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containing a scrap of paper on which is a letter written by Andrew Jackson. The note is an injunction to massacre. He commands General John Coffee to destroy the Creek Indians in Tallahatchie, in the Mississippi Territory, and “under a discreet officer … to envelop any Indians that may be spying on the south east bank … you will in performing this service keep the greatest order and observe the greatest circumspection.” Coffee descended upon the Creek Indians, murdered the braves, 186 in all, and captured eighty-four women and children. President Jackson adopted one of the orphans. There, in the case inthe Huntington Library, is the order, with deletions and rephrasings scored on it by Jackson. Down the years it has carried the testament of individual responsibility and, though the author did not see it that way, individual guilt. It is not a record that, in the age of electronic, industrialized consciousness, would have survived.
    June 28
    This year is the 325th anniversary of the day when the jurors in the trial of William Penn refused to convict him of violating England’s Conventicle Act (which declared as seditious any religious meeting outside the sanction of the Church of England) despite clear evidence that he had openly preached a Quaker sermon. The judge promptly incarcerated four of these jurors and they spent nine weeks in jail, after which their release and exoneration established forever as English and American legal doctrine that it is the right and responsibility of the trial jury to decide both on matters of fact and the validity of the law in the specific case before it. These rights are enshrined in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments, along with other rights enumerated in or implied by the Constitution.
    Since I started to write about the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), it’s been somewhat demoralizing to discover how many liberals and leftists actually fear juries, and think our affairs would be better conducted without them, preferring panels of “experts” or “qualified” persons passed through all the usual filtration systems to produce people of conventional thought and moral posture.
    I’m just about ready to junk the whole left/right taxonomy as useless and indeed an active impediment to thought and action. Why should we be dominated by a political labeling system based on where people sat in the Constituent Assembly in Versailles in 1789 with factions gathered to the right and to the left of the President’s desk?
    July 5
    I talked today to M. I. “Red” Beckman, who once wrote a little book, The Church Deceived , which contains anti-Semitic passages. Areporter in the Wall Street Journal , Wade Lambert, charged that such writings by Beckman somehow compromised FIJA, of which he is an active member.
    I talked with Beckman on the phone at some length. His central focus seemed to be the government’s abuse of power via the IRS, which he termed a “terrorist” organization. A Christian, he thinks all organized religions and governments use people ruthlessly. He says many adherents of Judaism are slaves of Satan, but he says the same of adherents to other religions, particularly those assenting to a 501(c)(3) relationship with the state. He was against the Vietnam War. He says the pendulum swung too far to the left and people like him are working to stop it swinging too far to the right. He says Hitler was a criminal, Reagan was a criminal. He thinks … But, so far as FIJA is concerned, what Beckman thinks and says is not the point. To denounce FIJA because Beckman supports jury nullification is like denouncing the Fifth Amendment because Communists used it in the ’50s.
    All over America constituencies written off as hopelessly uneducable have been abandoned to their own resources to deal with American capital moving abroad. The “farm crisis,” “oil politics,” NAFTA, the IMF and the World Bank can produce simultaneously militias in America and Chiapas.