The Garrulous American
Mayer, Milton
The Garrulous American by MILTON MAYER Don't cross me, or even look cross-eyed at me, or I'll slap a lawsuit on you. I have a lawyer, name of Francis Heisler, on a hundredthousand- dollar-a-year...
...He is the William Scott Stewart of civil liberties...
...He argues that in laying a hand on me, the flatfeet have violated the First Ten and the Fourteenth Amendments, the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact, the first four Beatitudes, the Natural Law, and the Farmer's Almanack...
...Scott Stewart was the great Chicago mouthpiece...
...and (3) the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 that the individual has duties transcending those imposed b y governments...
...or, if the indictment wasn't faulty, the grand jury had been improperly convened...
...or, if the grand jury had been properly convened, the court was improperly prejudiced a g a i n st gorillas...
...The next time around, he trots out the Treaty of Westphalia, the Code Napoleon, and the Decretals of Acidophilus VI, with the same result...
...What matters is that the United States stands confessed, in its own courts, for the first time in history, as the sworn enemy of its sworn word in the community of nations, its lawlessness embedded in its own judicial precedent...
...or, if he had done it, he was temporarily insane when he did it...
...At long last he has got his garrulity into the record, in a municipal court case out in the sticks...
...Let the flatfeet catch me in the act of cutting off the cat's tail, or molesting an adult, or indecent exposure— and my lawyer leaps into the breach...
...But this one didn't...
...Edward Nelson of the San Jose, California, Municipal Court instructed the jury that the laws of the United States, which protected the ladies, included (1) the Washington Treaty of 1922 prohibiting the use of asphyxiating, poisonous, or ether gases, and all analogous liquids, materials, and devices as "justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world...
...When the gorilla was invariably found guilty, Scott said, "Well, we tried...
...No matter...
...Last summer four ladies of peaceable persuasion sat down in front of a napalm loading barge at Santa Clara, in California, and were had up for interfering with lawful business...
...2) the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 renouncing war as an instrument of national policy...
...The gorilla, taken in flagrante delicto, twiddled his handcuffs while Scott argued that, if it please the court, his client hadn't done the deed...
...but it is not for want of trying...
...or, if he was sane when he did it, the indictment was faulty...
...At the close of the argument Francis Heisler showed up—I had given him the day off —with his bag of books, from which he had culled a few historical tidbits for the judge to include in his instructions to the jury...
...The jury ignored the laws of the United States and convicted the four ladies...
...The state objects that they are incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial...
...The Garrulous American by MILTON MAYER Don't cross me, or even look cross-eyed at me, or I'll slap a lawsuit on you...
...Francis Heisler has often held the United States Supreme Court less than spellbound with his garrulous recitation of the Hague and Geneva conventions and such like pieties...
...MILTON MAYER is a staff member of the English department at the University of Massachusetts...
...and my lawyer packs up his books and says to me, as I disappear into the pokey, "Well, we tried...
...I have a lawyer, name of Francis Heisler, on a hundredthousand- dollar-a-year retainer and he has nothing to do but sue...
...He does not do a very good job of it, as witness the deliquescence of my liberties...
...the court sustains the objection...
...Their lawyer, H. Reed Searle, argued on their behalf that the napalm business wasn't lawful...
...His business was criminal liberties, with, more often than not, gorillas for clients...
...or, if the court wasn't prejudiced against g o r i l l a s , the whole proceeding was unconstitutional anyway because the Cook County Courthouse had been erected outside the original boundaries of the county...
...His most recent book, "What Can a Man Do?," includes numerous articles originally published in The Progressive...
...Of course the judge would refuse to include them...
...An earlier book, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45," was recently republished as a paperback by the University of Chicago Press...
...His business is to preserve my liberties against the government...
...He brings them all into court, opens them up, and starts reading them...
Vol. 30 • December 1966 • No. 12
