taking invested funds in the form of Social Security taxes, paying current claims, and skimming the rest for other purposes is called embezzlement. When government does it, it is simply called politics. In either case the arithmetic is always the same. When the scheme goes belly-up, its operators, if they’re smart, will be in Brazil, or, in the case of Congress, retired, which is the political equivalent of being in Brazil.
With all of this, the people in what is touted as the greatest democracy on the planet have no effective recourse. They cannot act directly to fix any of the obvious open sores or seeping wounds in their own government, because the founders didn’t trust them with the only effective medicine, the power to amend their own Constitution. That is reserved for the serpent its creators never saw.
Short of revolution, something Jefferson urged take place at least every twenty years, the average citizen is left to pound sand by casting a largely empty vote to replace the devil-in-office with the devil-in-waiting and hope that the caustic nature of power to corrupt can somehow be neutralized.
Praying for the devil to grow a halo, we all plod on, one foot in front of the other, trusting that somehow we will not follow the Soviet Union over the national cliff.
It is little wonder, then, that the founders failed to envision the minuscule procedural crack that allowed the language of slavery to remain visible as a festering sore in the Constitution more than a century after the institution had a stake driven through its heart in the Civil War.
It would have taken a soothsaying of monumental capacity to foresee that Scarborough 150 years later could pick at this scab, the language of slavery, and open it to the point of inducing race riots and the civil unrest that now looms like a battle scene on Broadway out in front of the county courthouse downtown.
Early February, Friday morning, opening day of trial, and I’m being escorted by four burly sheriff’s deputies through the throng of people, a horde I would estimate at more than a thousand as it jams the sidewalks. There are groups of angry protesters hurling insults like mortar rounds from one side of the street across the four broad lanes of traffic to the other side in front of the main entrance to the courthouse.
A huge banner, letters three feet high in black paint, has been unfurled and is now being displayed on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse:
END BLACK SLAVERY
Separate lines of deputies have been deployed along the whole block, all dressed in riot regalia, holding ballistic shields to keep the two warring armies from charging each other and doing battle around the cars and buses that are now stalled in traffic. A few crazies have managed to infiltrate the enemy camp on this side of the street, one of them trying to rip at the banner. Three uniformed cops are busy trying to keep them from being killed, struggling to pull them through the mob back to the ideological safe zone on the other side, where their own band of crazies is located.
I am reminded of the politically sensitive phrase that the city prints on many of its forms in big bold type:
DIVERSITY BRINGS US ALL TOGETHER
They’d better hope not, at least not today, or there’s going to be one hell of a mess in the middle of Broadway.
Deputies at the fringes are confiscating any sign attached to a stick. Verbal insults are one thing, war clubs another. The sheriff has prepared buses normally used for jail transport so that if things get out of control, these can be rolled into place like a barricade to block the street directly in front of the courthouse. Thus far they’ve avoided using these.
So wild is the melee that Court TV, which wanted to film the trial but failed to get approval from the judge, has abandoned its outdoor perch, a covered enclosure set up on a scaffold near the corner at the intersection. Some in the crowd have now taken hold of the green metal pipes that support the scaffold. They are pushing and pulling them so that the entire structure, cameras included, is shimmying as if in an earthquake.
Many of the demonstrators in front of the courthouse are African American, some of them singing, others shouting. One woman, the veins on her neck protruding like electric wires under the skin, has blown her vocal cords. So hoarse is her voice that despite all the energy coiled in her body I can barely hear or make out her rasping words as I pass her with my escort, barely ten feet away.
As yet no one has taken particular notice of us. There are so many cops on the street that four more with a guy in a suit don’t even register. Lucky for me. If this continues, once my picture gets around and they realize I’m defending Arnsberg, I may need an armored car just to get to court.
The other side of the street looks like Halloween, people in costume, some of them wearing hard hats and white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled to the armpits. They might pass for construction workers on break, except that their clothes look like they just came out of the washer. A small group, maybe six or eight nutcases in starched brown uniforms, all sporting swastikas on their arms, give the cops indignant looks and prance at the curb as if they’re waiting for the second coming of the Fuhrer.
One of them ventures into the street and gives a stiff-armed Nazi salute to the cop in front of him. The deputy returns the greeting by nudging the guy with his shield, pushing him back up onto the sidewalk, where he lands on his ass. A few feet away, Oberfuhrer Number Two tries to get a bullhorn past security. A tug-of-war ensues. The cops end up with the bullhorn, and the field marshal ends up on the ground, his hands behind his back, being prepared for nylon handcuffs.
Surrounded by the escort, I hoof it quickly to the steps at the main entrance when something flies past my head. It hits one of the cops in the back. A partially crushed and fizzing can of soda shoots bubbles and jets of tarry liquid as it spins like a bottle rocket on the sidewalk at his feet. The officer is angry. Even with the armored vest he’s wearing under his shirt, he’ll have a fair-size bruise on his back by tonight. We stop momentarily while they scan the crowd, trying to identify who threw it. A few seconds and they give up. Even if they could identify the pitcher, pulling him out of an angry mob could turn what is a budding riot into a rampage. We make it to the front door.
Inside, the decibel level drops a hundred points. My escort takes a few seconds to regroup. One of them wipes some of the Coke off of his colleague’s back with a handkerchief, and they head back out.
On the ground floor of the courthouse, security is tight. Nobody gets in without going through the metal detector. Every briefcase and purse is scanned on the conveyor belt. Today there are uniformed officers questioning people as to their business, their purpose in the courthouse. If they’re loitering to see the action, they’re sent outside. By now every chair in the courtroom upstairs will be filled.
Anything, even a loud voice inside the lobby, will draw uniforms before you can move. I’ve sent boxes with all our trial documents and other materials ahead of me. Two young staffers hired part-time were assigned by Harry to deliver them to the courtroom early in the morning, before the storm troopers and the rest of the mob outside got out of bed.
It takes a couple of minutes to get my briefcase with the notebook computer through security. Before I can retrieve everything at the other side of the scanner, two reporters, one of them with a camera crew, jump me. The camera’s lights catch me in their glow.
“Does your client know what’s going on outside?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen my client this morning.” I’m walking, a good pace to get to the elevator, dodging people milling in the lobby.
Somehow the reporter with the camera is keeping up.
“What is he feeling?”
“Is he feeling any remorse?”
“Remorse for what?”
“He is charged with murder, isn’t he?” The one reporter has his microphone in my face, camera aimed at me from over his shoulder as they sidle along, three of us like a human crab.
“Mr. Arnsberg has pleaded not guilty and is therefore presumed innocent. Why should an innocent man have feelings of remorse?”
“What about the evidence, his prints at the scene?” The guy with the camera is goading, pushing for some flare, a show of anger-cum-sound bite.
I finally get past him.
