Editor’s Note: What would the sharpest critics of the past make of today’s political theater? To find out, we used artificial intelligence to imagine how historical commentators would review current events. The following is an AI-generated commentary on the presidential pardon economy, written in the sardonic, dictionary-making voice of Ambrose Bierce.
Addenda to a Dictionary Never Finished
A commentary in the manner of Ambrose Bierce
(A stylistic pastiche — not a historical document. Bierce vanished into Mexico in 1913; this imagines the copy he might have filed had he vanished instead into 2026.)
PARDON, n. A retroactive form of applause, formerly reserved for the penitent, now available to the solvent. Distinguished from a bribe chiefly by the order in which the money and the mercy change hands.
LOBBYIST, n. One who, for a fee, translates a client’s guilt into a language the powerful find persuasive. See also: TRANSLATOR, ALCHEMIST, PRIEST.
ARBITRATION, n. The polite fiction by which two liars agree to let a third liar decide which of them owes the other money. In the matter of the rap musician and his unreceived pardon, the sum in dispute is $300,000 — a figure that would have struck the founders of the Republic as an entire national budget, and strikes their descendants as a modest retainer.
WEAPONIZATION, n. The act of using government power against one’s enemies; also, ironically, the name given to the department established to complain about it. Its former chief, having been found to leak the very grand-jury secrets he was appointed to guard, has been reassigned to the pardon office, there presumably to practice mercy upon himself, being the only applicant likely to receive it.
I read, with the particular satisfaction a man reserves for confirmations of his lowest opinion of his species, that a popular singer paid two operatives the sum of six hundred thousand dollars for a Presidential pardon that failed to arrive, and that he is now suing to recover half of it — as though the man who sells you a forged deed to the moon owes you a refund merely because the moon proved unreachable. The White House disclaims all knowledge of the transaction, which I believe entirely, in the same way I believe a burning house disclaims all knowledge of the match.
A journalist, interviewed on the government’s own wireless charity, reports that the fee for such services now runs as high as five million dollars, depending on the eminence of counsel retained. I confess a grim admiration. Murder has always been priced by the deed and treason by the century, but here at last is a market that prices forgiveness itself, and prices it, notably, higher than most of the crimes it forgives.
The statistics, when a man troubles to compile them, are more damning than any editorial could be, which is why editorialists so rarely trouble to compile them. Of some sixteen hundred rioters absolved in a single stroke on a single morning, very nearly one hundred have since distinguished themselves by fresh offenses, a dozen of these so foul that even a newspaper of famously weak stomach found the courage to print the particulars: child molestation, assault, a conspiracy toward murder, a dog loosed upon a neighbor with intent. One such beneficiary of executive grace has since been sentenced to die in prison of old age rather than of justice — the two being, in this Republic, no longer reliably the same event.
It has long been my contention that man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to; I withdraw the observation. I have found, in the present case, an entire apparatus of government constructed for the specific purpose of never blushing at all, and staffed, appropriately, by men who have had a great deal of practice.
I do not say the Republic is dying. I have said that before, of other years, and been wrong, or at least premature. I say only that it has discovered a new organ — small, discreet, and highly profitable — through which its mercy is now dispensed, and that this organ, like the appendix, appears to serve no purpose except to occasionally rupture and poison everything nearby.
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