James M. Redwine

Posey County Indiana

Rome Was Built In A Day

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In the musical My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe Professor Henry Higgins is a middle-aged speech specialist who attempts to pass off the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle as a socialite. Eliza is young, crude, pretty and most of all female. Her audacious resistance to Higgins’ efforts to turn her into a fraud is beyond frustrating to Higgins. He sums up his Eliza dealings with a statement to his co-conspirator Colonel Hugh Pickering, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

I suggest the main reason My Fair Lady is one of the most successful musicals in history is this eons long male quest to control or at least understand their female companions. Every man, especially every married man, commiserates with Professor Higgins. When Higgins asks Pickering if Pickering would get upset if he did not speak to him for hours or if he forgot Pickering’s birthday, Pickering scoffs and replies, “Of course not”.

The reason I raise this subject pertains to Peg’s totally unreasonable reaction to my involvement in our move from Posey County, Indiana to Osage County, Oklahoma. I don’t get it. Regardless of what activity or inactivity I am currently engaged or unengaged in Peg believes I should be doing something else, something she declares is essential to national security or at least to getting us moved. And whatever it is it is vital that it be done immediately! No time to finish watching a ballgame or drink a cup of morning coffee or an afternoon beer.

Let’s take yesterday as an example of Peg’s recalcitrant attitude. I will leave up to all fair-minded husbands if I was in the right. Wives need not trouble themselves with a response.

I turned on the television about eight a.m. and was in the process of continuously switching between CNN and FOX in the hope of finding some news squeezed among the vitriolic diatribes at both ends of the impeachment debacle. My coffee had hardly cooled when Peg burst into the den with fire in her eyes and a dust rag in her hand.

“The buyers must never know we lived here for twelve years without dusting behind those boxes in the closet. Are you about ready to quit griping about the national news media and the government and help me?”

“Uh, can I finish my coffee or will Rome fall if I don’t immediately go searching for dust devils?”

“Oh, don’t let me interrupt your delving into the fine points of who did what, to whom and when. I am sure they will contact you for your solution to war in the Middle East!” I ask you, husbands of the world, does such sarcasm sound familiar? I calmly responded it appeared to me the dusting and packing of yet another item we had not used for years could probably safely wait until my coffee was finished. Such was not to be.

Anyway, it does appear we will get completely packed up this year. I am looking forward to my instructions on unloading and unpacking out on the prairie. Wish me luck all my fellow testosterone travelers.

P.S. From Peg, who has to type all these Gavel Gamut articles, post them to the jamesmredwine.com website, Facebook, and send them on to the newspapers, which happens to take 3 hours of her Friday because the author waits until the last minute to write them: “No wonder the National Organization of Women’s credo is ‘Men just don’t get it!’. And, by the way, I am more like a man! I have had to help my Dear Jungle Jim move quite a few pieces of heavy furniture from one room to another because he decided he wanted them in a different room than the moving crew originally moved them into!”

Table Talk

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is generally regarded as a portrayal of the evils of America’s wealth-driven culture. I suggest it really was about Fitzgerald’s tumultuous marriage to his wife Zelda who constantly drove him crazy. When the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, says about the wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”, I submit Fitzgerald really has Zelda in mind for Daisy. And he is not referencing Daisy’s money but her infuriating ability to easily manipulate Jay Gatsby and, ergo, Zelda’s penchant to drive Fitzgerald over the edge.

It is the institution of marriage, especially Fitzgerald’s complete inability to keep up with Zelda, that was the impetus for one of America’s great novels. Most married couples can relate to such a theme. For example, let’s you and I consider the dynamics between Peg and me as we negotiate our move from Posey County, Indiana to Osage County, Oklahoma. If there is anything more challenging than paddling a canoe for a couple it is moving.

I do want to be fair in relating both Peg’s and my viewpoints on the matter, but let me point out it was not Adam who first suggested taking a bite of that apple; original sin in-deed! Anyway, let’s start at the beginning when Peg first saw our cabin on the prairie.

“Oh, Jim, it is perfect.” That should have been my clue but then I am a man and female-speak will forever remain a foreign language. I did not comprehend that by perfect Peg meant everything from the yard to the interior absolutely required change. Let me suggest the fact that women generally outlive men by several years disproves Dr. Joseph Brady’s Executive Monkey Theory.

You may recall that in 1958 Brady published the results of his psychology experiment in which two monkeys would both be shocked if one of them did not “correctly” press a lever. One monkey had control, the Executive (or wife), and one monkey (or husband) had no control. The non-executive felt no pressure and lived a normal life. But the Executive died young. So, there, Dr. Brady; why do not us non-executive men live longer? But back to our move to the prairie.

Please allow me to cite just one example of a marital disaster in moving. It involves our “new” antique dining table that Peg saw as perfect until we moved it into the cabin. Then she demanded I modify it so there was more leg room. Not being completely obtuse I referred the problem to an expert, our general contractor in charge of implementing all of Peg’s changes to our once perfect property. Gentle Reader, I assume you agree that tables play a huge role in our lives. There is Leonardo da Vinci’s table of the Last Supper. There is Sir Thomas Malory’s Round Table in Le Morte d’Arthur. There were the endless squabbles over the shape of the “peace” talk tables between South and North Korea and South and North Vietnam. And there is Peg’s once perfect antique dining table.

So, I told Mark, our highly skilled contractor, about my problem and he, also of the male persuasion and also not conversant in female-speak, volunteered to help. You know what they say about good deeds. Mark understood the problem to be not that the sides of the table were too low to allow leg room, but that the whole table was too tall. When Peg saw all four legs had been cut off by four inches, well, somethings cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

All’s well that ends well however as Mark was able to apply his magic and restore Peg’s table including ample leg room. Peg, of course, never blamed Mark anyway. I am the one who had to deal with my own Zelda crisis. Well, Gentle Reader, let’s just table that thought!

The Ultimate Sin

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NJC/Dred Scott Symposium

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. Campbell was America’s recognized guru in the area of myth and religion. He postulated that the ultimate/unpardonable sin was to be unaware.

When Peg and I visited the just opened Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama earlier this month then participated in the Dred Scott convocation in St. Louis, Missouri last week, I was constantly made aware of Campbell’s admonition. I thought back to when I lived in an apartheid society of which I was barely conscious. When I saw the representations of lynchings and Jim Crow laws in Montgomery the stark reality of a separate and unequal daily life assaulted me. But when in St. Louis I listened to personal accounts of Black people who were on the unequal side of the equation, my own lack of alertness came into focus.

While you can anticipate the content of the displays at the EJI, when you walk through the hundreds of metal coffins inscribed with thousands of names of murdered Black people including several from Posey County, Indiana, you will naturally contemplate the evil we are capable of doing to one another just because someone may be an “other”. But when you hear directly from living persons who are still experiencing a denial of equal justice you are forced to confront your own previous lack of awareness.

The Dred Scott case was decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1857 and led directly to the Civil War four years later. It is only one of many wrong decisions of the Supreme Court but is probably the worst. Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864) who sat on the Supreme Court for almost thirty years authored the 7 to 2 opinion. It held that Negroes could not be citizens of the United States and had no rights that white men were legally bound to recognize, and that Dred Scott must remain a slave.

On Monday, July 16, 2018 at Logan University in St. Louis descendants of Dred Scott (c.1799-1858), Confederate President Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) and Roger Taney along with one hundred and fifty judges, attorneys and academic scholars were brought together by Judge Judith Draper and her husband Justice George Draper in conjunction with the National Judicial College to engage in “reconciliation”.

NJC President Benes Aldana, NJC technology specialist Joseph Sawyer, Michael Roosevelt education specialist for the State of California Courts and I as an NJC faculty member presented the afternoon sessions after the descendants and audience members held an interesting and extremely positive discussion during three hours in the morning.

The relatives of Taney and Davis did not attempt to excuse slavery. They did, however, clearly and poignantly point out their ancestors had done many good things along with their egregious errors in moral and legal judgments. As Peg and I listened to them I was reminded of Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar:

“The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft’ interred with their bones.”

William Shakespeare, Act III, sc ii.

What the EJI and Dred Scott experiences did for me was force me to remember and dissect my experiences under the system of legal apartheid in my hometown of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. I had never given more than a passing thought as to why “Colored” boys could not enter the front door of the pool hall or come to the front part of the building. And now my home town is New Harmony, Indiana where, according to the book by William E. Wilson On the Sunny Side of a One Way Street at page 91 he wrote that when he was a boy in New Harmony:

“By the twentieth century New Harmony had lost the egalitarian faith on which it was founded a hundred years before, and Aunt Minnie’s Lizzie (Wilson’s Aunt’s Black servant) was the only Negro permitted to live in the town. She had a room in the hotel (owned by Wilson’s Aunt and Uncle) and never went out on the street, day or night. Uncle Harry and Aunt Minnie did everything possible to make Lizzie feel like one of the family, not only because she was an excellent cook but also because they loved her. Even so, I have often wondered since how Lizzie endured her ostracism in the town.”

And Wilson also writes of his father’s loss of his Congressional seat in 1925 because he refused to join the Ku Klux Klan.

Well, I am more “aware” now than I was before the visit to the EJI Museum and Memorial, the Dred Scott convocation and Mr. Wilson’s book, but realize there’s more I need to do while, I hope, there’s still time to do it.

I wish to sincerely thank the friendly and expert staff of our fine Alexandrian Public Library in Mt. Vernon, Indiana for providing me with several excellent reference works on Dred Scott and William E. Wilson’s interesting book on New Harmony.

 

For video of Peg’s pictures of the Convocation please go to: https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=qqOf6KZ7ZBw&video_referrer=watch

A Tough Illness That Requires Tough Medicine

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Some medical conditions, say the flu, can be diagnosed and easily cured. Of course, if the flu is actually pneumonia the patient may not fare so well. Some medical conditions even if correctly identified may not be easily treated, certain cancers for example. And some cancers even if properly addressed may metamorphosize into others that are fatal.

In our Body Politic a serious condition we must either deal with or be permanently affected by is our Child In Need of Services problem. And even if we do not ignore it, a potentially fatal mistake, the cures we apply will be unavoidably complicated and expensive. Of course, to ignore a cancer is to court our own demise.

In this frenetic world of crisis-a-minute news and infuriatingly complex day-to-day existence, we just do not have the time or energy or money to be aware of and address all the problems that may seriously affect us. So we can be forgiven if we would prefer to ignore the extremely complex problems of child and family welfare, especially other people’s children and families.

But just as a spot on the skin may be the harbinger of disaster if ignored, if we do not attempt to help an abused or neglected child now, that child or that family may cause all of us harm later. And that harm may be a great deal more difficult and expensive than it would cost to prevent it now.

The complexity of our child welfare problem is highlighted by the Indiana Legislature’s scattergun reaction to the criticism of the former State Director of the Department of Family and Child Services who resigned in despair. Just in this year’s session of the General Assembly fourteen bills concerning DCS matters were introduced. This is a positive sign but just as “all politics is local” we in Posey County, Indiana, just as each of Indiana’s other 91 counties, must take some responsibility for our own situation.

In each county the general needs may be similar but specific needs may call for different approaches. Any solution should include numerous institutions such as the Department of Child Services, the schools, all police agencies, the County Council and Board of Commissioners, the Prosecutor’s office, the medical and mental health agencies and the courts. Of course, the most important constituency in this integrated approach must be the public along with the news media.

As I indicated last week I have plenty to do just in the Posey Circuit Court so that’s where I’ll concentrate next week as we work together to craft a comprehensive approach to diagnosing and treating our Child In Need of Services situation in Posey County.

Oh To Be An Egyptian Judge

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Some of you may have noticed I have been a judge for awhile. And, although I know it may surprise you, not everyone of my thousands of decisions has been met with universal acclaim. Occasionally someone may actually disagree with my fair and objective legal analysis and have the bad form to say so. Well, my friends, not if we were in Egypt.

According to a report in the Palm Beach, Florida Sun Sentinel of Sunday, December 31, 2017 a court in Cairo convicted 19 people of making public statements, “[t]he court found to be inciting and expressing contempt toward the court and the judiciary”. If you are wondering why I was reading the Palm Beach paper in sweltering 80 degree weather while some of you may have been enjoying a cool and exhilarating Indiana Christmas season there is no truth to the rumor it was because Peg and I felt compelled to be near President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago winter White House. We did not even receive an invitation to his $750 per person New Year’s Eve party. It may have been lost due to the holiday rush at the post office. Anyway, back to Egypt and the injured dignity of the judiciary.

The newspaper reported that the heinous criminals insulted the judges by making statements that were aired on TV, radio, social media or in other disfavored publications. Now the court did not deign to ignore these demeaning comments or to call for the miscreants to tug vigorously on their forelocks. Oh no. The defendants received 3 years in prison and were fined up to one million Egyptian pounds ($56,270 US).

Each defendant was also ordered to pay one million Egyptian pounds to each of the judges of the powerful union known as The Judges Club. Now I would never advocate for such a response against anyone who had the temerity to publicly disagree with my rulings. However, a few hours in the stocks on the courthouse campus might be considered or parading around the courthouse wearing sackcloth and ashes or maybe a few public recitations of “Judge Redwine is Solomon” or, well, you get the idea.

Actually, it is events such as those in Egypt that truly show what a blessing it is to be in a country where CNN, MSNBC, The NY Times, The Washington Post, FOX News, Breitbart and many other publications can spew their invective against anyone from the Supreme Court to even a court in Posey County, Indiana without fear of being jailed.

Instead of just worrying about the current protestors in our enemy Iran perhaps we should address the draconian pronouncements of offended judges in countries such as our friends in Egypt and elsewhere. The injured sensibilities of some pompous plutocrat may lead to far greater harm to the public than their unfair judgments that get publicly condemned.

Feet of Clay

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Picture by Peg Redwine

William Shakespeare had Marc Antony preach these words at Julius Caesar’s funeral:

“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Act III, Scene 2

Antony went on to list Caesar’s accomplishments in addition to his being ambitious. There was some good, some bad. Perhaps the citizens of Rome should have erected a partial statue of Caesar honoring just the good parts.

This could be a solution to our current controversy over monuments to historic figures. A committee could be composed of people who admire the works of a now dead leader and those who find the figure’s behavior flawed. A few examples might be helpful.

George Washington survived Valley Forge, presided over the Constitutional Convention and refused the opportunity to be named an emperor. On the other hand he owned hundreds of slaves and helped enshrine slavery into our legal system. The Committee might consider cutting the Washington Monument in half.

Thomas Jefferson was responsible for the Bill of Rights that guaranteed individual liberty but only to twenty-one year old white males. He also owned slaves and had children by one of them. Today such an employer/subject relationship would result in severe censure. Perhaps the Committee might recommend the Jefferson Memorial be closed every other week.

As we search for unblemished heroes to honor we could consider Abraham Lincoln who issued the Emancipation Proclamation. However, he at first averred slavery would be preferable to the disintegration of the Union and the Proclamation did not free all slaves just those in the states of the Confederacy. The Committee could maybe have a disclaimer added as a placard around his statue’s neck.

Andrew Jackson committed adultery, captured Seminole Indians under a flag of truce and as president created The Trail of Tears. On the other hand, he was a courageous and victorious military leader. A short bronze bust could replace his heroic sized statue.

As for Mount Rushmore the Committee would have to remove at least 3 of the 4 figures. Of course, Teddy Roosevelt had a penchant for shooting animals which might upset the ASPCA; so all 4 might have to be erased.

Right here in Posey County, Indiana we have a dilemma about what to do with our most famous citizen. Alvin Peterson Hovey was once Posey Circuit Court Judge, a Civil War general for the Union and our only governor. Unfortunately, he also was instrumental in helping to cover up the murders of seven Black men in October 1878. One of those Black men was shot and stuffed into a hollow tree on a farm owned by Hovey. Will the Committee have to remove the glowing patina from Hovey’s bronze in the Indiana State House?

One might look to Jesus as the paragon of virtue but even he got angry and threw the moneychangers out of the temple. He, also, voiced his hope that the cup of his great travail might pass from him. On the other hand, apparently no one knows what Jesus looked like unless one believes the Shroud of Turin is a clue. I guess the Committee would not be able to find any statues of Jesus to modify.

It appears that history has not provided us with any perfect examples to honor. Maybe the Committee will have to suggest that all statues be modified by substituting feet of clay.

Picture by Peg Redwine
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