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i agree with tully as to what's likely to happen.
and alot of this follows from the way in which the arrest was done.
i think everyone involved is looking for a way out.
this isn't about "justice" really. this is about saving face.
other folk have mentioned this, but you have to be dreaming if you imagine the american justice system applies the same standards to everyone. by way of law, it imposes the same constraints on everyone---but because of the nature of the process (trial etc) and because of the class system, at the level of outcomes conditioned by those constraints, it's nothing like equitable. never has been. never will be.
this in general.
secondly, insofar as the media-event dimension of this is concerned, it matters a whole lot that this is roman polanski. and it is this fact that sets up the problems which follow, and which will continue to follow, from the way this arrest was made. like i said earlier, given that polanski's owned a house in switzerland for 25 years and was living there the whole of this past summer, an arrest on the d.l. could have been made at any point. you want to treat polanski as a criminal, then arrest him at his house. you want to fuck things up, do what the swiss police did. because it explicitly invokes polanski's work, drags it into play, makes of it an Issue. it makes of the situation an embarrassment. an international embarrassment no less.
think about the reactions from french political quarters. you have the argument out there that puritan america with its distorted sense of "justice" is arresting one of the most important film directors of the past 40 years, who's 78 years old, and doing it in a climate in the context of which the entire notion of statutory rape has been refigured on a cultural level. like it or not, the crime is different--fundamentally different--now than it was in the early 1970s. the reactions here are anachronistic, and cannot be otherwise.
this is not to justify anything, either. it is simply to say that the is in all probability no way polanski could get anything like a fair trial in the united states were this charge at play, and he can afford lawyers who will make sure that this is the central argument, and that the la district attorney's office would loose in court. i have little doubt about this. the flight charge would be the one to maybe stick. but even then, because of the way the arrest happened, and because of how that arrest allowed this whole situation to be framed, that's not gonna happen either.
and so it doesn't matter what you or i think about it. the theater of which this is part is playing by different rules. it's just the way things are.
folk don't like the idea that this is the case, but that doesn't matter: it is the case.
like the wu tang once put it: cash rules everything around me.
we're free like that.
you want to adjust your image of the united states around this, do what Real Americans do: go out and buy something.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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