“This Is Where I Came In”*

Or what we call a Judge. 🙄 https://t.co/fUATaxBe66

— Dina Sayegh Doll (@askDinaDoll) June 8, 2024

I have memories of college kids (“radicals,” in the ‘60’s) complaining about judges being unfair and biased because they were upholding the law. Usually against black civil rights protestors (not all of whom were followers of Dr. King, so some violence was sometimes allegedly (or truly) involved.). Or anti war protestors, burning draft cards (it was a different time), etc. Sometimes protestors fighting cops, in court for it. I’m trying to be fair. It was never entirely a “police state” oppressing the people. Or, rather, People. Even though some tried to present it that way (sometimes quite correctly).

Everything old is new again, IOW (as the kids say). White college kids were the complainers with some legitimacy. Stokely Carmichael or Malcolm X were just thugs (in the popular mind/news narratives). Dr. King was troublemaker, not a saint. I’m trying to say white college kids (privileged. College kept them out of the draft.) were given some credence because they were…white. They were “radical,” but they were…misguided. King was wrong, but the Black Panthers were criminals (even though they were mostly interested in social justice) and dangerous (to thus day only rich white men can claim felonies as a badge of honor). And the critiques of those college students, the language they used, are now in the mouths of…Republican politicians and their supporters.

Judges were corrupt, biased, and part of the problem, back then; or so the protesters said. And the legal system as a whole was arrayed against the people. That critique was considered an insanely anti-democratic assault on Constitutional order at the time, a radical assault, a term the radicals meant was striking at the roots of the problem, and critics meant was simply too extreme to tolerate. Interestingly, it sprang from the same place as the critique against the “radicals” springs today: World War II.

That war destroyed the old world order and began work on a new one. Not just the Cold War, but the alliance with Japan and Germany, both if which eschewed the martial heritage of their wartime governments (“Godzilla Minus One” is a Japanese reboot if that country’s most famous pop culture icon. The movie opens in 1945, as the war is ending, and extends through the recovery years, in a kind of remake of the original “Godzilla” film. But what’s interesting is how much the characters who lived the war , reject the militarism of Imperial Japan, and clearly want to make better country from the ruins of the old. They don’t want to recover old glories; they want to rectify history and prove themselves better.). That new order inspired returning blacks to stop accepting Jim Crow in America. And the lesson my father’s generation taught mine, was that we could improve on the past, rather than accept it as just “the way it is.”

The radical idea of the ‘60’s was that justice could be for everybody. Black liberation meant women’s liberation meant gay liberation. Liberation not just for me, but for thee. True liberation had to be for thee, or how could I be free?

And now that language, those ideas, are co-opted: justice is for me (rich white men and their privileges) but not for thee (women, immigrants, non-whites, non-rich). Much of the radical assault on society and justice seemed foolish to me at the. It took decades for me to understand the wisdom behind it (and never all of it; discernment is part of wisdom), to learn some of it was right because the roots were rotten. But those critiques were meant to serve everyone. The same language, today, is mostly in the mouths of revanchists desperately trying to claw back privileges for themselves, or attain privileges they wish they could have.

And a lot of ‘em, like this guy, are just plain stupid.

*Even my analogies are outdated. In the days before multiplexes, a movie theater ran the movie almost on a loop. If you arrived late and the movie had started, you just sat through the beginning again, to see what you’d missed. I have a distinct memory of my father coming into the theater to pick up my brother and I as we sat in the downtown theater on a Saturday afternoon watching the show for the second time. Ah, dem was de days!