Shadowlands by Anthony McCann

Author:Anthony McCann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART II

The Boisterous Sea of Liberty

Opening Arguments

The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave, says Portland’s Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse to the world. These words of Thomas Jefferson’s are chiseled into the smooth dark stone at the base of the building’s steps. It’s a masterful act of institutional rhetoric; the phrase is perfectly positioned to preempt and incorporate into the building’s aura of legitimated power every act of dissent performed in its shadow. And quite a shadow it is: the federal courthouse itself stretches the confines of the word house well beyond bursting. A thirteen-story monolith of glass, concrete, stone, and steel, it has interior halls and foyers filled with speckled marble and granite. It’s not a house; it’s a formidable Temple of Justice. Still, for seven weeks in the fall of 2016, as the bright end of the Northwest summer plunged into the rain and gloom of fall, the old words of Jefferson took on a daily life that threatened to separate them from the stately rhetorical purpose to which they’d been bound.

The ragged scrum of energy that the occupiers had brought to the refuge rematerialized in Portland on the steps of that courthouse and in the courtroom itself. But as it stepped into this new frame, its meanings also began to change. No longer were these just the colorful or dangerously deluded gun nuts who had held a beloved wildlife refuge with assault weapons. Neither were they just the band of disenfranchised white men who had gone mining for feelings of sovereignty and personal power by restaging white settlement on Native land. Now they were also defendants, facing a sweeping federal conspiracy charge in a justice system many have likened to a conviction-and-incarceration machine. (Or a “predatory judicial industry,” as occupier Shawna Cox had called it in a countersuit.) Now they were also standing up in federal court for the right to protest, contesting the state’s right to declare which kinds of dissent were allowed and protected and which were not. Things got messy, and fast.

What follows is a travelogue of my time in the Boisterous Sea—which is the name I found myself using for the life of court and the more raucous life lived in its interstices, in its hallways, in its foyers, and on its steps, as well as out in the leafy parks and streets of Portland’s courthouse district, bounded by its city hall and its jail as well as the other seats of local and federal governance. It all took me back to my rock in the Mojave, where the sovereign national power of the Marines had interrupted my communion with the unsovereign dreamtime of the earth. Between these two, where was our contemporary public life to be found? Where in our world did the People properly take place? These were and are still my questions. I don’t think I’ve found any definitive answers, but for a few weeks in the fall of 2016—and again in the later winter of 2017—I had

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