Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a fitting and enjoyable, if underwhelming, conclusion to the exciting series of books.  Deathly Hallows was an enjoyable read, and a lot of fun.  But I have three problems with it now that I’m done; overall, I’d give it a “B” grade – above average but not excellent.  Some spoilers follow these thoughts.

 

First, it drags.  Particularly in its first act, the book’s characters just don’t seem to do very much after the first few chapters.  It’s not so much that they spend a lot of time sitting around talking about their feelings – they just plain sit around.  Also, the body count is not as high as I had initially thought; for all of there being a war going on between the wizards, there isn’t that much death depicted.  The book is not about making sacrifices to achieve defeat over evil; at best, it’s about patience in the face of overwhelming odds and at worst, it’s about patience in the mind of the reader to hope that Rowling will eventually get back to writing about some action.

 

Second, the climax of the book has a bizarre and off-balance interlude.  I would much rather that the author had found a way to realize her narrative goals for that chapter in a different way than she did and I’m sure I could have thought of at least five ways that could have been done.  Imagine if, in the big final scene of Return of the Jedi, when Luke and Darth Vader and the Emperor are all dueling and fighting, there was a three-minute flashback to a quiet moment from Luke’s training with Obi-Wan.  Similarly, the epilogue has no narrative purpose at all and could have been omitted entirely.

 

Third, it lacks the depth of the previous stories.  The story is a series of “find-the-dingus” mini-adventures rather than a single narrative, which will be no surprise to those who recall how the sixth book ended.  There isn’t a lot of exploration of Big Ideas along the way.  Previous Harry Potter books have addressed issues of morality, bravery, friendship, equality, and grief.  (And a healthy distrust of the potentially oppressive and abusive power of government.)  This book flirts with the ideas of acceptance and forgiveness, but only in a very roundabout sort of way.

 

Don’t get me wrong, there are some moments of genuine excitement, several scenes of fantastic fun and adventure, when the book demands attention and is a gripping page-turner.  The bad guys are really bad, Harry and his friends show what they are really made of and make you proud, and the story does build to a climactic finale that fans have been hoping for at the Battle of Hogwarts.

 

The movie that results from the book will be fun and exciting.  I think that the producers would be well-advised to film Harry Potter Six and Harry Potter Seven at the same time, before the actors playing the heroes grow too old to look like teenagers; Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, is already 18 years old and it seems to take the producers about two years to crank one of these movies out.  I’m just saying.

 

But the senses of wide-eyed joy, wry humor, and confrontation of bigger narrative issues are, if not completely absent, nevertheless present in deficient quantities. The book feels very much like it was written because of the overpowering writer’s impulse sometimes called “fulfillment of contractual obligation” but which surely had even greater pressure behind it because of the unprecedented global popularity of the books. 

 

I’m sure lots of writers have books like this.  The muse sings when she chooses to, and she doesn’t care when the publisher’s deadlines are approaching.  The obviously-talented J.K. Rowling was surely under immense pressure to write this book, and she turned in journeyman work despite it.  It’s good, but it’s not the magnum opus you were hoping to read.

Betting Against America

James Clyburn of South Carolina is the Democrats’ third-in-charge in the House of Representatives – his job is “Whip,” meaning that it’s up to him to distribute the “party line” on particular issues that come up to vote and to get as many Democrats as possible to adhere to the party’s position on an issue.  He worries, though, that if the report due in just over a month from the theater commander in Iraq is positive in tone and provides demonstrable proof that the surge in U.S. troops in Iraq is actually doing some good, this will split a significant number of Democrats from the party’s majority and block efforts to establish a solid timetable for the withdrawal of those troops. 

 

In an unfortunate bit of wording, Congressman Clyburn said to the Washington Post that a positive report from General Patraeus “… would be a problem for us.”  This phrasing sure makes the Democrats look like they’re betting on America to lose.  I sincerely hope that most Democrats don’t actually feel that way – but if the evidence demonstrates that “the surge” really is working, how will advocates of an immediate withdrawal of troops react? 

 

Will the most strident “pull-out-now” advocates say (as I am preparing myself to do) that their initial misgivings about this strategy were not well-founded and that indeed, things are getting better over there?  An admission of being wrong in the past is not good for politics, and a lot of politicians have painted themselves into a corner.  I’d hate to think that they are more concerned about saving face than they are about getting something good out of this war at last.  If you’re going to say “I hope the surge works but I don’t think it will,” that’s fine – as long as, if it does turn out other than you expected, you be honest enough to say so.

 

You can still argue for a timed drawdown even if we’re having success.  Yes, the “we’re bound to fail” argument falls by the wayside, but the “we have other theaters of operation that need attention” argument does not.  Neither does “it’s time for the Iraqis to start doing the job themselves.”  And most importantly, you don’t lose the ability to look a soldier in the eye and say, with sincerity, “Good job.”  Congressman Clyburn, by publicly regretting success, has come close to that point.

Ethics in Government

New media outlets are particularly good at putting facts together and reveal a larger picture.  Consider this example:  “One day after the feds rummaged through his property on a corruption probe, [U.S. Senator Ted Stevens] threatened to try to kill an ethics reform package.”

Agnosticism and Empiricism

I’m often challenged in my atheism – invariably by very religious types, often by a subset of religious types, who have bought in to the religious argument that “there is no such thing as an atheist.”*  They ask me to instead describe myself as an “agnostic,” defining that term as “One who does not know whether God exists or not.”  I typically resist this request, or at minimum, I demur to it.

 

An “atheist” is one who lacks a belief in the supernatural.  If confronted with actual evidence of God’s existence, the typical atheist would change that belief; that so few atheists do so is testament to the obscurity of such evidence (and those atheists who do adopt theological beliefs seem to do so based on emotional reasons rather than evidentiary ones).  It does not mean “one who affirmatively proposes the non-existence of God.”  That would be what humanists call “strong atheism.”  “Weak atheism” is the proposition that there is no evidence for the existence of God or alternatively that God’s existence has not been established and therefore cannot be presumed, which is different than saying “God does not exist.”

 

An “agnostic” is one who maintains that the existence of God cannot be known.  There is no possibility that evidence of God, whatever that might be, can be located which would satisfy the agnostic.  Alternatively (and not necessarily inconsistently), the agnostic thinks the question of God’s existence is not subject to objective analysis in the first place.  Thus, one could be an “agnostic atheist,” contending that there is no evidence of God’s existence, and there cannot be any such evidence, either.

 

By this definition, I am not an “agnostic atheist.”  I suspect that the existence of God could, at least theoretically, be determined.  While I’ve not taken the time to theoretically consider an experiment to test the hypothesis, it would necessarily include evidence of something that could not happen in nature; if it could happen in nature, there would be a natural explanation for it.  For instance, an omnipotent God could draw a circle (in two-dimensional space) whose circumference was measurably equal to its diameter.  I have yet to see such evidence and I do not see any reason to presume that in the absence of such evidence, I should assume the proposition is correct anyway.  (This includes Pascal’s fallacious and intellectually dishonest Wager.)

 

Notably, theists never seem able to identify any circumstance or fact in which God’s existence could be disproved to them.  That’s “faith” – belief in the truth of a proposition regardless of the state of the available evidence for or against that proposition.  It is this trait which I lack; I cannot maintain the belief in God in the absence of supporting evidence.  If you cannot come up with such a theoretical standard of proof, it may be that your faith is such that you are an “agnostic theist” – for you, there is not even the theoretical possibility that evidence exists which would convince you to modify your faith; entertaining the possibility of the non-existence of God is a meaningless exercise for you.

 

Variants of the ontological argument and the cosmological argument have failed to convince me, theistic Readers, so you need not propose them here; also, these are philosophical arguments rather than standards of proof.  What I’m interested in is what kind of empirical evidence would persuade you to give up your belief in God’s existence, as I have suggested above could compel me to do the same with respect to my own atheism.

 

* Another oft-repeated bromide is “there are no atheists in foxholes.”  An attorney with whom I work is a Vietnam veteran, and he assures me that during a time he was seeking cover from intense enemy fire, there was at least one atheist in his foxhole.  (There was one other guy in there with him.)  More on atheists in combat soon – a recent controversy about the death of CPL Pat Tillman has me pissed off enough that I want to calm down somewhat before writing about it.

That's Me In The Corner, Choosing My Confessions

A lot of religionists would like to believe that while people occasionally have struggles with their faith, they always return to God.  It’s not so, as this reporter for the Fish Wrapper describes in a moving and deeply personal story of what must have been a painful series of episodes for himself and his family.  Basically, confronting the evil that people do in the name of God illustrated for this reporter that the spirit of God, the spirit of doing good things, was absent from the religious activities he had worked so hard to earn the ability to cover as his beat.  It’s worth noting that he describes resisting that idea for a long time and that he approached his job as a religion reporter with great enthusiasm for the subject as a positive thing for people, and as a born-again Christian hoping to use his reporting beat to spread the word, and later to push clerical leaders towards reforming their bad behavior.

 

By offering the link, I’m not suggesting that religion causes bad behavior.  I want to be quick to point out that “correlation” and “cause” are not the same thing.  And I don’t think that the reporter suggests that religion causes bad behavior, either – but he does suggest that religion is used with some regularity to conceal or justify bad behavior when it happens.

 

Also, I’m also aware that “religion” – defined as some combination of the elements of ritual, periodic group meetings, repetitive recital of prayers or repetitive study of ancient texts, and veneration of particular objects or people – is not quite the same thing as “faith.”  And the objection here is to religion rather than faith – but it is an important demonstration of how closely the two are tied together that a man such as this, who sees evil done by religion, could lose his faith along with losing his religion.

I Got Simpsonized

You can do it, too.

Chuck Schumer on the Presumption of Nomination

Senator Charles Schumer feels like he got hookwinked during the Roberts and Alito nominations. And he’s therefore not going to support any Republican nominee for the Supreme Court at all unless a good showing can be made that a new nominee will vote in a manner that pleases him. The key quote from his speech is an exhortation to his Democratic Party colleagues in the Senate: “We should reverse the presumption of confirmation. The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice Stevens replaced by another Roberts; or Justice Ginsburg by another Alito.”

I disagree with the premise of his proposal. Politically, there needs to be recognition that the President is going to nominate someone who he thinks will rule in a manner that pleases him, and that there must be some deference to that process or there will be no judges at all. But that’s not the same thing as a “presumption of confirmation;” rather, that’s a realistic view of the situation, and Senators who know that they disagree with the President on Constitutional issues will need to be willing to settle for “half a loaf” during times in the country’s history that political control over the nomination and confirmation process is shared between differing political parties. The distasteful necessity of such a compromise is not exactly Schumer’s complaint, of course – he thinks he was actually deceived by these nominees and their White House sponsors, and that he and his fellow Democrats didn’t even get half a loaf out of agreeing to confirm the nomination of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. But that’s besides the point.

There should be no presumption either for or against confirmation of any nominee to any post, particularly to a post as critical as the Supreme Court. The Senate has its own role to discharge in the process of putting new judges on the bench, and the Constitution says nothing about deference to the President. The Senate’s main job is to render a sober and thorough evaluation of the nominee’s qualifications and abilities to discharge the office, and at least some inquiry into that person’s likely impact on the sphere of the law and government that the nominee will influence. The exact extent of that impact analysis is not definable in easy terms, since while a judge cannot evaluate the merits of a case before the case is presented to her, her attitude about issues, individual rights, the extent of the government’s powers, and the law in a generalized sense are all important to know.

So I don’t think Senator Schumer is out of line to demand some idea of how a Supreme Court nominee will vote and behave once in office. But I do think that a litmus test on particular issues (most prominently abortion) is improper, and it’s pretty clear to me that Schumer is particularly mad about the recent abortion-rights decision. He would not have made this speech had the Court ruled differently on that single case.

Postscript: I hope all my Loyal Readers, from left, right, and center, will join me in wishing the Chief Justice a speedy recovery from his seizure and fall this afternoon.

The Escape Goat

Here's a UoP student comment to a hypo about a company potentially able to pin a very illegal act on a "rogue" employee: "This story is a good example of why you should always follow the law because Rick didn't do it and now the company can make him the escape goat for all the problems that happened later."

You know, if that goat is not going to be a very suitable vehicle for placing blame if the darned critter is constantly getting away!

This time, I know it's not a spell-check issue. Other students' posts used the word "scapegoat" correctly. You know, while this bon mot is every bit as amusing as "analizing minors," and somewhat more innocent, too, I'm not going to miss these little moments.

The Short-Answer Atheist Survey

An interesting set of questions from the Friendly Atheist.  The key here is to have short, concise, honest, and meaningful answers to the questions.  Here goes:

• Why do you not believe in God?  Because there is no evidence indicating God’s existence and I have never had an emotional experience that inspires me to believe in God in the absence of such evidence.
• Where do your morals come from?  Christians call it “the Golden Rule,” but the idea is found in nearly every society and every religion in human history.
• What is the meaning of life?  It’s about being happy and helping other people be happy, too.  “Happiness” is not the same thing as “pleasure.”
• Is atheism a religion?  No, but the law sometimes has to treat it like one.
• If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times?  I hope.  I worry.  I seek comfort with my friends and family.  I try to do what’s right and what’s best.
• Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God?  No.  You need to figure out that the supernatural world doesn’t exist for yourself; I can’t do it for you.
• Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists?  Yes, but their acts weren’t motivated by their atheism.  Christians and Muslims have committed atrocities, too, both because of and in spite of their faiths.
• How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God?   They were wrong about the Earth being flat and evil spirits causing diseases.
• Why does the universe exist?  That question doesn’t make any sense.  It’s not a question of “why,” it just does.
• How did life originate?  Science doesn’t have a definitive answer to that question… yet.
• Is all religion harmful?  Sometimes a “little white lie” is not particularly harmful, but that doesn’t make it true.
• What’s so bad about religious moderates?  Nothing.  They’re generally nice people who happen to disagree with atheists like me about religion.
• Is there anything redeeming about religion?  Sure.  It helps some people arrive at morality, inspires people to be part of a community or to create great works of art, and it gives some people pleasure.
• What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)?  I’ll have to rely on my lifetime history of doing what I hope is mostly good behavior.
• Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected?  No. You wouldn’t take people who claimed to be Jedi Knights or Thor-worshippers seriously, would you?
• Are atheists smarter than theists?  No.
• How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity?  The same way I would “deal with” Charlemange or King Tut.
• Would the world be better off without any religion?  Yes, there would be a lot less violence.  9/11 would not have happened without religion.
• What happens when we die?  You’re gone.  And you’re not getting a do-over or a sequel.

 

A Pleasant Rediscovery

One of my favorite writers is back on the Net.  Has been for a little while; it just took me a while to find him again.  I’m very pleased.

Conduct Unbecoming

For the past several days, there have been a lot of discussions about The New Republic publishing descriptions of atrocities and other acts of insane cruelty by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, published under the pseudonyms “My Diarist” and “Scott Thomas.”  This person now identifies himself as Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, and I’m not the first person to do a simple Google search and find out that while in college, Private Beauchamp was the editor of a liberal political magazine, suggesting a bit of disingenuity when he protests that he never wanted to join an ideological battle.  Also of no small amount of interest is that he appears to be engaged to a researcher employed by The New Republic. 

 

Now, you may ask, what has the world come to when we can’t get a straight set of facts out of the partisan press, but let’s dispense with the sarcasm.  This guy is accusing his brother soldiers of doing some pretty crude and awful things – things that are somewhat difficult to believe and which do not really ring true for those in the military.  It is worthwhile to ask the question “why.”  The simple fact that Pvt. Beauchamp is willing to step up to the plate and identify himself as the author of these pieces does not substantially make me believe them any more than I did beforehand.  The fact that he is willing – almost eager – to portray the Army in such disrepute is a singularly peculiar fact about the whole affair.

 

Another interesting question is why Beauchamp, who apparently is reasonably smart and had gone to college, is a Private and not a Second Lieutenant.  Granted, not everyone is officer material, but you’d expect someone with a college background to at least try to become an officer.  Given the choice of serving as an enlisted man and serving as an officer, I wouldn’t think it’s really much of a choice at all.  It’s only in the Air Force that enlisted men send officers off to die; in the other three branches of the service, that formula is typically reversed.

 

Finally, there’s the matter of what to do with the information that Beauchamp has provided.  Its credibility is still suspect, but it still suggests that there are some soldiers doing some really bad things in Iraq.  We know that there are some soldiers who are guilty of war atrocities.  That’s not what Beauchamp wrote about – he wrote about what amounts to macabre immaturity on the part of our soldiers (using a part of a skull for a hat, mocking a fellow soldier who had been wounded by an IED, using a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to run down dogs), which in some ways is easier to believe and in some ways harder to believe than that our soldiers would do really inhuman things like shooting civilians in the back, committing rape, or desecrating religious monuments.  Unfortunately, we know from the Abu Ghraib incident that yes, some of our soldiers are capable of doing some very cruel and very stupid things and I still think of those particular people as “Those Six Idiots Who Lost Us The War.”

 

Beauchamp, however, has not reported this sort of thing as outrageous – which pisses me off even more.  Rather than reporting with disappointment and shock that our troops would do things like this, his reports in TNR carry an air of resigned inevitability, as if of course American soldiers do these sorts of things.  Of course they don’t do these sorts of things, not the soldiers I know – and if they were to do them, it would be very much an exception to the kind of behavior expected of soldiers, and it’s very difficult for me to imagine the sort of conduct Beauchamp describes as being tolerated by pretty much the entire rank-and-file of the military.  If someone in the Bradley were joyriding and trying to run down dogs, someone else would very quickly approach him and put that guy back in line.  And if it was an officer who heard about this stuff going on, I’d expect that officer to remember Abu Ghraib and squash the guy, to make damn sure we don’t get a black eye like that one again.

Words, Free Speech, and Testimony

An interesting issue raised in a rape trial in Nebraska:  does using the word “rape” to describe an event have an unfair emotional impact?  Basic facts:  man and women hook up at a bar, have some drinks, go home, and sexual intercourse occurs.  He says later it’s consensual, she says it was rape because she was too drunk to consent and never really wanted to have sex with him.  An unfortunately common story – the interesting tactic here is that the defense attorney said that even using the word “rape” to describe the events of that evening, because the word is so charged with emotion, will unfairly prejudice the jury to convict.  Even more unusually, the victim claims that the court’s order requiring the use of more clinical terms like “sexual assault” and “he was inside me” violates her First Amendment rights to use the word she believes best describes what happened.

 

Seems to me that if the victim thinks she was raped, she should say so – but I don’t think she has a First Amendment right to do so.  This is a criminal proceeding, and that means that she is not petitioning the government for a redress of grievances; instead, the government is prosecuting someone who stands to lose his liberty and may be innocent of any crime, so the accused’s rights are paramount, not those of the alleged victim.  And, the court has to have the ability to control the proceedings so that the trial is conducted legally and fairly.  If individual witnesses have rights that override a court’s ability to control the flow of testimony, that’s a big problem.  With that said, the court also has a duty to exercise its discretion in controlling testimony such that substantial justice is achieved along with conforming to the requirements of due process and other important laws.  Merely saying the word “rape” is not prejudicial – if the defendant has committed this act, it is just and fair that it be called that.  We don’t require antiseptic terms like “the taking of human life” when we mean “murder,” and the prosecution is entitled to accuse the defendant of a crime – by name – if there is a good-faith belief based on substantial evidence that the defendant is guilty of that crime.

How TL Got His E-Mail Back

My old e-mail address is working again. Hooray! My friends in Manhattan Beach fixed it up so my old e-mail address forwards automatically to their new e-mail domain, and assigned me an e-mail address there, so now I can continue to receive all of your messages to me. As you send e-mails directly to me and I respond, you may want to update your address books with the new domain name, because I'm sure they'll eventually phase out the old one, but like me they have years' worth of accumulated addresses and messages using the old server and it's just impossible to remember all of the places you've sent out your e-mail address.

Nearly three weeks' worth of mail had accumulated on the server during the interim period. 106 of them made it through my spam filters. About 10 of them were things that mattered at all; the rest were advertisements, notifications of bills paid, and other stuff I could just delete. Now, once again, I can get notices of when people comment on the blog.

So thanks again to my friends in the South Bay for the hook up.

Under God

I got forwarded a very old bit of urban legend e-mail today, the one about Pepsi omitting the words “under God” from the pledge of allegiance on new cans of its products.  This bit of falsity has been circulating since late 2001 and it is striking to me that this is still making the rounds. 

 

If Pepsi had put the pledge on its cans (which it didn’t; it was Dr. Pepper) and it had omitted only the words “under God” from the pledge (which Dr. Pepper didn’t do), I would applaud it for observing the Constitution.  As unpleasant a fact as it might be for some people to confront, the Ninth Circuit was right to find that the Pledge, with the phrase “under God” as added in 1954, does in fact violate the Establishment Clause.  The Supreme Court did not overrule this argument in 2004; instead, it punted a difficult issue by attacking the plaintiff’s standing to sue.  As I noted earlier this month, that’s the way the Court avoids deciding issues it would prefer to not confront.  To argue that the phrase “under God” in a mandatory recital does not constitute an establishment of religion requires arguing – as did the Solicitor General of the United States on behalf of the government – that the phrase “under God” does not refer to any diety but rather to a civic virtue.  In other words, “God” does not mean God, so therefore the Pledge is Constitutional.  This is as objectionable a piece of sophistry as Bill Clinton responding to questioning about having perjured himself by objecting that “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

 

“God” as used in the Pledge most certainly means God – and more specifically, Jehovah, the deity worshipped by Jews and Christians (and, some would grudgingly admit and others would prefer to ignore, by Muslims, too, under the name “Allah”).  It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that Congress had any other deity in mind, or any sort of pantheistic, generalized concept of whatever deities Americans might care to worship, and it’s a near-certainty that the rights and sensibilities of atheists, agnostics, and other kinds of non-believers were entirely absent from Congress’ considerations, since atheism was seen as a symptom of Communism at the time.

 

Being that I work in an office that includes some very devout evangelical Christians, I did not indicate that I thought the omission of the phrase “under God” would have been entirely appropriate and correct.  I did, however, point out to the sender of this e-mail that the content of the message was not true, and I included the link above.  I was probably less diplomatic about it than I could have been, but subtlety would have been lost on this particular person.

 

I don’t have any difficulty with the remainder of the Pledge (the original Pledge) although I do think elevating the flag to be an inherent object of veneration as opposed to a symbol of the polity that it represents is a bit too shamanistic for my taste.  When I am asked to recite the Pledge, everyone around me includes the “under God” clause, but I remain silent at that point and do not say those two words.  No one notices, or if they do, they’ve never seen fit to confront me about it.

 

If you want to say that this is a nation “under God,” that’s your call and I won’t try to stop you from doing so.  All I ask in return is that you don’t require me to say it along with you.

Online Students Say the Darndest Things

“…there has to be a line and the law draws the line where it draws it and it is unreasonable to ask a merchant to analize minors on a case-by-case basis.“

It’s called spell-check. Use it, every time.

The Bereavement of Hate

Every attorney, from time to time, has to give a “bad news” speech to a client. This is when the attorney’s people skills really matter. I had to give that speech this morning. It’s never any fun, but it’s an important part of the attorney’s duties. It’s best done in person. The client has invested a lot of emotion – typically hate, not love – into the lawsuit. And when the attorney says, “Sorry, the evidence has not turned out to be the way we wanted, and we’re almost certainly going to lose,” that involves confronting an unpleasant fact. The best way to do it is to be direct and honest, and not to give in to the emotional reactions the client will offer in response to the bad news.

After doing this many times in my career, I’ve noticed that this reaction is no different than what you would expect in a sudden loss of love. Just as the loss of a loved one to death will set in motion a cycle of bereavement, so too will a client who has been fueled by hate feel the loss of an opportunity for vengeance with the same emotional cycle of bereavement.

It usually starts with denial. “That can’t be right. I know the evidence favors our side. I can’t believe what you’re telling me, it’s just not true.” Here, the attorney cannot back down, and must be firm in explaining that no, the evidence and the law are not favorable, despite all the efforts necessary to get to a better position than this.

Bargaining comes next. “Well, what if we found this evidence? Or this other evidence? Can’t you find a legal theory that gets me what I want?” It doesn’t exist, and that’s a fact that has to be confronted and incorporated into the client’s strategy. Again, backing down is not an option here. One kind of bargaining raises an ethical issue for the attorney – the client may offer to “find” evidence on her own that supports the case on her own, which should raise a big red flag for the attorney that this evidence will be manufactured. The ethical attorney will steer such offers of production to other attorneys and not leave the client the option of “finding” that evidence herself.

Anger follows that. Anger is sometimes directed at the object of the client’s hate: “My enemy is so awful! They’re terrible, terrible people and they set it all up this way so they could get away with this!” Sometimes, it is directed at the legal system: “It’s a terrible, terrible country we live in that lets people get away with this! The law is unjust and unfair! “ And most dangerously, it’s directed at the lawyer delivering the bad news: “You haven’t done a good enough job! You should have found the evidence that proves the case! Go back and find it, I know it’s there!” This is why it’s important to have prepared to break the bad news, because this requires engagement and confrontation – the client must be made to see that indeed, the attorney has done as good a job as could be expected, that the evidence has been exhausted. Typically, the client needs only to vent the anger, and if the response can be met on its merits, the anger will not be able to coalesce on a single point of danger to the attorney.

After anger comes despair. “Oh, it’s awful that I’m going to lose. What am I going to do? I’m helpless in the face of my enemy’s evil deeds and a terrible injustice will be wreaked upon me because the courts will not come to my aid.” The client here will be frozen and unable to decide what to do, wallowing in depression and sorrow at the loss. Here, the attorney needs to be active in dispensing advice, and compassionate as a counselor. Sympathize with the client and validate the client’s emotions, and steer the client towards the right decision. “I know it sucks. I want to win, too; that’s why I’m an attorney. But not every case is a winner, not even every case that deserves to win. I’ve been around the block enough to know that some cases you think are going to win, don’t. That’s where we’re at. Let me do my job and cut your losses.” If there’s time, you can give the client an opportunity to think things through on her own, to work through the rest of the cycle of grief in private. Men often disguise their grief and sorrow by needing to “talk it over” with some other advisor like a wife or a girlfriend.

Only after all of these cycles have been completed in the client’s psyche does she reach the final stage of the process, acceptance. “Okay, the suit is a loser. Dismiss it. Settle it. I don’t care – do what you have to do so I can move on.” Now, the attorney needs to move fast and make the dispute go away quickly, in the event that the client backslides and returns to a phase of anger, bargaining, or denial. Backsliding into grief is OK, because as long as the client has not issued a countermanding instruction – and a depressed client does not act at all – the attorney can complete the cycle and resolve the suit. If the client completes the emotional cycle, though, the client will have accepted the facts and stand firm on the instructions to resolve the case, which is the best place to be.

Now, resolution can be difficult if the opposing side is in a different phase of the process or has emotional incentives that vary from the stimuli moving your own client. But managing that dynamic is both very difficult and beyond the scope of what I intended to write about here. The point here is that managing one’s own clients in a “bad news phase” requires an understanding of this psychological cycle, which is simply a part of human nature.

A lawsuit is ideally about economics, but more often it is hate and fear that powers disputes rather than money. That’s a fact of life. And given that it is these sorts of intense emotions that are at the root of so much litigation, rather than economic imperatives, it should not be surprising that when it becomes clear that a lawsuit is going to lose also generates intense emotions. What is interesting about this phenomenon to me is that it is so very similar to the emotions one feels when mourning the death of a loved family member or friend; only here, it is the loss of hate and revenge that creates the same cycle. I suspect this is why so many artists have developed the theme in their works that love and hate are flip sides of the same coin.

E-Mail Out

To all my friends with my personal e-mail address: It doesn't work anymore. My old firm in Manhattan Beach is finally changing its name and it seems that in doing so, they changed the domain of their e-mail server. They'd be happy to permit me to continue using their e-mail forever, but the domain shift inadvertently cut off my old e-mail address. Not their fault, and I have no cause to complain about it. The best e-mail address to reach me at now is at work. Shouldn't be too hard for you to find me in Palmdale. Or, if you need to, leave a post here and I'll get in touch with you.

Last Class

I had lunch today with a guy who is well-connected in local politics. We talked about how the Antelope Valley High School District has recently approved an online charter school, aimed to service "at risk" students who do not succeed in "traditional" school environments. We also discussed how much money was going to be moved around to make this project happen; there was some concern that the project would be nothing more than a financial boondoggle that would make its entrepreneurs rich without providing any real benefit to the students it was supposed to service. Seeking to lend some of my own experience to the conversation, I reminded my friend that I teach business law classes for the University of Phoenix.

"Well, do you find that it's a good thing for your students? I mean, do they actually learn well in that format?" he asked me.

"Not really, although I can't blame the online format for that, at least not much. It's more the quality of students I get -- they just aren't very motivated and you need to be a self-starter to succeed in that sort of format. Maybe two in twenty actually seem to learn anything or take anything away from my class, no matter how much effort I put in to it," I said back.

"Huh. Well, that's at least an honest thing for you to say. You know, the University of Phoenix has a really good marketing and student recruitment department. But from what I understand, the academic oversight into what happens in the classes is pretty minimal."

I had to admit he was right: "That seems about right. I get basically no feedback from my peers or the administration about whether the content of what I'm teach is right or not. I've had three classes in thirty reviewed, and I got very little critique into what I was doing, even though I know I've deviated a lot from the model class that they created for me."

"Well, hey, the University of Phoenix does make quite a bit of money. I hope you're getting your share of it, at least."

"Not really. About a thousand dollars a class. I think that's just a little bit more than what one student pays in tuition."

"You know, that's a price that seems more or less affordable for most folks, at least when it comes by way of student loans that the federal government either funds or facilitates in some way. And you've got twenty students in a class, you say?" I could see my friend doing some quick math in his head.

"More or less. There's tech support and all that marketing to pay for -- naming rights on an NFL stadium don't come cheap."

"I'll tell you what, more than a few eyebrows got raised in Washington and Sacramento when they pulled that one. There's that much extra money for their marketing?"

"Asses in classes, that's University of Phoenix's motto."

And that's when it occurred to me that I had sort of crossed a line mentally about this sidelight. If I've become convinced that the classes I'm teaching aren't doing any kind of substantial good, and instead are simply helping a big company funnel taxpayer dollars to its coffers at the expense of its students who have to pay back student loans for many years that don't even reflect a real education that they got, what in the hell am I doing participating in this sort of thing? It's all a gigantic ruse.

I don't mind the idea of students paying money -- borrowing money to pay for tuition -- if they are going to be given a reasonable shot at acquiring an education. But the quality of students I've seen in the past year or so is atrocious. The vast bulk of them are so academically unprepared for what I'm teaching them that they haven't a chance to succeed at all in any sort of an honest system.

But, they do get good grades -- because I'm required to make them work in "leaning teams" and to award a quarter of their overall grades for, in effect, showing up (and some of them can't even do that). The rest of their grades in my classes are based on objective tests, and the average grade on those tests is around 50% right. This is better than chance but not indicative to me that an acceptable level of learning is going on -- if it were just the tests, I'd be flunking students out left and right. But the grading format I have to deal with provides a very substantial cushion such that a student who gets half their objective test questions right will get a "C" in the class.

And oh, do my students whine about this! They all act as if getting a "C" grade was the equivalent of being publicly berated for stupidity. "I can't believe you grade like this! I've always been a straight-A student until your class!" "How come you make us write in complete sentences?" "I've never had to cite my sources before this." "Your tests are hard!" "This class is ridiculously difficult." (Yes, some students appreciate being challenged, and it's always gratifying when they say so. But the whining usually drowns out the praise.)

Grades have gone up, by the way, since I stopped asking my students to turn in research papers and essays. The quality of the writing was so bad that in my first class I was ready to fail everyone -- and I was counseled by my trainers that what I was reading was "pretty good," despite the lack of verbs in sentences, failure to spell-check, and inability to provide any kind of citations. My headaches went down and my students' grades went up when I stopped asking them to write anything at all -- but this means that it is simply another important life skill that their college is not teaching them.

As I told my friend at lunch, the students who do get value out of my classes are the most highly-motivated amongst them, the self-starters. They are in college for the right reasons, and they are using a remote learning format for the right reasons (they can't quit their day jobs, they live in areas too remote to have access to a community college, etc.).

But the bulk of my students are going online for convenience. There is no reason someone living in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area cannot attend one of the fifteen public community colleges or ten accredited baccalaurelate universities in the area and get a bachelor's degree at a real school. No reason, that is, other than the fact that their academic qualifications are not sufficient to permit them to enter a college that exercises some degree of selectivity in the admissions process. Which does not mean that they cannot pull up their academic qualifications by going to a community college, by the way.

So I can't go on with this. I just can't be part of this system any more. The only thing that's going on is the fleecing of a bunch of people who expect a sheepskin in exchange for agreeing to pay student loans. And the institution seems happy to accommodate them. Intellect, learning, and education have nothing to do with it. That's not why I signed on to teach there. I signed on because I thought it would be a fun way to make some extra money while helping people get ahead in life. It's stopped being fun and it's stopped being helpful.

I've got two weeks left on my last class that I'm under contract to complete. After that, I'm done with it, until and unless I get convinced that I'll be in a system with students who are there to learn, and a college that's there to teach. I quit.

Fred Thompson: Lawyer-Candidate

An interesting bit from Fred Thompson on the lawyer as a political candidate.  Much of it is biographical and designed to encourage political support for his candidacy (interestingly, Right Said Fred’s website does not describe Thompson’s positions on any political issues), but I commend the link for a concept that Thompson underlines:  A lawyer is not to be identified with his client.  I am not my clients; my job is to advocate for their positions, whether I would take those positions or not.  Obviously, there are limits; I cannot suborn perjury or undermine the legal system or the Constitutional system of government itself, although I can argue in good faith for a change the law to improve it (which I have only rarely had to do and never succeeded at doing).  Anyway, it’s worth remembering as we consider that the top tier of candidates for the Presidency are all lawyers:  Hillary Clinton (Yale J.D., 1973), Barack Obama (Harvard J.D., 1991), and John Edwards (University of North Carolina J.D., 1977), Rudy Giuliani (NYU J.D., 1968), Fred Thompson (Vanderbilt J.D., 1967), and Mitt Romney (Harvard J.D., 1975).

Hoosegow Hotties

From the ever-mercurial Iowahawk, you too can now vote for the best-looking inmate of the Polk County (Iowa) jail.   I picked Ashley B, but that’s probably my damn!-Nicole-Kidman-is-hot-as-a-strawberry-blonde thing acting up again.  None of them are as pretty as The Wife but they’re all surely more dangerous!  By the way, Iowahawk is running for President, too, so if you’re like the plurality of Republicans who prefer “None Of The Above” for President, here’s a guy asking for your support and an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.