If this keeps up, I’m going to turn into Avedon.
A panel of judges at the American Bar Association%u2019s meeting in San Francisco last week reported on threats to judges for crossing the religious right:
More than two years after enraging right-wing groups by ordering Terry Schiavo%u2019s feeding tube removed, George Greer still peers over his shoulder nervously at times%u2026
Two years ago, he said, someone in the Bay Area threatened to kill him over his decision to end life support for the brain-damaged Schiavo. And even though that person was prosecuted and jailed, Greer said, he%u2019s taking no chances.
%u201CIt is a little unnerving,%u201D he said. %u201CI still can%u2019t see a strange car come down my street without wondering [who%u2019s behind the steering wheel].%u201D
Greer was one of four current or former judges who appeared in a 90-minute seminar in Moscone Center West to describe how their lives were affected by their rulings in high-profile cases involving hot-button issues.
Besides Greer, there was New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto, who 10 months ago participated in a ruling saying gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights as married couples, but stopped short of approving same-sex marriage.
Eileen O%u2019Neill, a former Texas judge who in 1993 held Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and other anti-abortion activists in contempt for violating an order directing them to quit harassing several Houston-area doctors, was on the panel. And so was former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, kicked off the bench by voters in 1986 along with two other justices for reversing death sentences.
All four spoke about the consequences of their actions, but stood firmly behind them, while fretting somewhat about the political and social pressures facing judges these days. Unstated, but hovering in the ether, was the fact that many judges believe the current presidential administration has exacerbated the problem by blaming unpopular rulings on %u201Cactivist judges.%u201D
The Infamous Brad – Another Interruption. Ah, Fame. *eyeroll*:
In his excellent (if a trifle dry) A History of News, one of Mitchell Stephens’ insights to offer is that normal professional journalists (as opposed to that much rarer breed, investigative journalists) always “know” what the story they’re going to write is going to be before they even talk to a single source. How do they do this? Stephens says that there are probably fewer than 200 stories that can be written, period, that anybody who reads or watches the news ever wants to hear. He calls these recurring news story outlines the ur-stories, meaning the primal or elemental news stories from which all later news stories are descended. So the reporter shows up at the scene of a news story with an outline of a story in their head, learned in journalism school, and all they need is three one-sentence quotes for color, and the correct spelling of each person’s name. If it’s an in-depth report, they go to their editor or publisher’s rolodex and pull out the names of two “experts” who can be counted on to have opposing views on the subject and call each expert for another single-sentence quote. This is journalism as it is genuinely practiced. (Which, come to think of it, is relevant to what I was going to write tonight, more about that tomorrow.)
And it is my observation that there are only three ur-news stories that can possibly be written about a weird subculture or one of its members. I call them “Funny Zoo Animals,” “Threat or Menace,” and “Surprisingly Nice.” And I’ll tell you right now that the odds of you getting that last story are hundreds to one against. “Funny Zoo Animals” is the freak-show piece: look at the harmless, funny, crazy people. Aren’t they so cute? And oh, look, there are even some in this town! Isn’t that funny? It’s always vaguely condescending in tone; that’s what that story is about. People read it to reassure themselves that they’re better off normal. “Threat or Menace” takes its name from an old Reader’s Digest article about the Communist Party USA entitled: “Communism: Threat? or Menace?” Because in that story, that’s the whole range of possible opinion given: either the weird subculture in question is an impending threat or an already-serious menace. The weirdos in question are portrayed as dangerously crazy, likely to do anything, and very interested in recruiting your spouse and your children. “Are your children safe?” Experts will be quoted who say no. Any quotes you give will be selected for how crazy and stupid they can make you sound, any expert quoted as being on your side will be hand-selected for how easily they can be dismissed by other experts.
No, the best you can ever hope against hope for is, “Surprisingly Nice,” where the story starts off being how weird and silly (or weird and menacing) you and your subculture seem to be, still reinforcing one of those two stereotypes, “but (person’s name) turned out to be surprisingly nice.” This is the story that people try to get reporters to write when they talk to a reporter about some charity work that they’ve done, from Pagans or the KKK doing Adopt-a-Highway litter cleanup to biker gangs raising money for children’s hospitals or veterans’ hospitals. But reporters hate the “Surprisingly Nice” story because they take it for granted that they’re being manipulated. They know that you’re distorting how you really are in hopes of getting some favorable publicity, in hopes of getting somebody in particular or the public in general off of your back. So it takes a lot of years of very successful charity work to get a “Surprisingly Nice” story, and if you don’t believe me, look at how many literal millions of dollars worth of charity Penny Arcade has done for impoverished children on behalf of computer- and console gamers and how little favorable publicity they’ve gotten for it. No, the only time you really have anything better than a very long shot chance at getting “Surprisingly Nice” is when some inexplicable tragedy hits. Cancer is OK, but having your child murdered is better. The best way to get a “Surprisingly Nice” story is to come down with some fatal, wasting disease that strikes truly at random but leaves you looking photogenic; that’s always good for media sympathy. (Call it, if you will, the La Boheme variation on “Surprisingly Nice,” as in yeah this person is very weird, but even journalists admit that nobody photogenic deserves an awful fate.) Otherwise, forget it; what you’re going to end up in is “Funny Zoo Animals” or “Threat or Menace.”
The Wackiest Cover Songs on the Web Article from Blender and the 100 worst cover songs from retroCRUSH.