Fear and Loathing at the Van Nuys Courthouse

I was sitting in the jury room at Van Nuys Superior Courthouse trying to read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” while listening to a jury orientation video telling me how rewarding it is to perform jury duty.

I knew then that I had chosen the right reading material. Because Thompson’s book, with its surrealistic evocation of a nation delicately balanced between disillusionment and barely suppressed violence, seemed to match the mood of the room in which I was sitting. The air was practically crackling with menace.

Take the fellow behind me who, after some three hours of sitting without anything happening at all, suddenly proclaimed in a voice that anyone in the room could hear, “What kind of sheep are we to be putting up with this?”

Feeling rather fed up myself, I sympathized, but I also had an answer to his question. I just didn’t feel too confident about offering it to him on the spot. So I held my peace. But I think that the question still deserves an answer because it bears upon an important, if often ignored, class crisis in contemporary American society, one that is especially apparent in our own San Fernando Valley.

The quick answer to my fellow juror’s question is that we were there because, as members of the middle class, we had a lot to lose if we refused to show up. Fifteen hundred dollars--the current fine for jury dodgers--is a lot of money. Not for the upper classes, of course, who would see it as chump change; and as for the lower classes, well, they just don’t have that kind of money to lose. And because it is highly unlikely that a jury scoffer would actually be sent to prison if he or she couldn’t pay the fine, there is accordingly less risk.

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I could be wrong about this, but it was striking how just about everyone in the jury room was dressed in the usual casual wear of the middle classes. Certainly a lot of us were teachers, having chosen to serve on the first week of our winter vacations rather than lose classroom time during the term. And we agreed about the fine: We were there because we couldn’t afford not to be.

I realize that I am treading upon the message of our juror orientation video, which was that jury service is a precious democratic duty that we should all embrace. But the fact that the courts have felt the need to put together such a video pep talk indicates that most of us don’t particularly cherish this democratic duty; and the fact that we have to be threatened with a $1,500 fine to make us show up effectively proves it.

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So the question is, why do we have to be coerced into performing jury service? Certainly the main reason is that it is such a massive intrusion on our time, and for many a financial hardship as well. But this problem could be mostly solved if all employers were required to pay their employees fully for their time when serving on juries and if child-care reimbursements were provided. Interestingly, neither of these solutions has been adopted.

At the same time, I heard a number of jurors saying that they didn’t mind having to spend time on jury duty if they thought their time was being well used. What bothered people was the way that they were summoned to perform jury duty and then had to hang around the courthouse all day without doing anything.

Therein lies the social significance of what I overheard at the Van Nuys courthouse. The middle classes, who shoulder most of the civic burdens in our society, are still willing to do so, but they are beginning to suspect that they are being taken advantage of. Such a feeling, for example, is probably behind the current Valley secession movement, which is indeed a mostly middle-class affair--a fact that has caused a great deal of sneering against it--that reflects, rightly or wrongly, a perception that the traditionally middle-class Valley is being snubbed by Westside and downtown power brokers.

The rise and fall of the Reform Party is another example. Embraced as a middle-class alternative in 1992 and 1996, the party disintegrated in 2000 for want of a credible candidate who genuinely represented middle-class interests and values.

I suspect that these opinions will invite some sneering. After all, it has been fashionable to sneer at the middle class since it first became apparent in the 19th century that the old aristocracy was succumbing to it. Certainly intellectuals have been hard on the bourgeoisie, which is ironic because most intellectuals are bourgeois themselves.

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But the middle classes are remarkably patient. We do what we are told to do, pay our taxes, show up for jury duty, even when we suspect that the people giving the orders don’t really care a hoot about us.

And we are grateful for small favors, as when at the end of the day, my jury pool was told that, having sat in the jury room until 4:30 p.m. with nothing to do, we could go home and not have to return for another year.

Thus we are pacified, and the system remains the same.