Lives of Our Leaders: The Pardoner's Tale

Thank God, it looks like indecent exposure charges have finally been dropped against Jim Morrison. It’s only taken 40 years, and of course he’s dead, but perhaps the decision by the State of Florida will affect the case California has been pursuing against Roman Polanski for almost as many years. Which brings to mind the question of the first pardons of the Obama presidency. For example, Ronald Lee Foster of Beaver Falls, PA, who was sentenced in 1963 to one year of probation for mutilating coins, was pardoned along with Russell James Dixon of Clayton, GA, sentenced to two years’ probation in 1960 for a liquor law violation. It is apparent that the President dug deep in finding mercy for hardened criminals like Foster and Dixon. Fox News quoted White House spokesman Ron Cherlin as saying, "The president was moved by the strength of the applicants' post-conviction efforts at atonement, as well as their superior citizenship and individual achievements in the years since their convictions." One wonders about the kinds of rehabilitation programs provided for coin mutilators, and one also wonders about the nature of these heinous crimes. Are there people who actually torture coins? Is there coin slavery and prostitution in which coins from foreign lands are lured with the prospect of big-time collectors who will prize them like coins that come from ancient Rome, only to find when they arrive that they are simply pocketed and buffeted around inside of some indifferent purse? Are there twelve-step programs for coin mutilators in which those who have mutilated coins can actually make amends both to the issuing authorities and to the coins themselves. For instance, if one mutilates a 1983 D nickel (indicating the coin was minted in Denver), will one attempt to write a letter asking forgiveness of the municipality, together with its mayor and city council at the time the coin was pressed?

Out, Out Bright Spot

It was Sharon Tate who first predicted that her husband would end up making an adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Nastassja Kinski starred in the 1979 film, and now, like one of the characters in Hardy’s novel, the director sits in a Swiss prison cell, society exacting its vengeance 31 years after Polanski fled sentencing for statutory rape.

In a recent Times Op Ed piece, screenwriter and novelist Robert Harris faults Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The screening of the well-received documentary at Sundance, Harris argues, excited Polanski’s desire to prove his innocence, thereby daring the Los Angeles district attorney Steve Cooley to prove that no amount of talent, celebrity, or notoriety puts a man above the law. If Polanski had continued to walk softy through his cherished international stomping grounds, if he had not had the hubris to believe that he could test laws he had spent years flaunting, then he might have returned from the Zurich Film Festival to the comfort of his Paris home without incident. Instead, he sits in a Swiss jail, guilty in fact, but begging for exoneration due to extraordinary circumstances.

Unfortunately, the legal system cannot do justice to the complexity of human existence the way a great novel can. Tess is guilty of murder, but innocent by circumstance, just as Polanski is guilty of rape, and now entrapped by a fateful miscalculation, which led him to seek a pardon that the law would not grant. Once his appeal failed, he protested his innocence by behaving like a man who has nothing to fear. This might seem understandable for a Holocaust survivor whose wife was brutally murdered and who then succumbed to a temptation of the flesh. But it’s hard to let go of the image of an impish, irreverent genius who ruined a young girl's life. Is he callous, indifferent, unrepentant, or merely reacting to the consequences of an original trial which many deemed to be unfair (particularly as regards the behavior of the trail judge)? The fact that the girl now protests that she has long since forgiven Polanski is almost irrelevant to the moral and judicial issues the case poses.

From the point of view of law, it’s an open and shut case; in fiction, it’s an essay on the fallibility of the moral universe; and in life it fills the observer with what Aristotle defined as the two ingredients for tragedy—fear and pity. Classical theories of tragedy also introduced the notion of the fall of a great man. Well Polanski might not be great, but his early film Knife in the Water is a masterpiece. Rent it.