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When we reported to duty back at our day job yesterday, it was like
waking up from a long, weird dream. To have survived a week in the middle
of the media maelstrom, surrounded by power-hungry politicians and gear-stripping
journalists with their motors revved up but nowhere to go was a nerve-wracking
experience for an armchair journalist more accustomed to composing in
the wee hours of the nights, with the family asleep and the workload
at bay, enjoying the silence, alone but for the cat on our lap.
But enough politics, already! It’s an unhealthy obsession. It
still amazes that the Dowbrigade, who has been know to bellyache when
the Thursday night meetings consist of 90 minutes of political talk,
has gone a week without blogging about anything but politics.
In our own academic and sporting circles we are known as a political
junkie, but compared to last week’s display, we hesitate to even claim
the rank of rank amateur. We have always known, in a theoretical sort
of way, that there were political junkies so lost to their addiction
that they lived, slept, ate, breathed and fornicated politics, but we
had never before spent so much time in their native habitats, surrounded
by herds of the beasts.
It is a vicious and twisted pastime, and when it takes over a person’s
life completely politics can create a distortion of reality and delusional
psychoses which often cause permanent damage.
Which is why we have always preferred to take our politics in small
doses, and mixed liberally with other topics of interest; education,
cultural
anthropology, sports, business,
law, weird
photos and occasionally an unclothed
human body,
more often than not female. Wait! Before all you progressive females
(assuming there are any among my readers) expunge us from your aggregators
let us state for the record that we firmly believe that women are better
than men at just about everything, that the world would be in a much
better state if the ratio of males to females in government were reversed,
and
we have seriously considered starting a companion Blog named "Machos
for Matriarchy".
This week we have been blogging less because we had some catching up
to to with our current group of students, 12 foreign lawyers starting
an LLM program so that they can sit for the bar exam and eventually represent
their foreign clients in American courts. We did hold class last
week, every day from 9 til 1, but with the Convention and the Blogging
we didn’t do our usual stellar job preparing, correcting and evaluating.
They are a very sharp bunch, these alien barristers and they catch every nuance. It’s not easy to stay one step ahead of them. Hell, they are ambitious
young professionals in a cutthroat international arena. They cut me some
slack last week as they had picked up, from American friends, that the
DNC was a big deal. This
week we are giving them a little extra to compensate.
Today one of them, a 32-year-old Japanese lawyer, posed the following
question following a lecture on the cultural influences on the American
Judicial System: "If New England is the center of the Yankee culture
and Yankee tradition, why does everybody in New England hate the Yankees". Tomorrow
we will be spending the whole day at the Middlesex County Courthouse,
watching the wheel of American justice turn. We stopped by the
clerks office this afternoon after work to scope out the docket and plan
our tour.
We figure 45 minutes at the arraignments, watching the fresh
meat being paraded
through
on
their assembly-line initiation, or in most cases, reinitiation, to
the court system. The we’ll stop in at a hearing in the infamous
Paul
Shanley case, the hip defrocked priest who turned out to be more of a thigh
man. Finally, there is a murder trial that has been going on all week
on the sixth floor which should feature some good eye-witness testimony
tomorrow. And the principles are Vietnamese, so everything will
need to be translated, which actually makes it easier for my students
to understand.
So if any of our new readers are so far gone that they are allergic
to anything without the tang of politics, now might be a good time to
stop
reading the Dowbrigade. If you’re at all interested in the meanderings
of our sometime feeble, sometime febrile mind, then welcome to the Brigade,
and read on.
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