Remember Honestlawyers.com?

We are currently working on a virtual import project with our
foreign business students, in which they choose a product from their
home market they think would sell well in Boston, and via the internet go
through all of the steps involved in purchasing, packaging, shipping,
paying
duties
and
fees, and distributing said product, to see if there really is a profitable
business in there somewhere. We first tested a version of this project
way back in 1989, before the WWW, purely via email, between a class at
Boston
University and one at Hebron University in the occupied West Bank between
Israel and Jordan.  Things were really getting interesting, with
some serious inquiries from NGO’s about possibly funding some of the
Palestinian students’ project products, when the university was shut
down as part of the first Intifada But the idea lives on.

In the first
stage the students just brainstorm what products are produced in their
home region and which ones might find a market here in Boston. We emphasize
that not all ideas are good ideas, and that not even all good ideas make
good businesses. As an example, on the spur of the moment, we asked them
if they remembered "honestlawyer.com".

Well, do any of YOU remember honestlawyer.com? We thought
not. But this started us thinking about why this idea wouldn’t fly. The
legal profession is an example of a job with a built-in dichotomy of
values, a Janus-like schizophrenia in roles, and a psychological difficulty
little appreciated or discussed among practitioners.

Our lawyers are our surrogates in a very vicious arena
of public confrontation, where the course of lives can hang in the balance.
Everybody wants a mean unscrupulous bastard for a lawyer, who knows all
the tricks and when to use them, without, of course, transgressing on
the law itself. At the same time, we want a lawyer we can confide in
and trust not to screw US. The lawyer is required to have one personality
when facing the opposition – crafty, shifty, ingenious, dangerous, opportunistic,
merciless,and a completely other one when facing the client – honest,
straightforward,
trustworthy, friendly. The strain must be incredible.

The position of President of the United States is in
many ways similar and presents unique psychological challenges to those
who aspire to it. This is the essential dichotomy in modern democracy;
we want a mean bastard as our President, a guy who will hunt down and
exterminate the vermin who prey on Americans, a cutthroat negotiator
who knows all the tricks and won’t be out-tricked or outsmarted by some dastardly
foreign dictator, but at the same time we demand a principled saint
on the home front, an honest and straight-shooting man of firm moral
values and a patriarchal love for his people.

We learned what happens when we elect a genuinely moral
man when we voted Jimmy Carter into the Oval Office. History may judge
differently but current consensus seems to be that his was the most unsuccessful
Presidency since Warren Harding. He just wasn’t a mean enough son of
a bitch to fend off the jackals in Washington, let alone the international
mad dogs who were crazy enough to want to mess with the U S of A.

Luckily, this time it looks like we have a couple of
pretty evenly matched sleazy unscrupulous political infighters
ready to go toe to toe, no holds barred, which should provide for some
entertaining
mud-slinging
and dirty tricks over the next 2 months, as well as produce a President
who can allow Americans to continue to stride the world and declare "Our
bastard’s meaner than your bastard."