Friday, November 22, 2002

There continues to be little time for blogging around here today. I regret to say that this will probably continue through Monday. I do have time, though, for these two thoughts:

1) In the last 24 hours, 3 people whose musical tastes, politics, and core values are largely similar to my own have told me that they like Eminem's records. I don't know what to make of this. I even downloaded some stuff, and it still seems to me that it's just the sound of an arrogant swaggering guy, with a good producer. I don't like arrogant swaggering guys, even if they do have good producers. If you can clue me in, please do.

2) For some reason, I have been thinking all morning about a quote from William Kunstler, making an objection in the Chicago conspiracy trial. At the very beginning of the trial -- indeed, before the beginning, during jury selection -- the judge was reading the indictment to prospective jurors, and was doing so in a very dramatic way, seemingly to make the jurors shudder at the horrible conspiracy of those darn hippy freaks. Kunstler jumped to his feet and said "We object to the reading in a manner in which Orson Welles would read the Declaration of Independence." Of course there was no way that the objection would ever have been sustained, and no way that its overruling, in itself, would ever have formed the basis for a reversal by an appellate court; but the objection was, I think, a brilliant way of challenging authority. Sometimes a lawyer has to know how to do that -- and doing it in just the right way is extraordinarily difficult. I googled about this to make sure that I wasn't dreaming the quote, and found only one page on the whole web discussing this. (Now of course there are two). It's a recent article by a B.U. Law Professor about the trial as theater and law, pdf file here, that looks well worth reading.

posted by sam 12:16 PM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

email: first name@last name dot net