I left my heart in San Francisc-ugh… part deux?!?

Friends–

Attorneys are a weird breed, sometimes having to wear two hats, the hat of the lawyer and the hat of the counselor.  It is a fine line to walk, alternating between advocating and advising, arguing and guiding.  In fact, we as professionals, whatever the industry, have the same struggle.  While we want to act for our clients and adopt their passions to better serve them, we must sometimes step back and “talk them off the ledge,” to counsel them as to the more advisable tactic, whether it be a less aggressive investment strategy or a more cost-effective insurance policy.

And it is a struggle, one that creates a tightrope walk which can easily result in disaster.  Push your client too hard in attempting to guide them on the right path and you risk losing the client; push too softly and you risk being ineffective.

So what makes us as professionals qualified to act as counselors?  It is a level of dispassion, a modicum of rationality that can only be perceived when you are not intimately entwined with the circumstances and the outcome.  Sitting in a mediation and trying to advise a client to take a settlement which is less than what they believe the case is worth requires a separation of emotion from clear thought.  Our clients who are emotionally involved in their case can become unreasonable.  And rational thought is a must if you are going to serve your clients’ needs best.

A lawyer, as a counselor, must be rational.  My friends, I have a confession… sometimes I doubt my ability to be rational.  I can sometimes be totally irrational… it is embarrassing.

Legend has it that a college student taking a U.S. History course to impress a girl once wrote a final exam on the rivalry between the Dodgers and Giants.  Somehow he passed the class and won the girl.  She absolutely had to have been a Dodgers fan.

It is irrational, I know, to hate a team with as much revulsion and disgust as I hold the baseball team that plays in San Francisco and wears that ugly orange color.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate San Francisco.  In fact, it is one of my favorite cities.  Fisherman’s Wharf, Union Square, Ghirardelli Square and Rice a Roni… I love going there, I really do.

But that team needs to be obliterated from the face of the earth.  What did they ever do to you, you may ask?  Shall I mention the Shot Heard Round the World?  Or Joe Morgan?  Or Juan Marichal using a baseball bat to try to attach Sandy Koufax?

Consider this… Jackie Robinson was not just a Dodger.  He was a trailblazer, an activist and a humanitarian.  He has to be tops on many lists of the most influential and well-respected people who ever lived.  And he retired because the Dodgers traded him to the Giants.  He actually refused to play for the Giants and opted to retire instead.  Doesn’t that speak volumes???

So you can imagine my pain, my agony, when the Giants won the World Series this past week.  For me, I don’t want anyone to suffer.  I know what it is like to root for a team which fails to succeed.  For the long-suffering Cubs fans, I empathize and wish them success sometime soon.  But the Giants, it would not have bothered me if they never won another game.

It is irrational and I know it.  These are just baseball players.  They didn’t choose to be on that team, they were signed there or they were drafted there or they were traded there.  They haven’t caused me any personal harm.  I haven’t lost money because of them or suffered the loss of family members.  Whether the Giants win or lose, it won’t affect my family, my kids will still be healthy, and my career will still be what I make of it.

 

So my feelings and my intensities about the Giants are irrational.  And I wonder if that makes me ineffective as a counselor.  I guess the first step in fixing your problem is identifying that it is a problem.  So for me, step one will be to acknowledge the Giants and their success.  For me to be more effective, I need to turn that page.

 

So to the Giants, I say CONGRATUL… oh, who the hell do I think I am kidding?  Wait Til Next Year!!

www.robcohen13.wordpress.com

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“This is television, that’s all it is. It has nothing to do with people, it’s to do with ratings!”

Friends:

Finally I can speak with some intelligence about a topic we discussed many months ago, “The Hunger Games.”  Yes I finally saw the movie and after the first hour the only word that came to mind for me was “sadistic.”  If you want to read my initial thoughts on the subject on “THG” and other fiction which passes for “young adult” these days, here is a link to the post:

http://robcohen13.com/2011/05/02/i-remember-every-wand-ive-ever-sold-mr-potter/

I didn’t find it sadistic because of its subject matter, although the prospect of the government creating a game show for 12-18 year old boys and girls to kill each other was morbid to say the least.  It was the spectacle of it from the standpoint of the viewers, the public at large clamoring for the excitement and thrill of children forced to kill or be killed, the glamorizing of the “contestants” and the disconnection of the viewers from any semblance of reality.  Of all of it, though, it is this disconnection from reality that is most disheartening—because if it true of us today.

We as a society have become so fixated on the train wrecks that we have lost our ability to empathize.  When we watch reality television, it is in the hope that we see something outrageous, ignoramuses making fools of themselves, people getting hurt and hearts being broken.  We would much rather watch the tryouts for American Idol than the finals, simply because we clamor for the terrible singers who are so awful it is funny.  We take joy in the failings and failures of others.

So while we cannot seem to get enough of the human disasters on television, at some point we will reach saturation, and we will need more.  I think of it like the shower.  You like the water warm but you get used to it so you creep it hotter, but then you get used to it again so you creep it hotter still, and so on.  I am afraid that it is coming– that “Wipeout” will no longer be poor bumbling fools getting hit with punching gloves and falling into a shallow pool of water, but that the gloves will be replaced with knives and the pool will be populated by piranha.  Because what makes human travail more entertaining that serious risk to life and limb?

Is it that farfetched to think that it could happen?  Is “THG” only young adult fantasy or is it a prophecy? 

Unfortunately, it may be more prophecy than we would like to believe.  There are many instances in history of science fiction and fantasy coming true; what once were the writings and creations of mere mortals have now proven to be creations of forward-thinking pioneers.  People like H.G. Wells, George Orwell and Jules Verne gave us stories that have since become fact:  Big Brother, the nuclear submarine, voyages into space, genetic engineering… these were all mere fantasy and science fiction 50 years ago.  Will we soon be watching people killing each other on television?  A mash-up of Wipeout and ultimate fighting?  I worry that it is closer than we think.

Aside from all of that, though, the most disturbing aspect of THG was the fact that it was geared towards children.  In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in “The Running Man,” based on a novel by Stephen King, which was about a game show in which the contestants had to survive while being hunted by stalkers.  I have seen TRM many times and I enjoy the heck out of it each time.  It is campy, it is fun, the stalkers are cartoonish and the violence is graphic.  But it was also rated “R” and was not geared towards children.  THG is clearly a descendant of The Running Man, but the fact that it is for children, that the books are sold at elementary school book drives and are found in the children’s section of the bookstore is appalling.  There is nothing fun, funny or entertaining about children killing each other and it is this thirst for violence and hunger for despair that is just plain unnecessary.  Children find it entertaining?  Do we really expect that 6^th graders will understand the undertones of the dangers of government control and the need to rise up against oppression in order to effectuate the change we need? 

Maybe I am overreacting.  But the indelible image from the movie is in the first 10 minutes as the “contestants” are being selected.  A 12 year old girl is chosen but her older sister volunteers instead.  I can still hear the high-pitched scream of terror as the younger sister is carried away by the guards.  Do we really want our young children witnessing this?  Or do we give our kids credit to be able to handle themes like this because they are bombarded with similar or even worse examples of terror in all other forms of media?  That is just plain sad…

“I’m real sorry they picked you to defend that n…. that raped my Mayella.”

Friends:

Last week I provided for you an excerpt from the book “To Kill A Mockingbird,” specifically, a paragraph from Atticus Finch’s closing argument in his defense of Tom Robinson on the charge of raping a white woman.  I received many comments from you, the vast majority of them lauding the passage as inspiring, clearly reflecting the reverence with which you hold Atticus Finch.  Unfortunately, it was also clear to me that many of you didn’t actually understand why I selected that specific extract.  (If you didn’t read the excerpt, you can find it here:  http://robcohen13.com/2012/10/08/atticus-finch-closing-argument-excerpt/)

One of the reasons why many people, especially lawyers, hold Atticus Finch in such high regard is because he espouses all of the best qualities we would like to see in a human being.  I think that lawyers aspire to be like him and the general public would like their attorney to be like him.  He understands that he is a lawyer in a very small town that isn’t very progressive, but he still tries to influence the jury with talk of the enormity of their duty and the significant social impact that they can have by making the morally apt decision, not the racially charged one.

So when Atticus talks of the courtroom as the great equalizer, the place in which every person is equal, the proverbial “justice is blind” analogy, the reader actually wants to believe him because it is clear that he believes it so whole-heartedly, that if he didn’t believe it so ardently then he would be incapable of doing his job effectively.

As I mentioned last week, I had never read “TKAM” before; somehow I had managed to avoid having to read it in school and must have missed the movie version on television.  Sure, I knew the basics of the story (at least I thought I did—turns out, it isn’t really about a rape trial at all, to my disappointment), but I also believed, maybe simplistically, that Tom Robinson was acquitted on the rape charge and that Atticus saved the day by his shrewd lawyering.  So having some preconceived ideas and expectations, when it came to the passage I cited, my initial reaction was a snicker of laughter.  And out comes my cynicism:  Does anyone really believe that the court is a bastion of truth and equality as Atticus portrayed it to be?  My laughter was borne not of the words themselves, but of the naiveté of Atticus that he would actually say those words in open court and that he believed them.  Because, he had to believe them or else the reader wouldn’t believe that the character had the qualities I mentioned earlier.  How naïve can you be, Atticus?  The court as a great equalizer?  Where a pauper is an equal of a Rockefeller?

As you all know I am an attorney and I guess that in some respect in order for me to do my job and be an effective advocate for my client I have to believe that the process is effective.  I need to believe that if my client is in the position of right, that in a court of law he will prove to be victorious.  But I don’t really believe that and I think that many other attorneys feel the same way as I do.

Take a look at the OJ Simpson trial.  I don’t know anyone who thinks that the verdict was right.  But I know many who think that because of Simpson’s wealth and ability to hire high-priced attorneys, he was acquitted.  We see it on an almost daily occurrence where wealthy celebrities and celeb-utantes seem to evade harsh penalties for their sometimes egregious crimes with the sentiment being that it is because of their stature and wealth that they were not treated like the regular John Doe off the street.  Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, the list is endless.  I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me that if those people had not been famous and had lots of money that the result would have been the exact same.  So let’s revise the Atticus Finch passage to update it for the 21^st Century:  “There is one human institution that makes a pauper an equal of a Lohan…”  It just doesn’t have that ring of truth, does it?

And not to harp too much on the subject of race, but does anyone honestly believe that juries are color-blind?  You surely remember the 1992 riots after the verdict for the policemen involved in the beating of Rodney King—do you believe that race didn’t play a part?  And yet Atticus Finch would have us believe that he believes that all men are equal within the bounds of our judicial system. 

I don’t do a lot of work with celebrities; my clients are mostly hard-working individuals or business-owners, not incredibly wealthy, successful but certainly not of the upper-echelon of wealth.  Invariably as the litigation wears on and thousands upon thousands of dollars are spent, a discussion takes place in which an economic decision must be made.  A settlement proposal is on the table and it is far less than my client believes he should be paid, or the converse, is far in excess of what my client believes he should have to pay.  My clients are not of unlimited funds and so a decision must be made based not on principle or right, but on economics.  Not all men are created equal in the courtroom—she of the deeper pockets can outspend the opposing side and practically force the result.

In all, however, I think that “TKAM” is nothing more than a fairy tale, albeit one with suspense, charges of rape, racial unrest and shadowy and shady characters.  Atticus Finch is our hero; pure as the driven snow, beyond reproach, and what we would like to think of as the ideal lawyer and human.  And his closing argument is nothing more than a reflection of his purity.  The same way that Superman is 100% good, fighting for “truth, justice and the American way,” so too is Atticus that irrefutable model of virtuousness and wholesomeness.

But even Superman is allowed some comedic moments, right?

Atticus Finch — Closing Argument (Excerpt)

“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal – there is one human institution that makes a pauper an equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president.  That institution, gentlemen, is a court.  It can be the
Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or
this honorable court which you serve.  Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”