Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Laus Veneris
(1873 - 1878)

"Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise."

Who hasn’t spent some days, since this administration that hasn’t quite gotten around to administering anything, assumed office, engaging in revenge fantasies? Mine have, at times, been quite satisfying, as I imagined myself the just judge, wise jury, and even the enthusiastic executioner. I figured that the bastards had at least that coming, probably worse, and, rather than merely curse my fate, I might just as well serve some good old-fashioned just desserts. The judging came easily. The wisdom, a little harder. The enthusiasm surrounding the actual execution, though, undermined my earlier ardor. The prospect of getting blood on my hands, and probably down my shirt front, too, left me questioning the underlying wisdom actual retribution entails. It seems to require that the judge, jury, and executioner agree to engage in what would otherwise be easily seen as criminal behavior in order to properly dispense justice. This process seemed at best paradoxical.

But those were merely revenge fantasies. They proved enormously satisfying right up until they produced revulsion. Once they had insisted that I would have to commit a legal murder, or a legal burglary, or a legal fraud to settle the score, the score no longer seemed so settle-able. Who might later come after me and prosecute me for my prosecution, for the practice of retribution seemed to demand that the judge, jury, and executioner stick their noses where no nose should ever explore, and seemed wholly unlikely to settle any score? There were good reasons, and above all decent ones, why the early Christians rejected Old Testament practices in favor of others. Eye-for-an-eye justice eventually renders more than the guilty blind, and the purpose of justice cannot possibly have ever been merely to render anybody, especially itself, blind. Justice served should have dispensed some sense of closure along with some possibility of recovery. Turning the guilty into another dead body shouldn’t satisfy anybody, especially the dead body or his dispatchers.

Stuck with this paradox, justice and the society it serves face a damned-whether-it-does dilemma. We dare not allow criminals to simply roam free, for they seem destined only to take mean advantage and, unrestrained, seem likely only to repeat their performances again and again. We must intervene, but perhaps with intentions different from traditional ones. Once we acknowledge that what was formerly thought to be just punishment no longer serves the accused, the accuser, or society in general, we still face an essentially infinite set of choices. Reducing the possible infinite number of responses by one couldn’t meaningfully reduce the remaining number. We seem limited by little more than our imaginations, though our imaginations might remain focused on replaying revenge fantasies, given that they knew little other until they realized their quintessential error. If retribution goes the same way as vengeance, what cards does any decent prosecution have left to play? When the prudence part of our jurisprudence fails, what might meaningfully replace it? What does juris do when its traditional prudence fails?

Juris, a Latin term meaning “of law” or “of right”, has always faced a contradiction when engaging in its remit’s enforcement end, for it cannot hope to “fix” any past, though this seems to be its job when prosecuting a lawbreaker or a wrongdoer. Nobody can ever unbreak a law or undo a wrong. Those pasts have already passed by the time the law or the right caught up with the prosecuted. The infraction inexorably changed everyone’s world. Whatever constituted that prior world was already gone by the time the prosecution began, and that before-world will always remain the one thing nobody involved will ever be capable of returning to anyone. Perhaps prosecution involves accepting. It seems to closely follow the stages of acceptance, where denial precedes anger, and anger slips into bargaining before finally accepting that the world cannot be restored to how it had been before. Neither finding guilt beyond a reasonable doubt nor meting out a sentence brings about restoration. If even the punishment amounts to little more than another crime, though a legal one that time, what’s advanced by even prudent juris?

Last week, The Muse and I attended a Society for the Prevention of Port Commissioners Meeting in the Columbia Gorge. There, a forest primeval once stretched to the far edge of every visitor’s imagination. Now, a ragged burn scar stretches from horizon to horizon, that primeval forest reduced to ashes and stumps by a thoughtless teenager playing with fireworks over a Fourth of July holiday. Nobody in their right mind would ever think to set off fireworks in a midsummer forest, but then few have successfully argued that teenagers ever experience right-mindedness. Most somehow manage to survive those years to thrive in adulthood, but a few do real and lasting damage before they mature. Nothing any court might find will ever restore that pristine woodland. No punishment any prosecutor might seek could make up for the loss. No amount of money, time, or punishment could make a lick of difference to the millions of disappointed visitors or the displaced inhabitants. None of us alive today will live to see those vistas the way our younger selves saw them there.

It seems the worse the crime, the more inherently toothless the punishment. At Nuremberg, leading Nazis were sentenced to ultimately anticlimactic deaths. Their lives never amounted to much less than a hill of beans, anyway, so their forfeited lives were little more than symbolic gestures destined to fail to absolve anyone or anything. Few believed they should grace this world once convicted, but perhaps fewer successfully convinced themselves that killing them made more than retributive sense. And what sense is that? I fantasized while visiting The Gorge that the teenager was sentenced to a lifelong indenture planting trees for the forest service, where, in his presumably long life, he might plant more trees than he destroyed. After a few hundred years, with luck, a replacement forest might flourish, though not where he destroyed the previous one.

Perhaps justice is just a sophisticated form of denial, a studied refusal to accept that we cannot fix any past. My revenge fantasies vis-à-vis our current incumbent have blunted upon further reflection. He has been an idiot in office, and we still hold the promise of a future that is wise in ways presently unimaginable. I pray that the future holds little for those who thought so damned little of themselves that they visited such terror upon us when they were members of this administration that mistook the purpose of administering to be inflicting terror. May we learn from their vengeance that vengeance might not have been the solution we historically held it to be. May whatever we might choose to do before we commit retribution, before we consider &Retribution, be worthy of those who acknowledge that no present act could ever change any past. Let the eyes have it. Let us, in our future, not go quite so blindly into any upcoming darkness or sunrise.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz