A Brief Memoir

(NOTE: This post was supposed to be about my time down in New Orleans for Jazzfest. But after today, it's hard to even really think about it. Also, the following should be viewed in this context: (1)I have no personal life because I couldn't devote the energy for when it didn't work out.(2)I can't really ever relax. This past weekend should have been a good time, but I would get lost in thinking about different aspects of cases. My mom would ask, "Are you okay?" Truthfully, I would say, "Yeah, I'm just thinking." In the end, I'm a 25 year old parent to 20 people. What else should consume my thoughts?)

My day began sitting in court two-and-a-half hours waiting to be called for an interdiction hearing. Rather than listening and watching the other attorneys, I mostly just sat there thinking about all of the other work, I really needed to be doing. When the judge finally got around to my case, I barely said three words before he called opposing counsel and myself up and told us to do some more work and come back next week. He was being fair, but it's also a case into which I've put over a hundred hours or literally $10,000 worth of my time. So, it was a little frustrating to be told that I hadn't done enough yet and return when he deemed it sufficient.

I hadn't yet arrived to my office when I received a call from a client essentially telling me that his employer was getting ready to fire him, because he filed a discrimination complaint with the EEOC. I had warned him this might happen, but still it's a little tough to deal with when it is actually going. We worked out a plan of action which I think will diffuse that time bomb for a while.

When I got back, I checked my mail and calls. Everything seemed fairly calm, but I needed to get to lunch with my partners. I was hoping for some relaxation as we traded stories about our weekends. Instead, we got into a pretty solid discussion about which of our cases are the shittiest.

Returned from that only to have a deluge of phone calls from three clients wanting a whole bunch of crap done. While they babbled, I mostly thought about ways I could hang myself with my own phone cord. And then the real delight came at around 3:00.

A woman came into our offices to discuss a number of incidents. One involved her ex-husband molesting her, at the time, seven year old son. I read the police report which described how he used to sleep in the same bed with the child and touch his genitals. The kid was traumatized enough to fucking tell people that his father and him were going to have a baby together and drew stick-figure pictures of the three of them.

After I was done looking throught the horrific drawings, I went and visited with my new juvenile client. Since the last time I saw him, their house has had the electricity and phone turned off and the carpet is now covered with trash, giving the place a nice aroma of rotting food. The kid, who is 14, has no priors, but something is clearly now going on with him. A friend of his came in and grabbed the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers booksack that my client had been carrying. Something valuable was clearly in it, and my first thought was of the movie Fresh. And I wondered if he was a runner for some local.

I got back to the office, spent some time researching a hopeless argument, and then started typing this. I get to look forward to going home tonight to a cat that hates me right now, and then repeating all of this again tomorrow. It should be just as cheerful considering I'm doing a trial prep for a gun charge in Federal Court. My client is assuredly going to lose and get the maximum of 120 months. He's got 7 kids and a wife. But on the bright side, he's only 37, so at least he'll be out before 50.

My point in telling all of this is not to purely garner sympathy. But to let you know that for most of us young lawyers doing it ourselves, this is what every day is like. I work myself to the point of exhaustion, go to bed, get up, eat a pop-tart and go back to it. Every goddamned day.

8. Pulp Fiction

This review will be one of the shortest, because if you've seen it, you know why it's here. If you haven't, the only thing I can say is, "FUCKING WATCH IT." There isn't one Tarantino movie I wouldn't watch ad infinitum, and this would seem to be his best (although if Glorious Bastards is made, it might give it a run for it's money). The actors click. The story is brillantly structured. The direction is amazing. And there are just so many small, nice touches, such as Butch keying Vincent's car. Genius all around.

The greatest compliment a movie can receive is that it stands the test of time. For those of you about my age, did you realize that this movie was made in 1994? I was in eighth grade when I saw this motherfucker. I thought it was great then, and today it seems like cinematic gold. And so many movies ripped it off. For those film buffs out there, just think of the movies you saw, good or bad, which borrowed some aspect of this pic. They're too numerous to even begin a list.

And what makes it really great is that he never went back to the well. Tarantino could have made Parts II, III, IV...L, and he's so talented they all probably would have been good. But Tarantino realized what he had captured and was smart of enough to let it be. So, let me add my voice to one of the millions already and declare, "Bravo, Quentin. You made a masterpiece... and thanks for not thinking it was the only thing you could do."

On a side note, a close friend of mine and I had a great discussion about Cho and the topic of my last article. She certainly got me to reconsider some things. Not about whether NBC should have shown it, but how it was presented overall. So, look for a follow-up post after her terrific insight.

The Peacock and Virginia Tech

I awoke this morning to find various talking heads discussing how outrageous it was that NBC chose to air footage of Cho Seung-Hui's rambling diatribe the night they received it. The CNN production team put together a nice little package of the parents pleading with numerous news organizations to stop showing the clips. And all of the meadia members of the panel, except one, agreed. I don't remember much of what happened after that because my brain exploded.

Towards the beginning of the Iraq war, the Pentagon announced that it was going to severely limit the media's access to the coffins of soldiers which had been sent back stateside. The press, rightly, was up-in-arms over the decision. The journalists realized that, no matter how hard those images might be for the families to swallow, the world had a right to see the consequences of war. Furthermore, they also understood that some percentage of the population also wanted to witness it. Simply, the media recognized that deaths resulting from a conflict thousands of miles away was news, and they had a right to document it as such.

Flash forward to the events of this week. NBC received a package in the mail from the man who went on the the largest shooting spree the U.S. has ever seen. Knowing that people would want to see it and tune it, they put it on the air. As Brian Williams said, "By just about any definition, this is news," and they presented it as such. NBC and its cable outlet, MSNBC, made an editorial decision that at no time would the video and pictures take more than ten percent of an hour. And the watchdogs who keep track of these things seem to indicate that they followed this self-imposed standard. In other words, it was not in some sort of 'loop,' as many critics contended.

The whipping NBC has taken since it made its decision appears to be nothing more than a smoke-screen to cover up the harder truth that people are too shy to confront: Victims of a tragedy have no right to attempt to set the news agenda. They have every right to ask people to grieve with them, but they can not be allowed to tell people what is news. And, I'm sorry, but those tapes and pictures are just that. At the very least, the packet tells the story of what happens all too often when people with severe mental infirmaties are not taken care of by the system. While I can certainly understand why it is hard for the families to understand, other Americans do see it as newsworthy and have a right to have it at least presented to them.

The legal system recognized a long time ago that victims should at times be some of the last people to influence certain decisions. It's the reason that criminal trials are stylized, "State of .... versus....," rather than "Person X versus Person Y." Objectivity should rule the legal word, and journalism as well.

Taken to the logical conclusions of what the Tech families are saying, should the History Channel stop airing World War II footage, because we still have Holocaust survivors? Should every single bookstore in America be picketed because they have a copy of Mein Kampf on their shelves? Should Apocalypse Now and The Deerhunter not be lauded, because they were made so soon after Vietnam? Should the news just stop covering the Iraq War?

The answer is of course not. The world has a right to see what influences and shapes the events around them. While one may not personally care for it, that does not mean it fails to shed light and understanding about what happened. And truth be told, I shudder to think of a media which bases all of its content on what people like.