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Lawyer Clark Blues and the Life Well-Lived

Published in the Daily Record July 15, 2016

In a 1940 Who’s Who publication, now an online database, entitled Prominent Tennesseans, 1796 – 1938, there is a brief entry on one Hugh L. Clarke. It reads, in part: “Attorney, of Scotch-Irish descent…. Attended public schools of Haywood Co., and Haywood Co. High, 1923. Member of Christian Church; State Bar and American Bar Associations; a Democrat and a Mason…. Passed the State Bar Examination in Aug., 1924, and began the practice of his profession in Brownsville. Elected to the State Senate from the 31st Senatorial District in the 20th General Assembly of Tenn. Placed on most of the leading committees of the Senate…. His hobby is farming.”

A Testimonial

And that is the sum and substance of what the vast majority of us would have learned about this local worthy, had he not been immortalized the year after the Who’s Who book by another Haywood Countian, noted blues singer Sleepy John Estes (1899-1977). Apparently Sleepy John was a satisfied client, and recorded a testimonial, Lawyer Clark Blues. (Sleepy John chose his own spelling of his advocate’s name.)

Estes turned to Clarke after he found himself in some kind of criminal trouble. One has the sense, though it’s not absolutely commanded by the lyrics, that it was an emanation of race-based policing in the Jim Crow world Clarke and Estes both lived in. The norms of that world were reflected by another bluesman, Furry Lewis, in his song Judge Harsh Blues (1928), about a man wrongfully accused of murder and the cynical judge who extorts money from his wife. In Sleepy John’s case, whatever the charge, it obviously was not murder, but one senses that it was both absurd and not worth specifying the details of. From a few deft phrases, one gets a very clear sense of the absurdity and the lawyer-client relationship.

Now, once I got in trouble, you know I was gonna take a ride

He didn’t let it reach the courthouse, he kept it on the outside

One can guess that Clarke’s facility as a politician (he had joined the state legislature a few years earlier) might have had something to do with the outcome. But there’s also this:

Now, Mist’ Clark is a good lawyer, he good as I ever seen

He’s the first man that prove that water run upstream

This suggests that there might have been some basis to the charges against Estes, and also that Clarke might not have scrupled to urge miraculous thinking upon the court as a way around the facts and/or common sense.

Assurance and Assurances

Whatever legerdemain with facts or inferences Lawyer Clarke may have indulged in, he communicated confidence to his client:

Boys, you know I like Mist’ Clark, yes, he really is my friend

He say if I just stay out the grave, poor John, I see you won’t go to the pen.

Most of us would be terrified to make a categorical promise like that to a client, but we have to admire the assurance of a man so unafraid to make it. And it’s easy to understand the gratitude and confidence of a client thus reassured. “Don’t overpromise” is drilled into modern lawyers; not so much, apparently, in 1941.

Clarke had another trait that endeared him to Estes:

Now, he lawyer for the rich, he lawyer for the poor

He don’t try to rob nobody, just bring along a little dough

I’d be willing to bet that when Clarke lawyered for the rich, he charged more. But he was reasonable with Estes, who was not rich. You can check out the online photos of Sleepy John’s home, which is maintained as a landmark by the West Tennessee Delta Heritage Association: a small, meanly-built shotgun shack of unpainted boards. In another song Sleepy John sang about the rats in his kitchen. He had lost sight in one eye in his youth, and after World War II, which America was about to join when he recorded Lawyer Clark Blues, Estes was completely blind and destitute. (His rediscovery came a couple of decades later; for instance he was name-checked in the liner notes of Bob Dylan’s 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home.)

Rich and Poor

So Estes was truly poor. Clarke was probably quite comfortable:

Now, got offices in town, resident out on Century Road

He got a nice little lake right inside the grove

And if, as the Prominent Tennesseeans database suggests, Clarke was able to farm as a hobby, he was obviously in a completely different situation in every way from that his blues-singing client had to endure.

Given all these facts, it’s a very interesting professional relationship to contemplate. In his youth, Sleepy John had had dreams of accomplishing something like what Clarke had done with his life. He told an interviewer in 1964 that he had started out wanting to be a lawyer or a preacher. Then he had made himself a one-string guitar out of a cigar box, and one thing had led to another. One of those other things it led to was being the kind of man who needed Lawyer Clarke’s sort of services rather than being the kind of man who provided them. But one also senses just how hard it would have been for Estes to have realized that ambition. This was the South in 1941. Of course there were black lawyers in Tennessee then, but only a few. (See J. Clay Smith, Jr.’s 1993 book Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944.) Clarke no doubt was the beneficiary of what we now call white privilege, but one senses from the song that he wore it lightly. Estes clearly did not resent Clarke’s prosperity. And one senses as well that Estes saw in Clarke someone he might have become himself, in a different world.

Talented and Fulfilled

What I most admire about Clarke, based on the song and the database entry, is a little different. A lawyer whose services were sought by rich and poor alike, who practiced with his brother (“and tell him what to do” according to Estes’ lyrics), who could establish a rapport with his poor clients, who could communicate such confidence and engender such trust, and who could serve as a legislator, and not just any legislator, but one chosen for “most of the leading committees,” and who could farm on the side, simply must have been an extraordinarily talented and fulfilled person. And, I strongly suspect, a happy one.

To do so many things and to do them well, to be so connected with family and clients and peers – that’s the life too few of us get to lead, and more of us should try for. When new lawyers are sworn in, the courts that administer the oath could do worse than play Sleepy John’s song first.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for image of Estes, source http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/3bef5827-7f0e-4011-8f3c-50cf29bb187e .

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“Partner” and Other Big Firm Euphemisms

A version of this piece published on the Daily Record Website June 22, 2016, in the Daily Record June 23, 2016

Despite a mostly placid surface, the most recent of the Law Firms in Transition reports issued annually by law firm consultancy Altman Weil is alarming. True, it starts with the unstartling observation that larger firms continue to change in response to changing market conditions. And that anodyne tone continues. But then you start recognizing the unspoken norms and assumptions informing the report – and those are chilling.

“Non-Equity Partner”

I was reminded an old Steve Stills lyric: “You are living a reality I left years ago/ It quite nearly killed me.” The report is based on a survey propounded only to firms of 50 lawyers or more, and responded to by, among others, 49% of the 350 largest law firms. In short, the survey reflects the world and the thinking of Big Law. I myself labored in firms large enough to receive the survey until 22 years ago. I’m not there now. And to judge by the report, it’s just as well.

Around the time I left, for instance, I was just beginning to hear of a concept called the “non-equity partner.” That once-novel status is now reportedly a feature of the structure of nearly 100% of Top 200 law firms. By definition, the phrase must, at a minimum, mean that the partner does not receive “equity,” which equates roughly to ownership. (Thus Merriam-Webster’s relevant definition: “a risk interest or ownership right in property.”)

But wait: that’s contradictory, isn’t it? How can you meaningfully be a partner without a share of ownership? Neither in classical partnership structures nor in limited partnerships can you call someone a partner who owns no piece of the partnership control or profits.

In practice what the term means is someone who receives salary, and does not get a piece of the end-of-year profits. But, as noted, true partners divide profits. Anything less is simply a salary, and shouldn’t be called an incident of partnership. Economically, then, a non-equity partner is simply a mislabeled employee. There may be enhanced status attached to the label, and perhaps greater job security (hold that thought, though) but still what we’re really talking about differs at best in such particulars from the status of an associate.

Feeling Hobbesian?

Whenever something is persistently mislabeled, it’s time to take alarm. As was observed nine years ago by law firm consultant Robert Denney, “Whether firms admit it or not, the principal reason [for establishing a non-equity class of partners] is usually to avoid slicing the profit pie into more, and possibly smaller, pieces to maintain a high net income per equity partner.” In plain English, non-equities become that way to assure that the rich get richer, that the haves have more, and the have-nots have less.

This transfer of wealth and power is happening as we speak. Quoth Altman Weil: “Almost half of firms are taking the … step of de-equitizing full partners, moving them out of the profit-sharing class.”

Are we feeling Hobbesian yet?

“Underperformance” and “Counseling”

It gets worse, as one flips through the report. One learns, for instance that “[c]ompensation adjustments are being used in most firms to deal with underperforming partners…” That phrase “deal with” makes it sound as if “underperformance” were some form of misbehavior that the headmaster will need to address. Okay, so we know Altman Weil are really only talking about “compensation adjustments,” i.e. cutting people’s pay. But actually it can get worse. We learn that “chronic underperformers are being counseled out of their firms.”

Don’t slip and fall in all that euphemism. To say directly what the people at Alman Weil were too squeamish to: Firms are earning less than their shrinking class of true owners, the “made men,” wish, and lawyers perceived as not contributing enough to satisfy the overlords are being penalized for this supposed shortcoming by being fired. Not “counseled,” for heaven’s sake. Few people leave jobs they want to keep because they have been “counseled.”

Though why they’d want to keep such jobs, I’m not quite sure.  Why would anyone with his or her eyes open spend years trying to become an owner if that ownership was so evanescent? If the value and even the survival of one’s “ownership” were so dependent upon the favor of people who prosper more when one loses it? Well, you’ve got me. I can’t figure it out. But it’s happening.

Then too, work just seems not to be there for (oh, surprise!) the non-equity partners. Altman Weil say: “62% of firms report their non-equities are not sufficiently busy, including 80% of the firms with 250 or more lawyers.”

The Headmaster Awaits

Oh, okay. I grant it is possible that purely by chance and by some amazing coincidence the people who aren’t given a true stake in the business are so consistently the ones with too little work. Possible, like the possibility of drawing to an inside straight.[1] But a more sensible bet would be that the big guys are hoarding the work because they want to stay the big guys, and under the existing ground rules they endanger their status if they share the work. And when the non-equities aren’t busy enough because the equities don’t share the work, guess whom the headmaster, a/k/a the HR manager, will call next into his study? (A hint: a 2013 Altman Weil report suggested: “Over time, reduce the number of non-owner partners the firm has.”)

I’ve singled out non-equity partners, but actually there is a full trough of job titles for people who, most often, become losers in this Brave New World: of counsel and senior partner and staff attorney and permanent associate and contract attorney and many more.

Most people my age didn’t understand any of this when we started practicing law. There was another, more colloquial sense of the word “partnership” that we thought we were aspiring to: everyone working towards a common goal and a common benefit. Well, silly us! If the Altman Weil profile is to be believed, the risks of the biggest legal enterprises are now being increasingly spread over the whole group, and the bulk of the benefits are being enjoyed by only a diminishingly few members. (Incidentally, does this remind you of anything?)

Small Law Definitions

As I’ve said, I made my own break 22 years ago. And I’ve seen a lot of others do it since.

From my observation, most of the refugees to the world of Small Law have, in one way or another, tried to create workplaces that were about their owners. All of their owners. In the Small Law world, partnership truly means ownership. In the Small Law world, partnership means receiving a fair share of the firm’s proceeds and enjoying a fair share of the say in running the show, and relying on genuine job tenure.

To be sure, Small Law practitioners seldom have access to the huge clientele or the big money their bigger brothers and sisters do. At least up until that moment the Big Law “partner” is “counseled” out the door, he or she will probably earn more than we Small Law folk do. But in terms of what makes practicing law worthwhile, from where I sit, foregoing those extra dollars seems like a bargain.

_______________

[1]. 4/47 or roughly 8-1/2%.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Love Story Heartthrobs in LOVE LETTERS Play

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com June 8, 2016

Love Letters, gracing the Hippodrome’s boards this week, is a nearly idiot-proof show. All it absolutely requires is two performers who can read aloud. No memorization, no blocking, very little interaction. The two performers are asked to perform one task only: read letters aloud, thereby becoming vehicles for playwright A. R. Gurney‘s gentle tragicomedy of love and loss among mid-20th Century upper crust New England WASPs. It would take two extraordinarily inept performers to wreck the show.

Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal are far from extraordinarily inept; to the contrary, they are talented screen actors. And therein lies the beauty of this production: even if the stage is not their natural turf, they can surmount the mild challenges that this show presents; the play might be written for movie stars. It fact it is apparently written for almost anyone. It has been presented with couples young and old, famous and obscure.

Of course, it does not hurt at all that McGraw and O’Neal are so connected in their audiences’ memory. Practically everyone has seen their memorable first joint outing, the much-loved (if also occasionally derided) film Love Story (1970). And there is a natural curiosity to see how they and their chemistry have weathered the intervening nearly half-century, not to mention the ring of the titles Love Story and Love Letters. The show is a natural audience draw.

The audience will not be disappointed. The stars look older, naturally, as do we all, but they have aged gracefully, and their chemistry seems intact. Though the show does not call for them to interact directly except at the very last moment (their reactions are saved for the letters they are writing and reading), they must still time their speeches and reactions to each other. Under Gregory Mosher‘s intelligent direction, the varied rhythms of the show flow correctly.

The issue this show brought to the forefront for me was not anything to do with the acting or the directing, but with the play itself. It’s fairly weak tea. I suppose there are many who can bring themselves to care deeply about these bright but not bright enough rich kids, Andy and Melissa, and their triumphs and failings, and their inability to recognize early enough so it would do them much good that they were meant for each other. But at their heart, there is something un-universal about these stories.

Dramatic characters, like real people, are products of their time and place, but that seems especially true of Andy and Melissa, and A. R. Gurney gets the details convincingly right to make us believe it. That is a double-edged achievement. The child-rearing preppies of that era received, and the courtship customs they engaged in seem to make them, for all their prolific epistolary output, singularly bad at choosing loves and spouses, and inarticulate until it is really too late in the pursuit of each other. At the same time, these people were the masters of the universe in their time. Andy, for instance, goes from Ivy law school to Supreme Court clerkship to flossy New York firm to U.S. Senate. Doors flung open to him would have been closed to most of his contemporaries, and his marriage, somewhat emotionally unfulfilling but correct in terms of dynastic dynamics, is a part of his ability to walk through those doors. How much empathy, sympathy, or identification can the audience lavish on him? We don’t generally cry much over poor little rich girls, or boys.

The continued popularity of the play argues that there are those who care enough. Perhaps it may be the epistolary format. There is some discussion, chiefly by Andy, of the virtues of letter-writing as opposed to other forms of communication, and its frequent superiority to conversation. And that is true at least as a dramatic convention; the play exemplifies the power of the epistolary drama. It requires, simply for plausibility, that the correspondents not be close enough so that conversation would be a more frequent and natural form of interaction. But when the point of the show is the tragedy that life and bad choices have kept these two apart, the form and the message merge beautifully. The audience grows subliminally as frustrated for itself and for the characters as they become for themselves.

Are letters really a better way of communicating in real life? That’s a big discussion for a forum other than a theater review. But my own feeling, as one who can remember the era of the play, a time when one wrote lots of love letters, when loved ones were far away and the daunting tolls of long distance made extended conversation dauntingly expensive, is that things are better now, with cellphones and texting and e-mail. I would not go back.

Another conversation for another day, however. Meanwhile, if you love the play, if you want to Oliver and Jennifer again (sort of), or you just want to see two old professionals having gentle fun together, this show’s for you.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo

Photo Credit: Jason Gillman

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Thrilling NEVERWHERE: A Signature Production for an Ambitious New Company

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com June 6, 2016

There’s a theme in imaginative fiction and drama, especially of the British persuasion, of a hidden and somewhat magical world coexisting with our own, and of a protagonist, often a child or an unformed person who finds his or her way from an ordinary life into the magical world and, once there, embarks willy-nilly on a hero’s quest. (Think Alice in Wonderland, Michael, John and Wendy, all of the kids who visit Narnia, Bilbo and Frodo, or Harry Potter, just to name a few off the top of one’s head.) Neverwhere, brought to Baltimore by Cohesion Theatre in a thrillingly ambitious production, is firmly in that category.

This is the story of Richard Mayhew (Joseph Coracle), an investment advisor described in the script as “a fresh-faced man with a rumpled, just-woken-up look to him,” a naïve Everyman in short, whose Good Samaritan deed for an injured woman in the street catastrophically severs him from his life in our everyday world and initiates him into the life of London Below, amidst the Tube stops and the utility tunnels and rooms without doors that one can only enter by magic, filled with fantastic people and animals, ranging from an angel to superhero types to talking rats to millennia-old assassins to a mythical monster that a hero (Mayhew, it emerges) must slay.

Neil Gaiman, creator of Neverwhere, which I’m sorry to say I’d never heard of before Cohesion brought it to Baltimore, incarnated his reimagining of London Above and London Below first in a TV miniseries, then novelized it. Others turned it into a series of graphic novels, and there have been two dramatic adaptations, the second of which, a 2010 version, by Robert Kauzlaric, is the one on display here.

I don’t know the Ur-work here, so I cannot hold forth on the fidelity of the adaptation to the source-material, but I know a gripping mythos when I see one. This is the real deal. If you have the kind of imagination that responds to graphic novels and Game of Thrones, this one is for you. You will find yourself transported for three hours into a world completely different from our own, but it is nevertheless detailed, dramatically coherent, and totally absorbing.

And a heavy lift to boot. Cohesion is a young fringe company, and I have no idea how they summoned the resources to do this. Let me start with the set by Kyle Millionie. The principal features are two very large wooden cubes with three sides cut away, with ladders attached so they may be scaled; they sit on castors so they can roll, and roll they do. As they are moved back and forth, frequently with actors standing balanced atop them, precariously clearing the ceiling and the lights by mere inches, they become rooms, cars in the Tube, offices, bridge abutments, and who knows what else. The cast pitches in to move these boxes around with sometimes scary speed and precision, making for the same kind of dangerous-looking show as the flying knives that attract us all from time to time to Japanese steak house hibachis.

Let me continue with the costumes, tipping the hat as I do so to designer Samantha Collanta. They beautifully evoke various eras and contexts: punk for Door, the damsel in distress (Cory Dioquino), Victorian for the assassins Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar (Matthew Payne and Bobby Henneberg), superhero for the protectress Hunter (Cassandra Dutt), ancient Greece or Rome for the Angel (Melanie Glickman), Restoration or Regency for The Fop With No Name (Melanie Glickman again), etc., etc. (There are a lot of costumes and roles to go around in the twelve-member cast, with constant costume and makeup changes for many of them.)

And hence, by unconventional but logical progression, to the cast, who have the heaviest lift of all, even when not pushing the huge boxes around. I’ve been seeing some of them in different contexts over the past couple of years, and my take is that their craft, individual and joint, has been improving. Take Payne and Henneberg, who portray the assassins; they were also paired together speaking in awkward Clouseau-inspired French accents in Cohesion’s French romantic farce, 13 Dead Husbands, a year ago, and they both came across as a little unformed; this outing, equipped with Cockney accents that sound unforced, they do a fine and more assured job with menace and murder. Cassandra Dutt I have been following with interest since a show at Fells Point Corner Theatre a couple of years back, and with Hunter, she does her finest work I’ve seen. When she is onstage looking lethal in leather and wrist-guards, and speaking in (I guess) Scottish-accented tones of defiance while wielding a staff, you don’t look anywhere else. Melanie Glickman’s versatility is amazing to watch, as she shifts from Gary, another office-bound Everyman, or Everyman’s pub-mate, at least, and the above-mentioned Fop (really two roles, one (the before one) a dandy, and the second (after a calamitous loss in a vicious fight), an invalid), to the Angel Islington (a queenly characterization that reminded me of Cate Blanchett‘s Galadriel in the Tolkien movies). I could say similar things about almost every member of this cast. They are punching at or above their weight, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

Nor can I leave off without mentioning the fight choreography of Jon Rubin, and the creature puppetry of Elisabeth Roskos. This is an extremely violent show, with many fights, much torture and bloodshed, and even a confrontation with a monster. Rubin rises to the challenge of making all this mayhem, which has to be called a major element in the show, believable and unrepetitious. And Roskos’s puppet of the Monster, The Beast of London, even though represented only skeletally, conveys fearsomeness quite effectively.

Obviously, this show is a kind of signature statement by Cohesion, which seems to share with Spotlighters, a very different local company, an unwillingness to acknowledge any limits to what it can do with limited resources. One hopes Cohesion can sustain this energy, competing in the crowded environment that the Baltimore stage has become. It is a good sign that Cohesion has moved from the Church on the Square, its recent venue, to a hall attached to the United Evangelical Church in Canton. To do big, physical stuff you need a big space. The acoustics here are also better than they were at Church on the Square, although that is not saying much; the audibility of lines in this new hall is still nothing to write home about. Hopefully Cohesion can keep searching for even better spaces, maybe even one of its own eventually.

In the meantime, it is clear what Baltimore audiences need to do: they need to come out and support this company. The rousing and stimulating good time that Neverwhere provides is all the incentive they should need.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo.

Pictured: Cory Dioquino, Cassandra Dutt, Joseph Coracle, Danielle Vitullo (?). Photo credit: Shealyn Jae Photography.

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Fever Dream: Streetcar at Everyman

Beth Hylton

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 18, 2016

Tennessee Williams‘ A Streetcar Named Desire is atmospheric, outsized, swampy, passionate, quirky, in short Southern Gothic. In most respects, Streetcar is therefore the polar opposite of Death of a Salesman, the play with which it is being paired and presented in rotating repertory by Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre. We know that Streetcar, unlike Salesman, does not pretend to hold a mirror up to reality, or to address social issues except incidentally. Streetcar is a drama of private dilemmas and passions. Streetcar has nothing in common with a tract and everything in common with a fever dream.
Director Derek Goldman understands this, and doubles down on the fantastic elements, injecting a “Vocalist” (Kelli Blackwell, often seen at Toby’s Dinner Theatre), who roams the set and sings mostly jazz and American Songbook standards that annotate the action, and makes of the somewhat already spectral street chorus (vendors, sailors and such) an even more sinister group that might have been drawn by Edvard Munch, especially the Mexican woman selling flores para los muertos, who is rendered in ghostly whiteface. He even imports the spectral Uncle Ben from Salesman (Carl Schurr) for a brief wordless appearance.
Equally wisely, Goldman presents but does not moralize upon the strange norms in the world author Williams presents, one in which spousal abuse is simply part of the rhythm of life to be accepted with patience, and rape may perhaps be understood as an over-effusion of animal spirits, while the discovery that one’s spouse is homosexual is cause for nervous collapse.
Goldman and his cast also try gamely to navigate the split personalities with which Williams has furnished two of his three principal characters. Stanley Kowalski (Danny Gavigan) is constantly described as an animal, but (except during the “Stella! Stella!” scene) he is not written that way: based on his lines he seems articulate and calculating, and he correctly demurs to the notion that as a Pole he must be stupid or somehow offensive. Blanche DuBois (Beth Hylton, pictured above) is a running fountain of misinformation, but from the script it is hard to tell how much of it she believes and how much she is taken in by her own lies. She is neither a hardened schemer nor a naif. Gavigan is given the harder task; the way he resolves his dilemma is to ignore almost all of the animality with which Williams supposedly endowed the character, and present us with a Stanley who is not likeable but is plenty human and probably the smartest character on the stage. More Marlon Brando might have been enjoyable, but this is a reasonable response to the hopeless task the script sets. Hylton’s path is clearer, and she takes it effectively: this Blanche’s belief in her self-generated legend is held in abeyance until close to the end. The moment when she transmutes the doctor come to hospitalize her (also Carl Schurr) into some kind of beau is the first time that she herself seems truly disoriented as to the line between fact and fantasy.
The Munch-like passers-by and the two not-quite-human principals aside, Williams has rounded out his dramatis personae with what for Williams pass as normal types, including the third principal Stella, Blanche’s sister (Megan Anderson), who brings a welcome toughness to a role that in other hands might seem more like a doormat. The message seems to be that it takes a strong woman to look the other way and/or forgive the well-nigh unforgivable. This may not be politically correct in contemporary terms, but it is almost certainly the way the mid-20th Century Williams thought. Goldman and Anderson’s unflinching accuracy on this point is appreciated. Chris Genebach, Dawn Ursula, and Bruce Randolph Nelson all bring care to various roles of ordinary folk as Williams in his strange way conceived them. In particular Genebach’s Mitch, a Williams archetype, the gentleman caller whose romantic attentions might solve the otherwise intractable problems of a lady in distress, but whose attentions are interrupted, is a solid portrayal.
It is clear that in this “Great American Rep” pairing of Streetcar and Salesman, Artistic Director Vincent M. Lancisi and the Everyman company want us to compare and contrast. Lancisi writes in the program:

Miller and Williams were revolutionary voices in the theatre world, literally changing the form of plays that were produced on stage from melodrama to realism with stories embodying both realistic and poetic dialogue never heard on our stages before. Common themes arise like the pursuit of the ever elusive American Dream and self perception versus reality.

Let’s unpack this.

Every true original playwright is revolutionary in an important sense, but few change the form. Miller and Williams were true originals, but Miller’s was hardly the only voice of his era exploring political and social themes. What was going on then was much larger than Miller himself. (To suggest otherwise ignores Hellman and Chayefsky and Odets, for instance, none of whom owed a perceptible debt to Miller, so far as I know.) Williams was so sui generis, so deep into half-closeted gay Southern Gothic, that he lacked peers or followers. He had the fortune or misfortune to come of age a mere half-generation before the explicitly gay theater established itself. And Carson McCullers was Southern Gothic all on her own.

Melodrama to realism? Well, no question that Miller was realistic, but it’s hardly fair to say he was revolutionary in that. The theater before Miller was not all Eugene O’Neill; there had been Strindberg and Ibsen, to pull two names out of the hat almost at random. And Williams was firmly melodramatic from first to last; he never showed any interest in realism.

Realistic and poetic dialogue of sorts never heard on our stages before? That may well be true, though I would again mention O’Neill in the same breath as these playwrights for such accomplishments.

American Dream? Well, yes, although as I pointed out in last week’s comments on the Salesman production, it is hard to decipher exactly what Miller is trying to tell us about the American Dream in that play, at least as Willy Loman’s failures relate to it. It is doubtless true that Blanche is a dreamer of sorts, but her dream is far different from Willy Loman’s. Hers is in the past, not the future. It is not by chance that the family estate she lost prior to surfacing in New Orleans was called Belle Reve (beautiful dream). It is a dream of bygone gentility, of a husband who (unlike her actual one) was capable of loving her as she loved him, of financial security and girlish good looks. And as I pointed out last week, while Willy cannot realize the Dream for himself, he can and does make it happen for his family, so it cannot even be called totally elusive for him, whereas it is obviously foredoomed as to Blanche.

Still, I believe that Lancisi in selecting these plays is onto something important. Miller and Williams are each important, classic American playwrights it’s always good to revisit. More crucially, we care about Willy and about Blanche in much the same way. Each is so passionately devoted to his or her version of the Dream that each continually feels licensed to lie to others and finally to himself/herself in the pursuit of that devotion, to the point where each character’s grip on reality slips and fails. We in the audience are continually torn between cheering the gumption and the desire behind the lies and being appalled at the human cost the lies inflict, not least on the tellers of them. But there is a difference; Willy comes to a moment of total clarity before the end that determines his final successful actions. Blanche’s moment at the end does achieve a success of sorts for her; she leaves the intolerable environment that her sister’s apartment has become, and we can assume she will be cared for at the state mental hospital to which she is headed. But she accepts the necessary relocation at the cost of vanishing into her delusive dreams.

If only for the opportunity to compare these two different dreamers, Lancisi and company deserve our gratitude. I hope that Everyman will repeat this experiment again in the future.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo Credit: ClintonB Photography.

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SIJ Mentality: We Broke It, We Bought It

Published in The Daily Record the week of May 22, 2016

Among the oft-touted secondary benefits of pro bono legal work is making the practitioner feel good about himself/herself. And I won’t downplay the benefit entirely; there really is a worthy and appropriate feeling of satisfaction one derives from attacking a problem on behalf of someone who cannot afford to pay market rate for legal services. (Better yet if one has succeeded in helping the client surmount the problem!) But that feeling can be seductive and deceptive, as all forms of self-satisfaction can. And among the first things threatened are one’s critical facilities.

Right and Historically American

I recently smacked up against this danger when I got partway through a pair of “SIJ” cases. That unwieldy acronym belongs to cases relating to Special Immigrant Juveniles, mostly youngsters who have made the perilous unaccompanied journey to this land from south of our border, have been picked up by Immigration after crossing into this country, and are now seeking to stay. (Let me add parenthetically that there is a pressing need right now for lawyers to take up these kids’ cause, and there is good training available, and advocacy organizations and translators to hold attorneys’ hands as they do the work, and not usually being seen in family court and/or immigration court should not deter any attorney reading these words from getting involved.)

It is no secret that, for all our bellicose talk about defending our border, we frequently are better than our words, and this is particularly so when it comes to unaccompanied alien children. The way to permanent residency is more open to them than to many other undocumented immigrants.

And no wonder. You cannot look at these kids and hate on them. They are beautiful and young and full of promise, and any country that turned them away would be not only hateful but stupid. Most of them have seen and endured things no one should have to face, at a young age or any age: gang violence, grinding poverty, illness, hunger. And in our midst they are a natural resource, not a menace. This is the right and the historically American way to think of them; most of us would not be here if this country had not usually agreed with the view that immigrants, especially young ones, are a good thing. And all that is simply true, simply a truism, and yet it is tempting to get a little too misty-eyed about the legal work this vision inspires.

And Then I Stopped

I was getting excited about my work on behalf of these young clients, and meditating (without getting too full of myself, I hope) how the work of the network of lawyers aiding them were America at its finest, voluntarism reaching out to desperately afflicted youngsters who are part of the promise of the American future.

And then I stopped. I thought about how those youngsters came to be so desperately afflicted in the first place.

Banana Republic

One of my clients is from Honduras. I will not, of course, share identifying details about the client, but I can say that the client has experienced many of the tribulations mentioned above. And I thought about what is commonly known about the way Honduras became the kind of country where such tribulations were common. Since the turn of the previous century, it was what The Guardian called “the original banana republic,” a nation where governments were freely replaced at the dictate of United Fruit. It is the place where the Reagan administration staged contras to fight against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. To be sure, we sent plenty of foreign aid to address its chronic poverty, but that aid largely ended up in the hands of the elites and the military. The military was largely trained in the arts of repression at Georgia’s notorious School of the Americas, and was deeply and corruptly involved in the economy. There was a democratically-elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, deposed in a 2009 right-wing coup, conducted by officers trained at the School of the Americas. Washington feebly denounced the coup but since then has tacitly supported it, in the face of nearly universal opposition by other governments in this hemisphere. In the wake of that coup the country just collapsed. To quote the New York Times: “According to the United Nations, [Honduras] now has the world’s highest murder rate, and San Pedro Sula, its second city, is now more dangerous than Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a center for drug cartel violence…. The coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns.”

So it seems as if my client was fleeing a situation largely caused right here in the U.S. of A.

“Civil War by Other Means”

My other client comes from El Salvador. This was a country that has seemingly been “broken” since it emerged as a separate nation from the United Provinces of Central America in 1839. Up until its civil war that began as a coup d’etat in 1979, the responsibility of the U.S. was more routine: participating in a system of buying its produce cheap and propping up a reactionary oligarchy. But starting in 1979, to prevent leftists from taking power, this country intervened decisively, making the country a far worse place to live. We funded the death squads, and trained the military that massacred civilians, leading to over 75,000 deaths. Twenty-five percent of the population fled, 1.5 million to the U.S. And the brokenness and the emigration have continued even after the peace. The death squads we supported became the template for the gangs that have become the scourge of the country. The Nation recently characterized the gang violence there (and the government’s military response) as “the continuation of the civil war by other means.” And so the immigrants keep coming, many undocumented juveniles like my client, to the point that an estimated 19% of all Salvadorans now live in the U.S., making them the fifth largest group of aliens, and there are nearly as many Salvadorans living here as Chinese.

We, the lawyers who have these comfortable, safe lives can barely imagine the world our SIJ clients come from, or our own unwitting individual contributions to the mayhem and desolation in that world. We are not some kind of Lady Bountiful, bestowing the mercy and grace of a benevolent country on these children and their families and imparting the glories of the American way to these eager new recruits.

Getting Real

Let’s get real. We are merely doing a pitiful little bit to help them reassemble lives our own proxies disrupted. We are helping to re-situate our victims far away from the societies they should be growing up in, but they can’t because our activities wrecked those societies. (And that’s saying it in a way that can be printed in a family newspaper.)

In plain English: We broke it, we bought it. And at the cost of a few hours of pro bono activity, we are buying it dirt cheap.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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DETROIT ’67 a Lot Like Baltimore ’15

Michelle Wilson and Amari Cheatom

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 18, 2016

It is doubtless no mere accident of scheduling that Dominique Morisseau‘s 2013 play Detroit ’67 is being presented by Center Stage almost exactly a year after the death of Freddy Gray and the ensuing Baltimore riots. Yes, it is safe to say that the riots that broke out in Detroit in July 1967 were far more deadly and destructive than our April 2015 upheaval, and the long-term impact of July 1967 on Detroit will prove far worse than the impact of 2015’s unrest upon this town. The topicality rests less in the scale and significance of the events, however, than in the explanation for them.

Heaven knows I didn’t have an explanation at the time. I grew up in Ann Arbor, 40 miles outside Detroit, and had just graduated from high school a month before. And to me and my predominantly white compatriots, the bloodshed and destruction in Detroit were inexplicable. Why were the black citizens ruining black neighborhoods? Were they crazy?

Morisseau’s aim in writing Detroit ’67 may not have been to explain this now-ancient history to people like me, but her play certainly tenders an explanation that makes a lot of sense, and which resonates with my understanding of what happened last year a few blocks from where I now live in Baltimore. Not to give too much away, Morisseau’s thesis is that the black citizens of Detroit were not crazy, just reacting to an ongoing culture of police abuse, and that abusive police and military responses were to blame for most of what went wrong once the spark of protest had been struck by the raid of an unlicensed after-hours drinking club known as a “blind pig.”

I have not made a study of the Detroit upheaval, but what little I’ve read suggests that the tale was more complex than Morisseau depicts. No matter. She has latched onto what is at minimum an important piece of the truth, and one we need to have retold at this juncture in our national and local dialogue.

Her play is set in a house not far from Detroit’s 12th Street, the heart of the uprising, a private home being customized, as the action begins, to function as a blind pig. The owners, a sister and brother named Chelle and Lank (Michelle Wilson and Amari Cheatom, pictured above), are trying to get by in a world where setting up a legitimate and licensed bar may be only a dream, too expensive and too difficult, given the capital demands of a bar and the undertow of police harassment. There is nothing sinister about them. (This squared with my recollection: a few years earlier than the action of the play, a black couple who frequented blind pigs lived next door to our house; and they too were just trying to get by.) In prepping the house Chelle and Lank are aided by Chelle’s best friend Bunny (Jessica Frances Dukes) and Lank’s best friend Sly (Brian Marable). Then, as the preparations continue, Lank and Sly find themselves rescuing Caroline (Sarah Nealis) a badly-beaten and comatose white woman in microskirt and go-go boots, who, when she comes to, is obviously hiding some kind of secret and, for that matter, hiding plain and simple. But she too agrees to help out.

In the two weeks or so of these characters’ lives the play covers, it becomes apparent they are all urban strivers, pursuing one dream or another in a bleak world that is inhospitable to dreams. Specifically, every dream turns out to be under threat by lethal police brutality clothed with near-unassailable impunity. And when one routine police atrocity too many, a raid at a competitor blind pig, precipitates a neighborhood explosion of outrage (a sort of race-centric Stonewall) and then a city-defining conflict between citizenry and law enforcement, some of these dreams will prove too costly and must be jettisoned. At least one dream will survive, though, bathed in tears but alive.

There is a lot of sociology at work in the characterizations, which I won’t bother with discussing. It reminds me of the character construction of August Wilson, a vastly overrated playwright whom Morisseau has nonetheless repeatedly claimed to be emulating. For my money, though, based at least on this play, Morisseau is much better at Wilson’s game than Wilson is. LikeLorraine Hansberry, Morisseau gives us types who are also individuals, brimming with life. Bunny is a bit of a sexual free spirit, entering in a skintight patterned outfit with a big cutout in the middle of the bosom, not above engaging in a grinding dance with a male character or reminiscing lasciviously about her first kiss. Lank and Sly are schemers in both the good and the bad sense, pushing their project of a legitimate bar by fair means and foul, engaging in a bit ofRaisin in the Sun-ish skullduggery with an inheritance and taking other risks that more established and white businessmen probably would not have needed to take to further the scheme. They each are given opportunities, nonetheless, to show capacities for love and loyalty and connection. Chelle is tempted to be either a termagant or a pushover for the men in her life and succumbs to neither temptation in the end. And Caroline’s path to integrity is perhaps the hardest any of the characters encounters. The actors portraying each member of the quintet are superb (though I wish Ms. Dukes would speak more clearly).

The set by Michael Carnahan certainly bears comment as well. It goes to great lengths to reconstruct in detail what a Detroit basement and ground floor looked like in 1967, from the furniture to the lamps to the pillows on the couch to the products on display. That period detail pays off in making us believe in what we’re watching. (I detected only one error, and that an error only a Michigander of my vintage would spot: an onstage carton of what was in 1967 strictly a local ginger ale called Vernor’s anachonistically bearing the modern spelling Vernors, sans apostrophe.) The upper level is largely used for projections of videos, mostly from the events of 1967 in Detroit, drawn from who knows what archives. But at the end, after the parallels to modern events have already been clearly implied, the gloves come off, and there are projections of modern police atrocities, including the shooting of Walter Scott and the image of a “Black Lives Matter” sign being waved.

Let me also mention the music, which is a rich potpourri of Motown’s offerings of that era. Every time a character puts on a Motown recording, it is an invitation to love and/or rejoicing. It is also a thematically significant plot point that Chelle wants to play them on 45s, scratch-induced repeats and all, while her technologically forward-thinking brother wants to play the songs on a new eight-track player. But it is perhaps of greatest importance because of Motown’s cultural significance at the time. It was a local Detroit product with a totally African American face (though there were some white men in the company’s backroom business operations); at the same time, unlike “race music” of the then-recent past, Motown’s music was marketed to white audiences as well as black ones. But I can well recall that at that time not all white audiences were comfortable with it. I and my friends weren’t, for instance. It may well not have been until The Big Chill came out in 1983, a movie concerning a bunch of white University of Michigan grads sporting a heavily Motown-centric soundtrack, that our tastes caught up. And we were hardly alone in our tardiness.

I don’t think Morisseau was oblivious to this. The far-from-universal acceptance of this wondrous music, with the instantly recognizable sax-and-tambourine orchestrations, suggests, to those who can remember, another way the isolation of Detroit’s black community worked. I think the Motown songs are meant to signal not only how solid the cultural coherence of black Detroit was but also the fact that that community’s signature product, like its grievances, was unable to attract commensurate attention from the larger, whiter world.

My immediate thought as the cast was taking its bows was just “Wow!” It’s been so exciting to be taken along on Center Stage’s Artistic Director Kwame Kwei-Armah‘s adventurous itineraries in recent years, and this play, by a young, relatively unknown playwright with a fresh perspective and so much to say, is typical. Not everything Kwei-Armah has tried has been a total success, like the regrettable all-female As You Like It, Center Stage’s last outing. Not even this play, which seemed about 10-15 minutes too long, and needed to have its pace picked up a little, could be called a total success. But still, better by far to have swung for the fences. We can forgive a whiff or two along the way.

It is a shame that the Center Stage momentum will be slowed a little by construction. This and the previous show in its 2015-16 season had been performed at the very hospitable quarters of Towson University’s Center for the Arts while the headquarters was being overhauled. But apparently this is where Center Stage goes home and hunkers down. The 2016-17 season (at least as to mainstage productions) will start only in November. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, it will also be quite interesting to see the reception this production receives at its next stop, the Detroit Public Theatre, which co-produced it, and where it will play next month. (I’m sure there will be more. and better informed comparisons between what Morisseau has put on stage and people’s recollections.) And I hope more of Morisseau’s work gets staged here.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Richard Anderson.

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Everyman Makes What Can Be Made of Arthur Miller’s SALESMAN

Wil Love and Deborah Hazlett

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com April 12, 2016

When a critic talks about a classic like Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman, now in revival at Everyman Theatre, there is no need to worry about spoiler alerts. Even if this were not one of the most familiar plays in the canon, known to almost every theatergoer, the title sort of spills the beans. So I’m going to proceed on the assumption that the plot needs no introduction and is fair game for discussion in some detail.

And I want to get right down to that detail. The play asks us to consider three instances of failure in a single family: the breadwinner’s career, the family’s pursuit of the American Dream, and that family’s nurturing of its two sons. With respect to the first two kinds of failure at least, Miller leaves out some utterly critical plot information, so we cannot know how much to generalize from what we are witnessing.

Willy’s Career: Done In or A Suicide?

Career first. Is Willy Loman (Wil Love) the primary author of his own misfortune or does that honor belong to economic circumstances? We know that salesman Willy has gaping holes in his integrity. He cheats on his wife, he encourages his sons to steal, he cannot accept help from a friend when that would be the sensible and indeed virtuous thing to do. His salesmanship, to the extent we can glimpse it, seems to consist of attempting to capitalize on personal relationships that are founded on nothing more substantial than the impression given by a shoeshine – rather than resting on the merits of the unnamed product he sells or the attractiveness of the deals he offers customers. We also know that his career is failing, badly. But what does the one fact have to do with the other? We don’t know. We certainly never see him either making or blowing a sale because of any dishonesty.

And if Miller thinks it’s irrelevant to the audience what Willy is selling, Miller could not be more mistaken. If, in 1949, the year of the first production of the play, Willy is peddling buggy whips, it’s very different than if he’s selling something 1949 consumers demanded. We do know that in 1949, the world of traveling salesmen was constricting greatly. As Jack Viertel commented in this year’s book, The Secret Life of the American Musical, the audience of The Music Man (which came out only 13 years later than Salesman) was invited to consider traveling salesmen as a quaint piece of bygone Americana, with an emphasis on the bygone. (Not to suggest that there aren’t still traveling salesmen today in some markets.).

American Dream: Did It Fail Willy or Did Willy Fail It?

It would be very helpful to get a clearer read on this, because without it we cannot get a handle on Miller’s message as to the American Dream either. That Dream is, of course, the notion that by dint of hard work and inspiration one can achieve wealth and status, and make life better for one’s children. But there has always been a caveat attached to that dream, which is that the hard work and inspiration must be in a marketable field. If Willy’s line of work is collapsing, if he actually is selling buggy whips, then it’s his lack of insight or willingness to face up to economic realities that has foiled him, and not the failure of the American Dream. On the other hand, maybe his customers just don’t want to deal with someone as unprincipled as Willy. Which is it? We are starved of the information that would enable us to know for sure.

There are some suggestions that it might have worked out better had he been a better person. Willy’s neighbor Charley and Charley’s son Bernard (Bruce Randolph Nelson and Drew Kopas) are a virtuous family, and they are clearly getting ahead (what with Bernard headed off to argue a case in the Supreme Court). But are they getting ahead because they’re a virtuous family? It’s also arguable that Willy’s bad luck in being too tired to go on and being booted by his callous boss Howard (also Bruce Randolph Nelson) could just as easily have happened to Charley if Charley had been in Willy’s line of work and worked for Willy’s employer.

So we don’t know (because in this long and windy play, Miller has still failed in meeting his basic narrative obligations) what lessons we are supposed to draw from the fable of Willy Loman on the subjects of character, success, or the American Dream. What about the lessons in the other area the play focuses on, the family?

A Tragedy Reversed

This is the one area in which it can be confidently said that Loman’s failures are his own fault. The guidance and care he has given his two sons Biff (Chris Genebach) and Happy (Danny Gavigan) has been comprehensively wrong, and he must own in large measure the emptiness and the lack of success his sons have achieved throughout most of the play. But the “last act,” the funeral after Willy has taken his life, shows the family’s healing, and for that Willy also surprisingly deserves credit. His act of suicide is brave and loving and well-thought-through, calculated to bring about the good results it ensures. There is every reason to believe that the family’s failures are at an end, and that, based on a climactic final confrontation with Biff, Loman foresaw how and why his death would end them. (And of course, just to add a fillip to the an earlier-discussed theme the greater success of the next generation is part of the American Dream.)

Indeed, if there is a reason that, despite all the confusion just catalogued, the play continues to have a grip on us, it is precisely that in this one element, the family drama, we witness comparative thematic clarity and enjoy a somewhat paradoxical happy ending. Naturally, one can say that the impact of a continually changing and largely heartless economy is a perennial theme, and ditto the unfulfilled American Dream. But there is so much uncertainty surrounding the presentation of those themes in Salesman that it is possible to say with confidence that if the play were just about them and not the family, it would be a seldom-produced historically interesting “issues play,” like for instance Elmer Rice‘s The Adding Machine, and not a classic.

Constraining the Cast and Director

Still, this unresolvedness of the two social themes is a feature, not a bug, as far as Miller is concerned. And this places unusual limits on a company producing the play. There is very little a director and actors can do. Miller has perversely willed the ambiguities and the gaps in information, and he has tightly controlled the opportunities for interpretation that might resolve or suggest resolutions to the ambiguities. There is a path to execute, and the Everyman crew execute marvelously, but this is not the same thing as the artistry that directors and actors can ordinarily exert. Most plays give their performers more room to interpret, to breathe.

The only leeway Miller allows the director and performers is in the degree of histrionics with which they say his lines. And here we can tip the hat to director Vincent Lancisi and the Everyman cast, particularly the leads (pictured above) Wil Love and Deborah Hazlett (as Willy’s wife Linda) . It is a compliment in Love’s case to say that he has not matured in his craft since this reviewer first saw him back at Center Stage in the early 1970s, because he has always known just what to do. The role of Willy, adrift in time, sometimes reliving moments that had happened decades ago, veering between bravado and frank admissions of failure, between rage and mute seeking of forgiveness, may not leave room for interpretation, but still requires a deft touch, and Love always delivers it. Hazlett’s is a more conventional role, that of a wife who loves and therefore forgives everything, but again, over several decades and in a variety of circumstances. Even when pestering Willy about the money necessary to run the household, she must not be querulous or unsympathetic. The burden of the all-important funeral scene which nails down both the tragedy and the triumph in the family drama rests on her, and Hazlett has done a fine job in conveying the necessary dignity to make it work.

There is an additional reason to see this production. This Salesman is being performed in rotating repertory with a revival of Tennessee Williams‘ A Streetcar Named Desire, which premieres next week with almost the same cast. This is a way many American theatergoers in earlier eras got to experience theater, with troupes who presented shows in groups, rather than sequential seasons, and I have always mourned the loss of that kind of experience. It is exciting that Everyman is bringing it back, if only as a kind of one-off stunt (so far as we know). It should be even more exciting because these two classics have so much in common, so many themes that resonate with each other. I’ll be back in a week’s time to discuss the second show and that resonance.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: ClintonBPhotography

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The Book of Job: Little Things and Great Ones

Delivered as a homily during an Easter Vigil service 2016 at St. Vincent de Paul Church, Baltimore

(This talk was preceded by a playing of Song of Job, by Jim Roberts and Andy Kulberg, performed by Seatrain (1970). See it here. It was illustrated with some of William Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job, reproduced in the margins below.)

Most of us know the Book of Job, to the extent we know it at all, as a straightforward U-shaped narrative, that is a story of how things start out one way, change, and then come back to being the way they were when they started. The song you’ve just heard strips the book down to give you just that U-shaped narrative. In it, Job, a pious man, starts out healthy, wealthy and wise; then everything goes to hell because God is testing him; then Job passes the test, and so God sees to it that Job ends up healthy, wealthy and wise again. And that description is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.

Between the Bookends

As soon as you start to look more closely at the book, it gets more complicated. Structurally, it is less like a U and more like a bookshelf with the books held up by bookends. Job starts out with what seems to be the beginning of a simple prose folktale and ends with the prose conclusion of that tale. The folktale takes up Chapters 1 and 2, and then resumes mid-way through the very last chapter, Chapter 42. The 39+ chapters in between them are poetry, of a very high order and of considerable philosophical complexity, subdivided into many parts. The song you’ve just heard covers that material in only a few lines. But they are really the heart of the Book; the folktale gives it context, the way bookends give the books on a shelf shape.

How did the book get this structure? Clearly to most scholars, the folktale material at the beginning and end is a much older text, and it was sliced in half by revisers, and all that poetical discourse inserted in the middle. And it makes sense to me.

Now the bookend analogy does break down in one critical way. It doesn’t describe well a typical modern reaction to Job. Most of the time, with a modern bookcase, we obviously prefer reading the books to reading the bookends. But with Job, to the modern imagination, the folktale part at the ends, the bookend part, if you will, goes down a lot easier than the philosophical disputes in the middle. We much prefer folktales to philosophical arguments, even when the arguments are well done and quite poetic. Still, we can be quite sure the ancient authors who assembled the book weren’t crazy; they must have thought something was awfully valuable in all the discourse and poetry, or they wouldn’t have turned a simple tale into a mini-epic to make room for it.

So why did they do it? What was so great about the discourse and the poetry? And what use and relevance do the discourse and the poetry have for us?

To answer those questions, of course, we have to look at what happens there. There are six speakers over those many chapters. There are Job, three friends of Job named Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, and a young man named Elihu who thinks he knows better than his elders, and spouts off for awhile. And then God bats last.

Challenging God

Job is remarkably consistent in his approach to his misfortunes, though he certainly grows in volume and intensity as he goes along. He hates his life, he says – which is quite believable given that his wealth has been carried away, his children have died, and he is covered with unsightly and painful boils. He hates his life, and he wishes he were dead or had never been born in the first place. He does not understand why God would do this to him. He has led an exemplary life. And if he has been sinful in any regard, that is merely consistent with the way God made him. God is supposed to be just, and if He deviates from justice, he’s supposed to be merciful. Where are God’s justice or mercy in the way Job has been treated? In effect, Job challenges God.

Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad and Elihu all, in one way or another, refuse to accept Job’s premise. They reason that if Job has been afflicted, Job must have sinned, because God cannot be unjust. In contemporary terms, they do not accept that bad things may happen to good people. If bad things happened to Job, then, by this logic, Job must be bad people.

Now, we can agree that the three friends and Elihu are certainly quite wrong in their premise; everyone knows that good things regularly happen to bad people and bad things regularly happen to good people. And in the end we all die, good or bad. As Stephen Sondheim memorably summarized it in a lyric: “It’s called flowers wilt,/ It’s called apples rot,/ It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,/ It’s called God don’t answer prayers a lot.”

Unthinkable

But you can see why the friends and Elihu would have struggled so hard not to recognize this: the implications of “God don’t answer prayers a lot” were close to unthinkable. For the authors of the Book of Job and their audience, there was no afterlife, no do-over in which God could set right any misfortune befalling good people, or take back any ill-gotten gains accruing to the thieves who got rich. In short, there was no reliable justice, and no reliable mercy. What would that tell us about God?

We Christians do believe that there is a do-over, of course; that is one of the most consistent things in Jesus’ message. To be sure, Jesus never describes it as a do-over – rather, in Jesus’ description our lives to come are the culmination of our existences, not a repetition nor, on God’s part, a chance to rectify any mistakes. But there is an opportunity to execute fully God’s justice and mercy which, if we’re honest with ourselves, we cannot plausibly claim are fully executed in this life.

But even if we believe this, it doesn’t clear up the whole problem. Not at all.

And actually we can see that in how we react to the ending of the story. We are told that Job is restored to twice his former wealth, and apparently he sires a new family to replace the one God struck down. And “he saw his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-grandchildren. Then Job died, old and full of years.” This is the general Biblical formula for “and they all lived happily ever after.” But it is also specific; according to the Book of Job, the hero gets a new family, and he’s just as happy with them as he was with his old one, and God has now, implicitly, made full restitution.

 A Barbaric Restitution

Well, that’s nice. But in the meantime, a whole bunch of innocent members of Job’s first family were slaughtered just so God could deprive Job of their company. To be fair, they’re not really people. This is a folktale, and they’re not characters in it, just counters quantifying Job’s well-being as a man and a chieftain. We are told the number of his sheep, camels, oxen, and sons and daughters. They’re all in the same category. It may reflect the barbarity of the civilization that gave rise to this story that, while Job may feel their loss as a loss to him, their own dignity and their value to themselves does not enter into the equation.

And when we hear that God has taken these irreplaceable human lives and then, by bringing forth other human lives, thinks He’s evened the score, well, that just tells us that the God of the Book of Job shares some of the barbaric values of this barbaric culture. And it certainly does not make a modern audience feel all warm and fuzzy about God.

Especially not when we remember why, according to the story – at least as told in the bookends, in the folktale – God has stricken down Job’s first family and his first fortune to begin with: to win what at first blush looks like a bar bet with Satan.

“Satanic” Quality Control

Now, it’s not quite as scandalous as one might think in one respect. This Satan is not the fallen angel of Milton’s Paradise Lost; he is not what we call the Devil in popular culture. Scholars think the Satan of the Book of Job is more like God’s quality control inspector. God thinks Job is a fine piece of spiritual work; Satan is not convinced, and suggests that God needs to make sure. So it’s not so much God and Satan gambling, for the sheer fun of it; more like running tests on a sample that just came off the assembly line just to be absolutely sure it is marketable.

So: not as scandalous, but still scandalous. It’s still not right that Job be put through excruciating losses and pain just to confirm he’s a great guy and a faithful one, even if we decline to weigh the suffering of his family members in the balance at all.

Small wonder that critic Harold Bloom felt that the ending was not original, but was stuck in by a pious rabbinic fool. It seems to trivialize Job’s suffering, making of it just a temporary deprivation of the riches in a very rich life.

And maybe we will conclude that the original version of the story, the U-shaped tale of a rich man humbled and then exalted again makes God look pretty bad. Though I’d ask you to withhold judgment for a few minutes.

God’s Answer

The poet or poets who took over and wrote the long middle of the Book have a much different approach and a different answer to Job’s challenge. I’ve told you already in essence what Job says and what the friends and Elihu say. But I also mentioned that God bats last, and I haven’t yet adverted to what God says. Let me just read you a little to give you the flavor of it:

1 Then the LORD addressed Job out of the storm and said:

2 Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance?

3 Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers!

4 Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

5 Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it?

6 Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid the cornerstone,

7 While the morning stars sang in chorus and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

8 And who shut within doors the sea, when it burst forth from the womb;

9 When I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling bands?

10 When I set limits for it and fastened the bar of its door,

11 And said: Thus far shall you come but no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stilled!

12 Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place

13 For taking hold of the ends of the earth, till the wicked are shaken from its surface?

14 The earth is changed as is clay by the seal, and dyed as though it were a garment;

15 But from the wicked the light is withheld, and the arm of pride is shattered.

16 Have you entered into the sources of the sea, or walked about in the depths of the abyss?

17 Have the gates of death been shown to you, or have you seen the gates of darkness?

18 Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell me, if you know all:

19 Which is the way to the dwelling place of light, and where is the abode of darkness,

20 That you may take them to their boundaries and set them on their homeward paths?

21 You know, because you were born before them, and the number of your years is great!

God goes on to discuss the astonishing variety of animals He has created, and dissertates for some time about the warhorse, Behemoth (the hippopotamus), and Leviathan (the crocodile). Creation as extolled by God, is huge and intricate and powerful and full of wonderful things.

Good Enough for Job

That answer is certainly enough for Job. He responds as follows:

1 Then Job answered the LORD and said:

2 I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered.

3 I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know.

5 I had heard of you by word of mouth, but now my eye has seen you.

6 Therefore I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes.

Now God’s response to Job is not a direct answer. God says nothing about Job’s entitlement to justice or his petition at least for mercy or, failing that, for oblivion. But there is a clear implied answer: God’s plan is so vast, so mighty, so beyond human comprehension, that the way everything relates to Job’s little part in it is bound to be beyond human comprehension as well.

Not Good Enough for Us

This answer does not fall well on modern ears.

We get it that we don’t know everything. In fact, thanks to modern physics and cosmology we have a much clearer picture than the ancients did how unimaginably vast our cosmos is, and how many things within it, some of them quite fundamental, are unknown and likely to remain unknowable to us. Still, justice and mercy are things we think we do understand pretty well. We get basic fairness, much more even than did the civilization that begat the Book of Job. We’ve had Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the Emancipation Proclamation and the Geneva Accords and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We know we haven’t learned everything there is to know about justice and mercy, but we think we’re on the right track – and what God did to Job looks as if it’s on the wrong track.

And that matters. It matters tremendously because, to a religious mind, justice and mercy are tied up with the divine nature. They have meaning, they make a demand on us, precisely because they emanate from God. If they were not of divine origin, they might make no such demand on us, and a God who was not a God of justice and mercy would certainly not be the God we have thought we were worshiping, either.

And yet: the divine justice and mercy cannot be directed merely by what we see and understand. We do not and cannot see enough of the picture. And it is presumptuous of us to act as if we did.

God’s Fairness Not Ours

A message of the Book of Job, then, is that God is not just or fair in the limited way we understand those things. God’s covenant with us is that He will be our God and we shall be His people; there is nothing in there promising no crucifixions, as Jesus could tell us.

But the message goes further; the Book of Job says that this apparently intolerable state of affairs is still okay. God has bigger things going, a vast universe of which we are an infinitesimal part, a grand design we cannot hope to comprehend, and in this grand design God will do things that we cannot with our limited perspectives accept as fair – but it will be all right. Thieves will get rich and saints will get shot – and it will be all right.

We Christians are in the midst of a celebration of exactly that mystery. What happened to Jesus was a scandal. From our human perspective, nothing could be more unfair of the Father than to hand to Jesus the cup of the death Jesus had to die. But there was a bigger design at work. It was going to be all right, and that injustice, that scandal of the Cross, was at the heart of the process whereby it became all right.

Conversely, if Jesus had turned away, and insisted on fair treatment, if Jesus had not embraced what from an ordinary human perspective looked like meaningless suffering, it would not have been all right.

Joyous Days

And there’s one other lesson the Book of Job would teach: that at the end there is gladness. “Job lived joyous days,” the song tells us. “He saw his children, his grandchildren, and even his great-grandchildren,” the Book tells us. Maybe the gladness is not in this life, but there will be gladness. That too is part of the grand design. That gladness, incomprehensible and unfathomable, is almost as much of an affront to our way of thinking as was the pain that had preceded it.

Definitely an affront to critic Harold Bloom, whom I cited earlier, for the view that the ending was an afterthought stuck on by a stupid rabbi to make a scandalous story palatable. Both as a matter of textual history and as a matter of the story being told, Harold Bloom was wrong. According to the majority of scholars, the ending was not an afterthought. It was the original ending of the story, the oldest part, carrying the accumulated wisdom of the culture that had produced it. There will be suffering, those ancients tell us, but it is a little thing. There will also be gladness, and it is a big thing, the big thing. It will not be fully comprehensible to us why this is right, but it is right, and it is coming our way. And the best way to await it is with faith and with patience: The Patience of Job.

One afterthought: Just because we cannot comprehend divine justice and mercy does not let us off the hook on our own obligation to act justly and mercifully as we understand these things – though it may require us to be constantly questioning our assumptions as to what these concepts mean or demand. That’s a big subject for another time, but it has to be mentioned in passing.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Constitutional Rights Under Assault in Apple Encryption Fight

Published in Daily Record March 29, 2016

There are plenty of issues in the dispute between the Justice Department and Apple over the encryption of iPhones. But the two I personally find of greatest concern have to do with human dignity: that of cellphone users, and that of programmers who may at some point be subject to a direct order from some court to attempt to build an override for Apple’s encryption.[1] As this goes to press, DOJ says it may be able to unlock the phone without Apple’s help, mooting out this dispute. If so, though, this merely postpones the moment when the encryption improves, the government insists on help, and these two issues come back to life.

Human Dignity = Something

Cellphone users (like everyone else, if there is in fact anyone left who does not use a cellphone) cannot be forced to give testimony against themselves. The Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination rests squarely upon an understanding there are compulsions to which, as a matter of respect for human dignity, no one should be subjected.[2] True, that respect is of quite limited scope. It outweighs the rule that the law has a right to every person’s testimony only where speaking would actually threaten to incriminate the speaker. And even that exception can be overridden if the state grants immunity before the testimony is compelled. So there is not that much left to the right to silence and the dignity it protects. But it is something.

And that something is not without consequence. I think it’s safe to predict that if a machine existed, as it may sometime do, that could search our minds and read them, the courts would hold that the Fifth Amendment prevents our minds from being searched that way for the purpose of incriminating us. How different are cellphones, though?

Cellphones have become something like a memory and consciousness for most of us. We delegate to our handheld silicon familiars the tasks of remembering locating information for all our social connections, maintaining a history of our own physical locations (perhaps 24/7), carrying on most of our communications, and keeping track of our agendas, our secrets, our interests and our fantasies. And, yes, our misdeeds, the very thing a privilege against forced disclosure exists to shield us from exposure to liability for, be those misdeeds ever so evil and ever so threatening to national security.

Our Phones, Ourselves

Now, can we doubt that that distinction between our minds and our phones will only keep shrinking for the foreseeable future? Today our phones rest in the palms of our hands, or are worn with an awkward extension around the ear, or as a watch. It is a near-certainty that when they inevitably grow smaller, they will be implanted. They will become, like our brains, in-body compilers of our entire life’s story, including the parts of the story we have a constitutional right not to disclose.

Assuming that the equivalency of our cellphones and ourselves is near-complete now, and that it will come even fuller soon, are we willing to allow phones to be treated as if they were separate from ourselves when it comes to our limited but precious privilege against self-incrimination? The DOJ’s paradigm is that cellphones are like documents or things external to ourselves, things which may lawfully be seized and searched, given probable cause, even to incriminate us. But is that really different from saying that one’s brain could be seized and searched? Back in the days when “telephone” meant a communications device that lived on a desk, yes, it was different. Now, when “phone” means a computer into which we pour so much of ourselves (and which happens to include voice communications among its myriad of functions), the difference grows harder and harder to maintain with a straight face.

That near-equivalence between our phones and our minds also means that when, as in the California case where Apple and DOJ are facing off, the owner of the phone dies, but the owner’s near-prosthetic memory and personality live on, there is a strong argument to be made that that memory and  personality should be accorded the same respect, and that its freedom from self-incriminatory compulsion should be as great as the personality of the owner when he was alive. The owner cannot be convicted or sentenced, but, even after he has gone to face a higher Judge, he could still be incriminated in this world by its contents – and lack the ability to defend himself. The protection should therefore live on.[3] (And before you react that lending machines their owners’ Fifth Amendment rights is an extreme view, remember that a phone at least is corporeal; we live in a country where non-corporeal corporations have the same First Amendment rights as humans.)

Involuntary Servitude

Turning from the human dignity of putative bad guys, living and dead, to that of putative good guys, software engineers, what are we to make of orders conscripting their employer to devise hacks for its own security protections? We know that this ultimately translates to an order compelling the individual engineers to perform the hack. In both instances, that of the employer corporation with, as we know, constitutional rights and that of the individual engineer, we are forced to wonder how such an order squares with the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude “within the United States,” except as a punishment for crime. In protecting the security of iPhones with encryption, neither Apple nor its engineers committed any crime. Nor have they been convicted of any crime. Nor are they being punished. Yet DOJ is seeking to compel them to undertake labor they had not agreed to perform and which could not be compelled even if they had agreed; it is well-established that even if one has contracted to perform personal services, the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits a court to order specific performance of the contract.

DOJ claims that it has the authority under the All Writs Act, which provides that courts “may issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”[4] Even assuming a court order to software engineers to drop whatever else they were doing and help disable a key feature of their employer’s product were “necessary and appropriate,” how, after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, could such an order be “agreeable to the usages and principles of law”? One thing we know full well is that involuntary servitude was once enforced under the usages and principles of law in many states, under the guises of slavery, indenture, and peonage. But we know too that then the Thirteenth Amendment came along and destroyed them all. Involuntary servitude no longer conforms to the usages and principles of law. Notwithstanding, DOJ thinks there is still an unwritten exception in the Thirteenth Amendment for involuntary servitude to help courts fight terrorism.

That’s craziness.[5] There are few rights as unconditional as those established by the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Cost, Worth It

In so saying, I recognize that respecting the limits we have placed on ourselves comes with a cost, when we are combating terrorism. But our country and most of our countrymen will survive terrorism. We will surely all lose far more if the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments are damaged in that fight. The wounds to the self-incrimination privilege and the bar to involuntary servitude would no doubt survive long after Islamic terrorism is gone.

_______________

[1]. That very relief was compelled by an order in In re An Apple iPhone Seized During the Execution of a Search Warrant on a Black Lexus IS300, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20543 (Feb. 16, 2016). At this writing, that order is subject to a motion to vacate. My expectation is that the matter will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.

[2]. The writings of the Supreme Court, and for that matter of the European courts (which have arrived at the same result even though a right against forced self-incrimination is not set forth explicitly in the European Convention on Human Rights), are very confused and circular on this point. Yet I believe that respect for a defendant’s dignity is the gist of such expressions as this:

Our decisions under that Amendment have made clear that convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i. e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system — a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.

Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534, 540-41, 81 S. Ct. 735, 739 (1961). Or this, from the same case: “Despite such verification, [certain] confessions were found to be the product of constitutionally impermissible methods in their inducement. Since a defendant had been subjected to pressures to which, under our accusatorial system, an accused should not be subjected, we were constrained to find that the procedures leading to his conviction had failed to afford him that due process of law which the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees.” Id., 365 U.S. at 541, 81 S. Ct. at 740. As I say, circular. The involuntariness of the confessions makes the methods indecent, and the indecency makes the confessions involuntary. Yet common to both poles of the discourse is the sense that there are things to which a human should not be subjected, and with which the State must simply make do.

[3]. I acknowledge that I have made a somewhat contrary argument in an earlier piece about the survival of attorney-client privilege after the client’s death. See Vital and Inevitable: The Decay of Client Confidentiality (June 30, 2014). However, it makes a difference who is overriding the expectation of privacy. Given the Fifth Amendment, the government, particularly the prosecutorial organs of the government, should always have the weakest claim; true historians and those seeking to preserve the human experience for future generations have much stronger ones. I state my conclusion here; not the reasons for it.

[4]. 28 USC § 1651.

[5]. Apple’s counsel have not relied upon the 13^th Amendment. See the memorandum filed by Apple’s lawyers contesting the order. Apple relies largely on the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment. Nor did the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in issuing an order to opposite effect. In re Order Requiring Apple, Inc. to Assist in the Execution of a Search Warrant Issued by this Court, No. 15-MC-1902 (JO), 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 25555 (E.D.N.Y. Feb. 29, 2016). No doubt both Apple and the New York court have their reasons for not “going there.” But I believe that the 13^th Amendment is a valid concern.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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