Kafka and Me

     Here is the opening line in Kafka's important 1925 German novel, The Trial:

         * Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without
          having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
     
     And here is the parallel to my predicament:

          --Someone must have filed a whistleblower report to the government
            out of spite or for personal gain, because one morning, without having
            done anything wrong, FBI agents swarmed my office, assumed my
            guilt, and initiated the process of punishing me.

And more, from the strangely premonitory novel, written in 1915, and from my life--which is being written now:

          *"You're better off giving your things to us than leaving them in the 
            depository," the strange men said, "because they'll disappear into bribes
           anyway."
          --We're taking all your things, including your money, which will disappear
           into a black hole anyway, between your lawyers and settlements with us.

          * What sort of men were they?  What were they talking about?  What
            office did they represent?  After all, K. lived in a state governed by law,
            there was universal peace, all statutes were in force;  who dared assault
            him in his own lodgings?
          --What's going on?  What have I done?  Why is no one able or willing to
            give me an explanation for this farce?  Who are these people, who have
            raided my office, and confiscated my belongings?

          * "What is it you want, then?" K. asked.  
            "We weren't sent to tell you that," one official said.  Go to your room
             and wait.  I'm exceeding instructions by talking to you in such a friendly
             way."
          --"What is the reason for this raid?" I asked.
            "We don't have to tell you that," the FBI agents said.  Then they followed
            orders from their invisible superiors:  not to be friendly, and not to disclose
            the reasons for their drastic actions, whether they knew them or not, and
            to go through with the raid and theft of my clinic whether they felt doubts
            about the legitimacy or humaneness of their actions, or not.

          * "These gentlemen and I are merely marginal figures in your affair, and
             know almost nothing about it," the deputies said.  "I can't report that 
             you've been accused of anything, or more accurately, I don't know if you
             have."
           --"We're just following orders," the agents implied.  "Someone, somewhere,
             must know something about you, but we don't know who, or what, nor are
             we permitted to care.  We are programmed, like militia, to carry out
             orders."

          * "And don't make such a fuss about how innocent you feel;  it disturbs the
             otherwise unfavorable impression you make.  And you should talk less in
             general,"  was the advice given to K.
          --"Don't talk about your situation with anyone--it disturbs our case," my
             lawyers advised me.  "And don't write in your blog--it can't help you, and it
             can only harm you.  And don't go to the media, which generally harms
             cases like yours, and can never be an aid in your defense."

          * "I thought I was under arrest," K said to the inspector.  "So why are you 
            telling me I can go back to work?"
            "You've misunderstood me;  you're under arrest, certainly, but that's not
            meant to keep you from carrying on your profession.  Nor are you to be
            hindered in the course of your ordinary life."
          --I'm under investigation, and I've already been punished, and I may be
            indicted any day, since a grand jury has been convened, probably more than
            a few times, to indict me.  I must have done something terribly wrong.
            Nevertheless, it's fine for me to keep doing it, to go about my daily
            business, as usual, and to file my tax returns and pay the government
            its share of my (illicitly obtained?) earnings, year after year.  If I enjoy
            wasting time, I can do so by guessing what the federal government is
            formulating in the way of accusations.

          * K. has no idea what is going on, nor who is in charge, but as a way
            of surviving this bizarre experience, he denigrates the agents who 
            arrested him, and anyone else associated with this farce. 
          --I have no idea what is going on, why my office was raided, who's in charge.
            Even my lawyers are unable, when I request the information, to tell me who
            is supervising my case--i.e., who my prosecutor's boss is.  This information
            isn't readily available on the internet, either, or from the DOJ's office,
            perhaps because the bureaucratic entanglements of our judicial apparatus
            are too unwieldy for anyone to sort out.  So, my denigration of the process
            is limited to the only individuals I can identify:  the scriveners and
            messengers (prosecutors and FBI agents) who act on orders passed down
            from the ghostly figures who preside over them.

          * K. finds a lawyer, who makes it clear how unlike normal legal proceedings
            this is:  guilt is assumed, the bureaucracy running it is vast, everything is
            secret, including the charges, the rules of the court, the authorities behind
            the court, the role of the judges.
          --My lawyers tell me that this is how badly many federal cases proceed
            these days.  For a variety of reasons having to do with passage of statutes,
            one by one, over the past two decades, the government has acquired powers
            representative of a totalitarian state, including the ability to intrude on an
            individual's private and business life, obtain warrants to take money and
            personal belongings with ease, and abstain from providing any explanation
            whatsoever.  K. and I both face a government of the absurd.

          * K.'s attorney says it's difficult to prepare a defense since the charge is 
            unknown, and the rules are unknown--and may never be known.
          --My lawyers have told me repeatedly that their hands are tied, there is
            nothing they can do, the government has all the power, and they must
            wait for the government to "make a move" (meaning, indict me) even
            though that's what we have to try to prevent.  But there's no way to
            prevent it, at least no transparent way.  They have no idea what charges
            might be levied, as there appears to be no wrongdoing on my part.  Not
            that that matters.

          * K.'s lawyer says his most important task is to deal with the powerful
             court officials behind the scenes.
          --One professional friend, who was raised in the south, said to me:  "Don't
            underestimate the power of the good-old-boy network.  It's really how
            most problems get solved down here."  I understand this to mean that due
            process, legitimate cause, and facts have very little to do with the
            resolution of problems, including incomprehensible federal investigations
            like the black onw hanging over me.  Instead, who you know, and how
            you schmooze, are what determine your fate.

          * The lawyer tells K. how bad his situation is, and how many other
            hopeless clients he's had.
          --My lawyers regale me with stories about their past dire cases with clients,
            people who were hemmed in by inscrutable government forces, and
            whose ultimate fates remained a mystery until the very end.

          * K.'s work at the bank deteriorates as he is consumed with worry about his
             case.
          --I have much less energy and focus for my work as a physician, and very
            little motivation to continue practicing medicine.  In fact, my instincts tell
            me to shut down my medical clinic, stop interacting with people
            altogether, and hide out in a cave, away from everyone.  Then, maybe,
            I'll be safe from the lethal forces of greed, resentment, envy, and the
            misuse of power that seem rampant in our country.

          * K. learns from a long-time portrait painter in the court that not a single
            defendant has ever been acquitted.
          --No matter what the outcome, the fact of this "trial" will have changed
            me so definitively that I could never declare myself "acquitted" in such
            a way as be restored, finally, to my previous life.

          * K. meets another of the lawyer's clients, who is downtrodden, enslaved
            by his dependence on the lawyer, and almost bankrupt.
          --I have accumulated $115,000 in legal fees, and still have no information
            about my case, no understanding of the rationale (if any) behind it, and
            have made no discernible progress toward its resolution.  If this is how
            much it costs to go nowhere, surely I will become bankrupt if the case
            picks up speed.

     What happens to Josef K.?  In the end, beaten down psychologically, he is led to a quarry where two men place his head on a block and seem to expect him to thrust it into his own chest.  He refuses to kill himself, so one of the men takes the knife and plunges it into K.'s heart, twisting it twice until he dies.  There is never an explanation, there is never a legitimate trial, and the absurdity of the plot is trumped only by its terrifying correspondence to the non-trials of modern life. 
     The Trial, like Kafka's other two novels, was never finished and was not intended for publication.  Artists and writers are far more attuned to future events--the antecedents of which are embedded in the present--than the rest of us.  Perhaps the story's eerie portrayal of the twistedness of man's hierarchies, written almost in anticipation of the Nazi regime of World War II, was too much to bear and made him, like his protagonist, Josef K. (and like me), feel like a failure.  Kafka's last request, documented in a letter found by his friend after his death, was that all his manuscripts be burned.
     Kafka's macabre view of political reality, behind the sham reality (of democracy) we all agree to agree is "real"--until we're caught in its lunatic grip--is now my cynical handbook as I lumber through the cruel, cold, secretly choreographed judicial process, waiting for the next act of corruption by federal officials, whose paychecks for apprehending me are financed--ironically--in part by my own earnings.