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 In time of need we look for help. Even if it is small scale, a colleague standing by our side, or the prayers of a friend, we appreciate support. On big matters, personal or collective, we look around and get what support we can. Petitions, lawyers, campaigns—whatever helps our cause. 

In times past, people would hire someone to fight for their personal cause. These representatives were called champions medieval myths and legends are full of champions: swordsmen, knights in armor. Lancelot was Queen Guinevere’s champion. (He had to kill twenty-two knights when he rescued her from execution!) If your champion won, you were vindicated or innocent—at least in the public eye and legally. It was an easy-to-measure system even though it might not seem quite fair to the modern eye. Eventually the system changed, and a different kind of champion replaced the strongest fighter. The lawyer replaced the knight. Suit and tie replaced sword and armor.  Yet it was still the old story: money and power bought the best champion. 

Consider the following passage from The Once and Future King, a story of King Arthur, by T. H. White. Arthur understood how life worked, and he tried to explain that to his nephew:

 “You are still very young, Mordred. You have yet to learn that nearly all the ways of giving justice are unfair . . . .  If an assertion cannot be proved, then it must be settled some other way, and nearly all of these ways are unfair to somebody. It is not as if you would have to fight the Queen’s champion in your own person . . . . You could plead infirmity and hire the strongest man you knew to fight for you, and the Queen would get the strongest man she knew to fight for her. It would be much the same thing if you each hired the best arguer you knew to argue about it. In the last resort it is usually the richest person who wins, whether he hires the most expensive arguer or the most expensive fighter.”

A crowded arena these days where arguer champions defend their clients is our nation’s capital where we always hope for truth and justice to prevail, at least for our party, but, alas, it is still those who can hire the best champions who too often prevail.