In our instructions to the jury the court may have erred in its effort to shed this confusion and should better have issued a directed verdict for the defendant and his cross-claimant. The jury verdict is set aside N.O.V. and judgment for damages to plaintiff dismissed.
The black robed effigy swung closer, close enough for the cameras to read IMPEACH pinned to its skirts before the flames consumed it, SPOT LIVES, GOD Is JUDGE, Stars and Bars, rocks and beer cans, US GOVT KEEP OUT and hands crowding forward unfurling the headline CALLS GOD CAT'S CHINBONE through smoke swirling from the pork barbeque pit where a suited man in string tie hailed the thronged white faces buttoned to the throat many even clean shaven as their friend and neighbor stood to welcome our distinguished guest the honourable United States Senator here from championing your sacred rights in the black crime and drug capital of the nation wiping grease from his chin with a paper party napkin blazoning his name as he struggled to rise to the occasion from a folding chair flourishing a rib in response to their yelps of the name on the napkin with a scattering of more neighborly familiar salutes to Old Lardass since he'd 'growed up right down the road here apiece' well, he'd come back here looking for friends and by Golly he'd found them, they hadn't changed a bit in all that time and their moans confirmed that they heard this as a compliment — but you all mean so much to me it means so much just to be with you here like this. He wasn't much good at making pretty speeches but he didn't think they wanted to hear a lot of pretty words at a time like this while the Federal government had its Federal courts trampling their sacred rights to religious freedom, carry guns, trial by jury enshrined for all to see right up there in the U.S. Constitution — like we just witnessed here right before our eyes how this Federal U.S. judge just steps in there to suit his fancy and throws out a verdict reached after calm deliberation by a jury of you honest citizens black folk and white, right there in the Fourteenth Amendment in black and white, the jury that's the bulwark and cornerstone of American justice like you don't see in these dictator atheist countries slaps them right in the face and hands it over to this foreigner who came in here and put up this monstrosity he's from one of these atheist countries himself, says right here someplace in black and white this Christian sacrifice and suffering make him puke. You don't hear that kind of language before women and children at my house and I'm sure at yours neither but when I read that I was most like to puke myself, your hard earned Federal tax dollars going on things like that while they want to kill subsidies to our good hard working tobacco planters and growers of other nutritious crops supporting art and pornography to where nowadays you can't hardly tell them apart and paying these welfare women to go get their abortions. You put them together with all these homos parading around in the arts and pretty soon there won't be any taxpayers left, we keep going down this Godless path till one day they'll go and abort the Second Coming and nobody know the difference. And that's where this government interference with our sacred state's rights so many died for is leading us, sending in these Federal judges that take our great American language and twist the words around to mean whatever they want, calls God no better than a cat's shinbone, calls this beautiful land of ours a botched Creation and throws God right out of the courtroom, you heard him, do whatever they please because they're appointed for life. Well we have an answer for that, call it impeachment right there in the Constitution and that's the message I'm taking back up to Washington. They pay him with your good U.S. tax dollars and I'm going to tell them to take a look at one, take a good look at a U.S. dollar bill where it says In God We Trust and that U.S. dollar's gospel enough for me. That's the country I served back in the dark days of war right down here at Fort Bragg and the U.S. Constitution I swore to protect and defend from enemies foreign and domestic and we're seeing more than our share of both right down here in our own backyard. Now let's have us a little sip of that good bourbon.
And sure enough, there on the split page of the morning's paper flamed the black robed effigy of the craggy Federal judge who, like the sharp edges and jagged peaks of the controversial steel sculpture Cyclone Seven, had become a lightning rod for the passions of this once sleepy community, erupting last night in a virtual replay of an earlier melee which left seventy-two injured and extensive property damage in its wake. Among the dozen arrests that evening, that of Billy Pinks, thirty-two, an unemployed auto body worker charged with assault was later reduced to statutory rape on his plea that the 'provocative message on her T shirt got his juices going' and the admission by the twelve-year-old victim that she had deceitfully led him to believe she was fourteen. Mr Pinks was sentenced to thirty days probation and an apology to the victim identified only as Millie K, minor. The latest disturbance centered about an outdoor pork barbeque rally for U.S. Senator Orney Bilk, who is visiting the area on a campaign swing for the first time since he left his boyhood home in nearby Stinking Creek to enlist in the army following the end of hostilities in Southeast Asia. After graduating from army cooking school he was placed in charge of a field oven unit at Fort Bragg, N.C. Senator Bilk's interest in politics was kindled by the conviction on bribery charges involving unorthodox liquor procurement of an uncle whose place he later filled in the state legislature.
Known for his strong stand on states' rights in Congress, Senator Bilk took vehement exception to a decision by Judge Crease reversing a verdict by a local jury as undue interference by the Federal judiciary and called for his impeachment. Talking with the press later in the evening when the bourbon had been flowing freely, the Senator cited as an article of impeachment the possibility of a strain of madness running in the Judge's family, an allegation which has gained credence with the Civil War spectacle The Blood in the Red White and Blue, which is said to be based on the life of his father who later served as associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes until his death at the age of ninety-seven. Through his law clerk Judge Crease dismissed the charges as 'foolish fabulation.' His son Oswald, a wealthy recluse living alone on a family estate on Long Island who wrote the original script for the spectacularly successful motion picture and, in an announcement made by the studio late yesterday has lost his multimillion dollar lawsuit against its producers, could not be reached for comment. Speaking on condition that he not be identified, Village official J Harret Ruth, who introduced Senator Bilk at the rally and who makes no secret of his own political ambitions, said my God. Harry?
— In the shower.
— In the paper, this perfectly asinine story about that circus going on down there in Father's courtroom, carrying him around in a flaming effigy, talk about madness in the family and all kinds of nonsense. Can they get away with that?
— What? He'd emerged in the folds of a towel. — With what.
— This story in the paper, they've got everything possible wrong. There are laws aren't there?
— Have to prove malice. Can't make laws against plain sloppiness can you? He'd commenced the towel in a vigorous rubdown, — against stupidity?
— Well my God, impeaching a Federal judge by saying his whole family's crazy? Isn't that malice?