The Worm Comes Home to Roost
Worms are not terribly likable beings. The ones in the ground seem pretty harmless and some people, mostly organic gardeners, will tell you about all the good things that worms do for biodiversity and eco-balance. The ones that find their way into our bodies in various ways are a lot less pleasant, whether causing a crescent mark on the head of some ten-year-old Opey or being the subject of some digestive disruption that is almost too gross to mention. But for some reason, Shakespeare, some 450 years ago, decided that the lowly worm that has no real ambition other than to move forward, can be forced to turn direction when confronted with the proverbial immovable object. So to say that the worm has turned is to say that an otherwise humble beast has had enough and will change its course to keep itself in play.
Chickens and other birds always come home to their nests to roost or gather for the night. The roost is a bird’s safe haven and they go back there to be safe. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, it was Malcolm X, the black activist that coined the expression that the chickens would finally be coming home to roost. What he meant was that the wrong-doings committed by a politician or a political party will undoubtedly boomerang and come back to punish them. He wasn’t talking about JFK, but rather about the forces that conspired to assassinate the young president. His expression falls right in there with the biblical expression , “To sow the wind is to reap the whirlwind.”
The Bible teaches us that the world that embodies injustice, whether under the hand of Ramses II in Egypt or in some Judaean desert, will eventually rectify itself and righteousness will win out and the perpetrator of the injustice will be smote by the hand of God. Even assuming that is too much hellfire and brimstone for you, it is fair to suggest that what goes around comes around. And in the world of geopolitical wrong-doing, we have lots of evidence that despots and dictators have a hard time finding comfortable off ramps and eventually pay the price of their misdeeds. If we look at the world today, the high profile bad actors out there include Vlad the Destroyer, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Xi Jinping of China, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Victor Orban of Hungary, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea and perhaps Ali Khamenei of Iran….and, oh yeah, Donald J. Trump. As a teacher of ethics, I know that you cannot have ethical standards without judgement and I show my judgements quite clearly with this list. I do not put Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hilary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron, Lula de Silva, or other world leaders on that list, where others with different judgements might. What I choose to believe is that the bad acts of those on the first list are crimes against their people and the people of the world and that they will ultimately receive their comeuppance when the world decides to open its eyes to the facts and reality rather than the political expedient.
This week, we seem to be approaching such a moment, at least for two big players on the list. You can argue that Bolsonaro has already begun his descent into his appropriate layer of Hell. And Kim Jong-Un seems to be keeping a low enough profile that one must assume that he has his problems. Meanwhile the others are still banging around and hurting people at every turn. But this week, this week, everything has changed. First there is the biggest current threat to world stability and economic prosperity, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Russia, the 71 year-old president who has been the leader of Russia (either as President of Prime Minister) for 24 years. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has charged him with war crimes, specifically concerning the removal and relocation of Ukrainian children. On the surface, to some, this might seem like a toothless indictment since several key players, including the U.S., Russia, India and China, are not members of the I.C.C. and therefore do not acknowledge its authority. That all said and done, the membership includes 104 countries and the reality is that this action is noteworthy as an action against a major league player like Putin. The last national leader so indicted was the president of Sudan and that was over a decade ago, so this is pretty new ground for the I.C.C.. What the indictment does do to Putin is that it makes him harder for people to pal around with, people like Xi Jinping, who is supposed to visit Putin next week in Russia. It also narrows Putin’s world considerably because there are now a whole raft of places where Putin cannot travel without risking being arrested and taken to The Hague. Putin is already flaunting the order and has traveled into Ukraine and Crimea just to thumb his nose at the I.C.C. warrant. There is still no way to see that as anything other than a pain in the ass for Vladimir.
The other leader, or in this case ex-leader, who is at the top of the news cycle is none other than Donald J. Trump. On the morning news today I saw a very poignant graphic that had Trump at the center of a four-pronged set of criminal investigations including the Manhattan D.A. case regarding a porn star payoff that he claimed was not a campaign-related expense, the DOJ January 6th case regarding Trump’s alleged incitement of the attacks on the U.S. Capital, the Fulton County, Georgia Criminal Election Influence Investigation, and the DOJ/National Archives Criminal case about the Mishandling of Classified Government Documents. Those four investigations are zeroing in on Trump and gradually tightening the ropes on him. At any given moment, one or another of these four investigations is actively squeezing Trump, and today, the odds-on favorite to blossom first into an actual indictment is the Manhattan D.A. case, which Trump himself has declared on social media will have him needing to surrender to those authorities on Tuesday. I am not legal analyst enough to know which sequencing of these cases would be most effective in getting to justice, but it sure seems like this heretofore Teflon beast is getting to a place where he is cornered with nowhere to run.
When I looked up the official charges of these four investigations, I noted that there are no less than 2 additional criminal cases pending against him and 14 active civil cases pending against him. That is an amazing litigation burden for anyone, even Donald Trump. And here’s the thing, they are all more or less on their own schedule, but they are all also probably thinking that once someone has actually filed criminal charges against an ex-president (something that almost happened during the Civil war, but didn’t in the end), all hell will break loose. And that seems to be the exact moment we find ourselves in right now.
As we go through life, it is normal to wonder how injustices get perpetuated and not timely resolved. We see people who seem to get away with murder and we are left to opine that the worthy will get their just desserts in the next life and that the unworthy will sooner or later, but no time soon, get their punishment. I have found that such worm turning and chickens coming home to roost happen sooner rather than later and almost always do, indeed, occur. In the courts I have seen the righteous acquitted and the scurrilous and deceitful convicted. It is somewhat reassuring when justice is served in either direction.
I like to think of the bad actors as the worms in this scenario, but they are not the ones turning to improve their lot, but to hide themselves in their own deceit. Meanwhile the chickens are, indeed, coming home to roost in that the likes of Putin and Trump are finally facing the music. I feel inclined to mix a few more metaphors to make my point. As W.C. Fields once famously said in a manner to describe the roosting process, “there comes a time in every man’s life when he must seize the bull by the tail and face these situation.” Putin and Trump are both nose to ass with their personal bull’s backside and these worms have nowhere to turn.