Life is full of rude awakenings, but few are so cruelly impolite as being forced out of a perfectly comfortable bed at 7:30 a.m. in order to report for jury duty. Being so very civic-minded we nonetheless roused ourselves at that unfamiliar moment of the morning on Monday and presented ourselves for service at the Sedgwick County Courthouse by the mandated time of 8:30 a.m., bleary-eyed and brain-cloudy despite two cups of coffee, and proceeded to do our patriotic duty by somehow staying awake through a cheesy informational video and an interminable wait to be tossed into a jury pool along with 47 of our randomly-selected fellow citizens. Justice surely cannot be properly administered at such an ungodly hour of the morning, we mused as the hours ticked slowly by, but ours is not to question the peculiar workings of the American court system.
The judge admonished all the potential jurors not to discuss the case, and we will heed his order even though we are unlikely to wind up on a jury, as we are the obviously opinionated sorts that the attorneys with the weaker case are always quick to discard, but in any event at this point we know nothing of the case worth discussing. We mention the early morning ordeal only by way of explaining the scantiness of today’s report. Jury duty has not only jarred us from the nocturnal writing rhythm that typically propels our pen to the high standards of this publication, it also deprived of the usual afternoon’s slog through the news in order to find something to rant about. On our drive home for a brief lunchtime nap we heard a few minutes of Rush Limbaugh, who seemed quite agitated about something or another, but otherwise we spent the day frustratingly out of touch with the world’s events.
Nine hours of waiting around the courthouse reading an old P.G. Wodehouse novel in between listening to our pool mates answer questions about their marital status and the ages of their children left us exhausted, but upon returning home we somehow summoned the energy for a quick glance at the always-intriguing headlines on The Drudge Report. There were more outrageous details about the Internal Revenue Service’s systematic harassment of conservative activist groups, a story that had already outraged us, and a new tale that the government has also been snooping through the phone records of the Associated Press. The government’s animus toward the tea party is easily explained, as these groups as so extremist they would severely limit the government to a size that taxpayers are willing to fund, but we could not readily discern why the government would take such an untoward interest in the phone conversations of such reliable defenders as the Associated Press. It’s like the occasional stories of Great Britain or Israel spying on the United States, or at least like it used to be back when we had strong alliances with those countries, and it will be interesting to see how the story plays out. The Associated Press dispatch about the scandal seem understandably miffed, and if this signals the end of a beautiful relationship we suspect the government agents responsible will eventually regret their actions.
Depending on events we might be back to our usual routine by Wednesday, and we hope you will bear with us in the meantime. The news doesn’t always imbue a sense of civic responsibility, but we will press on.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 