Grandpa K. and Mom were explosive fireballs who charcoaled any never-innocent offender too slow or naive to flee to a cinder like Wile E. Coyote, confusing to a small boy because (1) his father pouted rather than volcanically erupting; (2) after the fierce thunder-and-lightning storm, his grandpa and mom a few minutes later were all blue sky, not a cloud in sight. I have inherited that spontaneous combustion--we do not suffer fools and laggards gladly--a useful parody out of II Corinthians 19. A quick wit with a quick temper are gas fumes and a match lurking to be lit, like that supercolossal volcano underlying Yellowstone N.P. whose bulges make geologists fret. My inheritance seems a good illustration of the cantankerous wedding of Nature and Nurture, sociopsycho babble for what one inherits and how one is brought up. Mom and I are Aries, and I think Grandpa should have been one; he's a Taurus, but the Bull's possible attributes of "tedious" and "boring" assuredly he never was. Maybe she and I got a double-barreled charge from his gruff, blustery full-blooded Czech (his parents from Praha/Prague, the capitol of Bohemia and the Czech Republic) wedded to the contentious, very garrulous Irishness of the red-headed Peters, who apparently preferred their Maher mother's nationality to their father's, the earliest family photo I have (from Grandma to Mom to me) being the Reverend George F. Twigg, born in Halifax, England, 19 August 1810, the grandfather of Edward LeRoy Peters: as Grandma often quoted, "Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined," Alexander Pope, Moral Essays I. Grandma was more a sharp-tongued scold; she and Grandpa wrangled like The Bickersons, which Mama considered a kind of endearing trait rather than cause for marriage counseling. Mama was ordinarily optimistic.
Technically, to anyone more familiar with science and astronomy than with superstition and astrology, the planetary motion governing the zodiac has changed enough so that everyone should move to the next sign. Believe me, Taurus may be a good car, but it fits me even less than Grandpa, "tedious" and "boring" tending to put me to sleep like the Seinfeld yada yada yada of church sermons, which I assiduously avoid for those reasons. Every alleged attribute of the Aries personality, from Ares/Mars, the hot-tempered god of war symbolized by red, seems fairly apt, confirmed by my Chinese zodiac sign of the Tiger and its alleged attributes. This is not boasting; "[to be] forewarned [is to be] forearmed" [Cervantes]. My Ares/Aries sign must explain why I have loved red since I was a baby, meaning Mom dressed me in red snowsuits when I was 2 or 3, the proof in untelling early black-and-white photos; and it certainly explains why I've been distressed by Nebraska's Big Red Cornhusker mania that my tomboy older sister has, because that's not why I wear red.
Anyway, Grandpa's temper scared the hell out of me, Mom having inculcated a kind of intimidated politeness in me to combat my temperamental heritage. His displays now seem as funny to me as they did then to her: angry with a cow, he would kick it and break his toe; furious with a beat-up old tractor he was trying to fix, he would throw the wrench as hard as he could and then have to go find it. Or send us. He was much more circumspect with me than with my cousins, who often stayed summers and worked for my grandparents. Example: In those decades every small town bigger than Center had a movie theater. Indeed, Mom and I and Grace P. and Marilynn, my surrogate sister growing up, went to movies weekly. The top ones were Sunday-Monday-Tuesday; the fairly good ones ran Wednesday-Thursday; the weekends of captive audiences when the farmers took their eggs and cream into town and did their weekly shopping had the B-on-down, like the shoot-'em-up-bangs of Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy or the Tarzan series, with the Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and then Lex Barker, the slapstick comedies of Abbott and Costello. We bought Screen Stories and Movie Story to read actual movie synopses and have the cast photos. I have an overfull box of them in this room. While Mom and Grandma went off shopping and visiting, Grandpa got stuck taking me to a Saturday-night animal tearjerker, Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, about a racehorse in, uhm, continuing bad situations. Grandpa and I were in the small overflow balcony of Bloomfield's Star Theater, and I would disappear down to the lobby whenever the horse was threatened or hurt, animal lover then as now. He warned me he'd never take me to a movie again if I didn't behave (on his terms), but I cringed again and thereby missed the ending forever because he could only brook so much. Nor did he ever take me to another movie. (I shouldn't even have had to write that last sentence.) That's what I meant by "circumspect." No whacking, no yelling. But The End. It took me until I was teaching at Western Illinois U. in Macomb and he surprisingly came for a week's visit to find out he was what Mama had always said he was: a big old softie under a deliberately gruff exterior. I had a grand time showing him the many regional historical and scenic sites, he bought me a new toaster in appreciative gratitude, and I loved him dearly, without fear, ever after.
It could be correctly assumed with Mom's spanking stick above my bedroom doorway and the carte blanche, a "white card," like a blank check, given to all the other mothers in town in those days to spank any child who misbehaved and teachers who soaped bad words out of naughty mouths and even slapped delinquents, I wasn't very temperamental. Aunt A. complained that Mom abused me, but we could go to Norfolk on a shopping trip where she would buy me three comic books, sit me down under a counter overhang in Hested's or Kresge's dime store, and know she could come back an hour later and I would still be there. Docile, right? Usually, but I swung a rake at Neal S. when Dad sent him over to do my lawn work.
All my reading and then my college education channeled that temper into the verbal arenas on those privileged campus enclaves where English faculty war with words witty or otherwise, a sort of esoteric verbal form of Basic Training. Court reporting shut my mouth, forcefully teaching me further disciplined restraint, but when my third and last bailiff found out what curmudgeon meant, she gleefully thought it fit me better than my clothes. Now being on the downhill side sliding toward the ultimate Black Hole, I have to use my Thumper principle a whole lot. I like cranks anyway, two of my top favorites being Kurtwood Smith's Red Forman on That 70s Show [Cop: "Your dad's Red Forman?" Eric: "Uh, yeah." Cop: "You poor bastard."] or the big acting change of Mark Harmon's thrice-divorced, exceedingly grumpy Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, gruff like Grandpa, on NCIS with its splendid ensemble acting, including the once-dashing Illya Kuryakin of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., now the elderly pathologist Disney-named Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, David McCallum. Oh, sorry, you're wondering what my Thumper principle is? You've seen Bambi, right? The most important line to me now of that animal tearjerker movie is when the lisping little rabbit--no, he is not gay; he's like Ron Howard's Winthrop Paroo in The Music Man-- has to apologize to Bambi at his stern mother's direction, "If you can't thay thomthin' nithe, don't thay nothin' at all."
OK, forewarned, forearmed. A social climber if there ever was one, my third and final judge in dull slang blew it big time this autumn. At the fall state bar association convention, in the state district judges' meeting, he was elected state president of that group. Celebrating or simply enjoying himself, he attended too many of the numerous cocktail parties and rolled his SUV several times at an Interstate curve, fortunately unhurt (drunks get lucky that way). The state legal blood-alcohol limit is .08; his was .20. (My second, long-time, favorite judge also got a DUI; I don't remember what his reading was, not as much, surely, but he lost his license so that the bailiff and I had to be temporary taxi service.) Judge R. is not an alcoholic, or certainly wasn't when I worked for him. And he made all the right moves. He immediately confessed guilt. After a prompt meeting with the executive committee, he resigned his prestigious position before he ever got to actually hold it. This was all covered at length in repetition in the local newspaper, one of my major news sources because I am a print person who despises TV news, the very worst kind but unfortunately the most popular--probably for the same reasons it's the worst, besides which the local TV and radio stations have a bad habit of cribbing their news headlines from the newspaper. I discovered how bad TV news was and other revelations when I did extensive reading that resulted in including Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, War and Peace in the Global Village, most famously The Medium Is the Massage, the book I used in class) in my World Literature courses. My Mass Media mesmerism then included my half-finished doctorate with a Mass Media orientation intended within English Department auspices, and I later taught Mass Media at Platte College. My credentials, so to speak.
Judge R. has just pled guilty, why in Sarpy County next door I don't know, though that alone does make the circumstances admittedly suspicious. The Omaha World-Herald, the state's major newspaper, went into an old-lady's tizzy resuming its former pompously moral posture--I had thought it more tolerant in recent years--with an editorial bitching about public and journalistic rights to an open courtroom while admitting, "This was not a closed court, but it might just as well have been one."
This is not to suggest that . . . Judge Gary R. entered a formally closed courtroom last week when he appeared before an out-of-town judge . . . . But the effect was the same. No spectators were present, no reporters, no cameras lining the hallways, no other DUI defendants, no courthouse gawkers or drunken-driving watchdogs. This is not surprising in view of the fact that the hearing was not announced in the customary fashion--by being scheduled and posted on a public-access computer site. How this all came about is very murky. Officials said R. did not ask for special treatment. But either someone or a series of accidents made it easier on the judge than would normally have been the case. . . . such lapses have a negative effect on the public's perceptions. They reinforce the suspicion that the big shots have one set of rules and the ordinary people have another.
I note the intrusion of the computer into every aspect of judicial action now. (I already know that court personnel are commanded to keep paperless records by the state supreme court.) I can add that the O W-H was at various hearings I reported with no spectators wherein my judge requested that the journalists present not report certain aspects, such requests courteously heeded. We never did cattle-call DUI pleas; in fact pleas were hectically scheduled, often last-minute, usually one-at-a-time, and handled as we could manage them. Unless it was a front-page case, all those people groups listed were ordinarily absent, even the courthouse addicts. (Sentencings were a different matter entirely.) MADD representatives might or might not show up; aside from them, I can't think of anyone interested in the ordinary DUI plea other than maybe the guy's family. The editorial admits that the courtroom was not closed, nor did the judge ask for preferential treatment. I guess the paper wants him to quit, for I find this a clearcut case of picking on the judge, who had done everything required through pleading guilty--none of this would even be broached on an ordinary DUI--so that,ironically, I sympathize with the judge who wore me into retiring, so that, unlike elections when I usually vote against many judges' retentions, here I resent the journalistic manipulation, the smarmy moral-superiority smugness that had also infected the front page (that I'll deal with later).
Worse, the W-H knows full well that their pious conclusion--Judge R. is not a "big shot" in this city of millionaires and billionaires, the home of Warren Buffett--that "big shots have one set of rules and the ordinary people have another" is the actual truth. It's late, and I'm tired, and I'm not as adrenalin-flooded as last night, but I can say for a fact that the rich have an entirely different set of players in the judicial system. Celebrities or corporate executives: Kobe Bryant, who had the shameless gall to complain that a friend was "hitting" on his wife after a notorious rape trial of huge expense with the outcome never in doubt, simply one instance when he got caught doing what he normally does; Ken Lay, former Bush buddy and biggest contributor, of Enron's scandal, one of the many corporate crooks who took their share of my pension plan stock holdings. How many dozens, hundreds of instances can you think of?? I could go through a variety of examples of what happened in our court, as when we handled a male palimony case discreetly over the noon hour, when courtroom doors are customarily locked for lunch, against one of the town's best-known philanthropists--married, with equally well-known sons--who enjoyed young men. Expensive lawyers expensively dressed manage such affairs. The courtroom taught me to loathe the rich as I never had before, so I have to appreciate the irony of the W-H' s highhorse moral jockeying. Big shots absolutely do live by different rules, whether here, in the Cesspool on the Potomac, Hollywood, or anywhere else in this nation about which Calvin Coolidge said, "After all, the chief business of the American people is business." Shucks, you're not surprised. I'm shocked.
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