What's That I Smell? Could it be a Slight Whiff of Justice?

By David Sherman

A dear old friend and wise man assured me justice doesn’t exist. I wouldn’t argue with him, then or now. He knows better than I about most things.

But, perhaps, on occasion, justice is meted out in thimblefuls. Once in a while, less often than a blue moon or dead flowers from an ex, it takes a bow.

Buried in the dung of the last year, are moments of hope, reasons to be thankful. Stephen Harper, his everyman cardigans and his buddy, former finance minister, Jim “Tax Cut” Flaherty, have disappeared. Harper wasn’t around much when he was in office, speaking to Canadians was beneath him.

If the Tories were in power, Harper or his white bread clones, Erin “Take Back Canada” O’Toole or the similarly charismatic, Andrew Scheer, the wealthy would enjoy tax breaks as a Covid balm and the rest would lining up at food banks and lying in hospital corridors. Funds for those in the gig economy? Be serious. Closing borders would be beyond them and we’d be in lockstep with the U.S. in infection rates.

Justice after years of Tory tax and service cuts is a Canadian government that drops survival money bi-weekly into millions of accounts. Even gig workers can pay rent and buy groceries.

Yes, maybe our response to the pandemic was slower than it could’ve been and our vaccine stores or orders are underwhelming, but in comparison to our neighbours, our response has been laudable.

Below the border, justice is a rarer commodity but it sticks its head above the foxhole now and then.

Nixon was forced to resign. George Bush the first was booted out after one term. Yeah, his son was cheered on for trying to bomb Iraq into the stone age and until Trump materialized and made Shrub, by comparison, look like Abe Lincoln, he disappeared, his legacy of WMD lies insufficiently mitigated by appeals for harmony after 9/11. Lest we forget his advising Americans to go shopping before the dust of the Towers had settled.

Justice, late and arguably insufficient, elected a Black preacher and a Jewish journalist/filmmaker from Georgia to the senate after President Joe Biden won the state. Trump and his cronies, despite threats that a win by Democratic socialists would end Christmas, religion and hamburgers and take away everyone’s Glock, lost. The Stacey Abrams revolution, ten years plus in the making, succeeded, like door-to-door combat, one household at a time. Can Texas be far behind?

Mayor Rudy had his true colours revealed during one of his Man from Mars pressers when brown dye leeched from his head. Now, it seems, he’s been brokering expensive pardons for Trump’s criminal posse. Trump wants to stiff him on his fees. Can prison be far behind?

Trump companies and the family are under investigation. Banks have cut him off. The PGA, never a bastion of racial justice, pulled a tournament from his club. Corporations say they’ll stop donating to conspiracy-touting members of Congress. People near Mar-a-Lago don’t want him there. Hate-spewing Tucker Carlson lost advertisers and the alternate universe of Fox News is hemorrhaging viewers.

Republicans with spines connected to working brains organized their own dump Trump campaigns and succeeded, before severing ties with Trump became fashionable.

True justice manifested itself when the attention-junkie president got more than he wanted, him and his MAGA-heads now being investigated by just about every agency in the U.S.

Twitter and other social media canceled his ass. The Trump brand and organization, known for tax fraud and dining at the public trough, is now as welcome as a pesty STD.

Stephen Miller, the smarmy fascist who oversaw the DHS from his perch on Trump’s shoulder and replaced experienced overseers with inexperienced lackeys, hence the debacle on Jan. 6, has disappeared. He will probably never resurface, unless his kindred spirit, Adolf, rises from the dead.

The U.S. did not go full fascist. Joe Biden won, Tony Fauci is back, white supremacists are being tracked and jailed, and Trumpism, like McCarthyism, will go the way of all things. Justice is often slow, sparse, or non-existent, but it eventually reveals crazies and criminals. See Cosby, Bill.

Yes, Trump pardoned his posse of grifters and thieves, but my addiction to crime novels exposed at least one truth. Criminals will always “step on their dick” again and find themselves on the wrong side of prison bars. It just might take a little more time.

Despite the yammering worship of talking heads for President Biden, no one knows how he will do. But, a smidgeon of justice along with a vaccine and hope for better days are here. And that’s not an alternate fact.