Eight Wee Ones vs The Great Republic

ON THE ROAD AGAIN...

BOSTON -- Do not believe all you hear about Americans’ passion for freedom. They all share a passion for talking about freedom but they haven’t been doing much about it lately. When Uncle Sam says “Jump” they say “How high?” This country has not yet advanced as far into the police state as Canada, but it is hurrying to catch up.

An example: The U.S. Government versus a tiny little computer company, as told by its executive officer of that period, Roger Marino, now retired:

“We were small then, doing maybe a million dollars business a year. In the computer world, that’s a dab of pablum in Tiny Tim’s porringer.

“One day a representative of the mighty Department of Justice appeared and ordered us to copy every document of every file of every year of our existence and send it to them immediately if we knew what was good for us.

“This is part of the usual movement toward the European justice system where the citizen is not only denied the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, he also has no right of silence and may be forced to testify against himself.

“You don’t argue with the justice department. We didn’t. We delivered all our documents, boxes piled upon boxes. We hired a lawyer, help we could ill afford. I put on my good jacket, tweed with leather patches on the elbows, and went to Springfield, Missouri, to face a grand jury on charge of monopoly practices, a fairly serious offence in this country.

“Our company was in Boston, the government was in Washington, so you may ask, why Missouri?

“That’s because you only think that the seat of the American federal government is Washington, D.C. In fact our federal government is like God. It is everywhere, and it may manifest itself anywhere.

“The first thing was that I learned was that I could not have our $16,000 lawyer with me. He had to sit outside the courtroom so he wouldn’t contaminate the process against me. I had to go there alone, together with a bunch of people picked up on the street who were in there because it was warmer inside than outside that day.

“Among the people were scattered the grand jury members, indistinguishable from the others except for one who identified himself by getting up and saying I wasn’t speaking loud enough for him to hear. Okay, dad, HOW’S THIS FOR SOUND?

“The prosecutor came forward, the little twit who was about to make a name for himself by protecting the Great Republic against businessmen of my ilk.

“After getting names and titles he said in that acute and penetrating fashion that all good TV actors can imitate on their better paid days ‘Let us begin with a very simple question. sir. How do you destroy documents you don’t want?’

“I said ‘I crumple it up and throw it in the waste basket.’

“He intoned his words like a Shakespearean actor ‘I see. You throw it in the waste basket. Do you have any other way of disposing of a document?’

“I said ‘Yes. Sometimes I give it to my secretary and she crumples it up and throws it in the waste paper basket.’

“‘’I see. You get up from your desk, walk outside and give it to your secretary.’

“No. I just give it to her. We are in the same office. We share rooms in our company. We are very small. There are only eight of us altogether, secretaries included.’

“I could see that little son of bitch grow white with both fear and anger. Before arraigning us for being another Andrew Carnegie or Bill Gates, he hadn’t even bothered to make a simple check and find that we were smaller than the local Dunkin Donuts shop and incapable of monopolizing anything bigger than one glazed doughnut. So he was afraid of looking foolish and angry at me for not being a criminal.

“To save face in front of the Grand Jury and any newspaperman who might have been around, but wasn’t -- the press doesn’t find cases like ours of much interest -- he asked three more inane questions I cannot remember and after a total of four minutes testimony I was released and the Grand Jury was sent home where they maybe had something useful to do.

“Our lawyer was then permitted to approach our government people and ask if the matter was closed. They said no. As far as they are concerned, no case is ever closed.

“Here I think is the great difference between the American people and the American government. The ordinary man in this situation would apologize for what he put us through. But these were government people and common courtesy or ordinary decency are just not a part of their makeup. Government people don’t possess such impulses. They cannot understand them.”

One of a series of columns from the Atlantic Coast.

June/02