Happy Victoria Day to our Canadian readers, Happy Pentecost Monday to our European readers, Happy Whit Monday to Brit old-timers, Happy First Day of Just Another Working Week to our American readers. Aside from those various Pentecostal-Whitsun-Fête de la Reine observances, this month also marks the seventh birthday of The Mark Steyn Club. We thank all those First Fortnight Founding Members who have decided to re-up for our eighth season, and we hope our First Month members will want to do the same in the days ahead.
~As you know, in three weeks' time my suit against the UK media censor Ofcom comes to the High Court of England:
The King on the application of Mark Steyn
vs
The Office of Communications
I'll be there. Not sure if the King will. Day on day, Ofcom's enforcement of the Covid-vaccine narrative looks increasingly not only preposterous but blood-soaked.
Yet, in the so-called controlled demolition of the entire western world, it's the small things that get you. Just about the only reason I was looking forward to my court date was that, after a month in the dank septic tank of the District of Columbia Superior Court, at least at the Royal Courts of Justice the judges and the lawyers and even the clerks would be properly dressed.
But maybe not:
Courts in talks to abandon wigs amid claims they are 'culturally insensitive'
As far as I can tell, this is mainly the initiative of a single barrister called Michael Etienne, who sports an afro, as indeed I did during the disco era. But disco faded away and I moved on. Mr Etienne, by contrast, appears to have made what he calls "hair discrimination" his life's work.
Are barristerial wigs racist? Everything else in the United Kingdom is, so it's not implausible. However, one notes that there are far more "black" countries with court wigs than "white" ones. And their judicial class does not seem as invested in the righteous cause of "hair discrimination" as the vexatious Mr Etienne.
The Bahamas:
Belize:
Fiji:
The Gambia:
Ghana:
Jamaica:
Kenya:
Malawi:
Nigeria:
Pakistan:
Sierra Leone:
(I understand there will be some reading this who would not wish to find themselves up before, say, a Nigerian judge. But compared to what? A New York judge?)
I could go on, and on. But you get the gist: If this sails through, there'll be English court dress everywhere but England. Because there are literally dozens of jurisdictions for which "hair racism" does not seem to be an issue.
I am so bored of tosspots like Michael Etienne. The notion that centuries of cultural inheritance have to be thrown aside because of an entirely invented grievance by a nuisance pseudo-litigant does huge vandalism to the very concept of a "land of laws". I see that an eminent KC, Leslie Thomas, justifies his support for a wig ban thus:
The wigs certainly should go. There isn't any place in a modern society for barristers to be wearing 17th-century fashion.
Really? You'd be surprised how many things pre-date the seventeenth century. Basic legal principles, for one.
That's the value of court garb: it signals that you represent not the modish fancies of the age but something eternal and enduring. In the Caribbean, for example, it symbolises the difference between the law in St Kitts or Dominica and that prevailing in Cuba or Haiti. I remember talking years ago to a Kenyan judge who said he liked his wig because its very weirdness - you can't wear it to Price Chopper or even Wegman's - communicated his independence from whichever political strongman was throwing his weight around back then.
[UPDATE! Michael Copeman, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, makes an interesting point:
Australia had a tragic experiment with de-wigging of Court personnel forty years ago. The Family Court (set up by Labor PM Gough Whitlam's interesting Attorney General Lionel Murphy in the 1970s to hear no-fault divorces) decided wigs were passé (and silly in Australia's often sultry climate). Within a decade, there were a horrifying series of murders of Family Court Judges and their family members. One factor, it was surmised, was that the culprit had turned the de-wigged and highly-recognisable Judges into their personal enemies. Wigs came back - to de-personify Judges and emphasise that their decisions were those of the Court, not individuals.
Exactly.]
The most basic of conservative axioms is that of the second Viscount Falkland: When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. Alas, our jurists are not what they were. Two decades ago, the Supreme Court of Canada floated a proposal to get rid of all the fancy red robes and ermine. So in The National Post I supported it and suggested the judges instead wear T-shirts with the slogan "I'M WITH STUPID" and large arrows pointing to the chief justice. The proposal was abandoned.
But the times are unutterably stupid, so we will assuredly replace court dress with something even more fatuously theatrical - such as the habit in American courtrooms of some of the highest-earning men in the land seeking to ingratiate themselves with the jury by wearing cheap, baggy, ill-fitting, worn, shiny suits. I expect there's a trial lawyer's bespoke outfitters somewhere that measures your inside leg and then lowers it by fourteen inches. At my trial in DC, the gusset of Mann's lead counsel's trousers hung below that of the hippetty-hoppin' gangsta on trial in the adjoining courtroom. I had to look at it for a month as he chuntered on subverting the norms of justice. I would have killed to see your basic KC silk and jabots.
But the object is to demolish it all. I often say we can't vote our way out of what's going on, which is generally taken as a call for non-violent protest. But I'm thinking of cutting to the chase and calling for violent revolutionary overthrow. After all, if the ancien régime is torching everything anyway, what's the diff?
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And, even if it's Dress-Down Tuesday, we look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's consideration of the latest curious developments in the origins-of-Covid story. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date plumped for Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred, and on Sunday Steyn's Song of the Week celebrated a cowboy classic, "Riders in the Sky". Our marquee presentation was the third edition of Mark's new weekend audio show, and our latest Tale for Our Time wrapped up with Steyn's concluding episode of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie.
If you were too busy spending the weekend blowdrying your afro, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
