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Bleak, because the Judeo-Christian world-view is on the ropes. Porn and shockingly violent video games are even more widespread and lucrative than at present. Arthur refers to Watson's Catholicism as "your, uh, background," as if it were no more important than, say, the fact that he majored in world lit. As the tenuous thread that was the Protestant consensus unravels further, the void is filled by a massive expansion of America's new makers of truth, the courts. Employment, tax, discrimination, and every other type of law has ballooned to elephantine proportions as new legal theories seek to make end runs around simple moral rules like Thou shall not steal. The legal arena has long ceased to be about conflict resolution, instead fissuring and fracturing the nation further. (Dooling, you won't be suprised to learn, is a lawyer as well as a novelist.)
The latest fault line is over a homicide. The Federal Court in Missouri's Eastern District has a long-standing custom of appointing newly minted lawyers to one pro bono case. Watson is assigned to a first-degree murder.
Hello? Why would a computer geek associate who has never spent one day practicing criminal law be assigned to defend a man who could get the death penalty?
Politics. The man James Whitlow killed was deaf and black, and Whitlow is clearly a bigot. He even has a tattoo on his arm that reads, "Jesus hates niggers." Though the crime was in fact probably only a "plain-vanilla voluntary manslaughter," Missouri's hate-crime guidelines make it very attractive for prosecutor Frank Donahue to up the ante and, perhaps, win a Senate seat in the process. But this still doesn't explain why Watson was assigned to such a high-stakes case.
Enter Judge Whittaker J. Stang, also known as "Ivan the Terrible." Stang is a throwback to a simpler, more decent, less litigious time. This Eisenhower appointee has an almost pathological hatred of lawyers and the muddle they've made of society. Being from another time, he understands Nietzsche's warning, as paraphrased by Tom Wolfe: "[Y]ou cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says, 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not.' " And so Stang seeks to put the fear of himself into startled lawyers. In his courtroom, he is god. The final authority is his, and he doesn't hesitate to abuse, annoy, and harass lawyers into respecting this fact.
But there's a softer side to the old goat, an aggressive mercy. The New Testament, if you will, is smuggled in under the covering fire of the Old. To wit,
"The Eighth Circuit can reverse me to Hell and gone," said the judge, smoke stinging his eyes into a squint, "they can mandamus my ass from backbone to backbone, but no white-trash punk is leaving my courtroom for the graveyard just because Frank Donahue wants to be senator."
But why make such a stink over a man who is (a) a bigot and (b) an undisputed killer? Because Stang is human after all. He recognizes that man—that's generic man—is steeped in sin. Let Whitlow be tried for murder and convicted; that's fine. But don't try him for "hatred," for the crime of being human. Asks the incredulous judge,
"You want to make hatred illegal? I've sat up here for fifty years and seen nothing but hatred. Everybody they drag in here is full of it, I'm full of it, you're full of it, and now what? You want to make certain varieties illegal? What are we going to do? Get some samples of hate and send them off to the forensic lab? See what kind we're dealing with?"
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