Interesting exchange between the spy for Cuba and the judge that gave him a life sentence;
The notion of a class above the law, one which could wave away the petty customs of the unwashed, were on almost cartoonish display in a moment almost made for television during the sentencing of Walter Kendall Myers, who was being sent to life in prison for spying for Cuba. He argued with judge Reggie Walton that he had a higher obligation from noblesse oblige to help the Cuban people. Kendall Myers is the grandson of National Geographic Founder Gilbert Grosvenor and the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell. Imagine the scene.
“The U.S. is not a perfect nation,” U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton said, noting that his great-grandfather was a slave and his grandfather a sharecropper.
“But America is not the devil you may believe it is,” Walton said. “You had privileges unlike others, and yet you squandered those privileges at the expense of your own government.” …
Myers told Walton the couple’s “overriding objective” was to help the Cuban people.
“If you believed in the revolution, you should have defected,” Walton said, adding that Myers showed “no sense of remorse.” The defendant gave the judge a 10-minute discourse on why the couple spied and how they’ve found a “silver lining” in prison: They’ve stopped smoking, he joked.
You could not have made the exchange up. The last remark about the cigarettes says it all. Even in the dock Myers was playing the Olympian, laughing at the petty conceits of a jumped-up Uncle Tom. The alumnus of a private boarding school and Brown University who had been a State Department intelligence analyst, university professor and weekend sailor of a 37-foot yacht grandly told the judge that he was only motivated by humanitarian ideals and would continue his ennobling work even behind bars. The descendant of a sharecropper might sentence him with his greasy little pen but for his part Myers could remain innocent before the great bar of his own opinion. The question nobody answered was whether he was also innocent in the judgment of his ‘peers’.
“Our overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution and forestall conflict between the two countries,” Myers said as the couple stood side by side before Walton. “We are equally committed to helping the struggling people of the world.” …The couple received little of monetary value from the Cubans. Instead, prosecutors said, they were rewarded with medals — and, in 1995, a private visit with Fidel Castro. …
Myers told the judge that he and his wife served as teachers’ aides in jail and had made friends among the inmates — “many are African Americans trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, drugs, crimes and jail.” Invoking Nelson Mandela, he told Walton that he hoped to be able to continue working with inmates.
The judge, though, said he was troubled by the idea of Myers teaching in prison, where he said inmates can be “radicalized to hate their own country.”
pajamasmedia.com
Good observation! Damn right, that guy will do his best to radicalize inmates to hate their own country. I can't help but remember that this spy for Cuba had taught an entire generation of Foreign Service officers.
My only regret is that Kendall Myers won't be hanged for treason. It would give our elitist disdainful of America State Department folks a good object lesson. |
