Just came back from jury duty -- my first subpoena in a little over four years. And I gotta tell ya, I just about burst into tears watching the little juror-orientation video, which is, I think, the same one they showed us four years ago, but I don't remember it making me want to cry last time. There was all sorts of nonsense about our wonderful Constitution and the rights it extends to all humanity regarding justice and trial by jury and all that rot, and how the Baby America encoding these rights in its very DNA in the 18th century was A New Thing, and how it protects us all from dictatorish rule (kings used to tell juries how to vote, you know!), and stuff like that.
And I wanted to shout, "Bullshit!" I don't, of course, mean that any of that is nonsense or rot, except that it feels like that today. How could anyone with an iota of awareness of what is going on in this country watch that video with a straight face? Sure, the Supreme Court's recent knockdown of the stripping of the right of habeus corpus from the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is a hint that things may be turning a corner -- though it comes six years too late and by the slimmest of judicial margins, and El Presidente refuses to acknowledge it in any case. But the House caved last week on FISA and telecom immunity, voted to grant the White House sweeping -- and totally unconstitutional -- powers to order private corporations to spy on Americans, sans warrants of any kind, on its secret say-so alone, and with every kind of immunity from prosecution for breaking the law. Because, you know, if the president says something is legal, it must be so.
(A succinct wrapup on telecom immunity can be found at Avedon Carol's Sideshow; see Glenn Greenwald at Salon has an excellent, if infuriated, explanation of how the House's vote on FISA and telecom immunity last week amounts to just the kind of dictatorial fiat my juror-orientation video told me me lucky-ducky Americans don't have to worry about.)
I return to Bronx County Supreme Court tomorrow morning for voir dire on a trial. I hope it won't feel like an empty gesture, the last hurrah of a country abandoning the principals upon which it was founded. I've served on a jury before -- nearly 20 years ago, now -- on a criminal case, and it truly was a fascinating and even inspiring experience. I would like to serve again, even though the State of New York doesn't make it easy -- as a freelancer, if I don't work, I don't get paid, and the 40 bucks a day the state gives me as a juror is a joke; it's kinda like how absurd it is that Election Day isn't a federal holiday, only amplified about a dozen times; why do we make people jump through hoops to perform what we keep insisting is a right and privilege of citizenship? I would like to think that were I ever to stand criminal trial or be party to a lawsuit, the people on my jury would understand how important their job is... but I'd also like to believe they weren't sitting there worrying about whether they were going to get shit at their jobs for being absent, or whether they'd be able to pay their bills this month because they hadn't been working.
But I have to wonder how many other people really realize how important our Constitutional rights are, particularly when the day began this morning with a lecture of almost half an hour by some court flunky on all the many ridiculous ways one cannot get out of jury duty (pretending not to speak English won't work, nor will a letter from your employer), all the many reasons why one must arrive on time in the morning and after the lunch break, and so on. I felt like a kindergartener being reprimanded in advance by the teacher, and indeed, you have to wonder at people who turn up an hour after the legal subpoena tells you to arrive. Maybe that's why no one seems to care about the Constitution being shredded before our eyes...
I dunno... I'm just really fuckin' depressed about all this at the moment.
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