The odd waking dream in which many of us find ourselves continues unabated. On any given night, the idiot box lives up to its nickname, giving a megaphone to folks who on a regular basis compare various politicians to either Hitler, Stalin or both. Elsewhere in television-land, highly scripted “reality†shows have folks mesmerized.
The temptation is to shrug and ignore it all. But these are symptoms – clues, perhaps – of how upside-down we’ve become and how astoundingly-unchallenged a culture we’ve allowed to flourish.
Is it not the damnedest thing that a Southern senator named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III tore into the late Thurgood Marshall? Or that he declared the recent Citizens United ruling, which opened the spigots for corporate money to flow directly into campaigns, to Brown v. Board of Education? In the world of this poor fellow and his like-moneyed friends, corporations are people just like you and me, and now they’ve been set free at last to pour more billions into campaigns.
Marshall, who served on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991 and was NAACP counsel in Brown, has resurfaced and is getting a modern “activist judge†makeover by those wishing to use the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of his former clerk, Elena Kagan, for political gain.
As Kagan herself has noted, confirmation hearings have become more spectacle than substance. Add to that a world where context is nearly impossible, 140-character diatribes are all the rage and it is increasingly easier to lie, twist and distort than to explain, converse and persuade. I don’t blame technology, but to see Marshall and Brown dragged into this maw is saddening.
I take some solace in the recollection of a quiet evening spent in Washington, D.C. I was staying nearby in northern Virginia and drove in for dinner and a pilgrimage. It was late January 1993, a chilly night, but no snow. I shared a table with a nice couple from American University and they told me the easiest way to walk to my destination.
Coming up 1st Street, you could see the line stretching around the marble edifice, warm lights glowing inside. Though the crowd was in the thousands, there was just a low rumble.
I headed up the sidewalk to the back of the line, passing those who had been there the longest, some shivering a bit, little ones bundled up and holding close, people of all colors clad in mostly black, some in clear remorse, others probably so, but with firm-set jaws. Solemnity is the word that most often comes to mind in trying to describe the moment.
And respect. I stood in line for maybe hours – now it seems like it was just a few minutes – and when I finally walked up the steps and entered the marble building bearing the words “Equal Justice Under Law†at the entry, you could feel the respect pouring out.
We walked around the closed casket counter-clockwise, and of all the images there – the pictures, flowers, the honor guard and all the tears streaming down all the faces – it was the letters from the school kids that have stuck with me, particularly, for some reason, a simple piece of ruled paper carefully, slowly inked in cursive by a third-grader, who started his thank you, “Dear Thurgood,†as if writing to a friend.
I remember that country, faintly now, as if it were all a dream.
[Editor’s note]: Thurgood Marshall is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. The title of this piece was taken from his official obituary at arlingtoncemetery.net/tmarsh