There Went the Judge

 It's not often that you are faced with the death of someone who was both a model and a mentor, a judge and a natural leader. For me, that was the late Chief Judge William C. Pryor, who passed away last Thursday at 88. At the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where I was privileged to work when Judge Pryor was the Chief Judge, he was the effective man i n the middle, calming the judicial waters after the court had almost torn itself apart with personalities clashing.

As a judge, he brought to the appellate bench the skills and the attitude of a good trial judge, basing his decisions as much as possible on the facts with scrupulous impartiality.  He was soft-spoken yet firm when he reached a conclusion. And although he had no particular liking for administration, he led the court system in D.C. effectively through cooperation with Chief Judge Fred Ugast of D.C.'s Superior Court, the trial court. During the decade I spent at the court, that kind of collaboration hadn't occurred before him and did not exist after he stepped down.

So often it happens that the most effective leader is the one who does not seek the position but accepts the responsibility. By proceeding calmly but firmly, he earned the respect of contentious judges on both the appeals and trial courts.  He took no pleasure from ceremonial or social occasions--often, he would approach me during some get-together at the court or with the bar to ask if I wanted to go for a run with him. 

The testimonials in the media from a deceased judge's law clerks are invariably totally laudatory and also completely predictable. But everyone on the staff at the court appreciated how he would treat them as full colleagues. And although he focused on the evidence in criminal cases, never succumbing to demands for either excessive leniency or firmness, he often was hailed by men whom we ran by during jogs in D.C. After one such greeting, he remarked to me that he had sentenced the man to a term of several years.

He grew up in the District, starting segregated public schools. He was a good athlete, especially at basketball and tennis, and worked out for most of his life. He would chuckle at remembering that he had been recruited by Dartmouth where it had been assumed he was a good football player but which he hadn't played. He loved basketball and blamed his bad knees on playing on concrete courts growing up.

After Dartmouth and Georgetown Law, he took a Master's in Judicial Studies at the University of Virginia with my former boss, Prof. Dan Meador. Unlike many judicial education courses, this one was demanding and rigorous. He was not prone to parading his education. Once in a divorce case, where counsel for a well-heeled couple had condescendingly tried to explain to the trial judge, Judge Pryor, about the importance of the right summer camp for the couple's children, he saw that they assumed he knew nothing of that strata. He never disclosed his own attendance at Northfield Mr. Hermon, then Dartmouth and Georgetown.

In his last years, we would meet, usually serendipitously, at the same health club. Everyone in the locker room knew and respected him; he would enjoy getting into discussions with them about almost any subject. He was also proud of his two sons, doing his best to launch them on good careers. At home, the judge conceded that his wife of many years was in charge, pointing out that she was a teacher, who to him had more natural authority than a judge.

There have been far too few jurists who brought his temperament and skills to the job. In our ideologically-divided age, he has already been and will continue to be sorely missed. He was someone for whom you wanted to give nothing less than your best.

Things Get Weird

Over the years since first reading George Orwell's two masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984, it could be said that they prompted a look backward--we conjure up recollections of totalitarian and authoritarian states but have been less capable of recognizing rather than envisioning dystopic societies such as that depicted in 1984. But today there have been many clear indications that such a future is not so distant and unlikely. 

Orwell's perception, moreover, extended to a clear analysis of not only why socialism has not been widely accepted in the U.S. but the reasons why its prospects here remain dim--as evidenced by how easily the Republicans wielded the scare propensity of the very word to successfully resist any "Blue wave" that might have accompanied Biden's victory. This has usefully been summarized from what may be his most continually relevant work, The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 :                    

    Why then are we not all socialists?

Orwell attempts to answer this difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies five main problems:

1. Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle-class socialists do themselves no favors by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate the large section of the population that is economically working-class but culturally middle-class.
2. Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. He criticizes H. G. Wells in particular on these grounds.
3. Crankiness. Among many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people.
4. Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with "notwithstandings" and "heretofores" and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
5. Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

Applying Orwell's analysis to our milieu more than eighty years later, we can point to those who, in focusing entirely on economic factors, diminish the significance of the "culture wars". Recently, we have beginning to hear acknowledgment of the negative power of elitism, condescension, perceived favoritism toward minorities, and use of such terms as "deplorables" in firing up people who didn't go to college to turn to those who surely do not have their interests at heart or in mind except to draw on the anger of people who feel neglected, insulted, or passed over. Resentment remains and is now again being recognized as a powerful generator of negative voting.

This counts for a lot. Lincoln observed, "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them." He also employed the self-deprecation tack since successfully used by politicians who seek to counter the tendency of many who are struggling to make ends meet to express misguided respect for rich candidates who inherited or made a fortune on their own. Some rich men may not steal; we have seen, however, that that is not true across the board, any more than it is the case that any economic group has a lesser propensity to engorge off the public trough. 

Asked about how his early life led to his success, Lincoln said that his early years could be summed up in a phrase from Gray's Elegy: "the short and simple annals of the poor." Lincoln was able to use these responses so well because he did rise from an impoverished and hard-scrabble background. Only those who did live a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story are thus able to employ this approach: it is akin to the now-iron rule that only members of ethnic groups can make jokes about their group. 

Something to Cheer

 We were out walking along Connecticut Avenue here in the nation's capital at about 12:30 P.M. and suddenly we heard and saw a cacophony of horns honking, banners waving, flags flying in the breeze out of sunroofs, and a whole procession of cars parading down the avenue past the Zoo and on, presumably, to downtown DC as thousands cheered. 

It's been much too long since we had something to cheer about like this. Even election night was muted because of the Congressional results. But now it was as if all the pent-up enthusiasm--absolutely no curbing allowed, Larry David--was suddenly released and exploded in a merry pandemonium.

As with every time one gets loaded, there'll be sober second thoughts in the morning, but today is just a great beautiful--70 degrees and sunny here--day for celebrating. Reminds me of the ancient ad slogan from my much much younger days: "They said it couldn't be done..."

Sermons and soda water tomorrow, comedy tonight! Everything is forgiven for Joe--and yes, over the years, there was plenty. But everything changes--now and then. I just received a note saying that the Year of Living Dangerously is over. As one who lived for a while in Indonesia, it really was like that here. Only it was for four years. 

Skip Happy Days Are Here Again, even if they are. I like Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead!!