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Here Come da' Judge Satire By Lorenzo Dee Belveal On April 3, in this new millennium, we were treated to an exercise in judicial arrogance that should stand as a high-water mark in the ranks of official dispensers of justice for a long time to come. It would have even been more appropriate if it had happened two days earlier. It took fifty (50) typewritten pages for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to speak his piece about Microsoft's real and imagined sins in the marketplace, in pursuit of maximizing the possibilities for their Windows product. Most of us would find it difficult at least, and perhaps impossible, to hold forth to such an extent on a topic less than totally familiar to us. But, of course, such a comparison is totally inapt unless each of us happened to be a Federal Court Judge, such as Hizzoner, Thomas Penfield Jackson. In any case, nothing is foresworn in the quest for judicial immortality. A judgeship, as you should know - if you don't - is supposed to free the individual who makes that lofty transition, from his or her last twig or splinter of modesty. A federal judgeship in particular, can only be compared to being appointed a Kentucky "Colonel": Such an ordination involves full, complete, wall-to-wall, authority to rule on mooted questions, contested issues, legal conflicts, assaults, battery, property encroachments, libels, defalcations, short-change and illicit lusting. (NOTE: This mandate applies to the judges, not to Kentucky Colonels.) If you are paying attention, you should know by now that a Federal Judge is somebody to be reckoned with - and seriously. Especially in the vicinity of any kind of a difference of opinion, and whether that difference of opinion relates to a fence-line between neighbors, misinterpretation of a contract, or legal possession of a Maltese tom-cat that won't stay home after sunset in any case. A properly anointed and black-robed Federal Judge is authorized to resolve any and all of these contestations - and more! Doing so is the core reason for having Federal Judges: to put answers to all of those pesky conundrums that are too tricky or too involved for ordinary people to hardly even think about. This Microsoft brouhaha offers us a perfect case in point. Microsoft, as you probably already know, is a company located in the beautiful green pine-cone State of Washington. (Not to be confused with the ‘other’ Washington, which perches on the banks of the Potomac River, and provides the nesting place for the greatest assemblage of personal pretension, professional incompetence, and organized public endangerment this world has ever had to cope with.) The corporate purpose of Microsoft is to invent, develop, improve, package and sell software for computers. And in doing so, to make and keep Bill Gates the richest man in the world - or anywhere else that we know about. All of these things Microsoft has done and still does, just a little bit better than anybody else. (Until very, very recently, it should be added.) Up until about five p.m. on the afternoon of April 3, (Eastern Standard Time), almost anybody would have had to admit that Microsoft had done an excellent job at whatever it set out to do. First off, it's Windows operating system can be found on just about every kind of computer this side of the bead-board that many of its users call an 'abacus", and its Chinese inventors label a ‘suan pan’ or a ‘quipu’. It’s easy to locate Microsoft on a map. Any map. This, because Windows is firmly planted everywhere and back again. Anybody who has a computer either has Windows installed on it - or wishes he did. Oh, there are a few die-hard exceptions to the global reality, but those hold-outs are probably still using slide-rules or bean-jars to do their arithmetic problems. Or maybe they just hate to admit it. It's safe to say that Windows is the world's paradigm for a computer operating platform. It's also fair to say that it didn't reach this lofty pinnacle of success by accident. It was planned that way............... Little boys are supposed to tell their adult relatives as often as they are asked, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" -- that they want to be president. But little Billy Gates, when he was asked what he wanted to be, etc., didn’t show the slightest interest in a political job. Not even in being president. He never came right out and said it, but it was clear he considered working for a salary to be beneath both his dignity and his aspirations. When Billy was asked what he wanted to be, etc., he always answered, "The richest man in the world." This reply made everybody laugh. Then they would pat Billy on top of the head and say things like, "that boy has spunk!" Of course nobody took the kid seriously. But it wasn't long until Billy Gates was cluttering up the Stanford campus, along with a bunch of other egg-headed social misfits who wore ill-fitting sweatshirts to their classes and spent their spare time drawing indecipherable diagrams on napkins, tablecloths and the walls in their dormitory rooms. These cybernutcakes couldn't even carry on rational conversations with people who only spoke English, but that was okay because they were reinventing the world we live in, and re-naming the components therein to suit themselves. In almost no time at all, the same people who laughed and patted Billy Gates on the head when he said he wanted to be the richest man in the world, were writing him letters to ask him if he remembered them, and importuning for employment in his far-flung and burgeoning enterprises. Sometimes it happens like that. Not often. But sometimes. Wealth tends to bring buttoned-down responsibilities. Thus, it wasn't long before Billy Gates yielded to conventionality, to the extent of buying a three-piece suit, a 2-seated sports car and a water-pik. That same week, he was authoritatively reported to have a million dollars. This was just the beginning. The following week, the figure was corrected to a billion (spelled with a "B") and it just kept on growing. At first Bill (he dropped the "y" off the end of his name, when he got nailed with his first I. R. S. audit) was said to be the richest kid in San Mateo County. He went from this humble beginning to being the richest young man in California -- in the western states -- in the western hemisphere -- east of the equator -- and, finally, just like he had planned it, in the entire world. Right along the lines in which Horatio Alger had spelled it out, except the Alger program was much too conservative. There's no place to go after you're the richest man on earth. But in the search for comparisons, innovative reporters and loose-lipped neighborhood gossips began saying things like "Bill"s take-home pay exceeds the gross national income of Peru". Then it was Thailand. France, Germany, Iran, and finally Great Britain - which Bill dismissed as being "premature". Not 'wrong', mind you, just premature. He still had some unrealized plans to harvest, but for the time being, he wanted to keep the record straight. We have to give him that. NOTE: He also denies as baseless, the recurrent rumor that he purchased the rain-soaked State of Washington in its entirety, before establishing his fledgling company there. It is true, however, that he built a home in a clearing on an otherwise tree-covered hilltop that, indeed, did cost more than Louis XIV’s Versailles palace, the Taj Mahal, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, combined. Needless to say, everyone (well, almost everyone) applauds success. We still pay oratorical homage and build celebratory bonfires in honor of the "local boy who makes good". We put his picture in the local newspaper and invite him to serve as a judge in the Fourth of July "Miss Artichoke" contest. "Making good" is a laudable and worthy accomplishment. It smacks of industry, application, and also sets a good example for the other, marginally motivated, lads who reflect nothing much beyond loose habits and feckless inclinations. But ‘making good’ can’t be allowed to run amok. It is not considered healthy for a boy-child to have a seven-figure income (after taxes) before he can legally drive an automobile, buy beer or vote. At least this is the settled opinion of the blue-nosed under-achievers who constitute the perennial jury to weigh such issues related to economic inequality. This is where Bill (no "y") Gates made his mistake. He was much too impatient to reach his goal of being the richest man in the world, or the galaxy -- or the universe? Who keeps score any more? Anyway, he did it too fast, and it was read as evidencing a lack of seemly shy and retiring restraint on his part. Bill outraged a lot of people who, otherwise, might have been his friends. He did this by demonstrating just how easy it is to make lots and lots of money. More mature folks who have trouble keeping current with their VISA card payments, resent a pink-cheeked show-off, who - when a bank-teller is slow cashing his check - gets impatient and buys the bank. Without really knowing, I chalk a lot of Bill Gates's legal problems up to this kind of animosity on the part of people he has so surrealistically surpassed when it comes to 'taming the economic tiger", as we say. It stings. No doubt about it. For example, a sixty-year-old Federal Judge, who knows the amount in his retirement account to the dollar, and thinks hard about it every weekend, has to feel the twinge when a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed software geek stands before him in a thousand-dollar Eyetalian silk suit, custom-made shoes and more digits on his bank balance that the judge has in his Social Security number and his Zip code combined. This can't be a happy day for the Judge so challenged, and this regardless of whether or not he got a bad cup of coffee before coming to work! So what happens? Well, I'll tell you. The way the law works, especially in the judicial stratosphere, as represented in a Federal Court, personal feelings can prove to be a major input to the issue of whether or not somebody gets caught with his foot off the bag. Appearing before a judge who has some substantial reason to resent you, is simply a dangerous thing to do. This, without regard for whether you 'killed cock robin' or not. People check out the inside of the "sneezers" in this Land of the Free every day, for the presumably heinous crimes of going to court wearing a yellow shirt and a green necktie, or a sweat-shirt with a peace symbol emblazoned on it, or having too long - or too short - a hair-do, considering the placement of their ear lobes. We don't like to admit it, but judges are just 'people', who are trying hard to shake the egalitarian label. They have deep, if unspoken, feelings about all kinds of things, including what the defendant at the bar probably has coming to him - just on general principles. Having much too much money, and appearing before a judge who knows he is vastly underpaid, shamefully overworked and otherwise endlessly imposed upon by the 'system', within which he is just one of the cogs, is playing with fire. "Justice", like beauty, larceny and rape, is more often than not an appraisal left to jaundiced the eye of the partisan beholder. Without seeking to put words into any barrister's mouth, I ask you, is it possible that a civil-service minion, four years, five months and seventeen days short of retirement on a terribly inadequate stipend, can be expected deal impersonally - much less generously - with a supplicant whose wealth exceeds not just his ability to spend it - but even to guess at its roughest sum-total? Such a challenge would tax the moral and psychological equanimity of a beatified saint. Write me down as a suspicious type, if you will. It is through these biased bifocals that I view Bill Gates's essential problem. If he could have gone to fulfill his date in Judge Penfield Jackson's court and contrived to leave his Crosean wealth out of sight and out of mind while doing so, methinks it would have gone much better for him. Do you seriously disagree, gentle reader? Not that I am willing to entirely dismiss the possibility that he has 'cut some corners much too close for comfort', as we say. Or even that in some close-fitting interpretations of the mystically esoteric laws, rules and regulations that define permissible commercial latitudes, he might, indeed, come off as a guilty conniving scoundrel - and fully deserving of everything Judge Jackson has privately planned for him. It's just that his appearing in court as the modern reincarnation of Midas, leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having lost his every vestige of claim on the sympathy, indulgence, empathy or feelings of shared humanity, with the robed figure who sits on his lofty perch like a judicial equivalent of the Damoclean sword. Bill, shake hands with your own private nemesis. The grim writing is 'on the wall', as the prophet put it: Bill Gates is much too rich to elicit warm humanitarian responses from the relatively poverty-stricken functionaries and legal scamsters whose official ordinations entitle them to charge his, judge him and punish him ....... until they feel satisfied. . Forget the stentorian language of the pertinent statutes. High Court Judges are not called "law-givers" for small reasons. In truth, ‘the law’ tends to be much less about what is written on the hallowed page, and much more about what the Judge decides is a fitting and proper penalty to assess for proven and/or surmised sins of the unfortunate suspect before him. This isn't the way we would like to envision the functioning of our Courts, but this is how it goes more often than otherwise. You can check it out with folks who know. . Whether it's a Federal Court Judge, or a Chicago taxicab driver, both of these worthies go to work each day with their full inventories of accumulated experience, inclinations, biases, loyalties, strengths and weaknesses that they have painstakingly accumulated in their years of constructing their individual personas. These are the components of what we call "judicial (and taxicab- driver) temperament". We all have a similar accumulation of emotional baggage that defines and colors our behavior. Most unfortunately, their - and our - appraisals, predilections and - yes - judgements, are all projected through each individual's own astigmatic prism. Forget about the blindfolded lady and the balance scales. So, to borrow a phrase from the duck-blind, "Bill’s goose is cooked!" How could it possibly be otherwise? ========= E N D ========== Lorenzo Dee Belveal Copyright April, 2000 Lorenzo Dee Belveal, Author All rights reserved ========================= Copyright © 1998 Lorenzo Dee Belveal
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