American Retributive (In)justice (1)

How far back would we have to go to find the seed of revenge, and then its growth into a system of justice?  We would need a Way, Way Back machine (“there must be some mistake”).  

Justice is about homeostasis, keeping a balance in the person and the body of people.  It seems as though the human brain is vulnerable to extreme, emotional disorientation, confusion, and distress when things are put seriously awry, especially by a sudden death or loss of one of the props of right relationship, wholeness, integrity, and meaning.  Then some “other” must be made to suffer the same loss, in order for the organism to be chemically calm again.  (I remember a study of a “head-hunter” people who become insufferably driven by grief to self-treat by taking a head of someone in another group.)  Putting an eye and a tooth in each pan of the scales has somehow seemed adequate, sometimes, someplaces; and maybe that’s a right step in the process of sublimating our temptation to cannibalism; maybe it’s better than our current sublimation in mass warfare.  But it only works if all related parties agree to the arrangement, are satisfied with the outcome, and ready to let it go—or are forced to do so, by their warlord.  But what if the entire family feels related, and furthermore both families, or the entire and both village(s), identity groups, nations, political parties?  

On our return from way back then to now, we would stop in Athens, 24-2600 years ago, to attend some civic festivals featuring dramatizations of the development of a better, more universally healthy and acceptable way for organizing an orderly system of justice for a people.  It would be based on a higher wisdom that could absorb the shock of violation and loss, an agreement on universal principles, objectivity and careful, dispassionate reasoning by disinterested parties, including a trained judge, provision of reliable evidence and regulated advocacy and testimony, and communal authorization to enforce the judgment—and now the principle of universal equality under the law, applied by jury of peers.

During the last few weeks we’ve been watching the practice of that very system, in two cases.  Like the great Athenian, Shakespearean, and modern American tragic dramas, they have been family affairs; but unlike the American plays (e.g. “The Death of a Salesman,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “A Streetcar Named Desire”), that have played out within the family, without the achievement of a just balance, our cases, while objectively adjudicated (with both defendants, Donald Trump and Hunter Biden, found guilty by their jury), are being further debated by the public (potentially the entire citizenry), because, in a blatant act of party over country, the American Fascist Authoritarian Party has politicized them into conflict by claiming that it is the victim of unjust aggression by the Dems—indeed the AFAP insists that the verdict will be rendered, actually, by an extrajudicial, winner-take-all, national election.  This aggrieved party is declaring its victimhood, proclaiming that reconciliation is impossible, and calling for justice in the form of eye-for-eye retribution.  It describes the horribly unjust practices (which it invents) of its opponent, claims the right to do the same, in return, if it achieves power, and vows that it will do so—indeed it has already begun, with unjustified threats and attacks on judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and jury members, and the U.S. Attorney General, who directs the Department of Justice.  All with the purpose of achieving power, in order to permanently injure the opposing party, and replace the objective system of justice, suitable to a democracy, with an authoritarian system of injustice.

The entire retributive attack, led by a frightened bully, amounts to a national(ist) act of domestic terrorism.  And indeed, following today’s meeting of AFAP congress folk with their party leader, a reporter suggested that the trauma of the 1-6-21, AFAP insurrectionist attack on Congress and the Capitol Bldg still terrorizes the people who work and meet there, including AFAP politicians, who dare not criticize their leader and Terrorist-in-Chief, Trump.  Furthermore, wonderfully, Trump terrorizes his own voters more than anyone, in order to monetize their fear.  After meeting with Trump, House AFAP Speaker Johnson told the press that this is the most consequential election ever—“Everything is at stake.”

[Page (2) of this episode. Contents page to chapter, “Fascism American-style.”]