Jackson Trial--No Peeking, Now
for release 06-06-05
Washington D.C.
The Michael Jackson case has gone to jury. I don't know if the man is guilty or not. I don't know him and I didn't sit through the months of testimony in his trial. But I do have some experience with the justice system in this country. I know how skewed and arbitrary it can be. Trials, and especially show trials like the Jackson case are not so much about law and justice as they are about theatrics.
Frankly Scarlet I don't give a good goddamn whether or not Michael Jackson stuck his hands in some boy's Fruit-of-the-Looms. Certainly not enough to spend 10 million bucks of public money to put him in stocks in front of the courthouse. And that's just the wasted taxpayer money. It doesn't count the wasted efforts of the legion of reporters and news organizations that are covering this trial instead of doing their actual job, which is reporting news about real crimes like George Bush lying us into a war that has cost thousands of lives.
So, on the backdrop of the Supreme Court ruling last week which let Arthur Anderson off the hook after proven complicity in the Enron scandal which cost thousands of people their jobs and their pensions, we have the fabulously important issue coming to jury of whether or not Michael Jackson used vaseline.
The Poet's Eye has a tear for the American justice system. It's hard to tell if it's a tear of joy or a tear of sorrow. That's because I have mixed emotions about this subject. Our adversarial system of justice is great in theory, but in practice it stinks. Witness the Jacko trial. It has been a carnival, almost as bad as the OJ trial.
The Jackson trial is a particularly egregious example of what our justice system has become. A circus. Everybody has something at stake, a career, a fortune, freedom, a reputation. This is not Justice, this is theater, a public morality play.
To start with, we have two very different judicial systems, one for the rich and famous and one for john q average American. Just as in the case of healthcare, being wealthy or famous buys you a better deal. If you are Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson or John DeLorean, you are held to different standards than if you are a pedestrian in Dallas or Cleveland.
If you are to believe the prosecution in this case, Jacko is a sinister pedophile who spent millions building his home into an amusement park where he could lure young boys for the purpose of sexual predation. He is obviously a pervert according to Sneddon and crew, look what an eccentric lifestyle he has and just look at how he went from a wide nosed little black boy to the Phantom of the Opera. You just know there's something strange about the guy, plus he has all that money.
Michael Jackson was a sitting duck for a different kind of predator. When the mother of the young cancer victim who Jacko is accused of assaulting with a friendly weapon came into Sneddon's office with the accusations, I'm sure you could hear the slot machines go ka-ching, ka-ching. It was a marriage made in heaven, a career shake-down artist and a suburban small-town district attorney with political ambitions going after a rich, famous pop star who everyone thinks is a weirdo anyway. It was a potential publicity and economic bonanza. Visions of endless damage suits and book deals and movie rights were surely dancing in their heads.
That's the dark and sad part about the American justice system, it has very little to do with justice. It is a meat grinding bureaucracy that gobbles up people's lives and spits them out. District attorney's offices are hotbeds of political ambition and greed, and they use their powers to advance careers and to exact vendettas.
Let me tell you a story. It's about a guy I met in prison. He was doing time for rape. If there was ever anyone who didn't need to be in prison, it was this guy. He was harmless and gentle and he studied the Bible in the original Greek. Here was the situation: he had been dating his girlfriend for several years. They were both students at Abilene Christian University on the Lubbock campus. One night their heavy petting went to the next logical step and they did the wild thing. The next morning the chic starts having post-coital regrets and says something about the incident to her roommate. The roommate convinces her that she has been raped (bullshit) and the poor boyfriend ends up with seven years in the slam.
There is a native hysteria associated with sexual 'crimes.' Even in the joint, it's a stigma to be a sex criminal, especially a rapo or a pederast. Murderers get more respect than 'short eyes.' Every week we hear of twenty or thirty young American lives taken in the criminal war in Iraq. But instead of trying George Bush for murder, we are wasting millions to try a pop star who's worst possible crime was plying young boys with alcohol, and we don't even know if that is true.
The test for rape is consent, not age. If force or coercion or drug induced unconsciousness is employed it is rape at any age. I don't know about you, but I had sexual awareness and a sexual identity well before I was eighteen and legal. In case you haven't noticed, young girls these days reach menses as early as eight years old. That leaves ten years before they can have legal sex. Is something wrong with this picture? Real love is possible before the age of eighteen. Mary Kay LeTourneau and her young lover (now her husband) are an example of this. This young man was not raped, he was loved.
The Poet's Eye sees that we are all guilty of sex crimes. My right hand was raping me when I was ten. And I loved it. We express our guilt with elaborate and expensive exercises like the Michael Jackson trial. And then we have the gall to call it Justice.
"In America you can have all the Justice you can afford."--Lrod
