Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right/Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
- Stealer’s Wheel (1972)
Everybody’s nuts right now. Panicked, angry and confused – frayed to the edge of a shattering, lunatic breakdown… Like the man on the bridge in “The Scream,” a single shock – one corkscrew plunge in the Dow or notice of a temporary layoff – from jumping headfirst in the river. That or melting down in a rage, frothing like the crazed anchorman in Network.
The Edge – that point where a man understands he’s got absolutely nothing left to lose – grows closer everyday for a whole lot more of us than the rest of us would like to admit.
Is this the end of Western Domination? Curtains for the American Dream? Probably not (if you’re an eternal optimist like me). But unless you’ve shit for brains, this much is absolutely clear – we’re sitting in the eye of the hurricane, waiting for the second wall to level our Monopoly money recovery. And if the dominoes we all plainly see fall as it appears they will, well… stock up on canned goods. You’ll have a lot more to worry about than an oil spill inflating the cost of shrimp by this same time next year.
And that feeling it’s beyond our control – that we’re helpless, adrift and assuredly, cosmically fucked – has the finger-pointers out in droves. Bleeding hearts and madmen like Paul Krugman are screaming for a second stimulus, blaming the “rich” and their avoidance of taxes for our staggering fiscal deficit. “The wealthy use the GOP and armies of lawyers to shelter them from taxes!” On the other side, the Tea Party blames the poor – mythical “welfare mothers” and the safety net programs they claim, wrongly, keep those “freeloaders” in gilded subsistence. “The poor forty percent of this country pays no income tax at all!”
The warring factions’ only point of agreement is that the middle class is going to get screwed. That when the proverbial bill comes due – and it will, probably sooner than we think – the rich and poor won’t pay it. The tab’ll get handed to the Middle, the least deserving of the three.
This is where the dogma of the liberals and the Tea Party starts tripping my gag reflex. Anyone who’s worked in a corporation in this country knows, the existence of an entirely honest, entirely hard-working middle class is myth and nothing more. There are actually two middle classes – the Productive Middle and the “Fattened Middle.” One carries the other, and the Fattened Middle has earned every bad turn this rotten economy’s given it.
A very early draft of Happy Hour is for Amateurs contained an Atlas Shrugged-like rant about this “Fattened Middle.” It didn’t flow with the book’s comedic thrust, and its points were made more elegantly elsewhere in the text’s narrative. But I’ve always liked this rant, and every author everywhere has a secret urge to publish his own “Who is John Galt?” speech. So here’s mine. A riff on the Fattened Middle, and why they deserve no quarter.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
How do you describe these people – this “Fattened Middle” of America? In government they’re known as bureaucrats; in corporate America, middle management (the non-revenue producing kind)… A long line of Waylon Smitherses bringing zero added value to the table. Hiding in their cubicles and offices, bouncing e-mails back and forth, passing decisions up and down the chain of command. Doing exactly what they’re told and nothing more. No forethought, no going the extra lap. Their sole aim never Success, but avoidance of termination… of getting a pink slip and being left to scramble, rebuild themselves on their wits.
But the fault doesn’t lie with them alone. Our McEconomy’s their perfect petri dish… A world of Byzantine administrative temples, with endless shadowed spaces – places where a man who wants to hide can duck responsibility forever. You can’t finger a bureaucrat or a middle manager on anything. What do these creatures decide? Nothing. And they’ve stacks of emails to prove it. “Here it is. March 2004. I passed that request on to the Finance Committee. I told them it was beyond my authority, right there in my response. I save all my responses.”
Of course you do.
And no, you can’t fire all of these people. Technically, most provide some service, some function that justifies their position. That’s their insidious hook, what keeps them in The Organization – performance of some finite task for which it’s obvious they’re overpaid, but for which finding a cheap replacement would be annoying and time-consuming. And they’ve never had a first or second strike. Their personnel files are squeaky clean. Ten years of cost-of-living raises. An award for most organized filing. A string of B and B+ reviews. Then there’s that issue of morale. Who fires a little league coach or the neighborhood Boy Scout den leader? What would that jolly, jowly HR administrator do if he were cut loose on the street? What are his skills? Saying “Yes” or “I’ll have to look into it” quickly? Firing the poor bastard’s killing him.
And so the inefficiencies persist, cancers on the body commerce. So much wasted time. So much idiot procedure. So many dollars pissed away that ought to be pooled into bonuses for the twenty percent of workers who actually create value.
I know, I know… “We can’t all be productive, but we all need something to do. These people have salaries, and those salaries get spent on stuff, and the selling of that stuff keeps our economy afloat!”*
That’s true, and you know what else? Unsustainable.
This screed might sound mean, and it is. But if you’ve worked in a law firm, or any large organization… If you’ve played e-mail tennis with these legions of chair-warmers daily, You Understand. Here’s an example of your day, my day, representing corporations and agencies, and their middle-to-upper middle management functionaries, earning their middle-to-upper upper middle management salaries, pensions and health benefit packages:
SERVE:
RE: ACME Co. Release
From: _______@______.com (Me)
To: bcarter@_____.com
Bob,
Here’s the release in the ACME matter. Let me know if this is OK.
RETURN:
RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: bcarter@____.com
To: ________@_______.com
Has Tim Perkins OK’d this? He’s got final say on these matters.
VOLLEY:
FW: RE: RE: ACME Co. Release
From: ________@______.com
To: tperkins@____.com
Tim,
Bob tells me you have final say on the release in the ACME case. Tell me if this is OK. We are obligated under court order to finalize it by Monday.
I think we need to have a meeting on this. How’s everybody’s schedule Tuesday afternoon?
Ahhh, the Meeting… The nucleus of every bureaucrat and middle manager’s world. The place where those with no interest in actually solving a problem can ricochet criticisms around the room, looking sage-like for raising a variety of theoretical “strategic concerns”… Where they can appear important airing their complaints about policy, procedure and arcane hypothetical risks no effective thinker would ever burn brain cells considering.
The meeting is middle management’s driving range, where they can swing freely for the 300 yd markers, safe in the comfort of knowing they’ll never be asked to come up with a better idea than the one they’re assailing with meaningless broadsides and corporate-speak gibberish. “Well… I’m really concerned that maybe taking this position will hurt our perception with organized labor in this area.” “This needs to synergize better with long term labor policy, which is progressively oriented.” But then if asked to provide a serious answer as to how the company might actually, pragmatically address the concern they’ve raised, these otherwise omniscient wonks suddenly devolve into mutes, shrugging at each other like a collection of Marcel Marceaus.
And there’s no use in trying to make them accountable. No use in pressing them for constructive answers, demanding to know what value they’ve brought to the company in exchange for the past decade of Cadillac benefits and free donuts. The Fattened Middle lives in a haze, terminally disconnected from what causes the productive to produce, detached from any semblance of ambition or curiosity. Horatio Alger in reverse, shuffling from their Japanese sedans and minivans to their offices, believing that as long as they eat three square a day and avoid ever making a decision the “American Dream” – an insulated cheesecake “career” on the government or corporate dole – is birthright.
They’re wrong, of course. But it’s a whole lot worse than that. In their confounding, parasitic persistence, they’ve perverted and warped the American Dream – turned the damned thing on its ear. The Dream, the bargain, at least a I’ve understood it, wasn’t a trade of perpetual comfort for thirty years of risk avoidance and prolific paperwork creation. The concept, for those who weren’t born with a trust fund, was with a good bit of work and some luck, you’d get back multiples of your sweat equity in dollars. If you worked smart and shrewdly, there was a good chance you’d earn a solid living, possibly even get rich. But it was never enough to just bank hours, or punch out a certain number of emails reminding management You’re Essential.**
Still, that flawed expectation persists. From skyscrapers to factories to City Hall, the Fattened Middle is entrenched, their “I am, thus I deserve” mindset a widely accepted religion. No class plays the victim better, and no class protects itself more. Consider how the armies of non-revenue creating administrators in your office busy themselves… What the workers in the government agencies sending your company reams of forms to be filled out do with themselves each day… What the people in the Human Resources department three floors up are doing right now…***
- Insert image of monkey scratching its ass here -
Perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Some are actually doing something. The moderately ambitious of them are creating mazes of new rules and policies they alone can navigate, all with a singular objective – to justify their paycheck. You’ll never know these rule custodians exist, but the minute you have to get something done – finalize some important project or close a significant deal – They Will Appear. Like a lump of rotting food jammed in the drain of your sink, from inside the company or out, these bureaucrats and administrators and their laundry lists of concerns and requirements will hold up every transaction, constipate the simplest business process… All in deference to the pretext that every corporate or government decision, from purchasing office toilet paper to opening an overseas plant, is too important to be made quickly, or by any single individual.
Bankers work with money, chefs with food, tailors with cloth, etc… What do these middling middleists create? They don’t fly your plane, fix your plumbing, or stitch your suit. Don’t drive your cab, drill your teeth or do your taxes. Don’t fix your car, bag your groceries or manage your money. They’re not developing the office tower down the street, designing the next generation laptop or writing the great American novel… Not curing any diseases, writing a marketing plan or landing the next big sale… They’re not taking the angry calls from any irate clients, making the presentations or trading any stocks or bonds… To describe most of what they do is to simply say They Are. It’s been said in every office twenty percent of workers do one hundred percent of the work. We all know the Fattened Middle. They’re the other eighty percent – creating the appearance of consistent proficiency with toil no one can describe and the value of which is rarely, if ever, measured.
And by insulating themselves from the axe, these parasites have created a second world, a middle management reality – an intractable, institutionalized selfishness – that permeates and corrupts every corporate and government office. A protective bubble for those in it; for those outside, an endless, energy and profit sapping irritation… a never ending ticker tape of complexities and annoyances costing a fortune to address. Worse yet than all of that, the Fattened Middle steals from the needy, most of whom would work twice as hard as the average bureaucrat or middle manager.
All of this damage, this waste, this immense needless inefficiency so a complacent, unproductive sector of an otherwise noble class can cruise through life unmolested, collecting $75,000.00 and up paychecks.
Yeah, I know… Doesn’t sound like a lot of money. Until you consider the size of the Fattened Middle.
Look around your department, your office, your floor… Look around the streets at rush hour, or the corporate park you drive through every morning. Look at the immense facades of all the enormous government buildings downtown. How much of what’s going on in these places is superfluous, overpriced – terminally, congenitally redundant? And how many people are engaged in this monstrous circus of busywork? How many bodies soaking up resources to create what no one needs or what at best should be done by computer? And how many times today will one of them get in your way? Infect or disrupt what you’re doing with some niggling peripheral concern or inane policy mandate. How many times will you come in at 8:00, hoping to get out by 7:00, only to spend the morning hostage to an idiot email chain, answering all those questions nobody ever needs to ask.
They say offshoring of American jobs is a “giant sucking sound.” Maybe. Or maybe the real sucking sound is right here, all around us every day, sitting in the office next door, punching out a memorandum on last week’s strategy meeting. Maybe it’s so loud, been with us so long, we don’t even notice it anymore.
_________________________
*Until it doesn’t. Until we’ve nothing left but a society of administrators, and we can’t allow the natural creative destruction necessary for a healthy economy to take place because if we did, we’d realize there was no real economic activity underpinning the slop of corporate structures, government agencies and financial houses of cards comprising our society. It’s one thing for the rest of the world to whisper about the emperor’s lack of wardrobe, another to put him on stage nude before an audience of would-be bond vigilantes.
**If only wealth were awarded based on mere hours expended, no matter how intellectually untaxing the toil… How many years ago would I have renounced professional work and picked up a spade to hoe ditches for the township?
***The business of America isn’t business. That ship sailed long ago. The business of America today is red tape. We’re a giant DMV, creating McJobs and Whiffle Careers in impossibly complex corporate and governmental hierarchies, masturbating processes, policies and frameworks creating nothing but salaries from streams of revenue that look more and more frighteningly fictional. What’s the alchemy involved in turning procedure for procedure’s sake into money? Somebody, somewhere has to make something of actual value sufficient to sustain all that administration. That or it’s all just a huge, impenetrable Ponzi scheme.
Here’s the second installment of a series lauding “brilliant, understated rock stars we ought to recognize more often – the frequently underappreciated who create the classic sounds we associate with the more self-promotional members of their bands, or whom we never pay attention to at all…” The idea is to build out an entire band of them – guitar, drums, bass, vocals and keyboards. Part I is available here.
Drums: Charlie Watts
I know… How can Charlie Watts be underappreciated? He’s a member of the world’s greatest – and most famous – rock and roll band?
Exactly. And that’s a lot of why Watts is overlooked. In the immediate orbit of people like Jagger, Richards and Brian Jones, who wouldn’t have been lost in the shadows? And Watts has always been immensely private – a gentlemen who simply beat the skins as Mick duck-walked the stage and Keith and Ronnie traded riffs, staggering, stoned, mugging through cigarette smoke.
That Watts has been recognized more as “rock star” than a technician – celebrated more for the company he’s kept than the skill he brings to the drum kit – is a criminal, sinful oversight. Because in fifty years of playing, the man has never missed a beat, never played anything off tempo. …Well, maybe a few times, but never so badly you’d remember. Never so beyond salvage he couldn’t make you quickly forget.
As I noted at the start, however, his band, their fame – the forty years of Kleig light glare on Mick and Keith, the death of Brian Jones, Altamont and all other scandals and drama that have cemented the Stones in our culture – is but a part of what’s overshadowed Watts. The other part of it, perhaps the bigger part, is that Watts is almost too good a drummer… too tight for his often sloppy band, so precise he almost slips into the background.*
Consider his early competition, the drummers we still view as masters. Keith Moon never saw a space he couldn’t fill, or a fill he couldn’t embellish. Same went for Mitch Mitchell. Bonham and Ginger Baker took over songs, became the gravity guiding everything around them. Watts never took the lead. He played an ensemble part, with tight economic fills you might not even have noticed, or if you did, thought were rote, mechanical… I’m not a student of the drums, so I can’t say how complex they were. But this much I’ve learned of art in general – that something might look or sound simple is rarely proof it is. More often than not what you’re hearing is the skill to make the difficult appear easy. Or simply flawless execution. Both describe Watts’ work:
The tempo shift between the verse and chorus show an amazing discipline. Watts stops on a dime and segues into an entirely different time sequence – one at odds with the previous rhythm – then shifts back seamlessly.
The subtle rolls behind the beats at the start of this song are genius – an ideal finishing touch, or accompaniment, to the greatest riff in the history of rock music. You might never have considered the importance of those sounds, consciously even noticed them, but without that filler, the song would have had just a bit too much dead air between the early guitar notes.*** It’s the little touches that always make the difference.
And if you doubt Watts can still play nearing 70, here he is in 2006, slamming through “Live With Me,” a tune built around a relentless drum beat (yeah, Christina Aguilera’s guesting in it, but it’s a smoking version of the tune, and she adds some welcome vocal heft).
Part III to follow.
___________________________________
*Mick Taylor, a ridiculously talented guitarist who elevated the Stones’ sound from Let it Bleed through It’s Only Rock and Roll, is frequently cited as the only virtuoso player in the band’s history. Absolute bullshit, and proof of two things: (1) the veracity of the argument Watts has been underappreciated; and, (2) that the music press’s taste is in its mouth.
**If I were old enough or responsible enough to concern myself with writing a will, this is the song I’d demand in lieu of a eulogy. Should I one day crash the Canyonero into a bridge abutment at 80, a victim of steering with my knee while talking on the cell phone, chugging a coffee and struggling to read some highly urgent business-related gibberish on a half-crumpled fax lying on the dashboard, when you click here that’s what you’ll hear.
***That Watts can turn 180 degrees in the middle and play the “Tito Puente” or “Latin jam” section of the song as well, if not better, than any drummer Santana ever had, shows his almost limitless range.#
#Yes, the Tito Puente link is gratuitous, and pointless. Possibly more pointless than a footnote to a footnote. Except that I follow a rule – every time Puente is cited, he must be linked.
The best song will never get sung/The best life never leaves your lungs/So good, you won’t ever know/I never hear it on the radio/Can’t hear it on the radio – “The Late Greats,” Wilco (2004)
If you don’t know, I’ve been doing a radio show, “Here’s What to Think,” with Dr. Rob of Shrinktalk.net and my long time editor, Donika. This week’s installment, “The Elephant in the Room,” is an interview with Paul Shirley, ex-NBA power forward, author of Can I Keep My Jersey? and creator of FlipCollective.com.* Among the myriad topics we discussed, including a smear-job some media outlets did on Shirley after he wrote an article criticizing Haiti’s well-known societal and infrastructural deficiencies on ESPN.com after the earthquake, we talked a good bit about music.
Specifically, we talked a lot about Pearl Jam. And more specifically than that, why Pearl Jam will never be the world’s greatest rock and roll band. That they’re not Zeppelin, the Stones, or even the Velvets… But that they just might be the world’s most dependable band – pumping out consistently great songs and performances record after record, tour after tour. It’s true. If you’ve listened to Pearl Jam’s catalog, or seen them play live, you know: The group simply Delivers. No pomp and circumstance. Minimal, if any, marketing. They follow the Grateful Dead’s approach – just play the tunes, and play them well.
Can’t ask for much more than that, can you? What’s better than a band that records and tours incessantly, banging out a killer set every night?
And yet as fans we rarely laud that approach – that dedication to persistently, methodically, without fanfare or drama, pumping out one great piece of art after another. That’s a tragedy, I think, because there are a lot of Pearl Jams out there, performers who are more “professionals” than “personalities.” Performers who focus more on the arc of the guitar solo or the timing of the drum fill than the next controversy they can stir by bad-mouthing ex-lovers in Rolling Stone.**
There ought to be an award for these performers – an “Underacknowledged Genius” or “Consummate Professional” Grammy. But I’m not holding my breath. In a music landscape dominated by ghoulish deformities like Lady Gaga, American Idol plasti-pop shiite and auto-tuned McCountry stars Hank Williams would have gored with a broken whiskey bottle rather than share the stage with at the Opry, I don’t think professionalism is going to be celebrated by the music industry any time soon.***
So I’ll do it here. This is a list of brilliant, understated rock stars we ought to recognize more often – the frequently underappreciated who create the classic sounds we associate with the more self-promotional members of their bands, or whom we never pay attention to at all… A “Supergroup of the Often Overlooked.”
Lead Guitar: David Gilmour
Think of Pink Floyd and you think of Roger Waters. And you think of Waters, of course, because you think of the The Wall, Water’s autobiographical two-hour rock opera. Not surprising either takes center stage in the band’s history. In the twilight of the group’s most productive and creative phase, Waters’ egomania consumed the band. Consider The Wall, with its limitless pubescent angst and endless, whining introspection. Who but a terminal self-promoter, a monstrous pathological narcissist, would produce such an epically bloated opera focused persistently, maddeningly, on nothing but his own tedious neuroses?****
But Waters wasn’t the whole of Pink Floyd. Thankfully, not even close to it. The sound of the band – what made their music majestic, unlike anything before or since – is all David Gilmour.
There are three phases of Pink Floyd, and David Gilmour’s been the backbone of the group in each. First, of course, was the Syd Barrett Phase, where the band put out psychedelic pop like “See Emily Play” and “Arnold Lane.” Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets were disjointed and flimsy albums, but still brilliant in spots, showing Barrett’s promise as a songwriter. Unfortunately, before any of that could be realized, as a result of underlying mental illness, or gross overuse of LSD, or both, Barrett lost his mind. Gilmour stepped in to cover for him at live shows, and that was where Pink Floyd’s sound shifted from thin and trippy noodling to a feedback-drenched sonic attack. Compare a 1967 “Astronomy Domine” with Barrett to one from 1968 with Gilmour. Gilmour brought The Heavy.
From there, after a few shaky records, the band hit its stride, a run of amazing records dominated by Gilmour’s guitar. More, Obscured by Clouds, Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Her and Animals – the list’s amazing, on par with the Beatles’ Revolver through Abbey Road phase, the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet through Exile on Main Street period or, for a more updated equivalent, Wilco’s string of perfect records running back to Being There (yeah, Tweedy’s that good). Unlike a lot of those comparisons, however, Floyd’s peak isn’t characterized so much by amazing songwriting, but by the sweeping walls of sound it created, all built around Gilmour’s unique style of playing. Many have tried, but no other band sounds as immense as the Floyd of “Echoes,” “Sheep” or “The Nile Song.” Some things defy replication.
The last era of Floyd, excepting the post-Waters records, which I’m not considering here, is what I’d call the Waters’ Soapbox Phase. If you’re the kind of person who pays attention to the lyrics, which I doubt most Floyd listeners are, you can hear a “Don Henley” effect slipping into the music starting as early as Wish You Were Here.***** Like Henley in “Hotel California” or “Life in the Fast Lane,” Waters whines about the crass commercialism of the record industry in “Have a Cigar.” By Animals, he’s bludgeoning the audience with Orwellian metaphors on the desperation of cogs in the industrial system.
By The Wall it’s all gone to shit… The audience is his therapist. His father’s death, the disconnectedness of being a sheltered, obscenely wealthy rock star and flailing rants against World War Two (as if England had a choice)… his axes are all ground, then ground some more, then a couple more times, just for good measure. Thankfully, the music’s so inspired, and the guitar on tunes like “The Thin Ice,” “Run Like Hell” and the solo in “Comfortably Numb” stunning enough that you needn’t pay any attention to the words. The Final Cut, Floyd’s aptly titled last record with Waters – a criticism of England’s attack on the Falkland Islands subtitled “A Requiem For the Post-War Dream” - is almost a bad joke.****** But I say “almost,” of course, because despite Waters’ attempts to turn the album into a spoken word diatribe with more extraneous verbiage than a Kevin Smith movie, Gilmour floods the record with amazing guitar work, not only rescuing the thing, but turning it into a great record.
Below are three exhibits proving my point about Gilmour – examples of him doing what he does best in a song from each one of the Floyd phases. The first is “The Fletcher Memorial Home,” a languid, meandering tune Gilmour turns on its head with a staggering solo that can’t be more than twenty notes long. I’ve been in the condition to “visualize” music enough to describe this solo without being ludicrous. And this thing appears as jet, or the wing of one – drafting long, flawless lines in its wake, puncturing through the fog of an otherwise forgettable dirge. Where a million other guitarists would have fired off dozens of notes, Gilmour selects a mere handful. But he makes every single one count, bending them to maximum impact. The effect is soaring, sweeping – more like the symphonic movement than a single instrumental solo. Comes of like something Wagner might have scored… optimal dramatics, but never overdone.
The second’s a somewhat obscure song from Atom Heart Mother, “Fat Old Sun.” Perfect “Echoes” era Floyd. The solo in this clip, from Gilmour’s Live from Gdansk disc, simply smokes.
The final one is a Syd Barrett era tune written by Richard Wright, the late Floyd keyboardist. The clip’s taken from a television show aired shortly after Wright’s death. The song’s got a lot of space in it, Gilmour’s playing slide, and considering it was a tribute to Wright, he could’ve gone nuts – played a mad, epic solo… interpolated elements of other Wright compositions. Instead he plays it tight, economical. Keeps it the way it was written, but as no one else – not even the other members of Floyd with any other guitarist, including the greats like Clapton, Beck or Page – could make it sound. Because like everything else he’s done, Gilmour “owned” the song the minute he started to play it. You just might not have known, as he never gave a damn about credit. That was for Waters, the tortured artist of the band.
Part II, “Drums,” to follow soon.
_________________________
* If you like the stuff I’ve written about the economy in the past, particularly our refusal to acknowledge and constructively address our financial circumstances on both a personal and national level, you need to read Shirley’s piece, Confessions of an Economic Simpleton.
** John Mayer doesn’t suck simply because he’s a pathetic scandal hound. John Mayer sucks because his music is shit. Even when he’s actually trying (the three songs per record that aren’t aimed exclusively at 16 year old girls), he’s sleep-inducingly dull.
*** Hank Williams III has my proxy on the rest of the argument against modern county: Play This Loud.
**** There are confessions to be made, and indictments to be handed out, regarding the sources of any artist’s neuroses. And perhaps it was Waters’ aim to splay his private life across the canvas in a manner the society he grew up in would abhor as a form of rebellion. In listening to The Wall, however, and hearing Waters bleat and screech about the endless injustices he suffered in a nation treating its citizens as barbarically as England apparently did (perhaps it was just his neighborhood), you can’t help wishing he’d developed a British “stiff upper lip” in place of his sense of self-importance.
***** Yes, I realize it’s almost impossible to compare something as awful as the Eagles to Pink Floyd. It’s also impossible to discuss self-important rock stars without dropping Don Henley’s name. He’s the archetype asshat of the category.
****** Not a joke. Along with providing an excuse to release a pile of outtakes from The Wall, the album is a response to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to go to war over the Falklands, an obscure and utterly useless British colony off South America the neighboring Argentinians had decided to annex. England famously won this dire conflict in large part by parking its ships just beyond the range of the invaders’ artillery, then shelling the shit out of the place. Waters later wrote a song critical of the use of such mechanized warfare during the Persian Gulf War titled “The Bravery of Being Out of Range.” Though Floyd employed every technological advance in its music, in matters of combat, he appears to be a stickler about fair fights.
“[I]t takes two to lie – one to lie and one to listen.” – Homer Simpson, “Colonel Homer” (1992)
Unless you’ve been in a coma, you’ve probably seen some snippet of the Senate grilling of Goldman Sachs’ executives. I won’t bother characterizing that embarrassment here. My earlier post on Twitter suffices:
The Goldman Senate Hearings. For the non-red light district crowd who’d otherwise never see a prostitute argue with a bookie.
But viewing that awful spectacle – watching a hopelessly out-of-her-depth lifetime government employee like Clare McCaskill attempt to cross examine a guy like Lloyd Blankfein on reconciliation of derivatives – an interesting question hit me.
Insider trading’s rampant, everyone knows that. A number of economists and policy wonks have suggested in the past the market might be more transparent if we admitted that fact and legalized the practice. In that same vein of thinking – in light of the obvious fact that humans will always commit frauds, more frequently the more money’s in play – I have to ask… Why not allow bankers to lie to one another?
Look at every disastrous policy or business decision creating the Great Recession and you’ll find a common element: lopsided informational asymmetries. The Goldman case is a perfect example. Paulson and Goldman knew something ACA probably didn’t. IKB apparently knew nothing, and took what it heard from the other side of the deal as fact. That or it thought it knew better than everyone else involved, and couldn’t have been more incorrect.
Either way, the reason IKB got taken was a simple lack of due diligence. The company was lazy with its research – assumed too much based on suspect sources, or simply didn’t analyze enough. But how do you cure that problem? We can’t regulate companies to competence, legislate their managers to shrewdness. Vigilance is only enhanced by a known, increased exposure to risk. And how better to reach that goal, keep every player on his toes, than allowing everyone to lie?
If every firm involved in the mortgage backed securities mess assumed every other firm was utterly, completely full of shit, the “marks” would have all been raging skeptics. No one would have accepted the surface valuations. Those Germans would have done their homework. Everyone would have done more homework. Paulson and Goldman wouldn’t have attempted to hoodwink a buyer the way they did. The chance of success would be too low.
I know what a lot of you are thinking… Madness! This has to be the stupidest goddamned thing you’ve ever written! (And you’ve written many stupid things!) We can’t allow dishonesty as a standard business practice – have our markets balanced on millions of people engaged in efforts to defraud one another!
Really? Are you sure that could never work? Because that’s exactly how our legal system operates.
I’ve sketched the various forms of “soft lying” lawyers engage in under the banner of “advocacy” numerous times in the past. This description, a mock obituary for a litigator from a piece called “Witness Preparation,” codifies them best:
[O]bituary writers can’t tell the truth. They can’t say that, among the many things [the litigator] might have been, he was undoubtedly a conniving, manipulative liar. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been successful enough to warrant all that ink. “Lawyer” and “liar” aren’t mere sound-alikes – lying’s what we do. We just don’t call it that. We offer platitudes like “there are three sides to any story – plaintiff’s, defendant’s, and the facts… by fighting, we ferret out the truth.” That’s true, but it also means one side is lying all the time. Our lies, however, are never direct. Nobody counsels his client to bald-faced bullshit – that could cost you your license. We lie by omission, hide facts or hijack the focus, making the other side’s credibility the issue, obscuring the claims against our clients. We warp the language of an agreement into something its simple verbiage could never have intended. Most of us rationalize this by lying to ourselves – suspending disbelief and supporting our client’s most obscene prevarications. I’ve been dressed down several times by partners for merely joking in private that our client was lying.
“The Judge will decide what’s true. You aren’t the Judge. You have a duty to your client. You’re an advocate, and that is all.” Translation: “I know our client is lying. You know he’s lying. But we want his money.”
And those are just rationalizations for the neophytes and service partner shlubs. The big fish don’t need the justifications. They know that the trick to lying effectively is complete self-delusion. First, you have to make the facts your client gives you real in your mind, as though they actually happened exactly the way you’re going to tell them to the jury. Give them a history, some context, a back story. This sounds easy, but as the WMD debacle in Iraq eloquently illustrates, it’s actually hard as hell. The real facts have a pesky habit of surfacing at the worst times, and this causes serious problems. You might mix up your client’s story with the true facts during a hearing or trial. If one real fact sneaks in, the rest have a tendency to flood in through that hole in the dyke. If you start thinking about the truth, your conscience might kick in subconsciously, leaving you a less than zealous advocate.
But how do you bridge the holes in your client’s fantastic story and bury the guilt of abetting his lies? With the second half of that self-delusion – the victim complex. Your client’s been screwed by his opponent before, so even if he’s wrong on this claim, he deserves to hit the bastard for some money. Your client did something wrong, but something we all do from time to time… Why should he lose a fortune due to some bad timing? It’s not lying; you’re righting a wrong – getting even for the aggrieved. And there’s no justice if you lose. Once a lawyer’s made the leap to this pedestal, the actual bullshitting’s easy.
You might say that’s cynical. Most litigators with the capacity to honestly assess their trade would offer a different descriptive: Accurate. Call it whatever you like, “advocacy” is a form of spinning, misrepresentation by omission, and both are, well, lying. Unswayed? For context’s sake, consider some of our nation’s most illustrious litigators and trial lawyers, and a few stories about their work:
Bill Lerach: The dean of shareholder class action “strike” suits. Served two years in federal prison as part of a plea agreement arising from an investigation his firm for alleged payment of illegal kickbacks to ‘professional’ class action plaintiffs.
The Pinnacle Corp. Billing Fraud Investigation: Associate at multinational law firm took partner to state ethics board for fabricating 450 hours of work in a mere two month span.
The Ross Survey on Billing Fraud: Barely more than half of attorneys responding believed bill padding was unethical; nearly one third have engaged in it.
But I haven’t come to bury Caesar. I’ve come to offer litigators and trial lawyers as examplars – to ask if what’s acceptable for them shouldn’t also be so among bankers. If an “adversarial system” where opponents spin and misrepresent facts to unsophisticated jurors is a credible enough structure through which to find truth in an architecture where our liberty and property can be forfeit, why can’t a couple of equally sophisticated finance professionals bullshit one another? If justice emerges from attorneys weaseling one another in the litigation process, wouldn’t the most informed trades result from two parties openly trying to deceive each other, suspicious as lawyers, vetting every element of the opponent’s proposition?
Why do we preclude that in finance? Is it because the money the bankers are dealing with is so much greater than what’s at issue in the legal business?
Wall Street compensation pool (2009): $130 billion
Amount Fed earned on repayment of loans made to big banks and mortgage backed securities purchases (2009): $46.1 billion
Economic costs of tort litigation (2008): $254.7 billion
Is it possible the reason is emotional, or worse, political? Perhaps attorneys get a unique pass because, unlike bankers, who have to buy the government’s cooperation, lawyers directly control the legislative and regulatory processes? (Need I cite figures comparing the number of JDs and MBAs working in the federal government? Didn’t think so.)
Maybe it’s as simple as party. Democrats love lawyers. Can’t get enough of them. “We need to embrace complexity!” That was our law professor-cum-President’s charge. No problem in the world that can’t be solved with a new volume of rules. And no better source of campaign funding than the industry that makes its living navigating the effluent stream of them Washington widens every day. And Lord, do populists on the Left love their attorneys. Robin Hoods for the working man! The little guy’s only chance against the monstrous, heartless corporations! And we are in populist times, with the Left, as always, playing for emotional votes… demanding economic “fairness,” whatever that is.
Populists, however, are exceedingly simple creatures. They worship notions like consistency, howl at the suggestion of hypocrisy. If you let them run the asylum, some might soon start asking, “When we’re done fixing health care, and cleaning up all these banks, should we clean up the Court system, too? Reform the legal industry people have been complaining about for decades?” They might ask the Democratic Congress to kill its golden goose.
Of course, that’s never going to happen. Neither party would ever give up the contributions it gets from lawyers. But in a better world – an intellectually honest, logical one – that lawyers are allowed to deceive while finance workers may not should at least give the banks some leverage, an argument against absurd regulation. If the legal system decides matters involving our core, essential rights, and the process through which it finds truth is an admitted competition of lies, why hold something as amoral as finance – trades among the most sophisticated of institutional investors, no less – to a higher standard?
Why should Goldman be flayed for pulling the wool over a bank’s eyes the exact same way “Philadelphia Lawyers” pull it over juries’ every day? And if the answer’s something incoherent – “Because that’s just ‘the way it is,’ and lawyers are different than bankers” – then perhaps the Left-leaning populists backing Democrats should rethink their allegiance. In the sort of republic they favor, where fairness would be paramount, consistency the highest grace, how can a party, Congress, or Administration root out thieves and degenerates on Wall Street without first cleaning the rats out of its own basement?
That or just let the bankers lie, too. Either approach would be more credible.
This is Donika, Philalawyer’s site admin. Welcome to the debut of PhilaLawyer, “PJ” on air, as a radio personality. The weekly podcast, “Here’s What To Think,” features PJ, Dr. Rob of Shrinktalk.net, and me.
Click here to listen to Monday’s episode, featuring Jonathan Bernstein. You can tune in each Monday morning, or download from iTunes any time. Thanks for listening!
Like many of the good, god-fearing folk celebrating Jesus’s epic “lost weekend” this Easter, I am in the midst of my own. And doing my best to stay crucified throughout (It’s 75 and sunny; G&Ts-on-the-patio and light yard maintenance weather).* But I do have a piece to offer, one I didn’t have a chance to link this week. It’s on BitterLawyer, the second of the “Ask the Philadelphia Lawyer” series. This one’s a common question – How to react when you discover your friend’s banging a chick you with whom you’re infatuated.** Insult? Assault? Battery?
Q: I have been smitten by an extremely attractive former co-worker… I have made my feelings clear—and been rejected…. [A] close friend and who knows my feelings towards this girl, admits to me he’s been fucking her for the past two weeks… [A]m I permitted to call her a slut to her face?
A: The only cure for not screwing who you want is screwing someone else. I don’t care if you have to go on a sex tour of Thailand, you need to get laid, yesterday. It’s ancient wisdom, predating Confucianism, Zoroastrianism…running back to the days of Neanderthals, that one can only purge the pain of love rejected by purging something else, into someone else…
The rest of my advice for your consideration here.
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*Some say it’s dangerous to fiddle with hedge clippers while drinking. These people have no appreciation for the unique symbiotic link between liquor and electric lawn equipment. The sober hands are tight, constricting – they fight against the rattle of the blades. Gin puts the limbs at ease, absorbing and channeling the shaking. Hands and machine become one, freeing the inner artist. Those Mexicans carving standard poodles and monstrous phallic structures out of the hedges around that estate down the road? Pasted, shitfaced… every last one of them. It’s high art, and they understand, as did Rembrandt, Picasso and Monet – the brush needs a smooth, lithe hand. You’ll never hear of gorgeous “Mormon” gardens. They’re all “English,” and that’s for good reason. The British drink. Britain’s the home of Gin, and Gin is the fount of all “yard sculpture,” as well as the official fuel of summer (and if need be, your riding mower). Beware of those keeping simple lawns… a sign of Puritan swine.
**An utterly gratuitous link. I just love the video – a perfect example of the ridiculousness of the 80s music scene, and how far Stewart had travelled, er… fallen, from the days of the Faces and “Every Picture Tells a Story” (one of the greatest rock songs ever written).
Many argue the best cure for the studied inefficiencies and intentional redundancies that make modern litigation the ridiculous process it’s become is to eliminate the billable hour. That’d be nice, but it’s not going to happen fast enough. The better fix is the simplest: Throttling the revenue stream. Slap a strong “Loser Pays” rule on corporate litigants, and they’ll think twice about filing dubious cases against one another. A smaller inventory of better cases—ones clients actually intend to take all the way to trial, rather than use to hold money or bleed a competitor—would reacquaint lawyers with the actual practice of law and the provision of value instead of “legal widget” production.
Read the rest here. If you have comments, kindly place them on Bitterlawyer. Thanks.
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The second part’s an out-take from Happy Hour about sex. Specifically, that moment after a mindless fuck, when the two of your find yourselves sitting there, thinking Damn. I wish I had a newspaper, or a sandwich. And was halfway across town from here.
* * *
“Maybe you should fuck me in the ass.”
“Did you just ask–” Her comment caught me off guard. Too polite, and no one ever asks – not in a tone like that. It’s always a cajoling thing, or a necessity situation. Somebody’s got to be swayed. Never a vanilla How about…?
“Is that a no?”
“No.”
“’Yes’ no or ‘no’ yes?”
“Wasn’t sure what you said. I hear things sometimes.” That’ll happen on a half bottle of Johnny Red.*
“We don’t have to.”
“No– Just making sure.”
“I am.”
“Let’s just see where it goes.” Horrendous. A porn writer couldn’t have farted a worse pun into the moment.
“Pick. Go in my ass, you stay there.”
At first I felt a pang of insult. Did I come off as green as that? An absolute fucking beginner?** But I held back on the lurch to offense. It wasn’t an unexpected caution. Every guy’s heard it before, like the rule on imbibing brew and spirits – “Liquor before beer, in the clear; Beer before liquor, never sicker.” You can start off as the Lord intended, then shift mid-fuck to the Back Door. The converse, however, is verboten, for reasons no one need explain.
“Do I look like I’m in high school?”
“Hygiene standards vary… wildly.”
“A chimpanzee wouldn’t do that.”
“A man might.”
“Me?” Really?If what attracted you to me, what got us here naked in bed — If that didn’t clue you to the fact that I’m not unskilled in this arena — Not some idiot frat mook who doesn’t know the rules on these things… You haven’t paid any attention. Some men in that spot would have felt used, perhaps even hurt… the kind who need a good slap.
“Yes, ‘you.’ How well do we know each other?”
“Five drinks?”
She rolled her eyes; that said enough.
I didn’t fuck her in the ass. Not because I wasn’t curious, but exactly for the reasons she’d noted. I didn’t know the woman’s past, and she seemed a little too eager. That and I’m a selfish man. I’ll try anything in bed, but my favorite act’s old school fucking. Mom, apple pie and Chevy… Baseball, Norman Rockwell and penis-in-vagina sex. Call me a hopeless nostalgic. I like it better than blow jobs, hand jobs, and certainly more than ass fucking. As I said, that’s more a boredom fix – what you do when you’ve tried everything else, or can’t do anything better.
I’d make an awful queer. And that’s a shame. Because if I weren’t straight… If I hadn’t spent my almost every hour obsessing over how to fuck women, most of whom made it a “chase” (or at least made it feel that way, even when the process was short), I might have gone on to med school, possibly cured some disease.
Did I just say that? Who the fuck am I kidding?
Where were we? Fucking, right. We did that a couple times, and as that tends to go, the process would peak and end. And then we’d just sit there, looking around.
So… How about Princess Di? Think she was offed?
You’re getting semen on the comforter.
Is that– What do they call that?
Paisley.
Strange moments when you’re done screwing someone you hardly know… A random hook up, even a liquored one, is charged with frantic energy – tearing off the wrapping, attacking the merchandise. But by the end of it, the exertion’s driven you sober, lucid enough to realize you’ve no interest in doing anything but getting as far from each other as possible… until you’re up for fucking again. Yet you feel like you’ve got to say something. Dialogue seems in order. You can hear yourself prattling on, and imagine what she’s probably thinking. Son of a bitch… Another Bolero-length refractory period. Where are the two minute Ramones’ single guys? Trust me – we’d love to shut up. But your TV’s in the other room, and if we don’t talk, you might.
“This is a… really… nice place.”
“I guess.” She fiddled with the nightstand lamp.
“I like the… espresso machine.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Whose is it?”
“The machine?”
“The apartment.”
“My firm does work for this developer. I sublet it from him. It’s cheap. He used to see his mistress here.”
“His ‘mistress?’” I didn’t ask the obvious follow-up.
“If his wife found out, she’d sue him for everything. She has cancer on her vagina.”
“On it?”
“That’s what I said. They can’t have sex because the tumor’s in the way. Awful mess for him. She’d take his bank in a divorce.”
It wasn’t a “Scooby Doo Ending” explanation, connecting all the guilty parties, but it was pretty obvious who’d given her a taste for ass fucking, and where that person had gained his.
“Interesting…” The moment seemed optimal for a bathroom run.
“Sorry. Did I say she had it on her ‘vagina?’”
“Yes.” I don’t hallucinate that obscurely.
“I meant ‘vulva.’ It’s on her vulva.” She shifted across the bed to grab a beer – breasts, ass, pussy, all rotating in the light. Man’s a visual creature, and with that, this’d be a short refractory period. Shorter than Blitzkrieg Bop. “You’d think I’d get that right, you know? Considering I have one.”
“You’d think.” So she’s nuts… They’re all nuts in this fucking business. The bigger issue was whether I could piss straight with a new-found emerging hard-on. Never miss north of the bowl, or half-soak the roll of toilet paper. She’ll know, and it’s terrible goddamn form.
* For years, I’ve also hallucinated cats. Probably because, since the earliest childhood I recall, wherever I’ve lived, there’s always been at least one in the house. I assume this is a trick of the mind, a laziness the brain develops over time. Instead of bothering to take the moment necessary to analyze what some errant shadow in the corner of my office might be – a cloud or a plane flaying between the sun and window of whatever anonymous skyscraper in which I happen to be ticking off the hours – the mind defaults to what similar shadows have been in the past: felines, lurking in corners, staring… cleaning their nails and laughing to themselves. Run along to work, monkey. Earn some more money so you can bring back take-out sushi, of which I’ll demand my scraps. White tuna and yellowtail… Fuck that greasy mackerel shit. Then I’ll recall my surroundings, that I’m thirty stories in the air, in a building I have to assume has the staunchest prohibitions on pets.
Perhaps these visions should be troubling, signals of a mind going rotten. But then what brain in front of a computer scanning legal dicta isn’t? I’m just glad I never had Bichon Frises, Chihuahuas, or any other breed of those insufferable “yip yip” dogs growing up. Visions of that would kill me. I shudder to consider the suicide note they’d find tacked to the screen after I’d thrown a chair through the window and swan dove into traffic below… Some awful Colonel Kurtz madness: “The barking… the barking…”
Alright… This is a catch-up post. I’ve been away, doing work on an internet radio show we’re hoping to have rolled out shortly. More on that soon, but for now, here’s some immediate business.
Terrible Advice
If you don’t know Bitterlawyer.com, here’s a perfect opportunity to discover it. I’ve done pieces with them on several occasions in the past and, aside from being great all around people to work with, they run the premier irreverent legal humor website online. Period. It’s a serious entertainment portal, with what I have to assume is substantial backing. Their spot-on sitcom, Living the Dream, is even streamed on Hulu. And no other legal humor site picks up interviews with everyone from Jeffrey Toobin to Tucker Max to David Baldacci. In the world of high quality, finger-in-the-industry’s-eye legal comedy, Bitterlawyer’s the shit.
I’m doing the first of a three column series over there starting this week: “Ask the Philadelphia Lawyer.” If you want terrible advice, ask away. The three inquiries we run with will get free copies of Happy Hour. If you’ve already got the book, give us the address of a fundamentalist to send your copy to. One with a heart condition.
An Interview
You can hear me interviewed tonight at “Q’s House:”
This week, a story of Sex, drugs, and rock music… that does not involve our host! We sit down with controversial author, The Philadelphia Lawyer, to talk about his book, Happy Hour is for Amateurs.
A new piece, “Post Sex Ruminations,” will be up by the weekend. In the interim, here’s another chunk of material from the Twitter vault. I know a lot of people loathe that site – think it’s further degrading the already chimpanzee-level attention spans of the average media consumer. I don’t blame you one bit. But it’s not without its pluses, and one of them, a very large one, is the way it forces you to dust off forgotten bits of your vocabulary. One hundred and forty characters is a tight space in which to offer a complex point. Twitter makes you focus on language, and in that exercise, as you’re searching for ways to abbreviate, condense and shorten, cliches pop into the mind. And that might get you to thinking, “Why do we use so many idiotic idioms? Do people realize how moronic they sound?”
George Carlin was, of course, the master of linguistic humor. But he’s gone, and in his absence we amateurs are left to take up the mantle and at least attempt to ask, as he would, “Where did all these stupid fucking expressions come from?” Twitter’s custom built for that exercise:
Seventy percent of happiness is lowering your expectations. Most of the other thirty is fucking someone attractive.
“I could care less…” How do you even respond to this? “Congrats on avoiding Nihilism?” #StupidExpressions
“…And God sent his only son so that we may rub carbon on our foreheads and refrain from eating certain proteins a few days a year.” #Lent
Here’s another outtake, from a near final draft of Happy Hour. My editor pushed me to yank this in favor of a much shorter description because he felt it was a bit too graphic – the sort of imagery that’d linger in a reader’s mind and detract from the story at a critical juncture near the end of the book. I fought him at the time, but looking back… Yeah, he had a pretty good point.
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“Oooh, it’s crowning!” One of the ladies in blue scrubs beamed.
“Crowning?”
“Come here.”
“No.” I wasn’t sure what she was saying, but I knew enough not to do that.
“You don’t want to see?”
How can I pretend to ignore someone in circumstances this severe? “Really. I’m fine.”
If you want to ever sleep with your wife again, you can’t watch The Action. Stay near her head, and never look where the doctor’s working. He’ll tell you to grab her legs and help her push. Everyone in the room will yell empty slogans at her – a soft variety of what you’d hear in a high school football weight room. “Push! Come on… Push! Breath! Push!” This will go on for a while. Then they’ll shove a vacuum in your wife and pull out a bloody, raisin-like alien with a Yarmulka ringed into the top of its skull from the suction. You’ll cut the cord, a flimsy white tube of flesh with the consistency of undercooked calamari. An assistant will take the screaming alien, wipe it down and place in under lamps exactly like the ones you’ve seen warming week old cheeseburgers in Hardees Restaurants along the Turnpike.
Next, the assistant flips out a huge needle and pumps the alien full of Vitamin K. Why, I didn’t know, and still don’t. And between the depth to which she inserts the needle (any further and I’d have to use “impales”) and the disturbing appearance of the child howling, bleated as though it’s being tortured, there’s no choice but to lurch your gaze away… to the window, the ceiling, the floor – anything that isn’t brandishing a spear-like needle or smeared with fluid and blood.
But that move didn’t work out so well. The minute I turned my head, the first thing I saw was the placenta. It was sitting in a steel metal bowl, like a monstrous sack of shad roe, smothered in fresh marinara. Jesus Creeping Christ… It’s bigger than a Wawa ‘Shortie.’ I pondered the bowl for a moment, trying to assess the object – its size and shape and weight. Where in the hell had she kept it? And what did we do with it now? Do nature freaks really eat that?
Yes, I’d heard that somewhere… That back-to-the-basics types – crazy hippie holistics… the kinds of loons who favor “herbal” cures – would cook and eat the placenta.
And for an instant you do get to wondering, What’s the consistency of that broiled? Plump up like Monkfish?
Afterbirth Royale
½ dozen cloves fresh organic garlic
½ lb fresh Alaskan crab meat
2 tablespoons dill-infused sweet cream butter
1 cup white wine
3 teaspoons sea salt
Bring iron skillet to a robust simmer. Stuff
sac with cloves and crab meat, seal with
umbilical cord using traditional Haggis
knots. Cook at medium until firm, slightly
slightly seared. Serve under drizzled
reduction.
But the recipes leave your head quickly… In the corner of my eye I noticed Lisa, now ignored by all the staff in the room, flailing like a fish out of water in what appeared to be a Grand mal seizure… Arms flapping, legs shaking, eyes wide in abject horror, a look between “Tell me this is normal” and “What the fuck is going on now?” frozen on her trembling face.
“Doc, doc. Is she ok?”
The doctor turned to look at her slowly, as though I’d asked him if he had any gum. “The shaking? Yeah. That happens.”
There are a thousand different reasons I’m thrilled to have a penis, but never had they been so clarified in such a persuasive presentation. Everybody likes to offer some “truth” about childbirth. Most of what them tell you is nonsense, as bad, if not worse, than the flawed advice these intrusive, uninvited sages will offer about relationships, therapy, home buying, chic but inexpensive vacations, dog buying, doctors, dentists, dildos, sunscreen, cellphones, brokers, IRAs, environmentally-conscious condoms, twist cap wines, mechanics, driveway sealant, babysitters, bedwetting, bed buying, the best sales at Bed Bath and Beyond, first timer’s anal sex and the everyday existential angst of being sensate in an increasingly commoditized, disconnected and impersonal world that’ll frequently spoil an otherwise excellent sashimi dinner.
The truth is, child birth isn’t life affirming. You don’t feel like you existed up until that point solely to be there. And no, you don’t immediately feel a love you’d never known existed before. But yes, you are amazed, and shocked, and stunned… And struck with a numbing fear you just did something a dozen times more reckless and insane than the dumbest thing you’d done up to then.
But you also feel a new appreciation, an admiration and sense of amazement. For your wife, for the astounding process she went through… Hell, for women in general. Because you know you couldn’t do that. Never in a million years. Of all the times you’ve thought, Thank God I was born a guy… Menstruation, growing breasts (or worse, not), having to wear make-up, be ogled and spend your life being judged on the size of your ass… That’s got to be so much fucking work… Well, none of that could ever compare to the madness of the spectacle you just witnessed. Simply, unequivocally, there’s no greater advertisement on the planet for the concept of being Male than watching childbirth up close.
Author’s Note: I’m still getting emails from college students asking me whether they should go to law school, and from law students asking me what practice areas they should go into. I don’t know what to offer to the college kids that I haven’t previously said here,here, here or here.
As to the law students, in this market, you’re going to face substantial pressure to take any job you can get. A lot of people are going to offer that tired “beggars can’t be choosers” adage, advise you to grab whatever’s being given. I’m not going to outright disagree. I will, however, offer this caution: The first job out of law school can brand you, set the trajectory for the rest of your career. Don’t take a shit position doing something you know you’ll hate. Law’s a brutal caste system, and if you wind up an Untouchable early, it’s damn hard to climb up the ladder.
Knowledge being half the battle, here’s an outtake from an early draft of the book describing the legal industry hierarchy. The setting was my last practice shift in Philadelphia, when I was offered a job in a field totally unrelated to my previous experience.
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“Let me ask you another question.” The managing partner ran his fingers over his chin. “Who do you think has more at risk here, you or us?” He was implying that if I didn’t succeed as a plaintiff’s lawyer at his firm, the business litigation bar would never have me back. I’d be a victim of the “once you leave, you’re out for good” childishness that permeated that practice area.
Law’s a world of endless hierarchies, more so than any other field. And almost all of them are superfluous, created more to stroke the eggshell egos of the lawyers involved than anything else. Most of the industry is in a constant game of keeping up with the Joneses. Everything – everything – is a dick size comparison. But it isn’t like Wall Street or your golf club. People aren’t fixated solely on money. For the lawyers who work in the billable hour side of the business, “Prestige” is the big measuring stick.
The “Big Firms” representing Fortune 100 behemoths are pathologically fixated on finding lawyers with Ivy League law school credentials, or barring that, top ten placement in their class. Of course, Philadelphia having little to draw those candidates, and firms in desperate need of clients, the rules are broken more and more for anyone with business connections. You can have just north of a Down’s Syndrome IQ and get into a good Philadelphia firm these days if your father’s the CEO of anything paying mid-six to seven figures a year in legal bills. But for the average kid tumbling out of law school, you need those sterling academic accolades, which are very rare.
Everyone in law school tries for those Big Firm jobs, but few get them. The overwhelming majority of graduates are left to scurry into various firms of different sizes and practice areas. The first level below the Big Firms are “Boutiques,” smaller groups of lawyers who’ve jettisoned Big Firms with stables of clients, opening specialized practices that handle one or two types of cases. You’ll see Employment, Bankruptcy and, lately, “Health Care Law” boutiques, to name a few varieties. These are respectable outfits, on par with Big Firms as to skill, only not quite paid as well due to their limited market.
There are myriad categories of firms below Boutiques, but the two biggest by far are “Insurance Defense” and “Personal Injury,” a/k/a “Plaintiff’s” firms. Insurance Defense firms look a lot like the Big Firms if you don’t know anything about the industry. Blurring this distinction further, some firms are both at the same time. Many of the big regional firms in Philadelphia have departments doing the same work Insurance Defense firms do at discount rates but don’t admit it in the professional community.
The real distinction between a Big Firm and an Insurance Defense firm is the amount of complex work the firms do and what they pay. Where a big firm will pay between $120k and $160k to first year associates, and a Boutique pay $10-20k less, Insurance Defense shops in Philadelphia will pay between $60k and $90k. The reason for the difference is simple – where a big firm gets $250 per hour for its associates’ work on an average case, an Insurance Defense shop gets anywhere between $90 and $150. The perception, fair or not, is that Insurance Defense lawyers defend cookie cutter personal injury cases, and aren’t as skilled or committed as the lawyers at the Big Firms. It’s a generalization, but the legal industry’s a patchwork of bullshit hierarchies, so it might as well be ironclad truth.
Alongside the Insurance Defense lawyer is his counterpart, or nemesis, the Plaintiff’s Lawyer. The classic old school Plaintiff’s Lawyer didn’t go to an Ivy, wouldn’t get past the resume screening process at a Big Firm and in many cases lacked the polish or network to even score a job in an Insurance Defense shop. Or was shrewd enough to avoid it. In fairness, this is changing. As a result of worsening margins in billable work, increasingly unbearable demands at Big Firms, and the perception one can get obscenely rich quickly as a personal injury lawyer, the Plaintiff’s Bars everywhere are flooding with well credentialed candidates. But again, fairly or not, it’s considered a bottom feeders market.
Evan was wild, and his firm was just a boutique, but he was considered one of the scarier business litigators in the city, and one of the few who actually knew how to try and win complex commercial cases.** Not too many of the Big Firm eggheads Evan went up against could bring the heat in a courtroom, and working under him had provided me with a unique, enviable skill set. Leaving that air, that guaranteed money, for a job as a plaintiff’s lawyer – an industry characterized by its lack of barrier to entry – was technically a huge goddamned risk.
“Technically” only, of course, as risk assumes there’s something to lose.
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* If you’ve read Happy Hour, this might sound like odd advice coming from someone who switched practice areas four times and leapfrogged in salary. It is, but I’m an outlier, not the rule, and I had the luck of working in a climate of growth and rapid pay increases.
** My boss at the time.
