Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf, epub
ISBN: 9780061733116
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2010-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

I apologize for not being a lawyer, except that it may allow me to comment sensibly upon the law. There is the law as it is intended, which, granted, can never be perfectly understood and would not submit to flawless interpretation even were it to have originated in one clear mind, much less in hundreds of legislative minds—which is why it is necessary to have lawyers. And there is the law of lawyers: that is, law as it was originally intended but then tortured for the rest of its life like a prisoner in the Château d’If.

To understand the perils faced by each of the laws as it exists for year after year among a million patient, bulldog-like talkers, one need only have had in college a sophomore roommate in his first philosophy course, and who, having been drawn to Bishop Berkeley, informs you that the table at which you are eating does not exist, and, when challenged to pass his hand through it, assures you that his hand does not exist, and then must be silent when informed that a hand that does not exist should be able quite easily to pass through a table that does not exist.

In a very short time he is cured of this—unless he goes to law school. If he does, he will first learn the lawyer’s prayer—“God grant that I shall be superficially mauled by an alligator at the Snow White Breakfast at Disney World”—and then spend a large portion of the rest of his life arguing in excruciating detail that this or that thing must be treated as if it does not actually exist, or, if it does not in fact exist, as if it does. Supposedly to protect innocent persons from the criminal abuse of the law by its agents, the policeman is not held to account for his errors or abuse; rather, the mass murderer is set free, presumably to change the policeman’s ways, but what does the policeman care, especially if he himself is lawless, corrupt, and escapes punishment? A contract is deemed unenforceable because a judge agrees with his intoxicating and bosomy clerk that the provision, “$100,000 shall be allocated for the purchase of safety equipment,” does not mean that said $100,000, or any part of it, need actually be spent for safety equipment. Rather, these dollars have the privilege of being hypothetically corralled, not necessarily in a vault or even a separate account but solely in the exercise of a mind or two, there to be forgotten, or perhaps to be spent by Bishop Berkeley. People who enjoy a specialty power often forget that it has been granted to them by a dog that does not want to be wagged by its tail, no matter how caught up in hypotheticals the tail may have become.

The law is imperfect, we are imperfect, this is the system we have and that we must struggle forever to balance judiciously. The system allows and encourages advocates at the bar to stretch

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