Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "A Socialist On Trial" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 201-203). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Spring 1980
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
I’ve never been raped, sexually. But I am being raped, politically and legally and psychologically, in the course of my absurdly long-running courtroom case against City Light.
It isn’t a criminal case. But I’m charged with being one. I’m not even the defendant — I’m the Charging Party, the plaintiff. Nevertheless, I’m the one who ends up on trial, with my virtue, past practices and motives subjected to a smear campaign — to the kind of slander and character assassination that routinely accompany a rape or murder hearing.
Fair players, the legally hip, and feminists have long been up in arms about the patent inequity of the courtroom process wherein a woman charges rape. It is she who finds herself on trial, not the man. The accuser becomes the accused, the victim becomes the criminal, the person affirming the law becomes the lawbreaker.
What isn’t as well known is that trying to make a discrimination case in court is tantamount to proving that Mt. St. Helens didn’t erupt last month.
Everybody knows it did, but legal proof is something else again. And if City Light’s lawyers were assigned to defend the mountain against my accusation that it really did blow, their arguments would sound something like this:
1. Eruptions are a management prerogative of mountains.
2. Anyone leveling such a charge obviously hates mountains and wants to level them.
3. Only a subversive incompetent would be reckless enough to call wayward boulders an eruption.
4. The steam, flames, and gases are a humanistic method of removing the surplus population at the foot of the mountain. (The last days of Pompeii were planned, implemented and monitored by a similarly liberal civic administration.)
5. Eruptions are more cost effective than complaining about them.
6. Mountains are scrupulously non-political, but commentators on their behavior have ulterior motives.
7. The poor mountain was only trying to protect itself from the ravages of an outside agitator. The end justifies the means, doesn’t it?
Ergo, there was no "eruption," only self-defense against a female, radical menace. Off with her head. To the guillotine. Kill, kill, kill.
But all is not lost. The bosses and their barristers and their perjuror-witnesses are simply killing the thing they love. They don’t hate me, you see, they like me. They say so. They all say so. They adore me, I’m a living doll.
Oh, I’m abrasive, arrogant, overbearing, disruptive, contemptuous, disloyal, disobedient, dilatory, thieving, manipulative, unproductive and hostile — but I’m nice.
Everybody in management thought I was great until I turned against them, for some mysterious reason. So they say. Actually, the top honchos were rendered apoplectic by an in-house, upfront woman socialist in middle-management who joined the striking electrical workers, tried to recall the antilabor mayor, helped negotiate an employee Bill of Rights, testified publicly against management violations of affirmative action laws, and agreed to interviews by the media whenever they asked me.
So it’s nothing personal, you understand. And, perish forbid, it’s nothing — you’ll excuse the expression — political! I just "ignored the chain of command" and had to be consigned to chains for suchlike lèse majesté.
The hell of it is, I can’t even plead guilty to that charge. I’d like to, considering what I think of their brand of chain and command, but I’m shamefully innocent. Because the only way to function at all within a vast bureaucracy is to try and stagger through the tortuous channels, and I did. I tried, I staggered, I kept upright for awhile, and then I got creamed. The commandants with their cookie-cutter politics may have liked me but they sure didn’t want me.
There can be only one politics — theirs. Only one philosophy — theirs. One avenue of self-expression and action — theirs. One criteria for competence, efficiency, cooperation and proper demeanor — theirs. They run the government, have the power, make the rules. And woe to the critic, the whistleblower and the unearther of skeletons in their bureaucratic closets, especially if she is a she and has been known to belittle capitalism.
If you tell the truth to a disbelieving world, you get raped. There’s no justice. Not in a courtroom, on a civil rights/civil liberties issue. Whether you win or lose, you are ravished in the legal mill. And what kind of dollar damages does one assess for premeditated political rape in the first degree?