AFTERTHOUGH1
Kill Me Pretty
By ALAN BRIEN
I HAVE never been able to get quite so worked up'as most of my progressive pals about the fancy dress which lawyers and judges wear: It takes some be- lieving to picture the average man today, so willing to face a television camera in the street and
express opinions only vaguely tied to any certain facts, becoming awed and tongue-tied by the sight of a nylon sausage wig and a flash of scarlet cape in the court. To the eighteenth-century ploughman, the nineteenth-century labourer, even the between-wars skilled working-man, all that panoply and paraphernalia may have suggested a secret society of the privileged designed to keep the poor and the weak in their place, the rich men's Ku Klux Klan. But now that adult suffrage is at last beginning to convince the people of Britain that they can actually boot their masters out of power (electoral democracy in Britain is, after all, just about half a lifetime old) I think many of them regard the elaborate tomfoolery and antiquarian costumes of the law with the healthy, humorous contempt of Alice in the wit- ness box.
Quite why my radical comrades should think that any kind of uniform must be a bastion of authority and an affront to liberty, I do not know. We are all of us togged out in some kind of conventional period garments, the shape and texture of which have been decided by other considerations than simple common sense. Men's clothes, especially, are a patchwork of fossilised knick-knacks intended for fellows who wore swords and ruffles and winged collars and spats. The difficulty of creating a purely rational suiting can be seen when the designers of science- fiction films, or the illustrators of science-fiction novels, try to dress the inhabitants of the twenty-second century. They can almost never
resist silly little capes and some kind of putted pantaloons We do not get particularly indignant about policemen retaining the silhouette of the Boer trooper, or waiters creaking and sweating in an unh■gienic and uncomfortable outfit which looks like the stage property of some music-hall comic playing 'almost-a-gentleman; Commissionaires. railway porters, clergymen, all members of all the services. dustmen. coalmen. grammar school- masters. park attendants—everywhere you look. people who work together dress together. An agreed form of costume is very useful when you have to decide in a rush or a crush who is giving the orders or who is taking them. Whenever I go to the House of Lords I feel cheated, rather than reassured, by their failure to kit themselves out in ermine and coronets. When a pop singer can actually be permitted to appear in court wearing only a leopard skin and carrying a club, there seems little danger that the Majesty of the Law, as expressed in its courtiers' clobber, is depriving the man in the shiny blue suit of his rights.
American courts, familiar now to everyone in this country through television, tend in my small experience to work sensibly and equitably in civil cases. You really do get the feeling that the com- munity is holding the ring while free citizens argue before a committee of their peers. But in American criminal cases, especially of murder, the lack of all that melodramatic play-acting, of those ghastly rituals by which society in Britain distances itself from the consciousness that the hanged man is standing in its presence, makes the trial seem a routine bureaucratic process, the informal registering in public of a statistical con- clusion. With everybody so relaxed and chummy, 'district attorneys in sports jackets, police wit- nesses accidentally addressed by their first names, the judge decreeing a break for 'a smoke and a cup of coffee' half-way through the morning, the courtroom like a modern parish hall in a new town, and the public benches with seats for
several hundred almost empty—you cannot be- lieve that an injustice might be about to be done. In Britain, it seems so final, so ghoulish, so rare and solemn an occasion, that you are forced to consider in your bowels whether they might he wrong. In America. who can think that these nice. brisk, ordinary folk, who have obviously been doing this for years without a tremor of self-doubt, are likely to make a mistake in operating their machine? It is hard. in the case of an unspectacular homicide, to convince yourself that the prisoner will suffer any worse punish- ment than a fine and a reprimand.
It seems to me. when the state sets out to take away your life or your liberty, that you have the right to expect that the occasion should be marked in the calendar by unusual settings, odd clothes, special terminology, deliberate ritual. It is the difference between the Nazi German gas ovens and the Catholic Spanish auto da Je. In either place. innocent people were being elimi- nated to suit the convenience, and gratify the ambitions, of a totalitarian state. But the Germans operated in a deliberately unemotional manner, without publicity, without celebration, using every device to reduce human beings to things which could then be handled by the most efficient mechanics of mass destruction. The Spaniards declared a holiday and planned the execution as a spectacle for the whole neighbourhood, like a bull-fight or an opera. Their victims remained individuals until the last moment, beseeched to confess, repent, recant and be converted to achieve a less painful end and more comfortable future life. (It is interesting to note that, even in the sixteenth century, the witch-hunters and heretic-catchers in Germany used methods of slaughter more appropriate to cattle than men, dispatching many of their victims in baking ovens rather than on open stakes.) Both these methods of stamping out your opponents are abominations, barely to be thought upon. But I have no doubt which one is the more human if not the more humane. If ever I come to be tried for a capital crime (I could still attract a death penalty by treason, arson of Royal dock- yards, and, I like to believe, by rape of Royalty) I would want everybody there, tarted up in their most fab gear, with bags of Latin quotations, mace-bearers. black caps and spikes round the dock. And I should see that my tailor dreamed up a costume for me that would make the Coro- nation look like a union meeting.
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