“I’m a desperate man. Send lawyers, guns, and money, the s— has hit the fan.” When Warren Zevon sang those words in 1978, he was a brilliant artist and an increasingly destructive alcoholic. By the time he relayed his final wisdom as a terminal cancer patient to David Letterman in 2002 (“Enjoy every sandwich.”), he’d been clean for 16 years.
Although the song alluded to America’s clandestine foreign policy in Cuba and Honduras, I always thought it described a domestic Holy Trinity as well, a path to gaining and maintaining power. Sending “lawyers, guns and money” was a simple and crude description of how to work the levers of American political and social power. I find it just as accurate today.
The stuff has definitely hit the fan. Zevon refers to CIA and military coups, but today we’ve all been drafted into a non-shooting culture war that has negligible benefits in daily life.
Shakespeare was one of the first to note the power of lawyers in the late 1500s when a character suggests killing “all the lawyers.” Today, conservative lawyers and lawyers-turned-judges are leading the charge in the culture wars.
State and federal court systems are drowned in lawsuits intended to cause disruption and delay in implementing legislative and executive actions. The 2020 election challenges went nowhere, but the courts are still inundated with claims related to gun rights, environmental policy, school curriculums, voting rules, gerrymandering, and other flashpoints.
The Supreme Court, with an insurmountable conservative majority, has devolved into a right-wing dream in which all “Christian” evangelical visions can be entertained. Against precedent, it is currently reviewing a “what if” case involving a web design company that might be asked to create a web page for a gay couple’s wedding. The company has never been asked to design a wedding site, but the suit is engineered by conservative lawyers (there they are again!) to provide a legal foundation for discrimination against LGBTQ people in all businesses.
The same groups are pushing suits to allow easier access to guns. Guns are a central part of our national culture: 330 million Americans own about 390 million guns, about 20 million of them assault weapons with firing rates between 1-15 rounds per second. If the assault weapons’ owners all fired at once, they could kill the remaining 310 million of us in seconds. Given the gun lobby stranglehold on Congress, I think Americans already have all the guns they need.
And how important is money? In our society, money doesn’t talk, it screams. A mental adolescent like rich-kid Elon Musk can unleash a torrent of hate on Twitter under the guise of free speech. I’m pleased with the outcome of the Georgia runoff, but $400 million was spent on it, including $50 million worth of Democratic TV ads in the last month, doubling Herschel Walker’s spending, with more than half the money from outside Georgia. Corporate earnings continue to set records, while inflation continues to dig in our pockets for the last few coins.
Two nouns-turned-into-verbs are currently very fashionable, and reflect our current culture: “weaponize” and “monetize.” Donald Trump and Senate Republicans accuse Democrats of weaponizing the Justice Department in a “witch hunt,” while Rudy Giuliani is charged by his Bar Association with “weaponizing” his law license with a frivolous lawsuit about the 2020 election. Packing the courts and then overwhelming them with lawsuits certainly fits the first definition of “weaponize:” adapt for use as a weapon. A country flooded with military weapons in civilian hands meets the second: supply or equip with weapons.
Today, some people and businesses are wildly successful at “monetizing” previously free products or services. These include “influencers” on the web, banks charging fees for letting them profit from our money, NFTs (mysterious ownerships of “unique” digital products), and the sale of our personal data by Meta, Insta, Twitta, and TikTok. I admit to dreaming about all the things I’d like to monetize: the crumbs in my pocket, sawdust from my workshop, the columns I write.
A recent New Yorker article described local school boards facing lawsuits from conservatives without children in the schools, funded by national groups with no local connections. It concluded with a question to a board member about whether the challengers believed a certain book or curriculum would actually harm children. Her response: “I don’t know what anyone believes anymore. We seem to have lost a sense of honesty. It may be just about power and money.” I think Warren Zevon would agree.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.