My sentence is two-thirds completed, and my daily routine is
predictable yet busy. I’m never bored or short of things
to do. There are actually days when I wish I had more time to
complete the tasks at hand.
I’m
an early riser here; more so than at home. I’m stirring
by 5:00 a.m. and up and about shortly thereafter. In to the
kitchen by 5:30 for a quick check of the dining area. Breakfast
essentials were set up the evening before. I shower and shave,
then back to the dining room by 6:15. I do some food preparation,
keep the supplies available, then clean up and finish before
8:00 a.m. A ten-minute break at 7:00 lets me watch the beginning
of the Today Show for an update on national news.
I’m
in the library, generally alone, for the morning where I write
for several hours. I prepare my column for the coming week,
work on my book, and do my best to answer the hundreds of letters
and e-mails I receive weekly.
Back
to the kitchen and dining room for an early lunch. We begin
eating here at 10:00 a.m. and close the kitchen a little after
11:00. I often buff the dining room floors after lunch. A little
floor wax mixed with shampoo and ice water. The floors really
shine. Then back to the library to write some more. A two-hour
workout from 1:00 till 3:30 p.m. With the cold weather, I am
stretching longer (25 minutes) and on a treadmill for an hour.
Time
to eat supper at 3:45 p.m. That’s right! The middle of
the day. And I’ll tell you something. You can really lose
weight eating this early. I’ve lost 16 pounds since arriving
here. About the only difference in my routine is eating early
with no late night snacks. This may not be convenient for most
of you, but it’s a sure fire way to drop a lot of pounds
quickly.
I’m
the last person out of the dining room, and I mop the floors
around 5:00 p.m. Remember, soak the mop in ice water and wring
it as dry as you can. The floors will really shine. Everyone
comments on the floors up here. Gladys says a number of her
friends want to hire me out. And I’m available. But my
rate will be a lot more than the 12 cents per hour I make now.
A
few of us ease outside to the recreation room office at 5:30
p.m. to watch the evening national news. There is much debate
over the President’s plans to attack Iraq. Little support
here for such a war among both inmates and staff without a U.N.
resolution.
I
watch little TV. It’s hard to find an available set. I
do join a group who watch “Friends” on Thursdays
and “The Practice” on Sunday night. My evenings
are spent reading, either in the library or on my bunk. I just
finished The Complete Stories of Mark Twain, and begin
tomorrow Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
A
stretch and walk about the building around 10:30 p.m. and a
look at the stars. The air is cold and crisp this time of year
at night. The moon is big and approaching fullness.
You
can really see the moon well up here. It was so big last month
I felt I could almost touch it. Some 240,000 miles away, yet
it seemed so close. A lot of people think the full moon has
some unexplainable effect on our behavior. I’m not sure
I believe in Werewolves. Lycanthrope (the study of Werewolves)
derives its name from the Greek king Lycaon who was transformed
into a wolf for playing a trick on Zeus. A “lunatic”
comes from the Latin “luna” or moon, and asylums
are known to bring extra staff on the night of a full moon.
And
did you know that the Easter bunny derives its existence from
the moon? The name Easter comes from the Saxon Eostre
(synonymous with the Phoenician Astarte), goddess of
the moon. The Chinese and other Far Eastern countries in ancient
times often painted the moon with rabbits running across its
face. I remember one ancient fable of the rabbit, with nothing
else to offer a hungry, weary Indra, jumps into a fire, cooking
himself for the deity. Out of gratitude the deity placed the
rabbit in the moon.
Remember
(I wrote about this in my stars column on December 11th) that
the new year in ancient times began at Easter. Now you know
where the Easter bunny comes in.
There
is a marvelous exchange about the moon in the Solzhenitsym novel
about a Russian prison camp, One Day in the Life of Inan
Denisovich. A sailor asks the captain where the moon goes
when it disappears.
'Where does it go? What do you mean? What stupidity!
It’s simply not visible.
Shukhow shook his head and laughed. ‘Well, if it’s
not
visible, how d’you know it’s there?'
‘So
according to you,’ said the captain, unable to believe
his
ears, ‘it’s another moon every month.'
'What’s
strange about that? People are born every day.
Why not a moon every four weeks?'
'Well, tell me. Where does it go?'
Shukhow signed and said with a slight lisp: ‘In our
village
folk say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.’
' But why does God do it?’
‘Do
what?’
‘Crumble
the moon into stars. Why?’
‘Well,
can’t you understand?’ said Shukhow. ‘The
stars
fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.’
I
guess that’s what I’m doing. Filling in the gaps
until my full moon (going home) comes up again.
So,
now it’s 11:00, I’ve checked the moon and stars,
I’m too tired to read anymore, and it’s time to
crawl into my bunk bed.
My
schedule only varies on the weekend. Visiting hours are allowed
Friday night and throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday.
Few inmates have visitors, and I try to low key the fact that
I have a number of friends and family that come to see me. Three
days of visits. With everything else I do, you can see why I
stay so busy.
When
I get home in two months, Gladys won’t know what to do
with me. I’ll no doubt be up at the crack of dawn, cooking
breakfast for her as well as the neighbors. Remember I’m
used to cooking for one hundred. After cleaning up, I’ll
be waxing and buffing the kitchen floors, then off to find something
else to clean.
GOOD
LUCK!
BOOKNOTES
Harvard
law professor Alan Dershowitz is the prolific author of thirteen
books and has argued numerous criminal appeals before the United
States Supreme Court. His public profile in Louisiana was raised
considerably when he took on the legal defense of former Gov.
Edwin Edwards. Dershowitz recently filed Edwards’ appeal
to the Supreme Court.
His
book, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case,
was made into a movie. You may recall Dershowitz won a new trial
and an acquittal of socialite Claus von Bulow, who was accused
of killing his wife. I have studied the von Bulow case with
particular interest. A major reason the conviction was thrown
out was the failure of the prosecutors to produce handwritten
notes of one of the investigators. Do you see why my interest
was peaked?
I
have read two books by Alan Dershowitz since arriving here at
Oakdale. The first Just Revenge, is a gripping novel
that explores how one deals with the limits of justice and the
primal impulse of revenge.
A
75-year-old Harvard professor lost his entire family 55 years
earlier during the Holocaust. By chance, the professor stumbles
across the Lithuanian officer that ordered his family exterminated.
He must get revenge. But how? Can he get vengeance now when
none was obtained during the Holocaust? How far can he go?
Dershowitz
raises the troubling dilemma of the limits of justice. How do
you contain a deep desire for revenge in a civilized world?
And how fulfilling is the revenge once obtained? (Did you see
the excellent film that came out last year from Alexander Dumas’
wonderful book The Count of Monte Cristo? Edmond Dantes
was imprisoned for something he didn’t do. He lived for
revenge only to discover how unfulfilling it was.)
The
novel is fast moving, cleverly plotted, and a real moral page-turner.
It’s a book that is easy to read, and I really enjoyed
it.
Let
me turn to a second book by Dershowitz, filled with violence,
lust, deception, murder, incest and vengeance. The author offers
a thoughtful, provocative book entitled The Genesis of Justice.
He argues that the elusiveness of justice and the struggle for
predictable standards is the basis for the biggest bestseller
of all time, the Book of Genesis.
Dershowitz
takes ten stories from the first book of the Old Testament beginning
with the fall of Adam and Eve, and describes how lessons from
these stories led to the Ten Commandments. He starts with the
premise from Ecclesiastes: “There is not a righteous person
in the whole earth who does only good and never sins.”
Justice is taught through examples of injustice and imperfection.
Dershowitz
makes a valiant attempt to justify the story of Abraham being
instructed by God to sacrifice his son Issac. You can read the
troubling story in Genesis 22: 9-10.
“When
they came to the place of which God had told him,
Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on
it. Next he tied up his son Isaac, and put him on top of
the wood on the altar. Then he reached out and took the
knife to slaughter his son.”
I
have always really had a hard time dealing with this passage
in the bible. What kind of a God would ask such a thing of any
father? Some would argue that God was “testing”
Abraham to see if he would remain loyal and put his full faith
in the Lord. But hadn’t earlier God made a covenant with
Noah that killing was wrong? And why didn’t Abraham protest?
When God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argued
God down at length. So what we see is Abraham arguing with God
over the lives of strangers then fails to argue for the life
of his own son.
Bob
Dylan sums it up pretty well:
God
said to Abraham, go kill me a son.
Abe said, man, you must be puttin’ me on.
Dershowitz
tries his best to explain what God must have been thinking.
When all is said and done, he leaves us with the thought that
“Religion is not a panacea for all of life’s tragedies.”
This won’t be satisfactory to many readers, but the author
gives us plenty of food for thought.
The
most personal chapter for me is the Joseph narrative where Joseph
is framed by his brothers. I feel like Dershowitz is talking
to me when he writes:
“Anyone
who has been falsely accused of a crime will
appreciate the need for a system of justice in which the
accused has the right to confront the accuser on a level
playing field. “How can we clear ourselves?” The
answer is by a fair system that places a heavy burden
on the accuser and provides the accused with adequate
safeguards against the false evidence employed in the
story of Joseph.”
Dershowitz
goes on to discuss the “horror of false accusation”
and the fact that the bearing of false witness is made a terrible
sin and is listed as one of the Ten Commandments.
“It
shows us the need for a system of justice in which all
stand equally before the law and those accused of a crime
have a fair opportunity to challenge evidence against them
and to demonstrate that it was planted, false or mistaken.”
Dershowitz’s
book should be required reading for the prosecutors in my case.
Every basic sense of fair play as outlined in the Old Testament
was ignored during my trial. I wasn’t able to confront
my accuser as the Bible requires, and I was not allowed to see
the evidence against me—the handwritten notes of my interview
with the FBI agent—as any fair system of justice would
demand.
Alan
Dershowitz doesn’t have all the explanations. But he does
a first rate job of making these ancient teachings extremely
relevant to our lives today. His reflections on these biblical
stories provide a provocative bridge between religion and the
law for all faiths. My personal opinion may be slanted because
of the injustice of what happened to me. But I consider
The Genesis of Justice as one of the most significant books
I have read over the past several years.
To live continually in thoughts of ill will, cynical
in suspicion of everyone, is to be confined in a
self-made prison hole.
James Allen
As a Man Thinketh
Peace and justice to you and your family.
Jim Brown
