He had heard the Yiddish curse “May you be involved in a lawsuit when you’re right.” And now he understood it.
He saw that the wrong side could and would allege anything, unbounded by the laws of probability or reason, while the legitimately injured side, the wrongly accused, could only allege the undramatic fact of its injury or innocence. The contest, the trial, was, finally, an entertainment, or a trial-by-entertainment, and that he, as the accused, no more enjoyed the presumption of innocence than had any unpopular man at any time.
The trial, in his case, was an inversion of the formula: he was, more than assumed, more than adjudged (denied the possibility of error carried by that form), he was known to be guilty. He was guilty, and the trial existed to prolong his entertaining punishment, and to ratify that entertainment under another name.
The Puritan Ethic led to the American hypocrisy of disavowing the need of pleasure. So pleasurable acts were called by the name of Service to Some Higher Good, their pleasurable nature denied, and that denial defended to the last—the gauge of a public act’s pleasurable component, in fact, could be said to be the extent to which its performance was decried as onerous.
In 1854 a Jewish child in Bologna fell ill. His Catholic nurse, concerned for his immortal soul, secretly baptized him.
The nurse confessed to her priest, and the Catholic hierarchy heard of the baptism. The boy recovered, but the Bishopric of Bologna, enraged that a now Christian child was being raised by Jews, had the boy kidnapped and hidden away.
No pressure from the family, from friends, from the world Jewish community, from foreign heads of state, could cause the Church to produce the boy.
Even to assert the family’s “right” was to give credence to an opposing view. But if there were not an opposing view, the kidnapping would have been stripped of its value as entertainment and stood simply as an obscene depredation.
And now he knew the meaning of the curse.