In which the pond spares a thought for our Glad, then fails the hole in bucket man exam ...

 

The pond had gone into training to prepare for an encounter with desiccated coconut Henry, but as things often do, the undertoad struck, and the reptiles went into a frenzy, and this was the day of the Gladys ...

Both the tree killer and digital editions had Gladys front and centre ...

 

The pond is sure that Optus would love nothing better than our Glad taking legal action and keeping the brand in the news ...

And that "guilty of loving a weirdo" set the tone ... no wonder the reptiles want more legal action ...

...and that "may prompt" was so neatly hedged, it was impossible to resist, so the pond tossed aside other temptations lined up by the reptiles ...

 

It's surely nice to know that Covid isn't entirely responsible for the devastation of everything, but the pond couldn't be bothered to shed a tear with cackling Claire and the transphobe activist prof ...

No, it had to be Gladys, but who to chose?

The meretricious Merritt was to hand taking a firm stand ...

Always reliable, but there was a problem in the reptile ranks, a feuding and a fussing ...

So we're mugs, but ICAC is terrible, as is any accounting for public behaviour in the eyes of the reptiles?

The pond rarely turns to ancient Troy, but this was an emergency ...

But what says the defence? Here the pond avoided the meretricious Merritt and turned to the lizard Oz editorialist ...

Oh dear, there was a billy goat butt in there ... "Given what has been revealed by ICAC, we in no way suggest Ms Berejiklian is without fault" ... but there was the lizard Oz editorialist quoting the meretricious Merritt, so it seems pretty fair game to drop public money on your lover's love of Wagga Wagga ...

Meanwhile, ancient Troy wasn't entirely convinced ...

At this point the reptiles dropped in a snap of Glad waving to the world ...

...but the pond wanted to wrap up the lizard Oz editorialist defence ...

Oh the poor biddy, but at least she knew her place. 

There are simply too many women who don't know their place and refuse to be complimentary women and that's why angry Anglicans must take a stand on the weevils of homosexuality ...

Thank you Graudian, more than the pond ever needed to know, and yet ancient Troy was still blathering on ...

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a very large snap of the happy couple posing for the camera in better times, but the pond thought there was no need to make it terribly large ...

Best get on with ancient Troy saying mean and nasty things...

For some reason at this point the reptiles decided a very large snap of a former premier was needed ...

For those who care he's off in Xian care ... still grinning away like a loon ...

Well no need to make it big in the reptile style, because there was still a gobbet of ancient Troy to go, albeit a doddle ...

What was the point of this exercise? Why, it was entirely a set-up for the day's infallible Pope ...

And it also confirmed to the pond that it was likely that everything written had been done by AI, as noted in this Crikey story ... (paywall, and just a sample) ...

Desperate times and now for the pond's strict training regime for our Henry. It began with a reading of Mary Beard in The New Yorker, The Divine Comedy of Roman Emperors’ Last Words:

In the end, godlike aspirations often met with all too human final moments. (possible paywall)

Blimey, it turned out that all the pond's training was for naught. 

Woe and alas, our Henry delivered a rant about Vlad the Impaler ... and so the pond includes it for the record, but only so it can note how misguided it was in its studies ...

It's true that our Henry wandered off down history's byways, but the pond remembered the time it had prepared for all the questions in an exam, and none of them were the ones the pond had prepped. 

So the pond wastes time on Mary Beard, and then blow the pond down, our Henry's off to the English East India Company and mercenaries in the eighteenth century.

Is there nothing the pompous, portentous blowhard can't turn to his cause, the boring of the reptile readership into insensibility? A bludgeoning, with the past some sort of weird baseball bat?

Sensing this, the reptiles quickly flung in a snap, but the pond is well over footage from the war zone ...

More to the point, would the hole in the bucket man settle, and get to the point? Sorry, it might take a while, and there's much more meandering through the byways to be done ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, he does like hearing the clacking of his keyboard...

There's the pond thinking it a simple matter of condemning that thug Vlad the impaler, and the possibly bigger thug, his onetime chef ...

So little did the pond know, so useless was that reading of the Beard ...

There was some mild comedy in that use of "plainly illegal", as if in a dictatorship criminal codes mattered, and confronted by our Henry's endless desire to parade his ability to gaze at his navel, the pond introduced a huge snap of a smirking mercenary ...

Still, with all that, at last there was just a short gobbet to go, and finally our Henry got close to a point ...

Meanwhile, it seems a few stray generals have gone missing, but at least that mention of Saddam Hussein allowed the pond to end with a joke, thanks to the roving Rove ...

Get it? The master mind behind the war criminal thinks that Wag the Dog is a joke, but the joke is that the mastermind and his puppet embarked on a war crime ...

And then in 2016 everybody agreed it was fine that the emperor should eat burgers and wander around in an orange buff colour, and false narratives were the go, and remain the go until this very day ...

Meanwhile, for those who might have missed Eric Foner's A Regional Reign of Terror in the NYRB ...

Most of the acts of violence related in By Hands Now Known were committed by law enforcement officials or by persons, such as bus drivers, performing public functions. This is significant because beginning in the late nineteenth century the Supreme Court embraced the legal concept of “state action,” according to which the federal government’s ability to prosecute violations of Blacks’ constitutional rights was limited to crimes committed by public officials, not by private individuals. Police officers and sheriffs were certainly state actors, and the federal government could have taken legal action against them but almost never did. The justices also adopted a rigid understanding of states’ rights and federalism, ruling as early as 1873 in the Slaughter-House Cases that despite the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred states from denying to any person the equal protection of the laws, most of the constitutional rights enjoyed by Americans remained under the purview of the states, not the nation.

The Court’s limited interpretation of the constitutional changes brought about during Reconstruction continued well into the twentieth century. In a ruling in a 1945 murder case, the Court declared that the instructions in the case failed to require the jury to find that the defendants acted willfully if it voted to convict. The case involved a sheriff, Claude Screws, and two deputies who beat a Black man to death on a courthouse lawn in Baker County, Georgia. Screws was prosecuted and convicted in federal court, but the Supreme Court overturned the verdict. Even though Georgia authorities refused to take action against the killers, the hands of the federal government were tied.

For good measure, three justices—Owen Roberts, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson—reflecting the prevailing historical orthodoxy, declared in a separate opinion that Reconstruction legislation authorizing federal protection of Blacks’ rights was motivated by a “vengeful spirit” on the part of northerners after the Civil War. For members of the Supreme Court to view expanding the rights of Blacks as a form of punishment to whites did not bode well for a broader understanding of the federal government’s power to protect Black citizens. Overall, Burnham writes, the federal courts “rendered nearly toothless the Reconstruction-era statutes that specifically targeted racist terror.” As for Screws, in 1958 he was elected to the Georgia Senate.

Along with Supreme Court rulings, a combination of other circumstances helps explain why so many persons guilty of heinous crimes walked away scot-free. These include the exclusion of virtually all Black southerners from jury service, the FBI’s reluctance to investigate these crimes, and the power of the Jim Crow South in the Democratic Party, which made it impossible to enact federal antilynching legislation....

And this ...

...The rule of law—a legal system based on principles that apply equally to all persons (including the police)—is a hallmark of civilized societies. A perversion of the rule of law in the Jim Crow South—the conviction of an innocent Black man charged with raping a white woman—is the centerpiece of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (which a 2021 survey of 200,000 readers of The New York Times named the best book published in the last 125 years). Lee’s hero is the white lawyer Atticus Finch, who understands that racism makes it impossible for southern courts to dispense justice fairly. He associates racial bigotry with the “cruel poverty and ignorance” of the accusers, a rural white family. Lee’s implication is that change will come to the South through the actions of well-meaning better-off whites like Finch. There is no room in this narrative for Black activism.

In reality, as Burnham amply demonstrates, respectable whites—public officials; newspaper reporters who deemed the murder of a Black person, as she puts it, “too trivial to report”; and businessmen who profited from the availability of cheap Black labor—all helped to maintain the Jim Crow system. Judges, from local courts all the way to the Supreme Court, violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution, while members of Congress refused to enact laws against lynching. The incidents detailed in By Hands Now Known were not the work of prejudiced poor whites. Nor were they random occurrences or the actions of a few bad apples—entire communities were to blame for the perversion of the criminal justice system. In 1947, just as the United States was embarking on the cold war, J. Edgar Hoover told President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights that an “iron curtain” in the American South made it impossible for the FBI to conduct adequate investigations, since white residents at all levels of society refused to provide information (not that Hoover had any real interest in investigating these crimes).

As Burnham makes clear, the events she chronicles must be understood as expressions of “systemic” racism (a concept whose mention can today cost a teacher in some states his or her job for discussing “divisive topics” in the classroom). Not long ago, admirers of Lee’s novel were shocked when Go Set a Watchman, which she had written before Mockingbird, was finally published. It depicted Finch not as a heroic man of principle but as an outspoken racist who could not accept the idea of Blacks challenging Jim Crow. Of the two portrayals of the character, this is more realistic. But it is the Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird who remains in the minds of readers and of admirers of the celebrated film version starring Gregory Peck.

Here's a cartoon ...