Back in the old days, back when we had to get cash by going to a cashier at our own bank, and only our bank, no cross-pollination, you’d never find me standing on line for the cashier, unless the line was pretty short and was moving fast.
If you did see me on line and waited around a minute or two, you would have seen me making a huff sound, leaving the line and heading out the door.
(Which reminds me of the day, around lunch hour, when Sue Shonnard, my dear friend and colleague at Paramount Pictures, went to the bank and did not return for several hours. A long, long line? No. She had found herself in the middle of a bank robbery and afterward found herself questioned by NYPD as a witness. No cell phones, remember?)
I’m now wondering how I ever managed to get cash — which was, if you recall, the sine qua non of buying anything. Maybe I just used my diminishing hard currency responsibly, by purchasing only one apple, say, instead of three and making that apple work for me until the lines at my bank became manageable.
Dear oh dear, this wasn’t supposed to be about standing on bank lines or armed bank robberies, or using money, so I’ll stop. And go on to what this is about…
Patience
Patience nowadays is a necessary grace while we wait for indictments. Mass arrests at 5 am. That sort of thing. A whole lot of us are waiting, some without patience (talking to certain relatives who know who they are, no names necessary), but patience in this regard is a suspension of gratification, supposedly one of the hallmarks of adulthood.
I’m coming to the realization that this newfound patience is the external product of some dramatic internal, even pre-conscious, activity.
I imagine myself as a paralegal at the Department of Justice. Along with hundreds of other paras, I’m at a desk in a room or series of rooms the length of a football field. Isn’t there a shot from a film, The Trial?, from a Kafka story, with a slew of uniformed people at a slew of uniformly separated desks, all working in unison?
Meant to convey the inhumane mechanistics of either office work or society.
But what I and all these other compatriots are doing is not mechanistic or tedious. And we’re allowed to talk to each other and share snacks and hand lotion, as we each go through boxes and boxes of evidence, entering each piece into a time line of events surrounding January 6.
So there we are, a paralegal army, scrupulously accounting for every phone call, text, sext, financial payoff, document, audio, video, and on and on. Into the logs and time lines are embedded the names of the potential perps. In my imagination, the investigation looks like a gigantic pyramid. A pyramid scheme. At the very bottom are January 6 thugs; at the top is Trump. The middle is filled with fake electors, people who interfered with the election in any other way, and scales up to planners, plotters, facilitators, congresspeople plotters and planners and facilitators and anybody else I’ve left out.
Then our logs and time lines go to a whole bunch of DOJ lawyers who attach the evidence and potential criminals to the laws that can be charged. Then jurisdictions and prosecutors have to be determined and/or assigned. What a massive job!
We know the hierarchy of J6 thugs are already either indicted, sentenced or being hunted down, which gets us to the next layer of seditious criminals. At some point, I’d guess, a day will come during which the smirking fake electors will each be arrested and hauled into the nearest federal court. That will be particular fun since a bunch of them are state legislators and middle-class dimwits who thought signing fake documents as fake electors was a neat idea and, at worst, a pleasant group activity.
Then come elected congresspeople, then plotters and planners and…well, gee, immediately under the dunce cap peak will be Trump.
So what keeps me patient is thinking of the potentially thousands of people who will be prosecuted for the big crime — sedition. There will be many people losing their legislative seats and barred from running for office ever again. And the cherry on top: in many states these felons won’t be able to vote, at least not until they pay off a slew of specious state-imposed fines.
What keeps me awed is realizing never in our history will so many people be brought to justice.
Trump incited a small, ugly and failed mass movement to overthrow our government. It will end up as a big mass movement for justice.
If our DOJ prosecutes more than 1800 people, it will be the largest justifiable perp walk in human history.
Picturing that perp walk keeps me patient.
And now,if you’re kind enough to remember my apple reference, I have three apples and must make some apple chutney. Good evening.