An Apple, Tree Sort of Thing

I've had a hard time figuring out just how to start this piece. I mean, I know what I want to say, but can't quite find a clever way to get there. I guess that's sort of the central challenge in all good writing.

The beginning, I suppose. Well, not THE beginning, but A beginning -- the beginning of the idea for this piece. My nephew was born a few weeks ago. His name is Logan (I assume after Marvel's Wolverine, but haven't yet been able to confirm that)*, and he is my parents' first grandchild.

This piece isn't about him. The little bugger's gonna get plenty of attention. He doesn't need more from me. Hell, he already has his own website. No point in over-inflating his little ego so soon.

Ok, it's sort of about him. But only because it was inspired by a picture on his website. A picture of Logan and his grandfather.

My dad.

You see (and if you clicked on the link already, your really did see), Logan's not supposed to be here just yet. He was supposed to be weighing my sister down and making her summer horribly uncomfortable until sometime in August. Human biology being the unpredictable creature it is, things didn't work out as planned, and the little guy had to be delivered almost 3 months early. I'm no expert, but I think it's safe to say that medically speaking, this was less than ideal. My sister and her husband do, I suppose, have the rare opportunity to be new parents and still sleep through the night. But that sleep would be a lot sounder if they didn't have to go home every night without their little boy, leaving him in a hospital intensive care unit while his body tries to catch up on those last few months of development.

But this piece isn't about them, either.

It's about that picture of my dad on Logan's website. Nothing on that site hit me quite as hard as that picture. Take a minute and find it so you know what I'm talking about. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Back? Ok. So maybe you see what I see, maybe you don't. I see the human being I aspire to be.

Some explanation is in order. The belief has been expressed in some circles that I bear certain similarities, characteristically speaking, to my father. By which I mean my wife thinks I'm his clone.

This strikes me as scientifically unlikely.

Still, I won't deny that we have some characteristics in common. Neither of us is particularly expressive of our emotions. Or excessively talkative. I might also share a tendency toward understatement. He does not suffer fools gladly. His sense of humor is dry, and he has been known, on occasion, to be a bit of a smart-ass. Some have made similar accusations against me. I won't say they are entirely unfounded.

That persona is only part of my dad's character, though. In that picture with his grandchild, I see much of the rest. He may not express his emotions much, but his feelings have a depth. Never in my life have I doubted how much he loved me, or that he was proud of me. I'm sure the same is true for my brother and sister. Sure, he got mad at me when I did some dumbass thing (which happened every now and then when I was growing up), but I usually knew (even if I refused to admit it at the time) that he had cause to be angry. It's that not suffering fools thing, especially when the fool in question is a son who knows better. He expected me to live up to my potential, and trying to meet that expectation has made me a better person.

That sounds cliche, I know. And it is, especially on Father's Day. It is also wholly inadequate. There's so much more that I can't quite find a way to capture -- frustrating for a guy who makes his living crafting words. Let me try a bit more.

My dad is loyal. He will be there for anybody who needs his help. Cliche, again, but also true.

He has a quiet self-confidence. Not arrogance, just a solid belief in himself. I think that sense of self is part of what makes it possible for him to talk to just about anybody, to accept people for who they are, and to make them feel comfortable.

My dad has great common sense -- and not in that annoying knee-jerk way some people use common sense as a substitute for actual thinking. And he has a powerful sense of right and wrong, of justice. He probably doesn't know it, but he's made me a better lawyer. In the practice of law, right, wrong and justice can get buried under statutory language, decades of precedent and the minutiae of legal analysis. Lawyers have been known to concoct arguments that might just be a bit too clever. Sometimes, when those legalities start to run away with a case, or I find myself being perhaps a tad too creative with an argument, I ask myself, "Would Dad buy this?" If, in the imagined conversation I have with him, my dad concludes it's bullshit, I figure it probably is.

Mostly, my dad is a fundamentally decent person with a full, loving heart. When I saw that picture of him reaching his hand out to his tiny grandson, my heart caught. I could feel what he was feeling (or at least what I think he was feeling). How much he worried about my sister and her husband, how he would take on their fear and pain if there was any way he could, the love and adoration inspired by little Logan, how he would fix it all if he could, and his frustration that he can't. I don't believe in God or angels, but guardian angels don't get much better than my dad.

Now and again, I find out that people see some of those same characteristics in me. A friend of Amy's once told her about how strongly loyal she thought I am. A kid I represent told me she was glad to hear my voice when I called. People trust my judgment for no more reason than they seem to think I'm fair and that I know what I'm talking about (even if I'm not always so sure).

When that happens, I think maybe these people are seeing in me a little of what I see in my dad.

I hope so.

So happy Father's Day, Dad.

And thanks.

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*It may also have been after the airport, I suppose. His dad has done a lot of flying in his lifetime, and maybe the Boston airport holds a special place in his heart. Again, this is unconfirmed.

Curses!

The self-declared culture warriors took a bit of a beating last week. It was just in time.

"Self-declared," by the way, because they aren't so much warriors as indignant blow-hards (some of whom have their own TV and radio shows) and because they wouldn't know culture if it reached up and slapped them on the ass.

Which, conveniently enough, brings me back to my point. The beating. Delivered, at least in part, by their commander-in-chief and his chief puppetmaster.

First, I'm afraid I'll have to bore you with some history. Sorry. On the up side, it's the history of naughty words on television, which should be at least a little interesting.

For decades, the Federal Communications Committee has charged itself with the weighty task of protecting our children from bad words on TV and the radio. The little brats are on their own everywhere else. It even came up with a definition of what qualifies as bad words. They are, in legal lingo, "indecent," a concept the FCC declared to be "intimately connected with the exposure of children to language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities and organs." All of which is a fancy way of saying "indecent" means words about pooping and screwing, without, you know, being indecent about it.

Ok, fine. This obsession with sex and defecation probably seems a bit silly and infantile to much of the world, but there probably isn't a burning need to graphically describe either of them during prime time. And the rules were applied carefully, so it took a pretty blatant violation to draw theFCC's attention. The classic case was the broadcast of George Carlin's seven dirty words during prime time. While punishing the broadcast of that particular bit is almost painful in its irony, even hardened America-hating liberals can probably grudgingly agree the broadcast wasn't a terribly good idea.

And then came Emperor Bush, and the social conservatives he had to please.

It all came to a head (so to speak) at the Golden Globes in 2002 or 2003. Bono got on stage and described some award as "really fucking brilliant." Inevitably, some ass whipped his indignity into a fine froth of righteousness and complained to the FCC. The FCC's enforcement bureau, being staffed by apparently reasonable human beings, dismissed the complaint. For nearly 30 years, the FCC policy had been that "fleeting expletives" are not indecent. This was clearly a fleeting expletive, so there was no basis for punishing the broadcast.

The righteous were having none of that. They owned the government now, so they -- not reasonable people -- would decide what was indecent. Which would be funny, if it didn't turn out to be true. In 2003, the FCC board (populated with several Bush appointees, selected, no doubt, to satisfy the same conservative busybodies who bitched about Bono's offhand remark in the first place) overturned the decision of the enforcement staff. And it wasn't fucking around. It didn't just overturn that isolated decision. It junked nearly 30 years of precedent and came up with brand new policy. Henceforth, it declared, any use of the words "fuck" or "shit" would be treated as indecent. And fined. Heavily.

To which, the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit last week said -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- "WTF?"

Struggling to defend an indefensible shift in policy, the FCC made a series of arguments, all of which the Court declared -- paraphrasing again -- bullshit. I found the full discussion fascinating. Then again, I like to curl up with a good decision on the law of reinsurance, so maybe I'm not the best judge of what makes interesting reading. A portion of the opinion, though, must be universally accepted as truly fucking awesome.

The FCC insisted its new policy was absolutely necessary because it is "difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish whether a word is being used as an expletive or as a literal description of sexual or excretory functions." The Second Circuit called that a dumbass argument -- more or less -- explaining to the apparently very sheltered members of the FCC board that these words, "as the general public well knows, are often used in everyday conversation without any 'sexual or excretory' meaning." To prove its point -- and this is the awesome part -- the Court had to look no further than the occupants of the White House. As you may recall, in a telling example of his grasp of the intricacies of foreign policy, Bush was caught on tape explaining to Tony Blair that the solution to the problem in Lebanon was to “get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.” Even more famously, Vice President Dick (how's that for indecency?) Cheney adroitly and persuasively responded to an argument by telling a United States Senator to "go fuck yourself."

I think the Second Circuit's reasoning went something like this: If a barely functional idiot and a soulless android can tell the difference between a fleeting expletive used for emphasis and a graphic depiction of fornication or defecation, then so can the rest of the country.

Again with the paraphrasing.

Whatever the Court's precise reasoning, it's timing couldn't have been better. The decision was issued early in the week. So on Thursday, if the universe were just, we could well have heard this on a 24-hour news station:

"Welcome back to CNNBC Fair and Balanced News. As we were reporting before the break, recent developments in Iraq .... Wait, interrupting here for Breaking News. We are being told that hotel heiress Paris -- Oh you have got to be fucking kidding me! This shit isn't news!"