably insane. And everybody knows it. This system destroys everyone consumed by it…. except, of course, for the lawyers. And who, pray tell, makes these laws under which these cases are heard? Who is the judge? Who is the defense, the prosecution? What profession is represented in our legislature at numbers all out of proportion to their share of the population? Lawyers!

Are we really so surprised that they have cleverly evolved us a system that pays only them?

And now the most distasteful part of this particular story. Eagleson’s loyal friends have written him letters of commendation. Eagleson is a good man. Eagleson is honorable. Eagleson is a loyal friend. Eagleson never done me wrong. Here’s a list (side bar) so you can remember their names. If you bump into Bobby or Willard on the street, please restrain your desire to punch one of them in the nose. And remember that Bobby Clarke is the hero of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series for breaking Valery Kharmalov’s ankle with a wicked–and unpenalized– slash in game 5. Sittler? Shame on you.

Yes, this is how it works. These are Alan Eagleson’s friends.. So while he was cheating Mike Gillis and Glen Sharpley and Bobby Orr, he was carefully cultivating loyal friendships with Bobby Clarke and Paul Henderson and John Turner. What does this tell us? That, contrary to the testimony of Gillis and Sharpley and Orr and all the others that Eagleson was actually an honest man? That’s what these “gentlemen” want you to believe. Their signatures on their letters are a slap in the face to all the honest, hard-working NHL players whom Eagleson has cheated over the years. Paul Henderson is saying, “hey– he didn’t cheat me. Why should I care if he cheated you? Go to hell, Orr…”

The only thing their letters prove is that even a brilliant lawyer like Alan Eagleson couldn’t screw everybody at the same time.

We often hear about the two tiers of justice in this country, but we don’t often get such an intimate glimpse into how it works. You rob a string of banks of various amounts up to $40,000 and get caught and brought before a judge. If you don’t have your friendly letters from wealthy members of the establishment, judges, members of parliament, and retired professional hockey players, you can look forward to a long stay in prison. But if you are a lawyer and you rob a disabled hockey player of $40,000, and numerous others, and if you have invested that money wisely by acquiring the clothes and cars and boats and homes that allow you to move within the ranks of the privileged and blessed… you’re not likely to serve any time at all. Well, maybe 6 months. In mean old Mimico Correctional Facility.

Eagleson moves in conservative circles and was a member of the provincial Tory caucus at one point. I wonder if he ever partied with Mike Harris, who grew almost hysterically angry at the teachers who defied the law and went on strike last year. At moments like this, it seems transparent to me that the law has nothing to do with justice or fairness or good order. The law is there to hold you down while the lawyers rob you blind.

 

Who wrote letters asking the courts to be lenient on Alan Eagleson?

  • Bobby Clarke
  • Paul Henderson
  • Douglas Fisher
  • John Turner
  • Darryl Sittler
  • Willard Estey
  • George Gross
  • Darcy McKeough
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The Wrong Issue: Welfare Bums in Ontario

A surprising number of my friends and acquaintances absolutely agree with Mike Harris when he says he wants to kick those lazy free-loaders off the welfare roles and put them back to work. Why should the government subsidize able-bodied adults who should be out there working? Why am I working hard just so my tax dollars can pay for you to have a good time?

Maybe I agree, maybe I don’t. The thing is, I don’t think most people realize how much a smoke screen this issue is.

The thing is, when the government writes a check for $450 to Mabel Smith (not a real person) and her two children because she doesn’t have a job and needs to pay for her apartment and food, we cry “hand out”! Welfare bum! Parasite!

But when a corporation receives a tax exemption…. we get confused. The government doesn’t give Molson Breweries, for example, a check, so it isn’t a handout… or is it?

You tell me: what’s the difference? There isn’t any. If Molson owes the government $10 million in taxes on it’s net profits and the government says, hey, tell you what, pay me $5 million instead, what we have is the government giving Molson’s $5 million dollars as surely as if they handed it to them in small denominations in a little black briefcase. If it was true, this would be a massive government “hand-out”. It would be unfair.

Well, the government does this all the time. It does it when it allows corporations to deduct the cost of renting a box at the Skydome as a “business” expense. It does it when it allows corporations to pollute the environment without paying the cost of cleaning it up. It does it when it uses tax money to pay for sports stadiums, or when it defers taxes on a new factory, or subsidizes the cost of electricity for aluminum plants. It does it when it builds highways and bridges for the cars manufactured by Chrysler, GM, Ford, and Toyota. It does it when it helps bail out the banks that made stupid loans to third world despots who used the money to buy weapons from American manufacturers. It does it every time two businessmen go out for lunch and bill their expense accounts.

The most egregious example of this kind of lavish government subsidy of the rich is, of course, professional sports. The Minnesota Twins are, at this moment, demanding that the hardworking taxpayers of the State of Minnesota fork over about $400 million to pay for a new stadium for the Twins. The owner of the Minnesota Twins is a billionaire. But, he weeps, he can’t afford a new stadium. The old stadium, built to last 30 years, is only 15 years old, but it doesn’t have a private entrance for the boxes, you see, so those rich people actually have rub shoulders with ordinary plebes on their way to their exclusive, private, privileged seats.

At the same time, these idiot owners are offering their players contracts for up to $100 million over seven years. Everyone on the face of the earth knows that this is insane, but most people seem to think that it doesn’t directly affect them because they don’t go to many professional sporting events and if the owner wants to squander his money like that, so be it. The truth is though that you and I are paying Joe Carter $6.5 million to hit 25 home runs and bat .240 this year, because we paid for the Skydome with our tax dollars and the money that the Blue Jays didn’t have to pay for a stadium was thereby freed up to pay for their players. Just to add insult to injury, they gave the exclusive food concession rights to McDonald’s so they could charge twice the regular price for a hot dog. You would think that since we paid for the stadium we could at least get decent food at a fair price. And, of course, McDonald’s is thereby getting a government subsidy. Where are all the free market believers when it really matters?

This is madness. This is insane. This is the product of a society that is full of macho sports freaks who get visibly upset when they hear about a welfare mother spending $30 of her money on booze and cigarettes instead of food but stare with envy when see a basketball star show up with his two bodyguards. What that welfare mother should really do is learn how to play baseball.

The solution is simple. The reason Minnesota even considered subsidizing the stadium for the Twins was the threat to move the Twins to another town that would be willing to pay for a stadium. (Minnesota turned them down). It should be illegal for any town or any state or province to subsidize, with tax dollars, a professional sports stadium. All of the other subsidies should also stop, including “hidden” subsidies, like the costs of dealing with environmental damage caused by factories and industries.

Every corporation should be required to clean up after themselves– if they complain that they can’t afford to do this, they shouldn’t be in business. Should car manufacturers pay to build roads? They’ll scream bloody murder. They’ll say that it would make cars too expensive. Well, isn’t that a thought! You mean the real cost of cars is far higher than the sticker price? How about the cost of bodily injuries caused by speeding? Maybe we should have built up the public transit services instead of the highways. Maybe we should have more trains and buses today and less Firebirds and Intrepids. Read the history of the development of our cities: this idea is not as far-fetched as you think.

Finally, no bank– including the IMF– should be allowed to loan money to any government that is not certifiably democratically elected. Why should the people of Brazil or Argentina pay for F-14 fighter jets ordered by the illegal governments that ran those countries in the 1970’s? Do you know what those jets were used for? Nothing. Do you know where the money is coming from to pay back those loans? It’s coming out of the schools and hospitals and development projects that are needed to help the average people of these countries survive.

Either that, or we should learn to shut up about welfare recipients.

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More Keystone Cops

A police officer in St. Thomas, Jeff Dreidger, was recently charged with drunken driving. Several officers (four) witnessed him consume at least 6 drinks and he was administered two breathalyzer tests which both showed positive. Nevertheless, the Judge let him off, declaring that, in spite of all the evidence in front of him, in his humble opinion, “his ability to operate a motor vehicle was not impaired by alcohol”.

Funny–then how come he ran his pickup truck into a sign post.

The Judge’s name is Greg Pockele. If you ever appear before him charged with drunk driving, be sure to mention it’s okay because you were with your good buddy Jeff Dreidger.

Kudos to the officers, three OPP and one from St. Thomas, who arrested the jerk. The judge should be dismissed.

Oops
An officer in Toronto called a fellow officer, whom he had never met, to discuss a recent arrest. During the conversation, he referred to the suspect as a “nigger” and “ape”, unaware of the fact that the officer he was speaking to was black. The officer was reprimanded. Shouldn’t he have been fired?

You Never Know…
In Nova Scotia, another man charged with murder is released after DNA testing proved he didn’t do it. The Crown “stayed” charges– meaning they wish to be able to charge him with the same crime again within a year– instead of dropping them.

You Can’t Have too Much SWAT
In Mildmay, Ontario, 15 police, including a SWAT team, and officers dressed in camouflage and carrying automatic rifles, invaded a Radio Shack Store to recover some military parts which the owner had lawfully purchased at a Flea Market in Ohio. What’s going on here? Playing at war, are we? Oh boy, we get to dress up like the army and pretend to invade Red Square. Isn’t that what the “RS” stands for?

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Damien Echols

Unless his appeal to the Supreme Court succeeds, Damien Echols is going to die some time in the next year or two. He was charged with the murder of three little boys in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. After a trial in which no conclusive physical evidence was presented, he was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection.

I think most people, even if they occasionally become aware of some negligence or corruption involving the police, generally believe that justice gets done and that bad guys get caught and life goes on. Give a thought, if you will, to Damien Echols, and to Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard, and Donald Marshall.

The most disturbing thing about the Guy Paul Morin case to me was not that the police made a mistake. (If you believe the police themselves, 99% of the time they are faultless.) It is the fact that the methodology used in handling the evidence was designed not to investigate the crime and identify a suspect, but to make a case against a suspect they had already decided was guilty. And they decided he was guilty because, well, he was a little weird. He was single and lived with his parents. He liked to play the recorder. And with the public very upset about the rape and murder of little Christine Jessop, there was a lot of pressure on the police to make good their mandate as protectors of the weak. Maybe they really believed Morin did it. Maybe they were happy to have a reasonably believable case. Maybe they were just plain incompetent. The bottom line is, the evidence against Morin was never very good but the police and the crown attorneys decided to pursue the case against him anyway.

If you look closely at the Donald Marshall and David Milgaard cases as well, the similarities are striking: shady informants, suppressed evidence, and intimidated or bribed witnesses. In each case, the police decided first who the suspect was. Then they seemed to see their task as that of playing a game, moving the correct pieces along a board until they had achieved the desired result, a conviction, without any regard for the truth. Along the way, they consciously discarded any evidence which might have implicated other suspects.

The pattern is repeated in the Damien Echols case in Arkansas, except the circumstances are far more egregious than they were in any of the three recent Canadian wrongful convictions.

On May 6, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys (Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore) were found in a creek in Robin Hood Hills near West Memphis, Arkansas. The police investigated of course, but couldn’t identify a suspect. In fact, it appears likely that they let the man slip right through their fingers, when an officer was called to a local restaurant after a man covered in dirt and blood entered the woman’s washroom. The officer refused to go in and the man left. Blood samples taken the next day were conveniently misplaced by the time the trial rolled around.

With no other likely suspects at hand, the police turned the focus of the investigation onto Damien Echols, a local teenager who was known to be “different”, by local fundamentalist Christian standards. Damien wore his hair long, dressed in black, listened to heavy metal bands like Metallica, and talked weird. The cops were familiar with him and didn’t like him. And some of the cops, fresh from a workshop led by a hopelessly inadequately trained “psychologist” on satanic cults, became convinced that Damien was their man.

I won’t go into all the details of the pathetically incompetent investigation, the politics, the leaks to the press, the intimidation, the bloodlust of the citizens. The details are available on the Internet at www.gothamcity.com/paradiselost.

Better yet, there is a riveting documentary on the case called Paradise Lost. Suffice it to say that the police had their suspect…. but no evidence. This might prove to be an obstacle to the average citizen, but the West Memphis Police were nothing if not resourceful. They pressed forward with the case anyway. Jurors aren’t necessarily bright, and the defense lawyers in town are even dumber than we are. What if we just make the guy look like some kind of weirdo Satan worshipper? Then we won’t need any evidence:

The judge took one look at the prosecution’s hopelessly inadequate “case” and tossed it out right? In America, you can’t convict someone of a crime without proof, right? Yeah, right. Maybe in a Disney film. The police tried to pressure Damien into a confession, but he was too smart for them. Well, how about Jessie Misskelley, a boy distantly acquainted with Damien, and very susceptible because, after all, he had the mental age of a five-year-old. It only took eight hours of relentless intimidation to get Jessie to sign away all his rights and make a “confession”. Never mind that the confession was incorrect about all the important details of the crime, and never mind that, as a developmentally delayed youth, his constitutional rights were ignored. The confession implicated Damien and Jason Baldwin and the two were arrested. And once Jessie realized that he was not going to be freed in exchange for his “help”, as promised, he immediately recanted his confession and denied any involvement. And never mind that he was placed by witnesses 30 miles away from the crime scene at the time the murders were committed… well, you get the idea.

The odd thing is that the dubious confession wasn’t even admitted into evidence at the trial of Damien and Jason. And without the confession, there was virtually no evidence at all. No motive. No weapon. The police couldn’t even demonstrate that they knew where the crime had taken place. The prosecution merely characterized Damien as a member of a Satanic cult (he was actually interested in Wiccan, not Satanism) and let slip that Jessie Misskelley had confessed and been convicted for the crime as Damien’s accessory… and the jury, which surely barely exceeded Jessie’s capacity for reasoning, convicted him. Even more preposterously, Jason Baldwin was convicted, apparently for the simple reason that he was a friend of Damien’s.

Damien was sentenced to death by lethal injection, Jason to life imprisonment. It is only through the good fortune of having HBO present with their cameras that their predicament got any attention at all. Even so, the appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court (howdy y’all) failed, and Echols’ only hope right now is an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, loaded with all those tough-on-crime justices that Reagan and Bush have been appointing for the past fifteen years.

It is hard to have any faith in humanity after becoming acquainted with all the facts of this case. But, hey, let me really add to your cynicism:

  • Mark Gardner, a fellow death-row inmate at Arkansas State Prison, has confessed to repeatedly raping and beating Damien Echols.
  • Damien Echols’ parents separated after the guilty verdict. In the fall of 1993, two men argued over Echols’ mother, Pam, while his father watched. One man shot the other dead.
  • Mr. Misskelley, Jessie’s father, inadvertently destroyed his house trailer while trying to move it in the summer of 1995. Later he accidentally set fire to himself and was burned over 75% of this body.

The families of the victims did not fare much better.

  • Melissa and John Mark Byers were arrested for burglary.
  • John Byers, who admitted beating his son with his belt the day of the murders, was charged by a neighbor with whipping their five-year-old boy with a fly-swatter and firing shots at their house.
  • Mrs. Byers was later charged with assaulting a pair of carpet installers after threatening them with a shotgun.
  • In March 1996, Mrs. Byers died under suspicious circumstances. It took more than six months for a toxicological analysis to be completed: it showed significant levels of an illicit drug was in her system at the time of death. Mr. Byers moved away, complaining about how weird his neighbors were.
  • Diane Moore ran over and killed a 26-year-old woman and was charged with vehicular manslaughter.
  • Terry Hobbs beat his wife with his fists, was confronted by his brother-in-law, whom he shot in the abdomen, and was charged with aggravated assault.

These are the normal, law-abiding citizens the police in West Memphis sought to protect from the deadly and dangerous Damien Echols?

From the documentary, Echols, who dominates the second half, comes off as the most intelligent and articulate persons in West Memphis, which, I guess, does make him “different”. But he was foolish enough to be cryptic, though honest with the police and in court when he would have been wiser to be silent. His attorneys did not adopt a wise strategy and it is only in comparison to them that the prosecution’s efforts resembled a “strategy” at all.

It is hard not to despair for humanity. First there is the atrocity of the murders, and the fact that the perpetrator is still free. Then there is the graceless lust of the victim’s families for revenge. Then there is the gross incompetence and negligence of the police. The hack of a judge. The phony “expert” on Satanic cults. The gullibility of the jury. The facetiousness of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The disgusting political machinations of senior politicians who fear that a concern for justice will be misinterpreted as softness on crime. The subsequent disasters in the lives of the victims.

A sensitive person could be forgiven for wanting to opt out of the human race. Let me confess that when I was younger, especially when I was in college, I thought there was a certain worldly-wise cache to this kind of cynicism. Secretly, we assumed that we would be proven wrong, that the world could be better, and that we would be admired for being aloof from it all. Well, I’m over 40 now, and the glamour of it has worn very thin indeed. Nowadays, it’s just depressing.

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Lovable Lawyers

A law firm in England checked on an employee who hadn’t shown up for work. When they found he was dead, they notified the family, then sent them a bill for $26,520 for the hours it spent on handling the affair.

After a public outcry, the firm backed down.

And you thought lawyers were heartless!