Of jury duty and global co-existence
ONLY in the United States.
Barack Obama may no longer be the leader of the free world, but that didn’t stop the masses from waiting for him to show up at a Chicago court for jury duty.
In the US, only mental defectives – that might possibly rule out the present incumbent -– and lawyers are exempt from such duty.
The latter category is exempt because anyone who called a 5,000-word document “a brief” had to be out of his mind.
But Obama had been a law professor who’d written thoughtful books and, as a politician, he tended to avoid anything brief.
He was still selected despite the fact he would come with Secret Service agents and journalists trailing in his wake. Probably fearing that it would turn the trial into a circus, the judge Timothy Evans wisely discharged him from duty.
Homer Simpson was wrong after all. He’d said the trick to getting out of jury duty was to tell the judge that he was “prejudiced against all the races.”
Now there was a third way: you were exempt if you could prove that you had once been President. George W Bush had been similarly discharged in 2011 when he had been so summoned in Texas.
Oprah Winfrey, however, had served as a juror in a murder trial that eventually convicted the suspect.
Obama proved to be a good sport. He arrived early at the courthouse where an enormous crowd awaited him. He chatted with court staff, journalists and onlookers and was then whisked upstairs in a private elevator where more staff and his fellow jurors waited.
Fellow would-be juror Ronald Stubbs pronounced him “cool” because he “shook the hands of everyone and signed copies of his book” that people had brought into the courthouse.
The judge then dismissed him and it appeared that the former commander-in-chief looked slightly disappointed: serving as a juror entitled you to US$17.20 an hour.
But if you thought about it, being selected for jury duty was a bit unfair. It was random chance that got you selected but the same random process never won you the lottery.
Keeping a brooding brief from Beijing, President Trump snorted at the attention his predecessor was getting in Chicago.
He thought the judge was a wimp by allowing Obama to be discharged so easily and made a mental note to himself to never, ever promote His Lordship any higher than the Sessions Court.
But the former property mogul cheered up when he was told by his generals that two neutron bombs suitably directed at Pyongyang would destroy infrastructure and homes but would leave people unscathed. It was, he reflected wit satisfaction, the humane way to go. And he knew he would go down in history as The Great Humanitarian.
President Trump was deeply suspicious about North Korea although he privately admired the way it had done away with jury duty altogether not to mention trials in any shape or form.
The latter fact left the president speechless in admiration and he wondered if he might sneak it past Congress. It would certainly have eliminated the obstacles to his immigration reform, he reflected bitterly.
But he was no fool.
Despite the threats and the bluster, he understood with sinking heart, the one terrible, inescapable truth: you couldn’t start a nuclear war with anyone. And he understood that instinctively, even on his worst hair days. It would mean mutual assured destruction.
Because in a nuclear war, all men are cremated equal.