By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
This Halloween Horror show began with me searching YouTube for It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. I just wanted to see if Charlie Brown might kick the football this year. But then, I opened “the creepy door that shouldn’t be opened” . . . I clicked on a protest video from a Portland I.C.E facility. At first blush, I thought the protesters were cute, like little Gremlins. (But more as if the Pillsbury Doughboy and “Mrs. Pillsbury” had a bunch of babies after meeting at a Renaissance festival 20 years ago.)
I mean, Portland hippies are kinda “doughy,” extremely white people (there isn’t much sun in Portland apparently) but mostly, they seem really agitated that federal agents aren’t paying any attention to them. So, they start following them around, from what YouTube is telling me.
This seems harmless enough to me, the feds don’t seem to care about them much, but they won’t go away. (The videos, I mean.) My YouTube feed keeps giving me daily updates and it may never end.
I couldn’t help thinking (which I suppose is the point of protests) this has all happened somewhere before. I know I have seen it. So, why not, let’s take a look on Halloween, at a few “spooky” books about “protest” things that really happened and were far scarier. If nothing else, to gain some perspective that things could always be worse.
Candide (The Optimist). Voltaire’s Candide is pretty much the 1750’s version of Forrest Gump. (Except people are waaaaay more scary and horrible to each other). The only real purpose served by Candide’s paper-thin plot, is to place Candide in middle of an endless series of real-life historical events, that you can’t believe would actually happen in civilized societies (but yet, does seem eerily similar to things we are arguing about 250 years later.)
And while I am on it, if you think Monte Python was cheeky having fun with the Catholic Church on BBC-1 in the 1970’s (“Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition,”) you gotta’ hand it to Voltaire. He was mocking Church rules in writing. . . during the Spanish Inquisition. Which landed him in the Bastille at least once. (That’s dedication to art.)
“In Italy,” Voltaire wrote of 1750’s church practices, “they are caponizing 2000-3000 boys a year,” because they felt these castrati could out-compete women singing in the choir (sounds somewhat familiar 250 years later) and also, as Voltaire quipped through our protagonist Candide, because men who are lacking a pair are “better suited to serve as heads of state.” (I said he was “cheeky.”)
Like Forrest Gump, Candide spends the entire book wandering the earth, chasing a girl, Cunégonde, but keeps getting sidetracked. He gets kidnapped into the Bulgarian army to fight in the 7 Years War, where he was beaten nearly to death, before escaping, only to be captured (seemingly two pages later) by the Spanish Inquisition, where his best friend is done away with in an auto-da-fé” (act of faith).
All of these things were common back then. The Catholic Church apparently decided that an auto-da-fé (publicly roasting a few undesirable people which they didn’t like anyway), would be pleasing to God and would ward off natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 which destroyed the city by a successive earthquake, tsunami and then fire consumed what remained. Apparently because they hadn’t roasted enough people.
While wandering the earth, Candide gets rich, almost by accident, is preyed upon by almost everyone he meets, and just like Forrest Gump with Jenny, he is finally reunited with the love of his life. Although recoiling in horror at the sight of what has also happened to her. He then grudgingly marries her anyway and decides to just tend his own garden.
A Tale of Two Cities. Voltaire died in 1778. The French revolution started in 1789. Meaning, the French Revolution and the American Revolution happened almost simultaneously. As horror stories go, it might be best to think of the French Revolution, as what might happen if the American Revolution had gone horribly wrong (and there were a comic-book, Bizzarro Universe, that we might have lived instead.)
That is the setting of A Tale of Two Cities. Maybe our American revolution worked out better, because unlike the French, the American revolution was started by a bunch of rich guys with comparatively speaking, no real reason to revolt in the first place. (If you can imagine Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg pouring tea into Boston Harbor, what would be the point?)
According to Dickens account, The French Revolution was started by a bunch of bitter little old ladies (the tricoteuses), sewing names of enemies they don’t like (who probably didn’t know they existed) into a blanket.
And then everything that could go wrong, did, in France’s nightmare fueled alternate universe. (Heck, unlike America, the French even lost WWII to Hitler.) In the French universe, the revolution was more like a “zombie apocalypse,” called the “Reign of Terror” from 1793-1794. They murdered everybody, from the King, Louis the VXI , the queen, Marie Antionette, and then everyone else they hated, as fast as little old ladies could sew names into a blanket. When they ran out of enemies, they started murdering each other.
All of this lasted and The Reign of Terror only ended, when a strong man dictator named Napoleon cam to power, who turned out to have world-dominating ambitions par with literally Hitler. So, yeah, that happened.
To add insult to injury, all this nightmare might not have happened in France, except when the women revolutionaries went to fetch King Louis XVI, they discovered him missing (he had tried to flee to Varennes), but couldn’t resist leaving a note pinned to the bed, which essentially said “screw you guys, Marie Antionette and I never liked you anyways.”
“Hell, hath no fury,” I suppose. This really pissed them off and started the Reign of Terror. So, yeah, things could have gone better in this universe.
Les Misérables. If “brevity is the essence of wit,” (Voltaire’s Candide fits into my front shirt pocket) then gravitas is the essence of Victor Hugo’s tale of “misery.” At over 1200 pages, you could chock the wheels of a 747 with Les Misérables. But I read it anyway, so you don’t have to. And it is also a horror story. But, time is getting late.
Essentially, Les Misérables takes place after A Tale of Two Cities, between 1815 and 1832. And they have a guy, Napoleon III, who actually didn’t leave office, and instead, named himself emperor after his presidential term ended and he couldn’t run again.
But, at least he wasn’t “orange.” And for Halloween purposes, the rule of Napoleon III was called the “Second Empire,” which gave us the name for the very creepy style of house depicted in The Adams Family.
So go, go have some fun on Halloween. What YouTube wants us to worry will still be here tomorrow.
History shows, people are pretty resilient and have survived much, much worse.