Orientalis: Clevelandia

Step 1: Avoid the common mistake (on the lake) of orienting Cleveland to fit the world.

Instead, orient the world to fit Cleveland.

Step 2: Approach the front door, and ring the bell.

Step 3: If no one answers (and they won't), try the back door. You'll find Prosperity and Grace, too, but beware the unmarked graves of the forgotten at the river's edge.

Step 4: Brush up on your secret handshakes. There are false ones about.

Step 5: Find Peace and/or Eternal Life. Happy New Year.

I am alone in a hallway behind a jury deliberation room, in podium posture, leaning on the register, gazing out the panoramic east windows on the 13th floor of the Justice Center. A packed courtroom awaits me. I raise up on my toes and fingertips, stretching every muscle of my legs and arms and back as i lean into the glass, then relax.

Beneath me is the Burnham Plan, three large rectangular parks bordered on the three sides by granite civic buildings, and capped at its north by a grand view of Lake Erie's shoreline. To the north, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's glass pyramid, the Great Lakes Science Center's hypnotic, trinitarian wind turbine, and the Browns' Shame Vessel all provide foreground to the intermittent white-caps charging the break wall and, beyond that, the thin, cloudy horizon.

Burnham's plan was this: leave the commerce and industry to the river. This broad tract would be where society enriched and managed itself. City Hall, The State Courthouse, Public Auditorium, The Board of Education, The Public Library, The Federal Reserve and Courthouse all surround these three simple parks. The buildings share a common architecture and common civic vision. Cleveland was once a city that understood itself.

Now, a century or so later, this cursed burg bangs it's head against the wall like an imbecile: this very plot of land the subject to a controversial plan to add a Medical Mart, whatever that is. Federal dogs are sniffing the contracts. To the south, the crumbling interstate thoroughfare is about to be replaced, a bridge span imagined over the exact spot of a long-forgotten mass transit tragedy. Back to the north, where the river meets the lake, the port has been run into the ground by incompetence and corruption, plans to modify it destroyed by obvious truths about the Great Lakes waterways. Federal dogs are sniffing there, too.

As a matter of fact, federal dogs are sniffing everywhere. A year and a half ago, FBI agents raided dozens of locations and offices connected to Cuyahoga County government; judges, commissioners, auditors, etc., all tethered together by the money they guzzle from the county Democratic Party.

I peer down across the street to the puddled roof of the County Administration building. It also sits on the perimeter of the Burnham Plan parks, but shares no architectural pedigree. It looks like it's trespassing, I think. Tear it down, brick by brick, and open the vaulted Burnham Plan to the Portal...

A tap on my shoulder distracts my inner civic planner. I pull out my ear buds and smile. The bailiff politely intones, "Good Morning, Mr. Bloomsday. The Judge is on the bench, waiting for you."

"I'm ready," I say. I follow her through a court staff only door, into the main hallway, then through the main double doors of the stinking, packed courtroom. I walk briskly to the center of the courtroom to my waiting podium, tucking my Ipod into my shirt pocket. Over a hundred eyes upon me today, plus a camera and a court reporter. "Good Morning, your honor. For the record, Ulysses Bloomsday, on behalf of the Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office and the indigent citizens of the City of Cleveland." I raise up on my toes and fingertips, stretching every muscle of my legs and arms and back as i lean into the podium, then relax.

[photos: Dr. M.A. Sullivan, Bluffton U., Emeritus]

Effluvium for All Good Men

[This is a placeholder for a work in progress.]

March Comes in Like a Psychic Lioness...

"I got a splinter in my foot."

"How can I assist you?"

"Not now. Later."

"Just ask."

"o.k."

We are watching the morning clock on the first day of school.  My psychic lioness will have a splinter in her kitty-cat paw all day.  Plus, Martha is sicky-poo.  And George is a single mother of two.


Now, let me get back to roller derby action!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eabefjsJsAQ

Strange But True Story #3

Back in college, I interned at the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. Located on Maryland Avenue, directly across the street from both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Capitol in an old, labyrinthine urban mansion, it seemed the ideal place to begin my legal career, years before I became a lawyer.

I was there during both the tumult of the Supremes' flag burning decision in Texas v. Johnson, and the parallel battle in Congress over a Constitutional Amendment to ban flag desecration. One day, the executive director of the office, Morton Halperin, asked me to participate in a debate on the issue for a group of high school kids; I would represent the A.C.L.U., and my opponent, a representative from The Heritage Foundation, would represent the contrary view. I was thrilled, especially because the debate would take place in a conference room somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol Building. Honest to God, I'm going to debate free speech on Capitol Hill.

Debate day came. I was no stranger to public speaking, and it was a gig of sophomores, but I was nervous, struck by the subjective gravitas of the moment: shaping young minds on a matter of profound cultural importance. I arrived to find a hundred or so kids, a moderator, and my debate opponent, twenty years my senior. As I greeted him and introduced myself, he made an odd comment I didn't comprehend about "the toilet."

I spoke first, and gave a reasoned presentation on the folly of restricting offensive speech within the very words of our Constitution. I gave slippery slope examples, and talked about past dark battles over free speech. My comments were well received, I thought, but I remembered that I offered only one side of the issue.

My opponent, spoke nothing about the Constitution, offered no stirring defense of the flag. Instead, he accused the A.C.L.U. of coddling the worst of society: abortionists, pornographers, murderers. His entire presentation was an indictment of the organization I came to represent. I was confused and embarrassed. I had been eager for a spirited, eye-opening debate, and instead, got personally attacked.

The moderator seemed to sense that the spirit of debate had been sabotaged. She opened the floor to questions. Many hands went up. The first question came: "We learned in our debate class about ad hominem attacks. You didn't talk at all about why banning flag burning is a good thing, you just personally attacked the other guy..."

The guy from The Heritage Foundation offered no response to the point, reiterating the wickedness of the A.C.L.U.

The next question, to him, pointed out that he hadn't responded to the first kid's point. When he refused to answer, I took the floor:

I grew up in a house that took the rights of individuals very seriously. I came to the A.C.L.U. to learn more about civil liberties and how our government takes liberties with our liberties, sometimes in the name of special interests. I know very little about The Heritage Foundation, but I am now convinced that I need to learn more about it, and so should you, because my debate opponent has shown his stripes. When he began to attack the organization I represent, I felt embarrassed. Now, I'm embarrassed only for this man, who seems intent on denying you what you came here for.

The Heritage Foundation guy packed up his stuff and left without a word, and left me to my audience. The kids were great; enthusiastic about the same issues that had brought me to D.C. in the first place. I spoke about the city, and my experiences in it, but reminded them that I had had my two most memorable epiphanies about politics and government on that very day: first, when my debate opponent went rogue, and second, when the kids called him on it. It was cynicism supplanted by faith. God bless the future of America, I thought.

And, now, free speech unencumbered, I finally exclaim: "HEY, HERITAGE FOUNDATION GUY, GO FUCK YOURSELF."

On the Sowell Matter

This is no sermon. There is no point in waxing poetic on the horror of it all: a mass murder amid the poverty class in the Poverty Capital of America, the loss and suffering of the living and the dead.

This is, instead, a public policy position statement shrouded in the loose observations of an author who is lamentably familiar with the poverty class. Consider this: the current and justifiable hue and cry can be Venn diagrammed by two overlapping circles.

First is the circle of Anthony Sowell, who ghoulishly lived among the victims for God knows how long undetected, despite his violent record, the recurrence of red-flag brushes with the law, and his loosely monitored status as a sex offender registrant.

Second is the circle of the dead: disposable, untraceable women in a community disinterested in their fates in life. Many had loose ties to their families, or none at all. Some had drug/alcohol problems or criminal records/arrest warrants, themselves, which left them outside of the social realm designed to look out for them, whether living, missing or dead.

These circles overlap, not in the Sowell residence, itself, but in the criminal justice system. Let me explain: justice is the intersection of many things, but the best (and I argue the only) way to evaluate it is to look at how our institutions treat the least among us in society. If the least among us are treated with dignity and fairness and reasonableness, in compliance with Constitutional standards, then our society is a healthy one. If our society ignores its obligations to look out for the least among us, then our society is a failure; it is unjust. This is the milieu of the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is a vast Venn diagram of its own. It purports to be the hand of society that serves justice, and it employs many constituent parts. Police, prosecutors, judges, jailers, defense lawyers are some of the parties paid to supply justice. It's subjective consumers are defendants and victims, its objective consumers are jurors and, theoretically, the public at large, the community served by the system.

It is the last of these categories that, now, sees the folly of a current system that "let Sowell happen," so to speak. But as the finger-pointing heats up (an aside: prosecutors blaming police, police blaming prosecutors? What a refreshing change from everyone blaming defense attorneys...), I suggest that the public at large "let Sowell happen." I don't mean his neighbors. I mean a society whose only engagements with the criminal justice system are the shamefully two-dimensional caricatures paraded past us by the media, with content spoon fed to it by people with much to gain by the maintenance of a corrupt status quo. I mean a society that knows nothing about the mechanism of the law, and cares nothing about the circumstances that lead subjective consumers of criminal justice to it's courthouses and cages.

It is just as likely that I would be assigned to represent Sowell in court for his crimes as it is that I was assigned to represented any number of his victims during their own legal headaches. That's because I look out for the least among us, the poor, the forgotten, the mentally ill, the addicted, even the despicable. I give them their Constitutional due. I give them some judgement-free dignity. You watch it and you smell it from the inside as I do, and perhaps you'll make sense of what I've said about the system and what I do for a living.

Welcome to the Bloomsday Device.

Look, Judge

Many years ago, as I began to beg for justice and mercy for the poor in the Poverty Capital of America as my father did before me before he died of a liquor-soaked, broken heart, I noticed a shocking disdain for my efforts on behalf of the least among us. Those chosen to sit on the altar of Solomon would spit venom rather than spout wisdom in my direction. Usually, I was an innocent bystander, collaterally damaged by the judge's Ayn Rants against my clients. But sometimes, the vitriol was aimed squarely at me.

I remember one moment, standing before an old, white, cranky slumlord of a judge, annoyed at my legal analysis of a statute-gone-wrong when an exasperated slip of my tongue gave him an opportunity to spank me: I began a sentence with a haphazard, "Look, Judge..."

"Don't tell me to LOOK, counsellor! I won't tolerate that demeanor in this courtroom!" He leaned over his bench and peered over his glasses, engaged, now, in a staring contest with me.

I apologized for my casual vernacular, and tried to finish my point, shaken and embarrassed. It was a mistake I never repeated. Demeanor matters.

But now that I am emboldened by age and wisdom, I say, once again, "Look, Judge..."

Look, first in your holding cells, where prisoners await their fate, hidden behind the walls of your courtroom. You'll find dank, smelly rooms, poorly lit and ventilated, with shocking graffiti of splayed pussies and dripping cocks, gang symbols, hieroglyphs of anarchy, ignorance, racism, and rage writ large. Ever think about a coat of paint, Judge? A fresh start? Ever think about installing a speaker in that cell so the dregs could hear your concerns, hear how their lawyer fights for others, hear how the system is supposed to work? These ideas would drowned out the din of stupidity that your prisoners see and hear as they wait FOR HOURS within the fart cloud of others until their cases are called.

Next, look in my intake lobby, where each afternoon, those lucky enough to be out of jail, wait for their Constitutional due. Notice the absence of empty chairs, and notice the ratio of clients to lawyers prepared to assist them. If you do the math, you'll find that each lawyer assigned to conduct intakes at the public defender's office is expected to talk to twenty or so clients a day; ignorant, angry people who suspect our abilities and motives. You threaten them with jail if they don't come, so here they are waiting in the chaos of the lobby with contempt for you and contempt for me.

Finally, stroll back across the street to your courthouse and walk to the West entrance, closed to the public since 9-11. There you'll find a now-forgotten work of public art, a sculpture in two pieces by Richard Hunt, the first African-American (Black?) artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It's called Sentimental Scale, and if you look closely, you'll see it is Dame Justice, her scales forever tipped in favor of one side and never the other.

Look, Judge. Look.

A 21st Century Parable

Once upon a time, there was a wrestler who never lost a match. He received accolades from far and wide, honored by heads of state for his strength, agility and prowess. All the citizens of the land gave him great deference in matters both on and off the mat. Even the referees of his matches adored him and rejoiced at their part in his success.

One day, a camera lens captured his cunning secret, a special move designed to disable his opponents before they knew what happened: the great wrestler poked the buttholes of his opponents with his thumb.

When the images of his tactic were played again and again for the citizens of the land, there was rage and confusion. Why did the referees never notice? Why did his opponents never complain? In fact, the referees, so enamored at their role in his ascent, did notice, but turned a blind eye. In fact, his opponents had complained, but they were silenced with threats and coercion.

All of the laurelled portraits of the wrestler were removed from public view, no one dared mention his name without sneering contempt, and all of his worshippers, now silenced by his disgrace, flagellated themselves for their ignorance and idolatry.

The historians simply called him a serial rapist.

The end.

The 30/30 Series: Loaded Guns

Bobby was a teenaged kid who lived down the street in my 1970's childhood. He was much older than me, but I adored him and thought of him as a friend because he (and the rest of his family) treated me with such fondness and affection that I felt as at home in their house as I did in my own.

One day, while playing with one of his buddies in the fields behind his house, he was shot and killed. I never knew the hows of his death, and there was certainly never a why, but I knew that his teenaged friend had pulled the trigger.

The whole neighborhood was filled with what I would later know as grief. I heard the story of the boy who shot him, sobbing and wailing on his porch, begging forgiveness from God. I saw his waxen body in the casket, and it was made clear to me that I would not see him again.

There was a photograph of Bobby, taken by his sister shortly before he died, that captured his essence forever: dressed in a football uniform, shoulderpads and all, running toward the camera full speed, arms stretched out with clawed hands toward the lens, wide eyed and grinning in mock attack, a split second away from tackling the photographer. Close examination of the photo revealed his feet barely touching the ground.

The 30/30 Series: Resurrexecution, Circa 1977

In the wake (forgive the entendre) of Gary Mark Gilmore etching his middle name in history by the device of terminating three lives (his two victims he dispatched unassisted; his own was aided and abetted by the Media, the State of Utah, the U.S. Supreme Court, you, me and five riflemen, tried and true), I am constrained herein to explore the meaning of it all. Surely such a momentous event has import beyond the fact that he lives to kill no more.

Certainly, we all cheered the valiant efforts of the doctors who vigorously repulsed Gilmore's presumptuous attempts to deny his executioners their moment in the sunrise by usurping Utah's Divine Right to take a life, even though it be his own. The work of the medical rescue teams which frustrated his suicidal activities and restored and preserved his life so that it could be properly terminated can be said to be commensurate with the best of medical practice -- the height of Hippocracy, so to speak.

In addition to that, we are proud of our courageous boys in denim (with the possibility of that misguided lad who drew the blank round and he knows who he is because his was the rifle that didn't recoil and he'll just have to live with his guilt the rest of his life) who took time away from their loved ones and rendered service to the Sovereignty of Utah on the firing squad. These dedicated volunteers demonstrated their love of country in the extreme, for surely the paltry fee paid them for the one-shot deal was not their real motivation.

It is to them that we are indebted for a rejuvenation of words and phrases in our discourse that we have too rarely heard these past ten years. Such gems as "effective deterrent" or "How about the rights of the victim?" and "It costs too much to feed them" together with their perinnial rejoinders such as "sacredness of life" or "Should the state stoop to their level?" and "ineffective deterrent," and all of which eventually rise to the level of "So's your old man," can again be heard in our land.

I suppose a principle that may be said to have emerged from the Gilmoribund events of the morning of January 10th is that a person sentenced to die has an inalienable, if not constitutional, right to force the State to kill him in accordance with his sentence. Neither family nor friend nor American Civil Libertarian has legal standing to foist an appeal upon an unwilling appellant.

Can we not envision the dramatic implications of this new principle? Imagine an anxious Governor or Supreme Court Justice waiting by his phone for a call from the Warden saying, moment before the appointed hour, that the condemned has had a change of heart and will file his Notice of Appeal after all or, at least, has decided to stay his decision to die until he has reviewed the merits of the case for continued life. Pen to paper, all ye playwrights!

All those sturdy death-penaltarians who cheered the execution on the ground that "he got what he deserved and what he wanted" might live the regret the full implications of the Gilmore principle. If the law protects the right of the condemned to choose death over life, finally and irrevocably, must not the law equally protect the right of the condemned to choose life over death, as finally and irrevocably as is the power of the law? Is that not what is meant by equal protection of the law? If the law gives me the power to cause the State to kill me, does not the law thereby give me the power to cause the State to let me live?

Sophistry, you say. Who knows what logic yonder lurks in the minds of men? Could it be that this wily, self-confessed killer perceived such implications to flow from his resolute refusal to appeal? Those who were convinced, prior to the execution, that Gilmore was bluffing as part of a devious plot to cheat his executioners can now repair to the belief that Gilmore may have said "let's get on with it" in furtherance of a deeper conspiracy to discredit the death penalty, once and for all.

Has he not also put both the Utah and the U.S. Supreme Court in a bit of a bind? Eventually, both forums will finally review the Utah death penalty statute. If either finds the law to be defective, that will place the Warden and the State of Utah in the position of having wrongfully caused the death of you know whom and potentially liable to his estate for who knows what. But maybe the Warden can write a book to pay the judgment.

However, if both Courts find the law to be enforceable, will it not be said for generations to come that they did so to avoid the implications of doing otherwise? I will never cease in my amazement at how such a man as Gilmore can so manipulate our system merely by doing nothing after his sentence.

This is the inevitable result of the system reflecting the naive belief that all persons condemned to die will fight to avoid execution. We may recall identifying tearfully with Susan Hayward as she won an Oscar portraying a character fighting a losing battle with a California gas chamber in the movie I Want To Die back in the late fifties. However, although the story was based in fact, the character is not a universal one (neither was the studio, it was United Artists, trivia fans.)

Our society has some folks in it who want to die but can't do the deed themselves. They might just decide to kill in the hope that the State will do it for them and immortalize them in the bargain. To those persons, death is a reward, life imprisonment is cruel and unusual punishment and getting away with the crime is the worst outcome of all. How does that hang on your gallows, Mr. Death-is-a-Deterrent?

The debaters on both sides of the deterrence/non-deterrence argument have missed the point. Capital punishment deters some, invites some, and, more often than both, has no effect whatsoever on whether most persons will take a life.

Similarly, those who contend that death is constitutionally proscribed as cruel and unusual punishement have their heads in the sand. In this country's history, it is far more unusual not to have death as a penalty than to have it. As for cruelty, death is as cruel to those who seek living as life is cruel to those who seek dying.

There is little to rebut the straightforward argument of retribution except that I wish people would say what they mean. Don't allude to "eye-for-an-eye" when you mean "life-for-a-life." The Supreme Court will not abide by any eye-gouging no matter what the crime may have been, nevermind the implication the simile has for males convicted of rape.

One rejoinder which occurs in the Biblical admonition that vengeance is the business of the Lord and not of man, but that's the same Bible that started the eye-gouging analogy in the first place. Perhaps the most cogent response is that the state cannot justify killing on the basis of deterrence and therefore is hard put to promulgate life's sacredness while busily engaged in its deliberate termination.

By far the best approach to the debate on capital punishment is to avoid it. It belongs in the category with religion and politics where few opinions, if any, change with discussion and where communication is rarely meaningful because of the emotion which pervades the topic and the participants.

The plain and simple fact is that a majority of or voting population now favors death as a penalty. Few who do really know why. They just do. Few who have the law in their State know what it says or care. They're just happy they've got it. As long as the majority of voters want it, the majority of lawmakers will enact it out of sheer self-preservation. Similarly, a majority of judges will invoke it at sentence and protect it on appeal. While it is not yet clear, it seems most of the governors will follow suit, too.

The majority will have their will. People will follow Gary Mark Gilmore's path to oblivion until the majority has glutted its bloody thirst or until opinion swings. People will kill each other and the State will call it murder. The State will kill those convicted in the name of the people and call it execution. Most of those will have been truly guilty but a few innocents will be executed along with them. The system, human and frail as it is, can never be a perfect one. Reformable condemnees will die. Hard core killers will escape death and kill again. The circle of death will go 'round and 'round until society decides to get off. In the meanwhile we who survive will all get dizzy together. Take your comfort from that.

[Happy 73rd Birthday, guest blogger, Roger S. Hurley.]

The 30/30 Series: Drugs and Alcohol

This is the second in a series of posts commemorating my fortieth birthday.

I got caught smoking in second grade. My mortified mother cried as her haphazard spanks landed mostly on the back of my knees: "Don't! You! Ever! Do! That! Again!..." My father's response was more subdued; he was, after all, the smoker in the house. He suggested that he would buy me cigarettes if I truly needed them, but that hiding such things from Mom and Dad was the real problem.

By high school, I was

The 30/30 Series: Abortion and the Death Penalty

This is the first in a series of posts commemorating my fortieth birthday.

One of the saddest, most disturbing moments of my life was a visit to a friend who had recently had an abortion. The sailor who knocked her up had no interest in raising a child with her, and her feminist ideologies, coupled with the fear of her conservative Catholic immigrant parents, told her it was the right thing to do.

I was not prepared for the now-useless milk that leaked from her breasts. She wiped tears and snot with the same tissues that daubed and dried her nipples. I tried to console her, and I had no right to judge her, but I knew she would be haunted for life by the decision. Perhaps she'd use the sorrow and guilt as a motivator for good, I theorized, but she seemed irreversibly damaged by her choice.

As affecting as the moment was, though, I have always found myself nauseated by the sanctimony of anti-abortion activists. I harken back to John Waters' screamed retort to clinic protesters as he rode past them: "I wish I was a girl so I could have an abortion!" Ultimately, my sentiments follow the safe, legal and rare line, with superduper emphasis on rare. I don't mean limiting access; I mean finding ways to reduce the need through sex ed, birth control, adoption programs, foundation money, etc.

In my personal life, I hope I never have to be that shoulder to cry on again. If a woman ever asked me for advice, I'd probably tell the leaky nipples story and the John Waters joke to convey my complicated sentiments. In the public sphere, I would never presume to tell a woman what to do with her own body, or preclude her from her choice. Any public servant who does so is a fraud.

Which brings me to the death penalty. Ever notice that most people who are rabid abortion foes are also pro-death penalty? Their sanctity of life arguments evaporate when the institutional decision to kill arises. Nevermind the racial and class disparities in its application, nevermind the ghoulish machinery and bloodlust, let 'em dangle or fry. It's justice, they conclude. That kind of hypocrisy offends me deeply, as I think it would Christ, who is remembered as both a death penalty abolitionist (Remember?) and a death penalty victim. (Remember?)

"Now, who's being sanctimonious?" you might ask. After all, isn't there a hypocrisy in supporting abortion rights and despising the death penalty? Perhaps. But I distinguish the personal decision (unique to women) to control the content of their bodies from the public decision to punish with death. Apples and oranges.

Or, if you prefer, the Constitutional right to privacy and the Constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment. Any member of the Church of the Third Revelation will agree.

Kipling Runyon Pome

I’ll dance like Rudyard Kipling on the jewel-encrusted Nile
I’ll feed the force of reason to your enigmatic smile
I’ll dance like Damon Runyon on your Nile-encrusted jewel
I’ll thrust my soul, in season, like an enigmatic fool.

Courtroom Classroom Theater Church

In my professional capacity, I beg for justice and mercy for the poor as my father did before me before he died of a liquor-soaked, broken heart. I believe I accomplish much for the least among us in our society with meager resources, a quick wit and a reputation that precedes me. If I were to distill what I do even further, I would say that my job is the art of persuasion.

I must, first, persuade my clients – poor people charged with crimes in the Poverty Capital of America – that I will look out for them. If bigots assume that the welfare class grabs and gobbles up every entitlement that comes their way, I can tell you that, with respect to free legal assistance, poor people hold their noses. Conventional wisdom among the poor is that public defenders aren’t real lawyers; that they’re in cahoots with judges and prosecutors. So I must act swiftly to change their prejudice against me. I have my tricks. Poof! I’m a real lawyer!

Thereafter, I must persuade prosecutors that I am a fair and aggressive advocate, I must convince judges that I know the law of the case, and, in trial, I must convince jurors to uphold their oath in their deliberations.
Justice requires that people think harder. I have to persuade people to open their minds to a deeper understanding of the matter at hand even though they think they know enough already. I call it paradigm-shifting.

I offer up this broad example: Courtroom, classroom, theater, church. If you compare them, you’ll find curious parallels. Each is a physical space where people interact. Each requires orderly silence. Each has an omnipotent power looming above: judge, principal, director, God. Each has participants who each have their role. The jury is to the class is to the audience is to the congregation. The lawyer is to the teacher is to the actor is to the priest, and each one of these is set to the task of persuasion. Ultimately, the law is to education is to drama is to faith. Note that churches hardly corner the market on morality. There are moral components to each venue, assuming, as I do, as our founding fathers did, that wisdom and knowledge and enlightenment and a just society are moral ends.

And so, I am a lawyer and a teacher and an actor and a priest in the emerging realm of improvisational moral theater formerly known as the criminal justice system.

Poof! Your paradigm has shifted!

Synecdoche, NY: A Strawberry Letter Review

I often defend my secular education this way: We read Waiting for Godot and Camus' The Stranger. I wrote a term paper on Woody Allen. For Godsake, we wrote journals. My wife doesn't buy it. She thinks her Catholic education imbued her with special powers of observation and perception, and closeness to God.

At any rate, I know my existential and absurd. As Magnolia was the best last movie of the twentieth century, Synechdocheny, New York is the best first movie of the twenty-first. It is a work of art and loving montage to film and theater and acting and women. Err, I mean homage. When you realize that Emily Watson portrays an actress portraying a younger version of the character played by Samantha Morton, who's character ages throughout the film along with Hoffman, you know you're in a movie like no other. Along the way you'll find pognancy and nihilism and sex and death bickering with one another.

Look out for Adele's NeighborLady, portrayed by an old, familar face. She was also in Doubt. Diane Weist gets Denschier by the day. Another important moment is the priest in the play, harkening to Donald Sutherland's priest in Little Murders. There is plenty of reference reverence and cinematic and theatrical worship. All of it quite Godless and magnificent.
Did I mention Keener as a Lucian Frued miniaturist, traipsing off to Berlin with Jennifer Jason-Leigh? Kaufman has created a movie that will alter your views of filmmaking and acting while it also makes us all accomplices in its sweet story. See it and discuss.

Oh, and Happy Easter.

Strange But True Story #1

I had been out of law school for a couple of years doing mostly appellate work for the Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office when I was given a surprise assignment: I was asked to represent a nineteen year old kid who was caught up in a major drug sting involving lots of cocaine. There was so much cocaine involved that the penalties included ten years of mandatory time on top of his potential sentence of a dozen or so years.

I attended the first pretrial conference feeling nervous and out of my league. This prosecution was handled by the “3 x Bulk” unit of the Cuyahoga County Prosecutors Office – the big guns who prosecuted the worst sorts of drug gangsters. The prosecutor assigned to the case never arrived for the pretrial – he was busy in another courtroom, I was told – and the matter was reset for another pretrial conference in a few weeks.

I arrived for the second pretrial feeling slightly more relaxed and prepared: I had studied the convoluted drug statutes, understood the elements and penalty enhancements, I had researched applicable case law and kicked around issues with older, wiser colleagues. I waited for several hours and was told, again, that the prosecutor was busy on another matter and would not be able to attend our meeting. The pretrial was, again, rescheduled.

When the prosecutor failed to show for the third pretrial, I was pissed. I called the busy prosecutor and graciously offered to come to his office for a discussion sooner rather than later. He was both amicable and apologetic, lamenting how swamped he was with cases. He said he could accommodate me and we scheduled a meeting at his office.

I arrived at the 3 x Bulk Unit office and waited in a small lobby. I had only spoken with the prosecutor over the phone and had no idea what he looked like. When he opened the door to greet me I was shocked by his appearance: on his head was a huge, cartoonish pompadour, like nothing I’d ever seen. His hair was perfect, immaculate and mountainous; a symmetrical gravity-defying wave.

We chatted about how busy he was as he led me to his office. He offered me a seat and we chatted some more as I digested my surroundings. On his desk, as garish and imposing as the hair on his head, was a large aerosol can of hairspray. I then noticed the décor. His office was filled with posters, pictures, drawings and calendars all depicting wolves. There were ceramic figurines of wolves. There were no pictures of people, no family vacations, etc. Just wolves.

The conversation was productive: he understood that I was new at these things and reassured me that my client was a bit player in the operation that was the subject of the sting. He was confident we could work something out. I left feeling off balance, but the guy seemed genuine, despite his caricatured existence. We would see each other in court at the next scheduled pretrial, the Monday of the following week.

That weekend, I was ruined with worry. The Monday morning pretrial would be the judge’s last big push to resolve the case before trial. Was the prosecutor conning me? Would he ask my client to snitch? Could my inexperience cause a nineteen year old kid to spend the next twenty-odd years in prison? Had I researched the law enough? Was there something I was missing? As the clock ticked toward Monday, I felt even more confused and overwhelmed. Late Saturday night, I turned on the television to distract me from my thoughts.

And there he was, on television. My prosecutor, his pompadour deflated, wearing a county prisoner uniform, looking haggard and exhausted and unshaven over a grainy, closed-circuit, jailhouse feed. That weekend, he had been arrested and charged with savagely attacking his girlfriend, shooting her and leaving her for dead in a ditch along side a deserted rural road. It was the lead story on the nightly news.

The following Monday, I arrived for the final pretrial to meet a sullen “replacement” prosecutor who promptly offered my guy guaranteed probation to resolve the matter as swiftly as possible. My client was bewildered by my information and quickly took the deal.

A few days later, I thought to check the calendar, and found my hunch correct: the night my perfectly coiffed prosecutor transformed into a maniac, his drug-fueled, bloody rampage was bathed in the glow of a full moon.

True fucking story. True. True. True.

A Coupla Pomes

The Murder of Absolutely

I murder the word, “absolutely”
With all of its toxins inside
For those who use the word loosely
Seem arrogant, haughty and snide.

I murder you, word, “absolutely”
And banish your use from mankind.
By hiding behind you so smoothly
Your users concoct a false mind.

I’ve murdered this word absolutely
To remind the deceivers what’s true
For all of them must be reminded:
A “yes” or “no” will do.



[untitled] or Id Puzzle

Flaccid/placid
Turbid/turgid

CE3K: An Appreciation

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The profoundest fear of my childhood was aliens. Somehow, somewhere, I got the notion, as a small child, that strange lights in the sky meant I was in danger. Close Encounters emancipated me from that irrational, childish fear, and set the tone (five tones, actually) for a life changed by cinema.
Spielberg set out to make a movie about UFO’s and Watergate, and he did so magnificently. Government conspiracies aside, CE3K resonates with an agenda that surely represents a high-point of movie studio money and individual vision. Like Welles before him, Spielberg spills his Jungian guts out, here: Devil’s Tower, a beacon metaphor for the collective unconscious – confused but ripe for evolution; a positively Zauberfloten score by John Williams; a cameo by Francois Truffaut, who was studying for a book he was writing on acting; Melinda Dillon, in her nightshirt and short-shorts, as vulnerable and imperiled as any screen heroine; Teri Garr, her tragicomic foil; Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss; the dazzling light show and concerto crescendo (No Dark Side of the Moon synchs, please...) All this and more from the Jaws wunderkind. CE3K is a movie about hysteria and vision, and how the two commonly intersect in the creative mind. It’s the anti-Apocalypse Now. It’s Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead without the creepy comb-over.
Roy Neary’s quest for meaning in his mashed potatoes unfolds like a puzzle. The protagonist loses his mind and his family in pursuit of the truth and “cosmic enlightenment.” All the childish toys and train sets and Pinocchio music boxes (hear Roy’s wife call him “Jiminy Cricket” to capture his distracted toddler attention span) are left behind as the boy becomes a man, bathed in the reverent, approving glow of the mothership. Those strange lights in the sky are no danger. They are, instead, a modern manifestation of hope (and vindication) for the seekers and travelers among us. We are not alone, after all.

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The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street

There's an episode of the old Twilight Zone named this, where the neighbors of an idyllic Mayberry-esque town find themselves plunged into darkness by a mysterious power outage. Soon there are rumors of malevolent monsters or aliens invading. Eventually they begin to turn suspicious of each other and viciously attack one among them for being different. It is the incivility of panic and fear that brings the true "monsters" to maple street in the guise of its own irrational residents.

I used this in court the other day to offer a parallel to my guilty client's neighborhood problem. He moved into a private bedroom community with his loud music and his barking dogs. He was neither friendly nor respectful to his neighbors. One day, he gets a note on his door threatening to "take care" of his dogs. Furious, he gets into an ugly argument with his neighbor, and gets pushy. Charged, he is ordered to stay away from his neighbors, and, accordingly, he can't stay in his own home. His entire neighborhood showed up in court for his sentencing to speak against him as "a bully" and "not a good neighbor" and a "danger" and a "threat to their community." None of them are willing to tell who wrote the nasty note that provoked the confrontation in the first place.

So I spoke on his behalf and reminded the court of that Twilight Episode I saw many years ago, a glazed-eyed fat kid, up too late watching TV.

As usual, no one knew what the hell I was taking about.

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A Childhood Anecdote

Like Machiavelli, I learned my political lessons young.

I was in elementary school when a levy on the ballot brought cameras to our class for a puff piece. It was in the media center where the cameraman lit up his lights, looking for ideal children in need of funding. Instead, he found a swarm of obnoxious children, anxious to be on tv, piling on one another at the bookshelf, ripping books off the shelves, glancing at their covers toward the camera, and tossing the books aside. They looked like the carp in the shallow pond at the amusement park, lurching over one another for a pellet. And what was that pellet, anyway? Media exposure? A childish urge for Warhol's 15 Minutes? McLuhan's bastards, every one.

I played it cool, found a quiet empty spot near a window for good lighting. I opened a book and read. The cameraman annoyed with the chaos and anarchy his lens was capturing, turned his eye toward me, alone in a corner. He set up his camera and filmed me. I never lifted an eye toward the lens. He captured a moment for public consumption, then went on his way, hurriedly packing his lights and batteries. I was the one who wound up on tv.

I think the levy passed.

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