Quote of the Week...from Frank Zappa

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.     ---Frank Zappa

I've seen comic Bill Maher get on his HBO show and often joke about how much he likes to smoke pot (years before eight of our states legalized casual use) and has had guests on the air who seemed to be stoned...and then I look at the statistic of over 600,000 people arrested for simple marijuana possession last year. Not that I'm a fan of marijuana: I've never used it and never will...and am skeptical of those who practically idolize the weed. Still, I have to disagree with the substance of late avant-garde rock musician Frank Zappa's above quote although I agree with its spirit: our laws are not randomly enforced...if they were, things would be fairer.  For Kamala Harris, current U.S. senator from California and that state's former prosecutor, to kid around about having smoked pot after she prosecuted others for the same offense isn't random enforcement, either: it's elitism, saying that some people in society are to be judged by different standards under the law than others.  And when you see this circus of result-oriented Federal and Supreme Court judge nominations that has been going on during different administrations during the last couple of decades at least (from both political parties), it becomes apparent that "justice" and the "law" are now being interpreted in a very political and ideological way that diminishes fairness and elevates agendas...

I don't think that police treat the upper class in our society like those in low-income areas...that's not random enforcement in the strict meaning of the word "random".  And in the courts the rich can afford better attorneys...along with private investigators...than the poor, who often must resort to whatever pro bono legal assistance the court provides them...that's not random justice.  The randomness in law enforcement is real, though, when laws are on the books that are violated so much by people at large that the police cannot possibly catch everyone and must then take violators in a more randomized fashion...traffic speed traps are a good example of this strategy.  But, of course, if profiling is going on in the mind of the stationed law enforcement officer, even that isn't truly random, either...

As for the first part of Zappa's quote stating that laws are badly written, just keep in mind that when a politician is elected to a legislature, be it local, state, or national in scope, he or she will naturally feel the pressure to "do" something...and that means becoming an active part of lawmaking.  Like the Geico commercial, it's "what you do" when you're a politician.  So a legislative body will brag about all the bills they submitted or passed and politicians will run for reelection touting their list of accomplishments.  And sometimes they'll pass laws just to say they passed them...after all, one of the most common election-season rallying points is that the other party is a bunch of  "do-nothings".  So as a result we often end up saddled with some pretty crappy laws as our elected officials struggle to justify themselves to the next round of voters...