The Sage Forge

Think hard and your conviction might waver some. A couple of years ago we found that the cauldron doth still boil and bubble. Once again a weird group in dark robes gathered ‘round to take fate from the hands of a nation's sovereigns. In "Macbeth"the tale told is a bloody, twisted path. Victory goes to the right man but the witches alone are left unscathed. The case of which I speak is the Supreme Court's decision to eliminate the death penalty for juvenile offenders. The characters in robes wrote the plot, and played out the twisted path they alone defined. Did we, as the terminally weak MacBeth did not, fight for the proper sovereigns' right to control a nation's fate? Not so far.

It makes no matter whether we agree or disagree with the decision of the Court on its face. The danger is in making right by incantation.

In MacBeth Shakespeare’s hero, MacDuff, is in no way a poor choice for King, but the magic by which the office arrives in his hands disrespects him and every other character in the play. So it is with the Supreme Court. What they did was to say of each and every character who might hope to share the worldly stage on which they have set themselves so lofty a perch that there is no point in their, in our, being there. Of these nine five knew better than all the rest of us combined. By the weight of a spell cast by a single hand they silenced us all and set us "right". Their inscrutable power set strings on us and played us all like puppets.

What wisdom can puppets have? How dare we disagree!

Such decisions by usurping wizards solve nothing. They dazzle as sparkling visions of the imagination but they have none of the weight of the words of real law wrought by the smiths of that craft who were chosen by real people to do the real work of making hard choices. No, these better wizards, so much wiser in their own eyes than the whole difficult process of bringing law to life by natural means, have chosen to make a prettier law by unnatural processes.

What such wizardry discounts is that in the wretchedness of the process these empowered ones so despise for its results there lies the long difficult path by which peoples entrusted with the making of their own laws educate themselves and their cultures to a kind of civility sustainable over eons. People learn the making of law by living under the laws they make. Living under the Court’s magical laws teaches us nothing but the weight of the boot, the chafing of the chain. They feel like political nullification. They sound like the march of conquerors. They breed fear, resentment, and hatred.

Years after another such hideously "pretty" decision most of us look at a piece of courtly wizardry that kills as many complete innocents in five days as it saves (in somewhat less "innocents") in a year and shake our heads. Roe v. Wade sounds like a bad trade, a grisly trade, a trade the likes of which left Lady MacBeth unable to wash her hands clean of the stubborn stain. A nation that has more and ever more difficulty sleeping with its legacy of carnage stands at the brink of once again forcing this law of the sorcerers back into the realm of real people. Are the heirs of the men so unwisely wise more than thirty years ago a better brand of conjurer than were they? You cannot make me believe they are.

With the stroke of a magical pen two years ago the Supreme Court’s weird sisters and their coven brethren set the most essential element of democratic government on its ear. They tossed the consent of the governed aside as an irrelevance.

It is difficult enough to bear the chains of law modern government imposes on us when its links are forged by the people we elect. When the people seek, by the shape they demand that their laws take, to have law acknowledge the value of innocent life even at the expense of young life they are making a hard choice. It is their choice reflecting their values, though. To have that hard choice and all it means swept aside by the work of a single legal sorcerer in dark robes is not merely bizarre. It means the fundamental promise that this is a land of, by, and for the people is a sham. We are really just the playthings of the magicians of the Supreme Court.

Smell that smoke? See the dark robes huddled ‘round that fire? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble, indeed!