In the first volume of his Rougons-Macquart series, The Fortune of the Rougons, the novelist Émile Zola traced the roots of the French Second Empire to its bloody origins in an act of democide. He shows how the empire—born of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état—came to power through literally murdering everything that was young and innocent and idealistic in the French republican tradition.
In order to symbolize this rise to power of murderers—Zola chose as the central images of his final passage of the novel two contrasting pieces of red. On the one hand—the red of the ribbon that is pinned on the breast of the Rougons—as a gift from the new emperor for helping him throttle French democracy. On the other—the red of the blood of innocents that was shed, in the massacre of French workers and protestors, through which the Second Empire claimed power.
With Emil Bove's installation this week as a Third Circuit judge—now holding a lifetime appointment in a U.S. federal court of appeals—I think back to that passage. He played his hand as carefully as Pierre Rougon. He knew exactly what blood had to be shed to get his own ribbon pinned to his chest—and he did not scruple to do so. After all—Bove is the same man who ordered his underlings at the Department of Justice to defy court orders by deporting 250 innocent people to a forever-prison in El Salvador.
Just for a handful of silver [...] Just for a riband to stick in his coat—to quote Browning...
And boy has he reaped his reward for it.
Under a sufficiently corrupt regime—whether the French Second Empire, born of a successful coup—or the emerging Trump Empire, born of an unsuccessful one in 2020—being willing to shed blood on the orders of the boss becomes a badge of honor rather than of shame.
It's how the Rougons made their fortune—by showing that conscience, with them, was no obstacle. It's how the entire brutal regime of Louis Napoleon seized power. And it's how Emil Bove has made his fortune too.
So now we have a federal appeals court judge who told his underlings to say "fuck you" to a court—according to the testimony of a whistleblower (who had a previous career defending Trump administration policies in court, and was plainly no liberal or Democrat), merely because the latter tried to pause the administration's orders to remove people in the dead of night to an eternal dungeon in El Salvador—a dismal bourne from which the presiding dictator bragged that no one ever returns alive.
The 250 Venezuelan asylum-seekers deported on Bove's orders were seemingly picked at random, or because they had tattoos—in short, based on no due process whatsoever—and few if any of them had prior brushes with the law. These were people who had committed no crime—and they get deported to a forever prison for it.
Meanwhile, Bove commits an abhorrent crime—defies a federal court order—and does so willfully, brazenly, publicly, conspicuously; but he does so on the orders of the boss—the would-be petty emperor. Trump le petit.
So he gets a lifetime appointment to the appeals court for it as a U.S. Circuit Judge.
Let him have it. Let him reap his reward. For "worse than the anger of the wronged / The curses of the poor"—as Edgar Lee Masters once wrote of another "Circuit Judge"—
Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
Hanged by my sentence,
Was innocent in soul compared with me.
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