Steve stood on the courthouse steps striking a pose of defiance. He looked deep into the gaggle of arrayed cameramen and let out a rebellious cry for freedom. This was his William Wallace moment.
In his mind he was leading a vast army, using the arrayed stringers and media strivers as the conduit, to motivate an unseen battalion of basement dwelling tinfoil hat radicals against a tyrannical opposition. It was a wild set of circumstances and beliefs that led to this moment. The kind that don’t go softly into that goodnight.
He was there in defiance of what he believed to be an illegitimate government order. All the faux intellectualism in the world and doomsday speechifying couldn’t mask how his ideology, if we can generously call it that, was devoid of any moral or ethical reason. It was pure unadulterated madness in pursuit of racist populism. He assumed that being white and male was enough to stay above the legal fray. The long arm of the law, while slow, and sometimes ineffective in matters of privilege taught us different. Justice is blind they say, and sometimes that’s actually true in America.
Later, when he had a rare moment of reflection, he tried to come to terms with his thoughts on the legal system. He always fashioned himself a law and order guy. He was the first to stick up for them when there were protests he didn’t like or they crossed a line with a minority or poor person. That was all fine and good. The problem is when the law was applied to him or those he supported, on their right side of racial and social divide. It was a major inconvenience. Hiring a lawyer takes time and effort. Getting to court is a drag. Who wants to go through that? Nobody. He thought of it more like a persecution than anything. A sad revolution stifled and stillborn. Who were they – Congress, the legal system – to infringe on his freedom to do whatever he wanted.
Ladies and gentleman, I give you hubris personified, the logical exponent of systemic privilege and the death of empirical fact.
GLAZ 