High Noon in America

There is an angry convicted felon coming this way to raise hell on the otherwise quiet streets of our town. He is out for revenge, and the fury and fear he sent before him are already here, forces of hostility that make otherwise good people run for cover, lock their doors, and look the other way.

As much as it seems I am describing where we our country is at this moment in presidential politics, I just summarized the plot of the 1952 movie High Noon, a classic American western starring Gary Cooper as Will Kane, the marshal of a small western town called Hadleyville in the New Mexico Territory, with Grace Kelly as his young bride. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I used to teach it to high school students in a film studies course during my Westerns unit, and it was always a favorite. It’s tense, emotional, innovative, and surprising, and it clips along at a brisk, 85-minute pace. The villain is on the train, the train is getting closer and closer: every approaching whistle is a warning that danger is nearly upon us, and the danger is whether law and order will survive or be destroyed.

Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane in High Noon (1952).

The film was made at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was accusing innocent Americans of spreading communism and Hollywood was blacklisting film directors and stars who were thought to be sympathetic with the forces of communism. Everyday Americans were swept up in the hysteria and absurdity, and old friends and even family members found themselves on opposite sides of the issue. The country was deeply divided by those who got caught up in the perceived threat against America and dedication to the founding principles of America. It's often the case that when a strongman in government claims there is a threat to America, that strongman is the threat to America. 

The film won four Academy Awards, but its impact was much deeper than that. It used a classic Western motif to create a metaphor for a deeply divided America, and how law and order was being pushed to the very brink of survival because the good people of Hadleyville were too afraid to do the right thing with the threat of violence on the horizon, just like the good people of America were too afraid to speak out against the threat that was the Red Scare, too afraid to do the right thing.

What happened next: as you might guess, it all centered around a violent figure on the horizon, a convicted felon promising violence and revenge, and whether or not a good citizen or two can summon the courage to tell face the truth and defend law and order and the American way.

And here we are again.

It is High Noon in America and it’s time for citizens to choose: you can choose Donald Trump or you can choose a country of law and order. You cannot choose both. One will cancel out the other.

Donald Trump is a convicted felon who promises violence and revenge and the destruction of law and order. Minutes after being convicted by a jury of his peers in a New York courtroom, he walked out of the courtroom and called the system that convicted him, our American system of jury by peers, a sham, a witch hunt, a rigged trial, accusing the judge, the prosecution team, and even the jurors of being political actors who ran a dishonest and politically motivated trial against him.

This rhetoric is dangerous from anybody, but it is deadly dangerous from a man who would be President of the United States. A president, or ex-president, or candidate for president must be an unwavering defender of the Constitution and the American justice system. Yet Donald Trump attacks and weakens it every day. The more power he has, the more he will use that power to undermine the systems that keep him in check: laws, regulations, traditions, precedents, the decency of those around him. Donald Trump has show time and time again that he either does not know better, or he does not care. The law doesn’t apply to him.

Donald Trump was convicted of the felony of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 election. He broke the law and almost got away with it, but a court of law, with systems and protocols and protections for both prosecution and defense, with strict rules for handling and examining evidence, and with twelve random Americans sitting in assessment and then judgement on that process, found him guilty. It was no sound bite on Fox News. It was no TikTok video. It was a process that took weeks. And it was process in which Donald Trump could not control the narrative: law and order controlled the narrative; and when the trial was done, with evidence both plain and protected from his malfeasance and spin, Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts.

But Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon. In an earlier New York trial, he was found liable for damages for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store decades earlier. The evidence was overwhelming and plain for all to see and Donald Trump could not spin it or lie about it or hide it away in a box in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. Once again, the outcome was clear: he committed a sexual assault and is responsible for the damages it caused.

But Donald Trump is not just a convicted felon and person found to have committed sexual assault, he is also under indictment for criminal activity related to causing an insurrection on January 6, 2021, a violent attack on the American Capitol building that resulted in the deaths of police officers, destruction to the Capitol, and the interruption of official government proceedings. He has also been indicted for trying to corrupt the 2020 election results in Georgia. And he has also been indicted for his mishandling of classified documents, including very sensitive state secrets that deal with nuclear and military matters. Two of these cases are considered slam dunks for the prosecution based on the evidence that is already known, if they ever come to trial.

For all of these reasons Donald Trump needs to evade or destroy the law and order that will otherwise continue to hold him accountable for his crimes. He needs your help to destroy law and order in America, or at least your blind eye. 

So what is going to be, America? It’s almost High Noon. The train is speeding towards the station.

Donald Trump has made it very clear that he will not be beholden by law, precedent, or decency. Don’t believe me, just read his social media posts for yourself, or look at this article from The Guardian that summarizes them: Donald Trump Vows Revenge, Retribution, and Retaliation.

The showdown on Main Street will take place in November at the ballot box. Meanwhile, you can hear the train whistle getting closer and closer. The threat is almost here. Time to choose: Donald Trump or law and order.   

OJ Simpson, Donald Trump, and the Monster on the Couch

OJ Simpson died again. When the news hit the airwaves that he had died of cancer on April 10 at the age of 76, it was a bit of a shock to the system. I mean, if OJ Simpson was anything, he was a survivor, and survivors don’t die. He was the heartiest form of life, the cockroach after nuclear annihilation, the barnacle on the bottom of the Queen Mary, the lichen in the crack of the boulder.

I didn’t even know he was sick. It still doesn’t fit with his public image. C’mon man, the Juice doesn’t get sick. Nothing catches him—he slips the tackle, grooves through the airport, grins at the camera, evades police capture driving on a freeway at 60 mph in broad daylight and on live tv, then beats the rap by becoming the real victim in a double homicide.

I was 25 in 1994 when OJ stood accused of murder, and at the time I had a head and heart full of belief in the foundations of this country and the values of my upbringing under a good Catholic mother and a Michigan State Trooper. I believed that justice was an unassailable force that kept the promise that all humans are created equal and would be treated as equals under the law.

Sixteen months later, when the verdict was read that Orenthal James Simpson was not guilty of a murder that everyone, everyone knew he committed, I learned that Justice wasn’t blind, but I was: to real, systemic racism versus the abstraction of racism that was the only one I had wrestled with, to the impact of mass media and celebrity on public opinion, to the surrender of the moral high ground to television hysteria and high ratings, to the fact that there are two systems of justice in this country if a person could afford the members-only version.   

In the thirty years since the televised travesty of justice that was the OJ Simpson trial, a lot has changed. I have changed. Television has changed. Now, thanks to the popularity of televised trials that followed in the wake of the OJ trial, Judge Judy is one in a cohort of household names, and the Court TV channel is available on your tv or on the internet 24 hours a day with nonstop courtroom feeds of live adjudications and special programming with sexy reenactments of slashing, beating, torture, and pain.

As I write this the channel is featuring coverage of the Doomsday Prophet Murder Trial, the Apple River Stabbings Trial, and the Border Migrant Murder Trial where viewers can munch popcorn and watch a jury visit a chunk of pasture where an Arizona cattle rancher is accused of gunning down a Mexican citizen crossing his land. America has changed. Half of America would watch the Border Migrant Murder Trial and cheer for justice for the rancher, and the other half would cheer for justice for the shooting victim. Few would be cheering for the once blind Justice balancing it all in her scales.

When the death of OJ was announced it struck me as significant that OJ’s death happened days away from the next version of the Trial of the Century, and perhaps the first of several such trials. Former President Donald Trump will face justice in a New York City courtroom against the charges that he broke the law. This is just one case, of course, the first to come to trial of four criminal cases that total 91 indictments and counting. These cases also follow the civil cases where in one a court found Donald Trump was liable for sexually assaulting his accuser and was ordered to pay her $83 million and counting.

Donald Trump has the influence to demand the unequal treatment under the law his money, celebrity, and gluttony of privilege affords him, and while the 25-year old me would have been more outraged, the 55-year old me now understands that America is the land of tv and the home of the crave. We crave celebrity more than we crave virtue. We crave the momentary rush of adrenaline more than we crave stability. We crave seeming more than we crave being. We crave winning an inch of turf more than a mile of compromise. We crave our side winning even if it’s not right more than we crave what’s right winning even if it’s not our side. At least that’s how it’s been in the thirty years since OJ Simpson died the first time.

To me OJ Simpson died in June of 1994 when he murdered two human beings. The man that lived on after was a body of plundered parts, a Frankenstein’s monster of celebrity and spectacle and hubris. Did the American justice system die, too? Did it stay dead? Is it dead now? Or now that OJ Simpson is dead can we begin to repair what his legacy cost us as a nation? Are there two systems of justice, or does justice just take longer to bring down the monster? We’ll begin to learn more next week when the next Frankenstein of celebrity and spectacle and hubris sits down in a courtroom to face a jury and Justice raises her scales, and all of America leans forward on the couch to wait and watch and wonder.