This very blog just turned one today. In that time, I’ve posted approx. 140 entries, or one every two and a half days or so.
Not very interesting, I know, but I thought I shouldn’t let the day pass without comment.
Glad to see somebody’s optimistic
Not.
Just take a look at these Federal Times polls of US government workers. Not very happy campers. If their agency offered buyouts for which they were eligible 82 percent of those polled would take them. 81 percent thinks “Bush’s proposal for a $500 million performance fund — to reward top- performing employees with raises above an across-the-board 2 percent raise” is a bad idea. Etc. etc. Mr Bush has such a way of winning
people over…
Thanks to the Sandwichman over at Max’s.
The myth of evil victims
Quite a while ago, Meryl Yourish wrote an article called the myth of the evil lawyers. In this she defends everybody’s favourite whipping boys (and girls), the lawyers from the accusation that it’s they who are responsible for the US being such a ligitious society. Which I think she is right in, but she does miss the point in where she shifts the blame to and in her explenation of why the US is so ligitious. I’ll quote the three paragraphs that form the heart of her argument.
But here’s the thing. Blaming lawyers for our litigious society is comparable to blaming drugs for their addiction. You show me one case of an attorney forcing a client to sue someone. The reason we have more lawsuits per square mile than any other nation is not because our legal system allows the unmonied individual to sue the wealthy corporations. It is because Americans now seem to have the idea that personal responsibility is for everyone else.
A crazy person pushes a man in front of an oncoming subway train in New York. He survives, he sues the city. They should have prevented it, he says. A crazy person jumps in front of a subway train, trying to commit suicide. He survives, and sues the city. They should have prevented him from being
able to jump, he says. The World Trade Center is attacked by terrorists. In order to prevent the plethora of lawsuits that could put several airlines out of business, the federal government sets up a fund–paid for by taxpayers–that families of the victims can draw from rather than sue. Otherwise, the families would have sued the airlines. They should have prevented it. Or the Port Authority, maybe,
who built the WTC. The towers obviously should have been built to withstand a terrorist attack. Sue! And here’s the kicker, which apparently nobody believes: Sometimes, shit happens. Sometimes, really bad stuff happens that results in horrible injuries and deaths. And often, it isn’t anybody’s fault. People
like the one in the subway who pushed that man under the train often exhibit no signs of insanity until that horrible moment. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was a horrible, horrible coincidence, and it’s terrible that he lost his legs, but the man has no right to sue the city for it. But you know he’ll win at least a six-figure settlement, because the new American Dream is no longer to work hard and become a millionaire: It’s to hit the lottery, literally or figuratively. The literal lottery is the one with the numbers. The figurative lottery: Get some kind of injury, hopefully not too incapacitating, and sue. Hell, you can even sue the airlines for not having your seatbelt on during turbulence when the captain specifically tells you all to put the belts back on. With any luck, it’ll only be a slight case of whiplash and you’ll get 50 grand for it.
I think Meryl is largely correct in her analysis, but misses the point as to why people bring on lawsuits. In my view, as much to do with not acknowledging personal responsibility or trying to get rich quick, as
with the everyday realities of the American system. That guy who lost his legs, how else is he going to get the money to pay for his hospital bills, his revalidation? How else will he make good the money he lost because he cannot do his job anymore?
The fact that there’s no consistent health and disability coverage in the US, that there’s only a very limited form of social security, that there’s little or no help available for people who do not have the resources (anymore) to take care of themselves, encourages people to sue somebody, anybody, who could even remotely be made to be responsible for their plight. In that light, it makes sense to go after the city rather than the person who pushed you off the platform, as the city actually has the money. If his case is really that flimsy, it will still be thrown out of court.
Nor do I think that the government offering extra assistance to the victims of a disaster is all that extraordinary. It is indeed one of the core tasks of government to help those in need and something that should be done as a matter of course.
This does not mean Meryl is totally wrong or even largely wrong though. As always, things are not that
simple. Partially the US is more ligitious because people expect somebody to pay for their misfortune, no matter how ridicilous their case (an offshoot from that whole “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” thing perhaps?), partially it is because people have no choice
and partially it’s also because there are quite a few lawyers who do indeed prey on such people, fueling their hopes of getting rich quick. Certainly the advertisements certain law firms put out here in the UK do so, I cannot imagine it’s any different in the US.
I also talked this through with S—, who is in fact a lawyer (but doesn’t play one on tv) and she has
a somewhat different perspective on this issue:
The US has a rights based constititution and caselaw has been made almost on the hoof in a little over
200 years. Whereas law has accreted in European countries over much much longer and is therefore more tightly circumscribed: there are holes a mile wide in US caselaw. Put the two things together and you get litigiousness.
Remember Stephen Donaldson?
If you do, you’ve probably read his fantasy series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Donaldson had a style of writing …uniquely his own in that series, which showed what can happen to a man under the influence of thesauri. In a recent discussion of Donaldson in rec.arts.sf.written, Joel Baxter illustrated his style as follows:
“Some coffee, Mr. Covenant?”
“No!” he panted, glaring. The gelid liquid was anthraciously black, atramentous, nigrescent as his carious and macerated soul. “No,” he groaned. “Do you hear? I will not!” Shaking, he fumbled for his empty mug, clawing at it with numb hands like blocks of rotted wood. Finally, gasping, he closed his fingers on the malefic vessel, upending it, then ramming it downward to the table again… violently stopping the irrefragable, ineluctable maw with intransigent formica. The sudden whipcrack sound threw a refulgent oriflamme of pain across his sight, and he closed his eyes with a febrile shudder. “No,” he whispered. No more. No more.
“All righty then, I’ll be right back with your check!”
It’s funny because it’s true.
Mary Gentle
Mary Gentle is an British writer of fantasy and science fiction, who finally got some of the attention she deserves in 1999, with her excellent fantasy/secret history book Ash: A Secret History. Before that, she was better known as the writer of the darkly humouristic Grunts, a novel about those bad boys of fantasy Orcs, (featuring such lines as “Pass me another elf, this one has split“), as well as of the science fiction duology Golden Witchbreed/Ancient Light. The latter is what I first read of her and are also the books with which she first gained prominence.
However, some of her more obscure and less accesible books also deserve a wider audience, but apparantely are too difficult or too weird to have gained one. I’m talking of the White Crow series, which consists of several short stories as well as the novels Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire and Left to His Own Devices. They take place in a sort of alternate 17th century England, where the compass has a fifth direction to it, (and the directions are all still 90 degrees apart), a female Charles Stuart and Olivier Cromwell, a magic system based on alchemy. And yet their author still insists they are science fiction rather than fantasy.
It’s no wonder then that Mary Gentle has just as outspoken ideas about her role as a science fiction writer:
A slightly less megalomaniac way of saying that I write to reform the SF/fantasy field is to say that I’m a reactive writer. When I see something done wrong, I want to do it right. When I see SF and fantasy novels that insult the intelligence of a weevil, I want to write a novel with an academic book list in the back of it. Or one that bases a lot of obscure English Civil War jokes on the conceit that Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell were female. When I get up to here with cyber-utopias fronted by dim young men who do not know where their dicks are, Valentine starts making waspish remarks and gets herself a job with the military-industrial complex. When I have seen more gaming fantasy-magic than even I can take, I want to write about a magic that works by pictorial association from a vocabulary of Baroque images. And when I see SF with a crew from central casting, and a political stance as naïve as the Sun, then I start writing near-future SF about Valentine and Casaubon’s messy home lives and respective families, and Marlowe’s take on the Internet.