http://www.pathguy.com/lectures/luke04a.jpg
Cool Hand Luke, Alberto Gonzales and Other Martyrs
for release 03-28-07
Washington DC
All of this hooplah over the fired US prosecutors brings to mind an old friend of mine. We did time together in the Texas prison system printing license plate stickers. Donny and I worked on the same press. When you are in prison, you find yourself with an excess of time on your hands. To maintain sanity you need a way to fill it. I used to read a lot. But Donny's hobby was litigation. He sued everybody. He sued the wardens and the guards and the prison system and the law librarian and the governor. At any given time he would have 60 or 70 lawsuits pending. He was costing the State a thousand bucks a month in postage alone. The caseload got so heavy that they assigned Donny his own private assistant US attorney just to deal with his suits. Sort of like a legal valet.
Donny was also the only inmate that I ever met personally who had successfully escaped the Texas prison system. He put a dummy in his bed one night and went out the duct system like the Ka, the soul, of a pharaoh escaping an Egyptian pyramid, and hot-wired a guard's car and got away like resurrection. Well, when I say successfully escaped, I mean that he stayed at large for eight days until his ex-girlfriend snitched him out. He was like the Paul Neuman character in Cool Hand Luke. All the other inmates admired him because he was a symbol of defiance in the face of all odds. He was always trying to escape even if it was through his lawsuits. One of his lawsuits cost the McClellan County government eight million bucks. They had to build a new jail facility to correct overcrowding and conditions which were deemed by the court to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Donny delighted in contributing to the overload of our court systems. Once he filed a suit in Federal Court that he styled a Writ of Hocus Pocus. In it he claimed that a giant armadillo had forced him, under duress, to escape from prison. It was a practical lampoon of our judicial system that nearly got Donny banned from the courts for frivolous filings, but I think there must have been a judge somewhere (maybe his name was Pilate) who couldn't resist the humor of the spectacle. It was like Jesus upsetting the money lender's tables in the temple.
Cool Hand Luke was of course a retelling of the Christ story. Luke is the Christ figure, the rebellious outsider who performs miracles like eating 50 boiled eggs and resists the system at any cost until his inevitable death. It also harkens to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Luke and McMurphy were both anti-heroes like Christ. They suffered on behalf of their disciples and symbolized the triumph of the unconquerable spirit. In the minds of the faithful, the hero never dies. His body can be scourged and killed but His spirit is forever escaping resurrected--the spirit of rebellion, the spirit of hope for every lost soul who has the courage to fight for his dignity and his freedom, even from death or prison.
The Poet's Eye has never seen much difference between a martyr and a fall-guy. Luke and Jesus and McMurphy all took the hit for their fellows. We all want to have someone else take the blame, eat the karma. do the suffering. According to doctrine, Jesus ate our sins, he took the wrap for us. It looks like Alberto Gonzales is about to be the fall-guy and sacrifice himself to cleanse the sins of the Bush regime. I hope he has better luck at this than Jesus did.
Captain: You gonna get used to wearin' them chains after awhile, Luke. Don't you never stop listenin' to them clinking, cause they gonna remind you of what I've been saying -- for your own good.
Luke: I wish you'd stop being so good to me, Cap'm.
Captain: Don't you ever talk that way to me. Never! Never!
[addressing prisoners]
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Some men, you just can't reach.
-- dialogue from Cool Hand Luke
