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Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player

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Niedria Kenny

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“Rare are the principles that drive us to stand even when we realize that we will likely perish in the standing. And rarer still is the person who will surrender everything to protect such principles. Yet, these very characteristics are the unbending elements that raised this nation up from untamed wilderness and turmoil, and let us all be warned that without them we will rapidly return this nation to untamed wilderness and turmoil.”

“I don’t understand,’ said the boy. ‘I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the cliché of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?’ ‘Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality. But often this isn’t understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act. But this was not my great concern then. I did not know these things then. I believed I killed animals for aesthetic reasons only, and I hedged against the great moral question of whether or not by my very nature I was damned.”