Conlaw is an art form in which you try to figure out what's more real than the person you're arguing with.
You're always reaching for one rung lower on the ladder on which he's standing.
The next deeper onion ring, might be another way of describing it, if you want to get poetic. It'll bring tears to your eyes.
The poet John Ciardi, of deep voice and great pronunciation (decades ago, before his death, he was featured regularly on NPR, always signing off with something like "Here's good words to you.") I can still hear his voice.
Here is one of his lines, more or less quoted by Kenneth Baker in the S.F. Chronicle, yesterday:
I took a caustic tone [said Baker] because I believe, more or less as the poet John Ciardi put it, that we are what we do with our attention.
So the next time anyone asks you what you are, you don't have to say "I'm an American," or Chinese, or Singaporean, or whatever (Americans are famous for impertinently asking, "But what are you, really," and "What kind of work do you do?" (which drives some Europeans nuts, particularly those who are the offspring of an earl or a count), you can just reply that of late you've been paying attention to finding the love of your life, or practicing geomancy, or whatever.
I once had an immigration client from Belgium who had no claim to remain in the U.S. beyond the expiration of his visitor's visa. "Would it help if we told the Immigration Service that I'm a count," he asked. He looked like an ordinary guy, to me, I must confess. Silly me, failing to recognize blue blood when I had the chance.
I thought before I answered, because I didn't want to wise off in front of a paying client, and simply noted that this country had been founded on the notion that royalty no longer counted, so it would probably not cut a lot of ice down at La Migra to rely on this fact.
The article by Kenneth Baker is below. He'd written an article critical of Dale Chihuly, the artist in glass, which Baker apparently decried as being non-art. It sure looks better, or at least more colorful, than some of the stuff I've seen hanging in museums, or sitting on the floor. I once saw, at SFMOMA, a Richard Serra installation consisting of wall-to-wall lead, what the plumbers use. He'd melted and poured it on the floor, which ate hell out of the floor, but left a ragged line of former fishing sinkers along the wall. Serra earns a lotta dough for this. My question is how does the buyer know when he's being conned and when he isn't. Chihuly melts glass and sells the hardened product. Lead comes in one color. Glass, a multitude.
Baker was thus impelled to address the question of what is art, or more to the point, what is non-art. I'll admit to having difficulty telling the two apart myself, sometimes, so I guess we can forgive Chihuly, and maybe even Baker. Serra's an open question. His brother practices law in SF, speaking of artists. The brother was honored last year by a criminal lawyers group for being released, for the second time, from the federal penitentiary, this time at Lompoc, for failure, again, to pay income taxes, or maybe it was for failure to file those nuisance returns on which you report earnings. That's a crime, alas.
Criminal lawyers are a most forgiving bunch, except as to hostile witnesses who are testifying against their clients. In such cases, any form of moral imperfection is capable of being blown up to dirigible proportions in an effort to achieve a semblance of justice for the client.
Question of the day: If no one told you that Picasso was supposed to be this very great artist, how long do you think it would take for you to figure it out on your own?