This piece was assembled for the November 19 occasion of Thinking Out Loud, a Pittsburgh gathering for creative engagement with the Constitution, inspired by No King’s Day protests. More about this event can be found @nonabiding “Thinking Out Loud #3.”
Article III, October
Section 1
During good behavior there shall be judges, supremes, ordained and established by electeds and compensated for continuance. And who defines good behavior?
October 4
The dictator infiltrates your consciousness. Hers. Does a day go by without his face or his voice or his words or all of him working his way in? Without a headline, a speech, an outrage, noise of protest or support? No president in her lifetime has had this power, and she’s lived through (count them) fifteen, if you count this one twice. Almost a third of their total number. It’s hard to get her head around but that’s how old she is, almost a third of the nation’s history. With ancestors on her father’s side here another hundred years longer, still babies in this land, colonizers, settlers—not immigrants—the immigrants were her mother’s. On her porch she hangs the flags of occupied cities, resisting cities. The city of her birth, the city of her former partner, the city of her former husband. Lifetimes ago and right here, right now. Los Angeles, D.C., Portland. Luminous, blowing in the wind—red, gold, green, white, blue—along with a string of faded prayer flags, another custom from another face of the earth. Protest and prayer, hand in hand, in celebration, in refusal. She’ll have to hang Chicago soon.
Section 2
In law and equity, crime and dispute, jurisdiction flows upward, original and appellate, in letter and in fact, the court supreme but not above, subject to regulation by electeds, trial promised by jury, not by judge. And who are these electeds and who elected them and who defined their districts and paid for their campaigns and do they dare to regulate or only stand in line and obey?
October 7
Lost an hour trying to discern whether the email from T-Mobile about a free gateway upgrade was a scam and honestly she still doesn’t know. Lost time, what is that? Lost a morning to baking bread, but is that a loss, with bread cooling on the rack? Lost a day to dreaming, or to rain, or memory? Or what about to the news? To the gut punch watching that young woman, so recently a child, swim her way through the angry happy shouting chanting crowd, looking broken in her body, knowing, everyone knowing, what was done to her, until the crowd is cleared enough, thanks to men, the men and the women who support her as she walks, as she swims, cleared enough for her to speak and remind the crowd and finally into the mics and the hundred raised phones pressing around her, above her, against her, to remind the world why she’s here, that she is not a hero and not the story, that the abuse her captors did to her is not the story, the abuse they did to the others with her is not the story. The story is why they were where they were in the first place, why they sailed into danger and why that army stopped them and took them, delivered them to off-camera detention sites where their captors delighted in the effort to break them, the effort at breaking that is not the story.
Section 3
Treason, everyone knows, is making war against the nation or giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And who is the enemy? Conviction of treason requires two witnesses to the same overt act—although tens of millions via live television don’t count—or confession in open court, not under interrogation at detention center or black site, let alone on impact of extrajudicial missile or drone.
October 26
When she dreams of the end of the world after a Netflix thriller-without-car-chases three times cuts to black on the brink of nuclear armageddon, when she sees herself alone in a town where she once lived on the east coast, with people she once knew on the west, when those people she once knew and loved are too preoccupied to acknowledge her arrival, when her arrival is irrelevant to those she loves and also her departure, when she can’t find her car, when she has no shoes, when she no longer remembers in the dream how she got here, or why she came, but knows still the world is ending, and knows in reality the world is ending too, when she reads the dream as telling her she wants to return, but to where?, when she can’t parse whether the town on the east coast or the life on the west or only the unreachable past itself is calling to her, when she’s trying to help another stranded traveler, and although she found her car still can’t find her shoes, at that moment when she finally wakes up to a morning still dark, to the sound of the cat sleeping across the room, to the knowledge that the world is still and always ending, even awake she can’t figure out whether the town on the Atlantic or life on the Pacific or the past or the future or only dread of nearness to death is speaking to her.
Section 3, continued
In the event that conviction of treason can be achieved within these extreme and narrow limitations, punishment is not to extend beyond the life of the traitor, nor to their children or to their children’s wealth. Ivanka can go free.
