This concept is one that haunts me. It is one of the reasons I think hard every day, and work harder to make sure I fully understand just what a cultural sin this MORAL PANIC is. It is one of the reasons why I am writing this blog…to tell you all, that witch hunts happen…today, outside, IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOODS, and they are not random acts of insanity, rather, and more horrible then existing, they are SANCTIONED!
Sure…witch hunts happen in third world gutters where the hangman’s noose is tight from use, but they also exist…right here…in your backyard, in your house…even in your family.
Which brings me to my movie selection: Witch Hunt
Witch Hunt is a modern day American disgrace, a savage sacrifice of justice and logic. Produced by fellow weirdo and idiosyncratic thinker, Sean Penn, Witch Hunt takes us on an up close and personal journey through an eighties butt rock nightmare, a Bakersfield bureaucratic bungle, in which a handful of children claimed sexual abuse, a charge coerced by ill equipped law enforcement in order to pin hideously graphic sins to the only witches worthy of such satanic sustenance…their own parents.
Mullets whimper in disbelief as blue collar couples are systematically charged, arrested and arraigned under the thunderous accusations, WITNESS TESTIMONY, and all of the non-evidence one backwards ass county can muster. Hard working, every day, people, people like you and me, suddenly find themselves hoping that its all just a shitty joke, praying that it’s all just a glitch, a wrinkle in the logic of law, laughing days away in disbelief, as they wait, for their chance in court to set the record strait…
Only problem with our legal system, a system built on numbers, and convictions, and success and money are directly attached to the amount of time wasted working diligently, filing motions, and paying county clerks, life behind bars begins to add up…there is no easy way out, even if you are “right”.
Days…and weeks…and months pass by, and all of a sudden…being an innocent in jail, in prison, IN SAN FUCKING QUENTIN!, doesn’t feel as good as say a plea bargain…
Flip, flip, turn, turn, and all of a sudden a wavering prosecutor has a pocketful of power, a handful of confessions.
Confessions?
Is it still a confession when pain, pressure, guilt and fear are applied?
Are those “confessions” worth someone’s life?
To think that every day in America, the land of the free, land of justice, we falsely imprison people, using archaic coercive techniques, techniques founded in an ancient tradition of punishment…
It seems we have no need for innocence, just a notion of blood for blood.
A tradition of witch HUNTING!
At least the religious fundamentalists had the personal courage to rip the suspect’s guts out with a knotted cord, robbing the suspect’s life in an up close and physical way…
…now we just use a expensive court system, a legally sanctioned chop-chop square, where we can hunt, serve up, and lop off our fear, the infected limb…and so what if we might be wrong…some of the time…
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