Just This

Some people should die. Like rapists. Or slavers. Or torturers. Also, Harvard and Yale graduates. And people who want the chief executive job at a PR firm, or to head up an army. Or run a country. You know, the demonstrably reprehensible sorts.

Which doesn't mean they ought to be killed. It's just that, if the universe were just and fair and actually coded to promote human happiness (which it is not, natch), those people would die. Or at the very least, suffer from debilitating vertigo and glossolalia.  They could have every possible desire to rape, kill, enslave, govern, rule, torture and generally be the sort of dick who gets off doing all that shit. But they'd be too permanently dizzy and creepily off-putting to ever be able to pull it off.

And as a back-up, they'd also have to suffer from chronic, stinky, highly audible meteorism. At the least. At the very least.

It might not be a perfect cosmos - because: asteroids, and planet frying quasar pulses, and viruses, and stuff -  but claims to categorically imperative justice would have merit. They don't, obviously. Because the universe is unjust. Or, more to the point, because "justice" is at once a conceptual imposition on a universe which is neither just, or unjust, and it is the bloody hand of power.

As in, criminal justice.

Which happens when shitclowns who like to tell other people what to do, and generally make living between the two poles of darkness a miserable affair, devote a portion of their ill gotten gains towards the enduring project of caging, poisoning, abusing, raping and otherwise dehumanizing people who break their rules. Sometimes the rule breakers are also shitclowns, as in the cases of rapists, child molesters, wife killers, slavers and fuckwits who get wasted and then operate motor vehicles.

When shitclowns punish fuckwits for being too obviously fuckwitted to put on a suit, get elected to office or appointed to position and then do miserable things to other people for a profit within the sanction of the law, nobody actually wins but the shitclowns in suits.

It's incidental, if you catch my meaning. The coppers aren't locking up the rapers because the President, or the governor, or the mayor has a personal loathing for rape. Maybe he does personally loathe rape. It doesn't really matter. The cops aren't locking up rapists because rape is one of the worst things you can do to someone short of killing her or him, or as is often the case, because rape is a violation of a person so devastating that it can and does prove to be worse than murder. The cops are locking up rapists because their bosses have to repeatedly demonstrate that their protection racket is a net benefit to their client populations.

Client populations, you get?

That doesn't necessarily mean you. Or any of us. It might, if you have the right certificates. Or breeding. Or daddy. Or it might not, if you have the wrong concentration of melanin per square inch, place of origin, or religion. Universal justice and equality before the law are chimeras. And not the poetic variety, which transform a futile gesture into a memorable adventure.

Nope.

Universal justice is a fool's dream. A deliberately cultivated one.

Don't believe me?

It's all good. Let's take a break. You get your hands on a civics, American history, law, ethics or philosophy textbook. We can wait while you flip through their pages.

Drinkers, now's the time to quaff another draught. Smokers, you dirty smelly fuckers, light another one. Ronpaulians, I believe this is your cue to break out the hookah, the pipe or the bowl. Smackers, shoot one on the house. I don't judge. Whatever gets you through the night, right?

Here's a song, for the rest of us, while we wait:



There we go.*

That was a nice break, no? If you haven't had the delight of an introduction to the music of Lhasa before, it was my honest pleasure to acquaint you.

But, I'm also an asshole, n'est-ce pas?

So, the textbooks...

You see all those paragraphs wherein the text repeats, over and fucking over again, that law and justice are universal, or at least ought to be? See where the fancy ones discuss isonomy and the dumbed down ones go on and about "rights and responsibilities"? Go on, take a moment. Note how often these planned and designed study guides mention democracy, human rights, equality before the law, one man one vote, et cetera. It's like a catechism, or a sales pitch, or a call to be washed in the blood of the Lamb, or some shit.

If you care to spare another minute or two, flip back and forth to all those sections which make mention of struggle for equality, democracy, rights, and universal human behavior. Even the whitewashed versions which get the imprimatur and the nihil obstat of the mandate schoolmarmers end up contradicting the claim to universality, don't they? I mean, if history is the record of people with power resisting giving it up or losing it - and it is, this royal history we're still learning in the age of Democracy™ - then you almost have to wonder why these same rulers insist on mandatory schools in which the opposite is also taught.

If they have to teach it, and if it takes them ten or twelve years to get children to believe it - it really isn't so universal, is it?. That shit is indoctrination. And a sales pitch. Like a Budweiser commercial for childhood expectations, where after ten years of relentless campaigning, the target demographic finally begins to associate coded terminology with a set of unrealizable assumptions about what it is the bosses and owners do with all their horded loot. Budweiser invests in getting twenty something fuckwits with jobs to associate a swilly alcoholic "beverage" with boobs and vomit-free, project-managed Ken-doll camaraderie. The text books aim a wee bit higher. Or lower. It's all a matter of perspective. They want the little ones who will become consuming big ones to believe that every one gets a fair shake.

Because - and I hope I don't have to point out how obvious this it - almost no one gets a fair shake. Let's be frank: almost the only people living fully human lives are also exactly the same people who can afford to earmark a share of their stolen treasure towards persuading everyone else, and especially the children, that the evidence available to them everywhere and free of charge by way of some really nifty senses - well, that it is false. Hell, they know it. And they know you know it. When the teevee phase shifts from a formulaic girl-as-prize "comedy" to a 30 second spot introduced by Starving African Child Music, the ad agencies for the lords of all creation are playing it up.

The point of the indoctrination, and the sales pitch, isn't to elide all sensory input and feedback. That's not possible. Sargon's first ever anointed priest had already figured that shit out, thousands of years before universal public education, ad campaigns and manufactured consent. Mother Church has already conceded the point, to the chagrin of Cathars and Bogomils. The host is a piece of bread. Or a stale cracker. The blood tastes like wine...because it is wine.

The investment in indoctrination doesn't pay back its investors by erasing the evidence of the senses, or by overcoming the thorny and nearly indestructible human capacity to observe events with relative capacity and then communicate those observations to others in a shared tongue. Its return - and this stock splits with predictable regularity - comes from defacing them.

Which is how we end up back at justice, perhaps one of the more lasting and damaging defacements of sense, and sensibility. Justice obscures, because it insists on a universality which cannot be demonstrated, and which must be believed, right at the intersection between real pain and loss and the application of power.

Justice is a false proof...

...with real consequences, as Duane Buck and Troy Davis may soon discover. (And as Cameron Willingham found out.) That is, right before someone poisons them to death in the name of that false proof.

And you know how we can tell rather quickly?

Because without some dude in a black robe, neither man would be isolated in near-solitary confinement, awaiting a poisoning to death. And without the intervention of a dude or two in black robes, neither man will escape that poisoning to death.

But Barack Obama, who has admitted in public to ordering the murders of people he has never met, will close out the year with a salary in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and all the pretty people for his friends. Because dudes in black robes say it's okay for him to do so.

Maybe Messrs. Davis and Buck murdered other people. Perhaps they did not. The case against Mr. Davis is certainly far shakier than the one against Mr. Obama. Mr. Davis maintains his innocence and the cops and prosecutors who made the case against him are lying abusive bullies who intimidated witnesses, appear to have falsified evidence, and generally embody a perfected douchebaggery. Mr. Obama - also a perfectly embodied douchebag, and proudly so - signed a confession. In public. Without coercion. And to waves of applause.

One week from now, Troy Davis will likely be dead. Barack Obama will have raised another million or so dollars in his attempt to recapture the most powerful office on the planet.

Because there is no justice. Because the law does not apply to everyone equally. Because, in fact, the very ideas of justice and punishment are themselves colonizations of our memories, scripted and refined over the last five thousand years in order to get us to police ourselves in expectation of reward. Because the law doesn't exist, anywhere or when, without force or the threat of force.

Because, most significantly, while some people perhaps ought to suffer or die for their unending forays into pillage, depredation, rape and murder, the ones doing the bulk of the suffering and dying are their victims.

I don't know exactly how that can be changed so that everyone has it easy, and the number of people who want to boss up and make others suffers reaches an all time low.

But a good place to start, I imagine, is with a challenge to the indoctrinated belief in a universal and equalizing justice.

Actual existing justice is anything but...

...which is a bummer, in the short term. And for that reason, it's a damned good thing there was ever a Lhasa de Sela:




* - here's more evidence that "justice" is false: Lhasa de Sela died of breast cancer last year, but - Angela Merkel is the Chancellor of Germany...