Coy Justice

You probably won't buy this, but I'm serious

Contemporary reality seems more and more like bad fiction

Most of us can't quite believe it, but we have to live with it

Shaking your head in disbelief has got to be good exercise

But it's hard to get by, when there doesn't seem to be a credible

Metanarrative around, and everyone is either fending for themselves

Or living according to one of the many, competing micronarratives

Of course, the very existence of the competition makes us all suspect

That they are all inventions, no one of which corresponds to how things are

The stories we live by may be fan dancing

Showing themselves to be alluring, but intangible

You know, truth is just a matter of correspondence

Do the words faithfully represent how reality is, or not?

You know when someone is bullshitting

Or simply lying

Their words do not match how things are, or what they do

Or they act in ways that show that they don't really believe them

If that consistency of sets of symbols with reality is truth

And the lack of it, a fabric woven of lies and illusions

What's justice?

I've tried to work it out, with the help of some other minds

And as far as I can tell, justice is a matter of rendering unto each one

What each one merits, given all of the contextual particulars

The local laws, the culture, even the order of nature insofar as we know it

That is, things unfold in ways that are routine and predictable

If you help the nun across the street, you merit some admiration

If you push her into traffic, you should probably go to your room for years

That sort of thing, the meting out of what each one merits

Keeps blurring and threatening to disintegrate

It is almost as if it is a figment of our collective imagination

What pretentious twits call a heuristic fiction

A lie that can teach us something, if we read it rightly

Thieves and frauds run entire countries

Or think they do

And no one has the courage to contradict them

But you know

I caught a glimpse of justice today

I can't resist the tradition

The power of the anthropomorphizing imagination

She is a goddess

Themis

She winked coyly at me

A wink is hard to discern, beneath a blindfold

She tests her devotees

I know a tedious mediocrity

Who has not had a new idea in years

Her students have suggested that she seek a new career as a remedy for insomnia

She gets off on mocking me when I encounter technological snafus

We all know twits who treat the technologically challenged this way

She knows the tech frustrates me to no end

Especially since I fell ill

The new software is just as incomprehensible and superfluous as the old

The bore starts smirking and mocking me before I can even read my email

And discover that the protocol for printing has changed

Then a frisson of sadistic excitement scampers through her

She reclines languidly in warm smugness

As I struggle, infuriated, to sort things out

Of late, she has been complaining of strange goings on over her head

Her neighbors appear to be breaking bad

Toxic chemical aromas saturate her capacious garments

She is full of paranoid whispering and strange theories

She enjoys BBC homicides and police procedurals

Strange fantasies are coalescing

I feel pity for her plight

Even as I resent her condescending smirks and trite advice

But I have been an utter fool

Her hubris is offensive to Themis

Mocking and deriding me, humble servant of the goddess

Has moved Themis to confirm that she is no fiction

My obnoxious colleague is suffering a strange indignity

I ought to keep my resentment to myself

It is wasted upon her

She is receiving what she merits

The goddess giggles in the shadows

And winks at me

I needn't trouble the boring buffoon

Or let her trouble me

The goddess is busy

I should be collecting evidence

And sharing it

She can be coy, and real

Be patient

Watch for her