I’m not sure this post is appropriately titled, particularly since at least part of the inspiration for it is an armless woman, Venus de Milo. More accurately, the re-evaluation of the time period in which she was created is the inspiration for this post.

My frustrations as a somewhat-recently-minted lawyer are mounting. Although I’ve now had approximately four or five years, including my time as student and law clerk, to become used to the way our criminal justice system works, or, actually, doesn’t work, it still really wears me down when I take a moment to think seriously about where we are. And where we’re supposed to be.

But tonight, I’m taking a break (uh-huh), by reading Janson’s History of Art (Sixth Edition). And I’ve run across these words:

The Renaissance must have been an uncomfortable, though intensively exciting, time to live in. Yet these very tensions, it seems, called forth an outpouring of creative energy such as the world had never seen before. It is a paradox that the desire to return to the classics, based on a rejection of the Middle Ages, brought to the new era not a rebirth of antiquity but the birth of modern civilization. — Janson, History of Art (Sixth Ed. 2000) p. 384.

I think — and I could be wrong — that we are at least two decades into a New Era in the history of humankind. But, sadly, I don’t actually think it’s all that new after all; it is a kind of negative Renaissance. A return to the Dark Ages.

The seeds of it began to sprout a few decades ago. Hell, now that I think about it, they probably germinated almost from the same day as the Founding of our Nation. The growth was quite — extremely — slow at first. And in the last several decades only has it really become noticeable. How prescient was Thomas Jefferson, one of our Nation’s Founders, when he wrote to William S. Smith in 1787 and said, “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion [as that which lead to the founding of our country]… We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half, for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?”

The problem is that we really do seem to be moving into a kind of New Dark Ages. The Law has been all-but-abolished. Our judges no longer concern themselves with precedent, logic and the idea that there are certain inalienable Rights we each inherit by virtue of simply being alive. The New Dark Ages are marked by Legal Positivism, the idea that the Law and Rights are what those in power say they are.

*sigh*

Four days of almost no sleep, as I fruitlessly pursue pro bono cases defending people who shouldn’t even be charged are taking their toll.

Maybe I can make more sense of this in another post…or several….hundred….thousand….

In any event, what’s most ironic is that the Venus was most likely unknown in the Renaissance period, the reading of which inspired this post. If I recall correctly, she was not re-discovered until the 1800s. So the thinkers, artists and others of the Renaissance knew nothing of her.

Oh, well, that’s what I get for writing down my thoughts so late at night after four days of almost no sleep, eh? 😉