James M. Redwine

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Not Rocket Science

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The Rule of Law is not the stuff of artificial intelligence and differential equations. It is not about the James Webb telescope that may help disclose where and when we came from. It is not about a cure for COVID. No, the Rule of Law is far more complex, and perplexing, than any of those things. However, if properly applied, the Rule of Law can help us understand and deal with these challenges and others.

Law sounds simple. Treat others the way you wish to be treated. Respect the person and property of others. These principles are easy to say but thousands of years of human history prove they are extremely difficult to apply. Our Declaration of Independence sets out the basics of our legal system, “…[A]ll men are created equal,” and all men have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When Thomas Jefferson penned those simple ideals he owned slaves, and had children he did not acknowledge by at least one of those slaves. Also, women could not vote and the property rights of Native Americans were not even an afterthought. Were Jefferson and the rest of the 1776ers evil? No, they were human. We call these concepts ideals because the realities are nearly impossible to achieve. That is why we need the Rule of Law, to encourage us to try.

Our Constitution sets forth America’s aspiration to form a more perfect union. Surely none of our Founders was naïve enough to believe perfect self-government was achievable. That is not why goals are set. Just as it is the struggle of life that can separate us from all other animals and, perhaps from some humans, it is government’s role to help us strive for perfection. We have often fallen short and we always will. But just as we are fighting the war on COVID in fits and starts we can face our past failures in how we have behaved and strive to be better. There will never be a cure for our occasional imperfect collective missteps. That is why we need to acknowledge our past failures and seek to avoid future sins. We should do this together.

In her book, On the Courthouse Lawn, Sherrilyn Ifill points out the irony of many lynchings being carried out by large numbers of a community right at the seat of justice, the county courthouse. Also, our courthouses are often the site where the legal system has been used to deny human rights, such as through the separation of Native American families and establishment of some guardianships that led to murder.

Community recognition of these subversions of the Rule of Law is important. Monuments that show society admits its wrongs, even if long past, can help people heal and avoid new injustices.

Mr. Thomas, Meet Phil Redwine

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Philip W. Redwine

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who was imploring his dying father to fight against death. Dylan pleaded with his dad:

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The bravest fighter against Death I have ever known was my 79-year-old brother, Philip W. Redwine. Death was playing against Phil with a stacked deck but Phil kept drawing to inside straights for 34 years after Death thought it had dealt Phil a losing hand. The ultimate outcome was never in doubt but the timing sure was.

In 1987 Phil had a wife to help support and three young children to rear when, as country singer Tim McGraw sang:

“He was in his early forties (Phil was 44) with a lot of life before him when a moment came that stopped him on a dime.”

The oncologists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington told Phil he could die within 4 months but certainly would not live beyond 2 more years. Phil and our sister, Jane Redwine Bartlett, had gone to Seattle so Phil could apply to be a part of an experimental treatment program as Phil’s physicians in Norman, Oklahoma where Phil practiced law told Phil he only had 6 months to live. The Fred Hutchinson medical team apologized to Phil when they told him the cut off age for the experimental treatment study was 40. As Jane reported to our oldest brother C. E. Redwine and his wife Shirley and me, Phil simply responded that the Fred Hutchinson team, “Was not talking to the Phil Redwine who was dying, but to the Phil Redwine who was living and they were going to want him as a model for their study.” He asked them for the treatment even if he was not included in the study. After an overnight meeting Fred Hutchinson agreed to let him try.

So, for 34 years Phil practiced law, supported his family and was deeply involved in giving of his very limited time and limitless talents to his community. He endured chemotherapy, radiation, kidney failure, heart disease and cancer induced diabetes as he gave love and free legal advice to countless family members and friends. Phil could have been the model for the author of the Book of Proverbs. Just a few of the truisms that Phil’s life exemplified are:

Proverbs 13:22            “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”

Proverbs 19:11            “Good sense makes a man slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.”

Phil would always listen respectfully to another’s point of view and would hear them out completely before agreeing or, gently, disagreeing.

Proverbs 18:2              “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”

Proverbs 18:13            “If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”

Proverbs 18:15            “An intelligent mind acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”

When you sought advice from Phil you knew he would carefully consider everything that you said then he would respond wisely and never make you feel lesser. Perhaps his constant companion, Death At Any Moment, guided his thoughts and helped him see others as Ernie Pyle said about soldiers in World War II:

“When you’ve lived with the unnatural mass cruelty that mankind is capable of inflicting on itself, you find yourself dispossessed of the faculty for blaming one poor man for the triviality of his faults.”

And perhaps his own constant vulnerability filled him with a passion to champion those who could not champion themselves. Phil fought the good fight for good causes in and out of court and often at immense cost to himself. He will be greatly missed, but his legacy is long and strong. Well done, Brother, you are my hero.

This picture was taken immediately after Peg finished printing the “Gavel Gamut”. Do you think Phil read this article?

Motherhood and Apple Pie

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I am for both of these institutions and I bet so are most voters. So the slight of hand our politician’s must pull off is to make us think we are getting Mom’s apple pie for our tax monies when, in fact, we may be getting Jezebel’s cow pie.  

Take the Patriot Act for instance. The full name the naming gnomes came up with for this abomination is: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001.” An example of the Act’s true purpose is the secret FISA courts it created. FISA courts are Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts where the term “court” is turned on its head. Secret proceedings are the stuff of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, not places where due process and the protection of rights and liberty occur. Nothing could be less patriotic than The Patriot Act.

Much as we have ignored and subverted our core principles of innocent until and unless proven guilty in Guantanamo Bay “Detention” Camp, our legal and political system has incrementally used words to obfuscate and mislead. A detention center is where bad behaving children are disciplined. Guantanamo is America’s shameful gulag where we give the lie to our core values every day it remains open.

George Orwell was an English writer but his prescient works, Animal Farm and 1984, could be sounding the alarm for our government’s attempts to have us believe politicians pet projects are infrastructure and military incursions are peace missions. It is difficult to get voters to re-elect a politician if they know the person they are paying about $200,000 per year is spending trillions of dollars of taxpayer funds on pet projects and claiming they are infrastructure. Maybe what the politician wants to fund is a good idea but lying to the American public to get it funded is not.

Perhaps if we would rename broccoli, ice cream, we could save broccoli farmers from bankruptcy. Or maybe we could champion those wonderful brussel sprouts as COVID-19 cures. I am confident there would be some late-night charlatan somewhere on the internet or cable t.v. who would run such an idea as a Biblical alternative to vaccines.

As Congress castigates Mark Zuckerberg and wrings its hands at his subliminal manipulation of our youth, perhaps it could turn its spotlight on itself and start policing its own Newspeak. The politicians’ callous indifference to the citizenry’s confusion over science and religion or peace and war or progress over stagnation is in need of a good analysis by a contemporary Will Rogers or Mark Twain or George Orwell or Joseph (Catch 22) Heller.

Anyway, I cannot devote any more time to such pursuits as it is the middle of football season. So, for now, I must concentrate upon what is truly important, at least to me, and I will blithely rely upon the goodwill of the politicians to address the rest in terms that lull me back to indifference.

Thanks A Lot Noah

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In his book Letters From The Earth, Mark Twain has Noah making an extra trip in the Ark so he could save the housefly that spreads typhoid fever. I could not find any reference to scorpions in the Book of Genesis nor in the account of the Great Flood that also appears in the Quran. However, Noah, or in Arabic, Nuh, must have heroically preserved the “creature with the burning sting” as I stepped on one in our cabin at JPeg Osage Ranch last night. If Satan had stepped on a scorpion with bare cloven hoof, I bet he would have sent a scathing letter to heaven from his temporary banishment on Earth. Perhaps then either St. Michael or St. Gabriel, the Devil’s correspondents, might have pointed out to the Creator that His creation of the scorpion was a bust.

The Latin name, scorpion, given to the eight-legged arachnid with the pinching front claws and the stinging tail aptly describes the menace that apparently has no value except to encourage one to wear shoes in the house. Except for me, scorpions have few natural enemies other than lizards and tarantulas; choose your poison.

What I want to know is whom did Mother Nature put in charge of species extinction and why hasn’t She extinguished scorpions? Scorpions have been around for 435 million years and, I humbly suggest, that is long enough. According to Google (who else are you going to rely on), extinctions are a normal part of evolution. They occur naturally, periodically and somewhat regularly. We Homo sapiens would not be here if millions of other species, dinosaurs for example, had not gone extinct before we came out of the primordial ooze two to three hundred thousand years ago after two to three million years of genetic iterations of hominids.

I submit it is fair to ask Mother Nature, “What were you thinking?” Much like the White-Tailed Hornet of poet laureate Robert Frost’s poem, it appears to me whoever designed the scorpion should have gone back to the drawing board, or better yet, file thirteened the whole thing. The white-tailed hornet (or scorpion) might be viewed romantically by nature lovers who assume infallibility or even lovability in all of nature’s creations. But Frost (1874-1963) watched in disillusionment as a white-tailed hornet in search of a fly to eat repeatedly attacked both the head of a nail and Frost’s nose. As Frost concludes about nature and life in general, once we begin to see the fallibility of the natural world “reflected in the mud and even dust” we can no longer convince ourselves we humans are only a little lower than the angels and are probably no higher than creepy crawlers on the floor.

 

The White-Tailed Hornet

The white-tailed hornet lives in a balloon (nest)
That floats against the ceiling of the woodshed
…
Verse could be written on the certainty
With which he penetrates my best defense
Of whirling hands and arms about the head
To stab me in the sneeze-nerve of a nostril
…
I watched him where he swooped, he pounced, he struck;
But what he found was just a nail head (not a fly).
…
Won’t this whole instinct matter bear revision?
To err is human, not to, animal.
Or so we pay the compliment to instinct.
…
’Twas disillusion upon disillusion.

 

In much the same manner as Frost’s hornet, did that scorpion on my cabin floor mistake me for either dinner or a possible mate? Why bother me at all? When it should have been gainfully employed in more reasonable pursuits it was not using any reason and we both suffered for its frailty.

The Greek astronomer Ptolemy identified the constellation Scorpius in the 2nd century A.D. Why didn’t Mother Nature take that as a clue to make scorpions extinct 2,000 years ago? Even Nancy Reagan with her reliance on astrology for advice to her husband on affairs of state might have used her influence to have “Scorpio” disappeared from our existence by bringing the power of the federal government to bear. After all, our federal government killed off generations of eagles and other more cuddly species than scorpions with DDT. Why did scorpions escape?

I am glad the bison somehow miraculously survived mankind’s slaughter but do wonder what if any reason exists to preserve the scorpion. I guess it comes down to “Only the good die young” and we humans have been around about 430 million fewer years than the scorpion. We will probably be gone long before scorpions pass.

On the other hand, perhaps I can convince Jeff Bezos and Amazon to help me market scorpions to the public as pets. Hey, entrepreneur Gary Dahl got rich back in the 1970’s by convincing people a rock could be a loving pet. Maybe a slogan such as “Get Your Zing Avoiding a Sting” could be catchy. Or maybe I could sell them as a great gift idea for misanthropic people or dry them out and make necklaces from them. I see all kinds of people sporting plastic human skulls on their belt buckles or as tattoos.

Of course, if I were able to get such an enterprise going the government would just regulate it out of existence or tax it to death. Well, at least I could get rid of some of the crunchy little crustaceans that way. In the meantime, I guess I’ll just need to wear my shoes and watch my step.