THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE

 

I HARDLY KNOW WHERE TO START WITH THIS BOOK!  It's just PACKED TO THE GILLS with meditations on Chaos and Order and the way they blend at the edges...

First off, this is a true story taking place in a courtroom.  The author -- who was one of the defendants in this case -- recorded this memoir in the form of a play,  which is MORE THAN FITTING because what is a trial, after all, but a theatrical presentation?  The public is the audience and the jury, I guess, is a panel of critics who GONG THE LOSERS.  

(If you don't know what I mean by 'GONG' you need to find some old video of a now-defunct television program called THE GONG SHOW.  All will be explained.)

The play -- authored by Daniel Berrigan and published under ISBN 0-8232-2330-2 --  takes us back to the chaos emanating from, and surrounding, the Vietnam War.  The Catonsville Nine was a group of Catholic War protestors, including a priest or two, who felt that allowing the war to go on would be a gross violation of everything Jesus Christ stood for.  And everything the Nine stood for.  

(Nobody ever commented anywhere about the OPPOSING VIEWPOINT, held by MILLIONS, that Jesus stood firmly against communism and would have been in favor of this war.  If that had ever been brought up the book would have been MUCH, MUCH LONGER.)

There was almost no discussion of the evidence against the Nine.  They cheerfully admitted making a batch of gasoline jelly, walking into the Catonsville Selective Service office, taking the 1A files outside and NAPALMING them, so the teenaged boys represented in those files would not, themselves, die in the napalm holocaust that was the Vietnam War.  In short, they were trying to impose Order on the Chaos of the war by visiting a little Chaos on Catonsville, Maryland. 

What the defendants talked about in court-- in the form of blank verse -- was how their life experiences working with the poor, in the USA and elsewhere, changed how they saw foreign policy.  It changed how they saw the role of the Catholic Church and it definitely changed how they saw their own personal roles in the fracas.

The beleaguered judge -- trying to keep things Orderly, of course -- dragged them back again and again to the essential legal questions in the case.  They and their defense counsel calmly riposted, in essence, "You're missing the point."  The judge countered with, "Do you really think you're going to stop the war at this local court hearing? It doesn't work that way."  The Nine responded -- not in these words -- with "You are still completely missing the point."

And I started Googling a bit, because for sure they were far from the only ones protesting that war in various ways.  One of the defendants said he visited the deathbed of a young man who'd set himself on fire to protest the war. Like that famous Buddhist monk who immolated himself in protest: 

Looking him up, I discovered a whole list of people who did likewise.  It was a huge thing for a while there.  At least the Nine only immolated a stack of paper.  And in doing that they undoubtedly saved some lives.

There are comments through this little book challenging the reader to ask, OK, what is Chaos anyhow?  What is Order?  Where are they exactly the same?  Do they ever truly diverge?  Where?  Are they in fact opposites, and in that case how do we find it so hard to tell them apart?

This is great reading for Discordians everywhere.