Equal Justice: The Legend of Herkenbald

Law, we are told even in fifth grade, is something that applies to all without respect to wealth or status.  And then a few years later the same notion gets drilled into our mushy skulls during civics class as high school freshmen.  It's a noble ideal, and we like to think that the world follows America's example as a model of how under the rule of law, there are none deemed greater than others.  Rich or poor, celebrity or obscure, politically affluent or peanut gallery... it doesn't matter.  Here we are all equally accounted and equally accountable.

And it is all a damnable fantasy and we all know it.  Even if we don't talk about it.

I suppose the current situation with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is in my mind tonight.  As of this writing some former classmate during the early Eighties is alleging that Kavanaugh did something, or other, whatever.  She's due to testify before the Senate next week.  It's already grounds enough, however dubious, to have a number of elected officials and many commentators in the media demanding that Kavanaugh withdraw himself as a nominee.

Huh.  Funny.  I remember many of these same people insisting in 1998 that President Bill Clinton's sexcapades were inconsequential.  That his "character didn't matter".  That it was all "sex lies" whatever that is supposed to be.  If it didn't affect his performance as President of the United States then it shouldn't be on the radar.

These same people went down to the mat tooth and claw to fight for Bill Clinton.  Now they demand that Brett Kavanaugh be stricken from consideration for the Supreme Court.  All on the word of an individual whose integrity has been questioned by her peers and students, and is now found to be an anti-Trump activist at least at some point recently.

Maybe it's just me, but a semen-stained dress is a lot more incriminating than high school gossip from thirty-five years ago.  That a heap of Kavanaugh's former fellow adolescents are now vouching has been made out of whole cloth circa September 2018.

Don't even get me started on the obscene double-standard in regard to the allegations of foreign interfence on Trump's behalf in the last election and the uranium sale that we know happened with the blessing of Hillary Clinton.  One is fast becoming an unsubstantiated scandal that has lost all meaning for most Americans.  The other supplied nuclear material to those who would do harm to this country.

But, none of those particulars are really germane to this post.  I'm discussing the greater tragedy across our system of justice.  Namely, that justice is not impartial.  It plays favorites.  It has become a commodity for sale to those with pull.  And it's not supposed to be this way.

Which brings us to the legend of Herkenbald.

It was something introduced to me when I was in Belgium many years ago.  And ever since I've thought that it's a tale well worth telling to students here.  It should especially be shared in law schools, and in police academies, and with anyone who takes it upon himself or herself to become involved in the judicial process at any level.  It is, in my mind, the perfect parable of incorruptible justice.

So, what is the legend?

Herkenbald is said to have lived around 1020.  That is when he was a judge serving the people of Brussels, anyway.  And he was renowned far and wide for the wisdom of his decisions.  He was also famous... or infamous... for how serious he took his duties.  Everyone, no matter their station, was beneath the same shadow of immutable law.

And then came the day when Herkenbald, after many years of faithful service to his people, was very old and taken with grave illness.  He was moved to a bed in the hospital, to wait for the end.  And yet, he insisted that he be allowed to carry out the task appointed him long before.

Toward the end, Herkenbald heard a commotion outside of his room.  With hesitance, the great magistrate was told that his own nephew had taken a maiden against her will and committed rape.  Herkenbald commanded his subordinates to bring his nephew to his bedside.

However, the subordinates disobeyed, and took measures to hide the nephew.  And for whatever dumb reason, five days later the nephew came to the hospital on his own and entered Herkenbald's room.

Herkenbald was friendly and kind to his nephew.  He was very glad to see the young man, here at the end of his own days.  He bid his nephew to come and sit beside him.

And that's when Herkenbald grabbed the youth, held him with all his remaining strength as he pulled out a concealed dagger, and slit his own nephew's throat wide open.

His nephew's body collapsed to the floor.  The act discovered even as Herkenbald's breathing grew shallow, the bishop was summoned to hear his confession and to deliver last rites.  But Herkenbald refused to confess to the murder of his nephew.  It was not murder at all, the judge told the bishop.  It was the administration of justice.  His nephew had raped a woman and thus forfeited his life.  The law was without question in the matter.  A crime had been committed and punishment must be meted out.  And that is what Herkenbald had done.

Outraged, the bishop refused the final sacraments to Herkenbald.  The legend says that just as the bishop was storming out of the room, Herkenbald called out to him.  Then Herkenbald blew the high clergyman a holy raspberry: upon his tongue was the sacramental Host.  He had been given communion by the highest of all judges.  And then, his tasks fulfilled and a proverbial "up yours!" to the Bishop of Brussels, Herkenbald died.

Now if that's not a hardcore myth to convey to apprentice practitioners of the law and to veteran judges and constables alike, then by all rights it should be.  The legend of Herkenbald is the perfect morality tale about the law.  It is an admonition to judges and to politicians and to all who would hold sacred the rule of law in a society.  It is a reminder that though man and his schemes are inescapably fallen, there is an incorruptibility that must be striven toward without favor.

That photo is a depiction of Herkenbald slaying his nephew.  The statue itself decorates one of the churches in Brussels.

Maybe there needs to be a sculpture of Herkenbald in the United States Capitol Building.  Perhaps in the Rotunda, where every member of the House and Senate might see it.  And in the United States Supreme Court Building.  And in every courthouse in America.  And in law school textbooks.

After all, Lady Justice carries a blade.  Herkenbald actually used his.

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Lovecraft the prophet

"That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."

-- from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 1928 when Howard Phillips Lovecraft published The Call of Cthulhu: his seminal classic which forever altered the nature of horror fiction.

That passage has stuck with me from the first time that I read this short story in the fall of 1996.  And I've thought about it countlessly in the years since.  It has been difficult not to see mankind through the vision of those cultists waiting for when the stars are right: when the incomprehensible horror that is Cthulhu will arise at last from the cyclopean city of R'yleh far below the waters of the Pacific and lay waste to the Earth.  Until then dead Cthulhu waits, dreaming...

Mankind, "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside."  Men "shouting and killing and revelling in joy."

It has been eighty-five years since Lovecraft wrote those words.  And with each passing year it seems as if humanity... or at least the civilized realm of it... is descending further and further into the barbaric, unrestrained frenzy of pleasure and pain that he described in his tale.

Slaying the innocent for sake of money and convenience.  Government gone lawless.  Men and women descending beneath their nature.  Wars without reason or end.  Conscience and ethics spurned utterly.  Good proclaimed to be evil, and evil to be good.

Perhaps more than we have realized... maybe more than we would like to acknowledge... H.P. Lovecraft had a prescience of far greater clarity than any prophet or futurist of this age.

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Wars have consequences. Don't we know that?

My great-uncle Rob was a G.I. who served in the Pacific during World War II. But unless you were family you likely would have never known that. It was something that, like many others who served during that conflict, he never liked to talk about.

Mom told me when I was a child that Uncle Rob had to kill an enemy soldier. I didn't know until years later that it was during the American invasion of Okinawa. Uncle Rob dived into a foxhole for cover. At almost the same moment a Japanese soldier jumped inside the same foxhole.

The Japanese man said something that Uncle Rob could not understand. My great-uncle killed him without thinking. He beheaded the Japanese soldier with the bayonet of his rifle.

Uncle Rob was one of the kindest, gentlest men that you could ever meet in this world. But from a young age I sensed that he was a very haunted man. "Post-traumatic stress disorder" wasn't medical terminology until the tail end of the Vietnam War, but by then Uncle Rob had lived with it for thirty years. Until his passing in 1993 his experiences in the war would continue to linger on the edge of his memory. I once saw him go pale in the face as an Army helicopter out of Fort Bragg flew overhead.

Like I said, my great-uncle was a good man. So were the millions of other young men who went off to Europe and the Pacific islands to stand against their country's enemies in World War II. Another member of my family was already in the Army stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He survived the war... barely. A friend of my family who died recently was one of General Patton's staff officers. I had no idea that in my friend's house, which I'd been inside a few times, there was some of Hermann Goering's finest dinnerware. Turns out that a lot of the Third Reich elites' personal items made their way into farmhouses across America, but I digress...

War is terrible. Perhaps the most terrible thing. It is an unfortunate result of this fallen, broken world that war happens. That war is, sometimes, necessary and unavoidable. But I've never understood why war could possibly be a thing to be glorified, or honored. To respect and honor the sacrifices made by those who served in war, absolutely. But war itself?

I posit that our perspective on war is a far different matter than how our grandfathers and their brothers saw it. None of them regarded themselves as "heroes" because they wore a uniform or went abroad or even because they fought in combat. They knew they had a job to do, they did it and they came back to be husbands and fathers and productive members of the community. That was enough for them. Today we have an inclination to deem anybody and everybody who wears a uniform as "heroic". World War II was a conflict where we knew who the bad guys were and we knew that we had to defeat them and we knew why they had to be defeated.

But I can't for the life of me understand how any war that America has engaged in during my lifetime has had either a definitive enemy or a definitive objective. Sometimes both.

For more than ten years we have had our forces fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. For almost two years Osama bin Laden has been sleeping with the fishes, and Al-Quaeda has been quashed more or less, yet we try to conquer a land that not Alexander or the Soviets could overcome. The Iraq War turned into a costly experiment in "nation-building" (as many of us knew it would).

America's running tab the past decade and more is now a few trillion dollars and thousands of American lives lost, when the matter of bin Laden could have been resolved easily within a matter of months after 9/11. As for Iraq well, I've written before how that country needs a "strongman" figure along the lines of Tito to hold it together and how the United States has become that strongman in the absence of Saddam, but again I digress...

I was led to write something after watching what has transpired in the past few days regarding what former Representative Ron Paul said via Twitter about the shooting death of Chris Kyle, the retired Navy SEAL considered to be the most lethal sniper in American military history...

As a longtime supporter of Ron Paul, I will admit that the former congressman exercised the wrong tact. Almost certainly an ill sense of timing. However, I do believe that I can understand what he is trying to state in 140 characters or less. Paul is - apparently - noting that war has consequences, that those who fight in war must live with those consequences... and there may even be a snide remark in there about how our system has failed many of those who come back from war.

Maybe it's just me, but war seems a horrific enough thing by nature that there should be no immediate desire to write bestselling books about fighting in one. An armed forces uniform does not a hero make. Neither should tactical operations readily produce celebrities (Alvin York being one of the few exceptions).

Anyway, Ron Paul released the following on his Facebook page later on Monday...

Paul acknowledged - and there is no reason why any person should not - that Kyle's death was sad, tragic and unnecessary. But Paul also stated that...

Unconstitutional and unnecessary wars have endless unintended consequences. A policy of non-violence, as Christ preached, would have prevented this and similar tragedies.

Now, is there anything at all wrong with this, which Ron Paul has said? Because I've read it over dozens of times and I'm not seeing anything un-American, unpatriotic or insensitive toward the memory of Chris Kyle. What I am seeing however is an uncomfortable truth: that war comes at a cost. War without meaning, far more so.

I see no reason why the former congressman should be reviled for saying what he did. Instead I have read a lot of anger and even hatred vented toward the man because... well, he strongly suggested that wars involving America can be - gasp - wrong on moral and legal grounds.

But we aren't supposed to dwell upon those trivialities, according to some. Instead we are to cheer on the war, cheer on the "heroes", forgetting that too many are coming home with wounds whether visible or not.

When a young man or woman enlists in the United States armed forces, he or she is making a sacrifice of a few years of their lives. Years that could otherwise be spent in college, falling in love and starting families, buying houses, earning money. Some even choose to spend their entire lives in such sacrifice toward serving their country.

Again, perhaps it's just me, but it seems that if any person is going to lend his life and precious time to his country and its government, that that person more than deserves to trust that his time... and perhaps even his very life... will be used wisely, be given the utmost and sincerest respect, and expended only when all other options have failed.

Those who fought in World War II paid for that understanding in grief and blood and were humbled by it. As well we should.

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