James Victore

"You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?" It's so sad how hard it is to be a Supreme Court justice.





The collapse of Americans' faith in the Supreme Court has been recent but dramatic. Somewhere in between Bush v. Gore and Clarence Thomas's paid appearance at the Koch brothers' retreat and Antonin Scalia comparing surgery to broccoli, Americans noticed that some of the foremost justices in the country are buffoons. Since 2009, public approval of the Supreme Court has declined fifteen percentage points, and according to one survey less than one out of four Americans has confidence in the court's judgment. With the decision on health care scheduled for June, the country's already tenuous regard for the Court may grow even more strained. The idea of the Court as an above-the-fray guardian of the Constitution is, by this point, strictly the stuff of civics classes and nostalgia. In ordinary life, the law has never been held in as much contempt as it is now. Quite simply, nobody follows it anymore.

Wow. It would be so nice to break the law while reading this column.





According to one estimate, the average American commits three felonies a day. Most of these occur online, where we have created a parallel universe that everyone has agreed to treat as a cesspool of permitted illegality. One of the most astonishing contradictions of the recent SOPA/PIPA debates was how rabidly otherwise liberal, even socialistic people — citizens who would consider it obvious that the state should have a place in regulating every other kind of business — wanted the government out of the Internet. Everybody is a libertarian online. People who would never consider buying a pirated DVD off a blanket in the subway feel absolutely entitled to the equivalent via BitTorrent. Not only do they feel entitled, they're self-righteous about it. As if ripping off The Love Guru were a revolutionary act.

The teacher who discovers he's good at cooking meth and killing rivals is a figure for our time. The final line last season: "I won."





But fear of a regulated Internet is only a symptom of a far more general distrust in the law and its makers. The drug war — over forty years of failure — has made us all comfortable being criminals. The word scofflaw was invented during Prohibition, when a Massachusetts man held a contest looking for a word that described upstanding citizens who simply ignored laws they disapproved of. Prohibition may have coined the term, but the drug war has made it a near-universal condition. Only twenty years ago, Clinton had to pretend he never inhaled. Today, Obama openly admits to vacuuming cocaine, as do workmates and brothers and neighbors.

A Gatsby reboot is coming in December. He works for the mob. And why not? It's just selling cocktails. We've all done worse for less.





The law has always been an ass, but the current crop of laws on a whole range of issues — from what we're allowed to put in our bodies to fair tax rates to who enters the country and how — is so patently ridiculous, so adrift in an ideological purity that has nothing to do with how ordinary people live their lives, that the country has more or less accepted that ignoring them is okay. Boardwalk Empire is set nearly a century ago, yet feels completely contemporary. Why? Because we all recognize how living with laws that try to restrict inevitable human desires twists people's souls. During Prohibition, the gangster hero emerged from American popular culture — outright criminals who were glamorous for their outsider status, rebels of selfishness. During the current confusion, the ordinary-guy gangster has risen to similar prominence: the Miami psychopath that is Dexter, the schoolteacher/meth boss that is Walt in Breaking Bad, Lee Child's Jack Reacher. These lawbreakers are not at all glamorous; their situation is one we all face. They need to fudge things around the edges of systematic absurdity just to remain who they are and to ensure justice. They've just had to go a little further than everybody else.

At least Scalia et al. aren't as hated as this man and the rest of Congress, with its 17 percent approval rating. At least not yet.





So how do you deal with the absurdity of laws? Ever drink under the age of twenty-one? (You're old enough to kill for your country but not to have a beer?) Ever pay a nanny or a gardener under the table? (Find a public official who hasn't done the same.) Ever have an engagement ring shipped out of state so that you didn't have to pay taxes? (Don't tax love.) Overclaim slightly on your end-of-year filing? (Make Romney pay the same rate I'm paying and we'll talk.) Have your doctor pretend he didn't notice something serious so that you could hastily buy better insurance? (I am not going to be the reason Access Health has a fatter profit margin.) Follow a Twitter feed that updates speed-trap locations? (Solve your budget crisis some other way than by catching me going five miles per hour over the limit.) Join an NCAA office pool? (Beneath the dignity of a response.) Criminals, all of us. Also, perfectly ordinary citizens.

The Watch is out in late July. These guys play the role of George Zimmerman — but they're funnier.





The most profound irony of all is that within this permissive attitude toward lawbreaking runs a ferocious insistence on order — the United States has one quarter of the world's inmates for 5 percent of the world's population. America is full of scofflaws who are tough on crime, such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who will do actually anything to protect Arizonans from the illegal nannies and gardeners they want to hire. Or those toking presidents who admitted to legal lapses while locking up small-time offenders by the thousands. Equality under the law, the definitive accomplishment of Anglo-Saxon civilization since 1215, has been tossed aside as casually as the double-breasted suit you wore to prom.

The tragic result of a law — if you provoke the feeling of fear in another, you can be shot down — that promotes lawlessness. We're a nation of vigilantes.





The growing contempt for the Supreme Court is more a symptom of this metamorphosis than a cause. Among liberals, the Roberts court can feel like the ghostly claw of the Bush years, an avatar of a defunct radical conservatism reaching from the past into the present. Nothing could be further from the truth. In its shallow squabbling, the Supreme Court is completely of the moment. The justices are just trying to help themselves and their buddies, like the rest of us. The question for them this summer is whether, at the end of that squabbling, people will actually respect the laws they codify.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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