The Crazy Years

by Spider Robinson

  Mr. Skelton also spoke with Michel Perron, a senior adviser to the federal solicitor-general and the bureaucrat who shepherded the new regulation through the approval process. Mr. Perron “said fears of entrapment are exaggerated…However, asked if the new rules could be used to investigate an individual suspected of using marijuana, Perron said, ‘There is no distinction in the regulation [of] the amount or the type of drug.’”

  Will the regulation stand up under court challenge? Opinions differ sharply; we won’t know for sure until some years after the first cases work their slow way through the legal system.

  Meanwhile, Canada—a country where people care so much about human rights that many of them will risk pepper-spray in the eyes merely to protest the presence of a visiting politician from a land without such rights—is now the only nominally civilized nation on earth in which the police are allowed to tempt people into criminal activity and then arrest them for it.

  The Process

  FIRST PRINTED OCTOBER 1997

  YOU HARDLY EVER HEAR of judges committing suicide.

  A guy gets caught promoting bogus stock, cheating people who agreed to gamble. He faces the admiration of strangers, the contempt of his friends and an extended vacation in a place where they won’t give him a special phone line for his modem and it can take days to get a hooker sent in. Instead, he sky-dives without equipment. A kid gets caught with a ten-millionth of a lethal dose of cannabis—a vanload—and hangs himself in his cell rather than face his parents. A betrayed spouse makes the ultimate complaint. These we hear about all the time.

  And then there are the people who must deal with such doomed bent souls all day long. How frustrating it must be to try and straighten out all those derailed lives when you’re forbidden to use common sense or compassion or any tool but a single unwieldy blunt instrument called The System. It must be like being a combat surgeon before anesthesia, when all they had was a knife and a saw. You always hear about cops eating their guns—see? there’s even a special expression for it—and you think, who can blame them, with what they have to see and be unable to resolve? Somewhat less often, you hear of social workers who either simply burn out, or find themselves guilty of some monstrous life-destroying error at work and decide to handle it the way Jehovah would have.

  Considerably less often, you hear of lawyers committing suicide—and that is odd, since they are the ones who always seem to be faced with all the most weighty and poignant ethical dilemmas on all the TV shows. The TV defense lawyers agonize over their obligation to knowingly help criminals and psychos return to work and cringe at their own shameful pride in their skill; the TV prosecutors suffer over their inability to outwit the defense lawyers and occasionally question their own integrity as they offer plea-bargains to monsters. And when prosecutors and defense lawyers argue in chambers, the TV judge always frowns as he listens and ultimately renders his decision with the air of a man who knows he will be haunted by it for many sleepless nights to come.

  But they all always find a rationalization and are prepared to carry on by the time the closing credits roll. And so it is in real life, where you hardly ever hear of a big shot defense lawyer who commits suicide, because in a moment of clarity it suddenly came to him that he is evil scum, or a prosecutor whose rigid sense of justice continues to operate after a DNA test conclusively proves that one of his past triumphs was the execution of an innocent man, or a judge whose self-respect finally breaks under the weight of all those dreadful deadly mistakes he made or allowed The System to require him to make. Perhaps the money consoles them when they wake in the night. They can afford Prozac and melatonin: maybe they don’t wake in the night.

  Or perhaps when they do, they tell themselves that they did about the best anybody could have done with the clumsy instrument of the law—that, considering their massive caseload backup and limited resources and frozen budget, they removed from the streets and processed and warehoused about as many genuinely dangerous individuals as society was willing to pay for…along with, to be sure, an inevitable percentage of poor bastards who wandered into the gears, generally owing to defects of complexion…and that nobody bats a thousand. I hope they do have some such comforting thought, for we cannot spare any of them, even the incompetent ones.

  But I can’t agree with that kind of thinking. That can’t be good enough. They may have to settle for that—but I’m a taxpayer, and I don’t. More than I want a balanced budget, I want a world in which the helpless can get protection from the beasts.

  Arlene May of Craigleith, Ontario, sobbing, handed her twenty-two-year-old daughter a document one day: her own will. She was sure Randy Iles was working up to killing her. She was sick of subjecting her other four children to the turmoil and trauma of shelters and safe-houses, and she refused to be run out of her own home any more. The daughter offered to move back home and defend her mother, at knifepoint if necessary. Arlene said it wouldn’t make any difference. She was right. Randy Iles did everything the daughter could have done himself: immediately after he put two bullets through Arlene’s chest, he put one through the place where his own parents had tried unsuccessfully to grow a brain and fell dead beside her on the bed.

  The daughter told all this to a coroner’s jury in Toronto last week, and the Canadian Press account implies that she was a little irked. At the time he murdered her mother, you see, Iles was out on bail. Three times out on bail. On three prior charges of assaulting Arlene May. He was under at least one court order to have no contact with her.

  Think about how bad a “domestic disturbance” has to be for the cops to actually cuff someone. How aggravated the assault must be before a prosecutor will file charges. The judge has to know that the creature standing before him is probably not some politically incorrect Honeymooners fan who picked the wrong moment to quote Ralph’s famous, “One of these days, Alice—bang, zoom, right to the moon!” line to his wife. And if he doesn’t, the second judge sure does. Now tell me what was going through the mind of that third judge who looked at Randy Iles and read his file and set a bail within his means.

  Maybe he was so overworked his eyes glazed over. Maybe he knew he didn’t have a cell to put the bastard in, or the funds to feed and clothe and entertain him there. Maybe he simply calculated, with cold practicality, that he and the state couldn’t afford the time—that the endless hours of droning rituals necessary to remove this particular loose cannon from the street would be better spent on the fellow in line after him, who looked even more toxic.

  I would like, badly, to think it was one of those. Not only are they all fairly honorable explanations, but we can throw money at all of them.

  Where I grew up, in the Bronx in the early fifties, a Randy Iles would have come to the attention of the beat cop. We had beat cops, then, who knew every family on their beat. The first time Randy gave Arlene more than a black eye, the beat cop would have taken him into the parlor and explained that a man has pressures and women can drive you nuts, but from now on Randy should follow his wife around and make sure she didn’t bang into anything, because henceforth, every bruise discovered on her body was going to become a greenstick fracture somewhere on his. If his behavior had persisted despite negative feedback control, there’s a good chance Randy might have fallen down some stairs, as often as necessary.

  Give me back a world like that and I don’t care how big a deficit you run. If you do, fine: I’m willing to ante up. Double the taxes I presently pay for prosecutors and courts and prisons and police manpower; I won’t squawk.

  But perhaps more money would not have helped Arlene May at all. It’s hard to imagine a system with jaws strong enough to stop a determined lunatic that will not unreasonably infringe on rights of all the rest of us, or that could not be misused by an angry wife as easily as muscles can be misused by an angry husband. To stop Randy Iles, someone would have had to point a gun at him and use it. I’d hate to be married to a beat-cop’s girlfriend.

  The thing is, it’s hard to tell whe
ther the Randy Ileses are freaks or a growing trend. You seem to hear about them more often these days than you did thirty years ago—but is that a genuine increase, or just a combination of changing perceptions of domestic violence, growing media lust for sensationalism and a population growth so robust that today if someone is a one-in-a-million freak, that means there are at least three hundred of them in North America alone?

  Maybe there is nothing that can be done about the occasional Randy Ileses, except to wish we knew what makes them and how to fix it. But if that’s true, you’d think you’d hear of judges committing suicide more often.

  Qui Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

  FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 1999

  IN THE VERNACULAR it means, “Who will police the cops?” It has been a good question for a long time—as evidenced by the fact that it’s proverbial in Latin. The Romans were probably paraphrasing earlier epigrams in Hyksos. There may even be an expression for it in Great Ape.

  Humans are inherently disorderly, yet crave order—every blessed one of us wants to be the only one allowed to break taboos. The only solution ever found is to separate out the biggest, meanest mothas, give them the best weapons and exclusive right to commit deadly violence and let them enforce whatever taboos the old men and women can dream up. What prevents them from running wild? Innate moral integrity…plus the fear that other big men with weapons will come for them if they do.

  And they will…if the king has half a brain. Nothing—nothing—can more quickly or surely shatter a social contract than the general realization that the police have gone rogue. Any hope of a civilized society immediately becomes a doomed joke.

  So we have to have cop-cops. But, oddly, we don’t want them to be too good at it. An entire generation of movies, TV shows and novels about cops, a relentless onslaught of propaganda, has persuaded us that IAD offers are the villains: the handicap the noble hero must bear in his struggle with Evil. Internal Affairs officers are always depicted as heartless swine, who live to destroy a good cop’s career just because he committed some trivial technical mistake while Doin’ What He Hadda Do. The Rat Squad, they’re generally called. Nothing could be lower than a cop who would look to hurt another cop (merely because he disgraces the badge), right? Ask any cop.

  Can there be any clearer proof that deep down, most cops think of themselves as at least potential criminals?

  Requiring cops to adhere to the laws they enforce hobbles them, we’re told. After all, the other side gets to cheat. Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue has been perhaps the most eloquent exponent (at least since Eastwood quit playing Dirty Harry) of the proposition that sometimes an officer just has to “tune up” a suspect—that is, beat a confession out of, or kill him. Ah, “…but only when you know you’re right.” That’s who I want arbitrating the complex moral dichotomies of our time, someone sure to be infallible: an uneducated overweight civil servant with a jaundiced world-view and a nine millimeter.

  In Abbotsford, BC, in 1999, a bunch of these secular Popes surrounded a house where they had reason to believe marijuana existed. Naturally they were armed to the teeth and keyed up: everyone knows pot-sellers love a shoot-out with overwhelming forces. This house, which they put under surveillance for two hours, had a gigantic banner in the front window reading, “Happy Birthday!” and was surrounded by children playing street-hockey, who all cheered and went inside when a grownup yelled “Cake and presents!” Imagine the astonishment of the officers when, kicking the door in and brandishing cocked firearms, they found a birthday in progress and the house full of children.

  It must have been during those two seconds it would have taken a reasonably considerate moron to safety and holster his weapon that they received their second stunning shock: the dog they knew was there was there. The one they’d had to pepper-spray the last time they’d busted this suspect in this house, five weeks earlier. Who could have expected such a thing? Furthermore, the dog had apparently spent the time practicing Transcendental Meditation, for he now evinced an ability to levitate and, it says here, “bit one of the officers on the upper arm.” (He was also a disguise expert: although the police swear he was a “pit bull,” his photo looks nothing whatsoever like one—even his owner was fooled.) But much had changed in those five weeks: pepper-spray was now out of the question, even for a dog, so the officer’s partner did what his bosses maintain was the correct, reasonable thing: he blew the dog away.

  Say that again: a policeman popped two caps in a room full of children to save his partner from the bite of a flying dog, and his superiors have no problem with that.

  They refuse to say what kind of gun was used, so one must presume it was non-reg, a hand-cannon. Children as young as six months old were spattered with blood. So were their parents. As I write this, the TV news just reported that police response to their loud complaints has been to arrest one for assaulting an officer (if true, good man!) and criticize the rest for allowing their kids to attend a party at a “drug house.” One sees the sad truth of this: they should indeed have known smoking pot is an activity known to attract trigger-happy idiots. It was in this part of the world, only a few years ago, that a boy was shot dead for making the fatal mistake of having a TV remote in his hand when officers kicked his door in. (They were looking for a pot-dealer who’d once lived in another part of the building.)

  Nor has BC any monopoly on this sort of thing. In Sunderland, Ontario, a cop busted a twenty-year-old for pot possession, and the foolish young man utters a threat against him. A few weeks later, the officer and three other cops decide to discuss it with him at his home at eight P.M. They end up gut-shooting his father and kid brother. One cop has a black eye, and another “barely escaped death when a bullet passed centimeters from his nose,” even though none of the civilians had guns. The cops don’t want to talk about it; there’s a publication ban.

  The hell with Andy Sipowicz and Dirty Harry! I want more Internal Affairs-type cops—with bigger budgets and broader powers. What a good policeman does is a holy chore, and the power he is given is sacred: he must be worthy of it. Otherwise good people start to fear the cops more than the crooks…

  Declarative Sentients

  FIRST PRINTED MAY 1997

  OKAY, AS USUAL, we had an election and little or nothing important has changed. How could it? Nobody was offering any change. So I guess I can’t duck the responsibility any more. I am founding my own political party.

  The Sentient Party, I will call it. What follows are some of the planks of my platform. Or, putting it another way, these are the minimum conditions under which I’ll agree to rejoin the human race:

  —NGWOT. This stands for “No Grieving Widow(er)s On Television.” If elected, I will introduce legislation to mandate vicious public horsewhipping for any alleged journalist who ever again sticks a microphone in a stricken survivor’s face and asks how it feels. But this is merely emblematic: in fact, no journalist will ever again be allowed to film or tape anyone, for any reason, without their express prior consent. If you camp on some victim’s lawn, you go to jail. It is long past time we tamed the arrogant bastards who think of other people’s misery as a career opportunity. They shame us with their assumption that we want strangers ambushed for our entertainment. The people have a right to know diddly, until a judge tells them—and decent sentients prefer it so.

  —CCA. Criminalize Car Alarms. They have not prevented the theft of a single vehicle, serve no rational purpose and always make me want to go offer the thief my help so the ordeal will end sooner. For a first offense, death. If offenders persist, we’ll try and get them help. But I suspect anyone dumb and pretentious enough to believe that even a possible danger to his precious car is worth disturbing everyone for six blocks is beyond help. (Silent alarms will be encouraged.)

  —DDMAF Don’t Do Me Any Favors. This is a catch-all plank, inspired by anti-tobacco bullies like BC’s Glen Clark and Joy McPhail, but aimed at any self-righteous fascist who wants to take away my freedom For My Own Good. Even if it
did not lead to transparent idiocies like trying to extort (even more) money from tobacco companies on the pretext that their product costs society money, it would still be evil.

  Even if Clark and McPhail were capable of doing kitchen arithmetic (that is, were not politicians) and could grasp the obvious point that the younger a citizen dies, the less money he or she costs society for health care, it would make no difference: what they and their ilk really want is not to save us money but to have the warm pleasure of forcing benighted addicts to quit. This has been tried for decades with alcohol, heroin, morphine, cocaine, methedrine, PCP, LSD, mescaline, marijuana and hashish, and has never once proved to be anything but a doomed, costly, ineffective, life-shattering and disgraceful fiasco; I suggest it will not work any better with a substance used by somewhere between a quarter and a third of us.

  Also under this plank, anyone making derogatory remarks about Dr. Kevorkian would be beaten senseless; anyone interfering with a physician’s right to dispense mercy, in Halifax or anywhere, would be forcibly intubated and put on a respirator; Greenpeace would be sent to live with the seals (on whatever rations they can devise for themselves there, building shelters without wood); and anyone seeking to “protect” me against certain forms of entertainment would be forced to watch Mr. Rogers reruns and read Nancy Drew until they agree to sodomize a goat (a volunteer goat, I hasten to add.)

  —MSR. This is the radical plank: Make Stockholders Responsible. At present, any fool may buy stock in any company and unload it five minutes later. The directors must court his goodwill and seek to fulfill his wishes—but since he could well be gone in five minutes, they must assume that his primary (indeed his sole) wish is to maximize immediate short-term profit at any cost. Often enough this is his wish: we have all heard of companies purchased for the express purpose of dismantling them. Net effect: no major business on this continent is presently being run intelligently. Control is in the hands of strangers who happened to pass by, and will leave when they’ve finished looting.