Nowhere else, in all the globe, is this ethic so prized and honed as in Massachusetts… Or am I the only one to see, in the most recent of debates, the poetics of staging (perhaps accidental…) which here radiate and fairly glisten with comic irony?
Dead historians (and historians alive today are making plans to) spin madly in their graves after the sight of Kerry Healey lecturing Deval Patrick on our justice system. Flanked, on one side by a massive bust of John Adams, defender of decidedly unsavory, that is to say British, perpetrators of the Boston massacre she actually scolds him. And again flanked, on the opposite side, by an equally massive bust I believe to be that of John Quincy Adams, defender of the slave perpetrators of the Amistad massacre, perhaps the most unsavory of defendants of the time, she thinks she can preach to Deval Patrick, and to the rest of us, some repulsive notion that mere dislike is the prime enabler of justice. Of course, as if to underline the point, behind her the serene countenance of Fredrick Douglass, waiting as patiently as ever, for rationality to re-emerge. Or perhaps he’s simply waiting for the day, in time, when a bust of Deval Patrick is placed among the other defenders of the unsavory at Fanueil Hall.
This is our history and our most sacred values under attack BY SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE GOVERNOR.
If you treasure innocence, be thankful that Deval Patrick is willing to peer into the dark heart of guilt ’cause Kerry Healey won’t — can’t — do it. If you are repulsed by rape and murder, be thankful Deval Patrick has a strong enough stomach to define the countours of evil and apply appropriate justice. Kerry Healey just uses your repulsion to stab, viciously and unthinkingly, at the one person who most takes that repulsion seriously.
