By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
Only a fool would talk about politics in a legal blog a week before an election. Confidentially, one of the best things about being a solo practitioner—I can’t be fired for saying what I honestly think. I don’t have any particular leaning, one way or the other. I like some things about Republicans and some things about Democrats. One week from an election, my main thought is, “Please, make it stop, I wanna get off.”
But, apparently, according to the ads, I am to “hate vote” for one or the other. (Even after I did, the Text messages didn’t stop.)
I don’t’ think Republicans are the heartless capitalists of the Gilded Era whom Democrats claim them to be. They no longer send children to work 18-hour days, in locked factories (at least not here.) Democrats aren’t the Marxists of the old Soviet Union who murdered any Kulak peasant rich enough to own a cow, and then murdered anyone who told the truth, “this isn’t really doing any good.”
Speaking Truth to Power. Perhaps the most famous painting of a “fool,” is “Stanczyk,” a jester in the court of King Sigismund I, the Old of Poland (1506-1548). Stanczyk was known for being able to tell the king the truth without being punished. The painting, was completed in 1862 by Matejko, and depicts Stanczyk in a red outfit, sitting dejectedly in a darkened room outside a ballroom. The jester has a “1000-yard stare” on his face, because beside him on a table is a newspaper he has just read (most likely the King’s newspaper that Stanczyk just happened to find, during a break in performances).
The paper contains the news that Stanczyk’s home, Smolensk, has fallen to Russia. It is a tragic scene, made more so, because just to his right and through a doorway, we can see the court of the King and Queen, having a ball (literally), unaffected by the news that has stricken poor Stanczyk so sorrowfully.
I think most of affecting thing about “Stanczyk,” at least for Americans, is that is so hard to tell in a country as fortunate as we are, “when is it okay to be happy, even though there is no end to news that somebody, somewhere is suffering?”
“John Frum and the Cargo Cult.” That won’t stop people from making a religion out of politics. One thing is for sure, you can make a religion out of anything. We watched this unfold in real time, beginning in the 1930s, in an island known then as “New Hebrides,” in the South Pacific.
Americans made a base of as many as 50,000 service men and women in advance of WWII. The islanders watched as cargo parachuted from the sky, with food, clothes and other goodies, in crates marked “United States of America.” So, the islanders formed a religious belief, that leaders quickly turned into a church, which preached that there was a deity named “John Frum” (as in “John from America”) who was magically causing goodies to fall from the sky.
The Americans tried to tell the islanders that, “we are from America, there is no ‘John Frum.’” But the islanders were suspicious, “that is exactly what Americans want you to believe.” Which is sort of a “Pascal’s Wager.” (If you believe and you are wrong, you are not any worse off, but if you are right, you get goodies.)
After Americans departed in WWI, the “Cargo Cult of John Frum” continued to exist in the Hebrides, at least until the decade of the 2000’s. Still believing what their leaders had told them, that “Santa Jesus” John Frum would return from America, they built landing strips on the island, and sat and waited.
Politicizing the bell curve. I have a theory that American politics exist on a bell curve. Most of the people are like me, in the middle, while towards the left end and the right end, there are ever-increasing “cargo cults,” who exist in ever decreasing numbers the farther away they are from the middle. They are sure noisy at the ends, but there aren’t really statistically, that many of them. Until election time, and then, the statistical ends ends are all that seem to get attention, on matters I wasn’t really worried about before.
I get that same feeling at Southwest Airlines during the boarding process. All the “rich people,” and people suffering some “hardship,” get to board first and everyone else that isn’t special in any way, can just “suck it.”
Even though I know there aren’t that many of them (and we all are get to fly at half the speed of sound, to a destination that pioneers literally had to walk to reach), the ones that get to board first still give me “compassion fatigue”— to the point that I am looking at them side-eyed, “you don’t really need that wheelchair.” (Which makes me feel like a bad person.)
Please make it stop!