Satiricus was ecstatic. As he’s confessed before, when he was a small boy, he’d always hoped to be a lawyer. Using all those fancy words, like “sine die”, and “sine qua non”; jumping up and shouting “incompetent, irrelevant, immaterial!!” (Young Satiricus had seen Perry Mason on TV) …and more to the point, earning the big bucks, had made lawyering his lodestar.
Only his miserable grades at CSEC had stood in his way. So he’d done the next best thing – become a news hack where his editor could yell how “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial” his articles were. But now hope beat anew in the breast of Satiricus. It didn’t matter he couldn’t make it through the door of the law school at UG – much less Hugh Wooding: anybody could now practise law!
And not only ordinary law. Like finding out whether a fowl thief of his mother’s fowl also had rights over the fowl and so could not be charged for larceny – whether petty or grand. Now ordinary folks could even argue Constitutional Law! All you needed was to have an opinion on something and you could tell even Senior Counsels they are “incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial!” It helped too, if you were part of the Opposition.
Take this lady Jam-it Bull-Can. For years Satiricus has seen her long – very long – letters in the press about our trees. Satiricus had never read any of them – there was only so many hours of the day, after all – but he’d figured she certainly knew a lot about trees. Satiricus had this mental image of Bull-Can always hugging one tree or another.
Occasionally, however, Satiricus wondered if Bull-Can could see the forest for the trees. Not least because that’s tough when you’re clinging on to a trunk for dear life. But here it was Bull-Can had solved – just like that! – a legal conundrum that had divided Courts, the Attorney General, the Ex and Present -Speakers of Parliament and every lawyer in town!
The legal issue had to do with a similar problem that’d confronted Hamlet hundreds of years ago: to cut or not to cut, that is the question. Like the little boy who told the Emperor he had no clothes, Bull-Can cut the legal Gordian knot by ruling “cut!” Why? Well… “Duh” she retorted: didn’t everyone see “the importance of the budget as the ultimate lever of control of the legislature over the executive in tripartite Jeffersonian government”.
Now Satiricus hazily remembered from his news backgrounding grunge work that in the U.S., the Legislature has been explicitly given “the spending power”, and the same wasn’t true for Guyana. But what did poor, unlettered Satiricus know? He could only see the forest, not the trees.