Law According To A King

"You've chosen to be the president's lawyer," declared Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono to Bill Barr in the Senate Judiciary Committee when the Attorney General testified on his handling of the Mueller Report. Since his appointment in 2019 after the firing of Jeff Sessions, Barr has led the US Department of Justice and acted as the nation's top law enforcement official for his second time, after a two-year tenure under George H W Bush. His expansive view of executive powers and his apparent partisan actions have drawn a great deal of criticism, particularly in his last congressional hearing two days ago on the current unrest across the US following the murder of George Floyd earlier in the year. Barr's direction to federal officers to use chemical weapons, including tear gas and pepper bombs, and violent tactics against protestors, most infamously to move demonstrators away from Lafayette Park to allow for the President's photo op, drew particular ire from Rep....

In Tennessee Williams's play 'A Streetcar Named Desire' the protagonist Blanche DuBois finds herself living with her sister and brother-in-law after she loses her house and livelihood. Blanche, throughout the play, slowly descends into madness, as she is abused by her sister's husband and haunted by the death of her former lover. At the end, when she is taken away to a mental institution, Blanche softly says to the doctor "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." As a woman who has spent her life hounded by the stark injustices of her situation, Blanche has depended on the kindness of strangers to offer her comfort where there is none, a home when she has lost her own, a job when she has been dismissed, and love where she cannot find some, but it is this same dependence that allows Blanche to be inherently vulnerable to those she depends on: the lover who kills himself, breaking her heart; the sister who gives her away to a hospital; the brother-i...