Perspective

Across the median and on its dirt borderline, red and blue danced gingerly on the light rack of a white Crown Victoria’s roof. His hat held by its visor in one hand and slightly above his pate, his other hand smoothing his cropped black hair, the cop was walking measuredly toward the passenger door of a green SUV, its emergency lights flashing. It must have been a female he had just pulled over. What number was he? Five? Four more to go to match the yesterday’s count. Five, to beat it. The compact had still some ten miles to cover, and not until its engine was turned off on the parking lot of its driver’s employer, the count retained its potential to rise. What was it that dictionary said in its example on elucidating the entry’s meaning through contemporary usage in a concrete phrase? Or rather in two interrelated phrases? Page 871. 1978 edition. What were those phrases? a democracy in name, a police state in fact How fitting. But even that was not anymore allowed into print. Innocuous as a dictionary is, and whether voluntarily, self-consciously, or coerced by the thought police, and again whether subconsciously or consciously, not to be used anymore is totally irrelevant. Not politically correct would be the official stand. The same, but revised, dictionary. Page 905. 1993 edition. Just one phrase. in name only What a far cry in lucidity in comparison. We’re forging ahead. The Mitsubishi sped by the exit ramp. Fool, the lips of the driver of the compact articulated voicelessly, that’s it. You’ve just missed your only chance, his mind sized up. Whoever you are, sitting behind that steering wheel, you’ve just sealed your speeding ticket. The fine involved, doubled. An eternity of a fraction of a second elapsed. The cruiser jumped forward, making the cars to its left seem stationary. As it was crossing the white triangle’s base, a whirlpool of gaudy red and blue invaded the air above its roof. The brake lights of its quarry came on. Caught in the act? Hardly. All of the vehicles in the column that fell intentionally back, and some besides it, and that the cruiser overtook were originally doing its speed. It wasn’t the breaking of the law that condemned the Mitsubishi to its status of a violator; it was its non-acknowledgment of the authority at whose hands rested the ultimate decision whom to declare and prosecute as a violator that did it in. As such, that kind of decision is plainly arbitrary, its only determining factor being the state of mind of the individual endowed with the power to enforce or not to enforce the law at a particular moment and the level of vanity that the power can imbue the enforcer with. The law itself becomes questionable. How did it go? “Democracy in name?” Greek dēmos, common people, and kratos, strength, power. Rule by the people. Rule by the people? Somebody, and it was one from among the common people, had not yet learned that We the People moved forward, but drove backward. The female detached from the shackled, turned around, and got hold of the brown panel flush against the wall. Swinging the panel on its golden hinges, she walked the semicircle with it until the entranceway was shut close. On her return to the prisoner, both officers nudged the man, his shoulders towering over their heads, into the corner next to the door, his back against its vertex. A couple of feet from the convergent walls, the queer trio came to a standstill, and their eyes rolled up to meet the judge’s. “Not you again?” The judge exclaimed in apparent desperation. But he refrained from tossing his arms theatrically up in a helpless gesture. “Sir Your Honor Mister Judge,” the black man said in a humble, yet urgent, effeminate voice. “I will repay the fine. I got a job now and I will pay.” “That’s what you said the last time I saw you,” the judge retorted. “When was it? Three months ago?” A calculated mocking tone crept into his voice. “Sir Your Honor Mister Judge, I lost that job after three days. I was on the unemployment until the last week. I couldn’t pay. I didn’t have no monies. I was staying at my sister’s. But now I got a new job, Sir Your Honor. You can ask these officers here. They’ve picked me up there.” “Is that so?” The judge sang. “Yes, Your Honor,” the female officer replied. “We have just picked him up at this place down the street. Not far from here, Your Honor. Sam’s steelworks.” “Sir Your Honor Mister Judge, I beg you. I will pay. I mean it. I swear by my mother’s grave. God bless her poor soul, may she rest in peace.” Can you do that? Yes, we can possibly do that. In many cases we have done it. But can you do that in real? Yes, we can possibly do that. And possibly reduce your penalty at the same time. One more time. Can you do that? Yes, possibly. Not possibly, sir. In real. As I’ve already told you, no attorney by law can guarantee you a result. In other words, sir, if you don’t succeed, do I still have to pay you your fee? Of course. Even if a physician’s patient dies, his estate or his health insurance company must pay for the unsuccessful treatment. Why should be our treatment different? But you won’t die, that’s for sure, if we fail in our representation of your case. That much we can wholeheartedly guarantee you. He chuckles. Cough, at worst, he mutters to himself, almost inaudibly. Why, then and again, should I let you represent me? Because of our combined experience of over one hundred years, your odds of success are a lot higher than strictly your own, since you have no experience at all. Since when the Law, a seat-belt law to boot, supersedes, displaces, and overrides the Constitution, the 13th Amendment in particular, anyway? Just chip away at the document’s parchment. A bit at a time. The tinier the bits, the better hidden their motives. It will all, in fact, look as simply a refashioning, an updating, if played properly. For their leitmotif is the ultimate destruction, euphemistically called the development, or the evolution, of our Constitution, and the less vociferous and vocal the chipping, that much less its dents in evidence before the eye of its leery, though weary, witness, the bombardment of the sounds the grinding the life of the day produces drowning the own sounds of the ax’s impact for his ear not to catch and to be taken an unabashed advantage of. Private property, being the concomitant, and indispensable to the true practice of freedom, is the ax’s other favorite and inevitable subject. Call the ax’s activity and its manifestations plurality or social equality or any ism such as communalism, collectivism, egalitarianism, socialism, Nazism, fascism, communism, conservatism, or twisted modern liberalism, its effect is the same enslavement. Has the Constitution become yet another historical document, since nobody wants to breathe life into anymore because adhering to its word makes no money? It is the Law to wear the seat belts. Nor do your earlobes ask for rings; it is your mind to think of and implement the idea. Nor did your penis or your vagina ask for the removal of its prepuce, or foreskin, in the first, or of its clitoris, prepuce, and labia in the second instance; the circumcision was conceived, ordered, and executed by and on the command of the brain, not even the brain of either owner, but the brain of another person, without the circumcised’s any word whatsoever into the decision and its execution. Religious motivation, or not, makes no difference. Either way, once removed, they are gone for the rest of the life of their true, and former, owners. It is this same brain power, which finds gross mutilations of innocent infants, particularly girls, at their most private desirable and defensible, that the sexual organs have no other choice but to entrust the fulfillment of their needs. The prospects quite bleak, considering. Mutilations, in majority, sanctioned. Yet, it is the primary job