{"id":2500,"date":"2004-08-03T22:19:23","date_gmt":"2004-08-04T02:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2004\/08\/03\/political-withdrawal-symptoms\/"},"modified":"2004-08-03T22:19:23","modified_gmt":"2004-08-04T02:19:23","slug":"political-withdrawal-symptoms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2004\/08\/03\/political-withdrawal-symptoms\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Withdrawal Symptoms"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n
\n

When we reported to duty back at our day job yesterday, it was like
\n waking up from a long, weird dream. To have survived a week in the middle
\n of the media maelstrom, surrounded by power-hungry politicians and gear-stripping
\n journalists with their motors revved up but nowhere to go was a nerve-wracking
\n experience for an armchair journalist more accustomed to composing in
\n the wee hours of the nights, with the family asleep and the workload
\n at bay, enjoying the silence, alone but for the cat on our lap.<\/p>\n

But enough politics, already!  It’s an unhealthy obsession. It
\n still amazes that the Dowbrigade, who has been know to bellyache when
\n the Thursday night meetings consist of 90 minutes of political talk,
\n has gone a week without blogging about anything but politics.<\/p>\n

In our own academic and sporting circles we are known as a political
\n junkie, but compared to last week’s display, we hesitate to even claim
\n the rank of rank amateur. We have always known, in a theoretical sort
\n of way, that there were political junkies so lost to their addiction
\n that they lived, slept, ate, breathed and fornicated politics, but we
\n had never before spent so much time in their native habitats, surrounded
\n by herds of the beasts.<\/p>\n

It is a vicious and twisted pastime, and when it takes over a person’s
\n life completely politics can create a distortion of reality and delusional
\n psychoses which often cause permanent damage. <\/p>\n

Which is why we have always preferred to take our politics in small
\n doses, and mixed liberally with other topics of interest; education<\/a>,
\n cultural
\n anthropology<\/a>, sports<\/a>, business<\/a>,
\n law<\/a>, weird
\n photos<\/a> and occasionally an unclothed
\n human body<\/a>,
\n more often than not female. Wait! Before all you progressive females
\n (assuming there are any among my readers) expunge us from your aggregators
\n let us state for the record that we firmly believe that women are better
\n than men at just about everything, that the world would be in a much
\n better state if the ratio of males to females in government were reversed,
\n and
\n we have seriously considered starting a companion Blog named "Machos
\n for Matriarchy".<\/p>\n

This week we have been blogging less because we had some catching up
\n to to with our current group of students, 12 foreign lawyers starting
\n an LLM program so that they can sit for the bar exam and eventually represent
\n their foreign clients in American courts.  We did hold class last
\n week, every day from 9 til 1, but with the Convention and the Blogging
\n we didn’t do our usual stellar job preparing, correcting and evaluating. <\/p>\n

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
\n young professionals in a cutthroat international arena. They cut me some
\n slack last week as they had picked up, from American friends, that the
\n DNC was a big deal. This
\n week we are giving them a little extra to compensate.<\/p>\n

Today one of them, a 32-year-old Japanese lawyer, posed the following
\n question following a lecture on the cultural influences on the American
\n Judicial System: "If New England is the center of the Yankee culture
\n and Yankee tradition, why does everybody in New England hate the Yankees".  Tomorrow
\n we will be spending the whole day at the Middlesex County Courthouse,
\n watching the wheel of American justice turn.  We stopped by the
\n clerks office this afternoon after work to scope out the docket and plan
\n our tour.<\/p>\n

We figure 45 minutes at the arraignments, watching the fresh
\n meat being paraded
\n through
\n on
\n their assembly-line initiation, or in most cases, reinitiation, to
\n the court system.  The we’ll stop in at a hearing in the infamous
\n Paul
\n Shanley case<\/a>, the hip defrocked priest who turned out to be more of a thigh
\n man. Finally, there is a murder trial that has been going on all week
\n on the sixth floor which should feature some good eye-witness testimony
\n tomorrow.  And the principles are Vietnamese, so everything will
\n need to be translated, which actually makes it easier for my students
\n to understand.<\/p>\n

So if any of our new readers are so far gone that they are allergic
\n to anything without the tang of politics, now might be a good time to
\n stop
\n reading the Dowbrigade.  If you’re at all interested in the meanderings
\n of our sometime feeble, sometime febrile mind, then welcome to the Brigade,
\n and read on.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}