What does it take to get convicted of bribery in the District of Columbia? Apparently it takes more than providing lavish gifts to a high-ranking city official who just happens to be providing you even more lavish gifts in the form of city leases worth several times the actual value of your properties. It even takes more than that city official pleading guilty to receiving bribes from you. Now that's where it gets interesting: since Douglas Jemal was "not guilty" of bribing Michael Lorusso, should Lorusso try to back out of his guilty plea of accepting "bribes"? After all, if the jury bought the idea that Jemal was simply providing gifts to someone he hardly knew but was in a great position to help him defraud the city government and its taxpayers, shouldn't Lorusso stand a pretty good chance of getting another jury of equally stupid individuals to acquit him of accepting these "non-bribes"?
Meanwhile, in the sad case of Princess Hansen, a juror was replaced during deliberations for relying on numerology to decide the case (it seems more likely the juror was simply trying to scuttle the case, as she apparently declared "she was the savior, there to force a mistrial"). Native Son has a good post on the lack of parenting involved in allowing your 14 year old to "date" a 28 year old and be out and about at 3 a.m.; aside from the abysmal display of parental interest in Princess Hansen's life, the fact remains that the trash who murdered her are still on trial and unlike Jemal, let's hope they face justice.
The root of the Princess Hansen story really is our throwaway society. In this city, a good segment of the population is considered throwaway, either working at jobs that offer nothing more than subsistence wages for the rest of their lives or not working at all because even those jobs are unavailable. This population is thrown into hellholes like the Sursum Corda Projects, and as Chuck D once intoned, "what is a project but another word for experiment?" You learn early on that you either need to keep your head down or jump in headfirst. Back in the 1940's Ann Petry wrote a brilliant novel called The Street that captured the daily dangers that confronted even a diligent parent; it helps readers understand why it is that seemingly simple solutions like "just move away" don't work as a mass solution. It also allows us to recognize that as dreary and neglected as slums are, the people who live there are diverse: some are strong, some are weak, some are good, some are evil, some are wise, some are fools.
However, by and large, this society considers "those people" interchangeable parts in a service economy and who really cares what the conditions are in the Projects so long as I get my #4 Value Meal hot and fresh?
4 comments:
The first thing that struck me about that sursum corda article was how poorly written it was. How do these people get jobs at the post? But beyond that, $8K seems a bit high for a hit on a teenager. You could pay her to keep quiet for a lot less than that, I'm sure.
Ah, I love The Street. Petry's treatment of the projects is really devastating, but it also seems very focused on the body of the African-American woman and all the ways in which she is imperiled. It's something very particular about the body of the woman, whether she is a mother or a madam (a la Mrs. Hedges, who is in a way a mother, albeit an exploitative one), that compounds her position.
I don't feel smart enough to add anything to MG!'s comment, but for whatever it is worth I always feel smarter for reading your blog and its comments.
I'll try harder in the future.
I so appreciate your thoughts, Cuff. I had such a hard time convincing the District of Columbia to take my money and make me a licensed massage therapist, that I began to wonder who I should try to bribe, to get the paperwork through channels. Once I finally did get licensed, I discovered I was only the 347th massage therapist in the District to do so. That was some years ago, but I'm CERTAIN there are at least a thousand M.T.'s conducting business in the District. It is such a corrupt place.
An unrelated question - can you recommend an accessible annotated version of Milton's Paradise Lost? I'm also interested in Dante's Inferno - do you have a favorite translation? If so, can you let me know? reyasdottir@verizon.net
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