Fic: An Excerpt from the Transcript of a Public Radio Interview... (Gundam Wing, Relena)

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Title: An Excerpt from the Transcript of a Public Radio Interview given by Justice Relena Peacecraft Dorlian on her Sixty Sixth Birthday
Author: tiamatschild
Fandom: Gundam Wing
Rating: K
Characters: Relena
Summary: “Hello, you’re listening to Worldview. I’m Sun Hui, and today we’re talking with Justice Relena Dorlian, about her new book on her experiences serving on the World Constitutional Court…”
Warnings: None.
Notes: Written for anenko’s Impromptuthon prompt: “A (preferably gen) fic that deals respectfully with Relena's pacifism.” I don’t know about this. It’s awfully meta, and I’d rather revisit the canon more heavily and write something longer with more heft and more. You know. Plot. Other characters. Stuff like that. But it’s nearly out of time and that’s not happening this weekend, so I hope this is something remotely approaching what you were looking for.

An Excerpt from the Transcript of a Public Radio Interview given by Justice Relena Peacecraft Dorlian on her Sixty Sixth Birthday

Moving from the legislative to the judicial… It’s been interesting, yes. Of course I didn’t even start in the legislative: I was tossed right into the deep end, the administrative end, which was very intimidating. [She chuckles.] I had no idea what I was doing. I’d watched my father practice diplomacy, and I’d been trying some of the things he did on my classmates most of my life, but actually running a country was very different. There’s an exercise of authority that I didn’t really know how to navigate at the time. What authority does any teenager have, except her own moral sense and her innate human dignity? I knew how to leverage those, but the structural authority… that was different.

Diplomacy and the business of legislation, a representative republic, that made another change, but it was an easier one to handle, I knew where were I was. Moving past that, to a judicial practice, has been something like coming home for me. Judicial decision making is a conversation, with the past, with the people in front of you, with the people you’re speaking to, who have to accept what you’re arguing in your decision – all judicial decisions are arguments, you have to persuade before you can dictate, because if you haven’t persuaded, you may be in very deep trouble. You have – well, when you’re serving on a constitutional court, you really don’t have anything to back it up with, except the moral authority you can muster for yourself, and what authority people have already granted you by putting you on that court.

[She laughs.] Oh, yes, that feeling, that’s very familiar. And a relief, because the thing the war taught me was that if you can’t persuade, you haven’t won. Force doesn’t achieve the ends it sets out to. Maybe it can get some kind of approximation of them, but it’s all to do over again in ten years, twenty, and as long as you’ve got to keep having the argument, you might as well have it without killing each other, right? Some things are too important to be over with. You have to do them again, and again, and again. I have a friend, and we’ve been having the same argument for fifty years, ever since I met him. Over and over and over. I can’t imagine where we’d be if we hurt each other over it every time. Nowhere good, I don't think.

But my point is, when you’re a queen, or a president, or even a senator, people expect you to bring out the troops. Or the militia, the riot police maybe. You have access to physical force, and that changes how people relate to you. When you’re a judge, you do have the force of the law behind you, in a sense, but that isn’t a given, because you can’t actually give orders to the police – except maybe for your courtroom bailiff, if you have one. An administration can ignore a judge. Even a constitutional judge, even a supreme court judge –

There’s a very famous case, several hundred years ago in the old United States of America – I do mean the old one, early in its history – where a court said to the then president, “This order you’ve given is unlawful. You cannot proceed with it, it violates the constitution of our country.” But the president answered, “How will you enforce your edict? I command the army. You command nothing.”

Thousands of people died because in that case the army did indeed obey the president, not the court.

Every time you make a decision it’s a gamble. You can’t force anyone to do anything, when you’re a judge. You have to persuade them that your decision is the right one, the one they should follow. We’ve been very lucky, those of us on the World Constitutional Court – even when we’ve been on the dissenting side, people have read what we argued, people have agreed that they said that would abide by what we said, and they have done so. It takes that. It takes everyone deciding that they don’t need violent action, that arbitration and dedication and searching after justice are enough for now. That maybe we don’t quite know where we’re going yet, but where ever it is, we’re all going to go there together.

All going there together. That’s what I’ve wanted, ever since I was a teenager, and realized that there was somewhere good to go, after all.

Comments

[anenko.livejournal.com]

Oh, Relena. Thank you for this lovely and respectful look at my favourite GW character.

I love the last line.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm really glad it works for you. That last line just kind of offered itself up.

[impactbomb.livejournal.com]

YES. This is Relena in a nutshell, perfectly, yes. I love that last line too, and how wonderfully aware and self-confident she is here, how great it is that she has achieved so much and become so much of what she believed she could be as a teenager.

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

:D :D :D Thanks! I've wanted to write about grown up Relena and her hard won self awareness and how, despite the fact that she's learned lots of other tactics over the years, sometimes she still tosses herself in harm's way and starts arguing, ever since I finished the series. I've never quite managed it, but I have rough timelines. She's just too awesome.