Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Wednesday July 15, 2009

Making life less painful

By Jim Taylor

Chronic victim
        One young man elected to stand trial immediately, rather than wait for a later date. He chose to defend himself. The judge carefully explained the procedures. Aside from two minutes while he took the stand himself, mostly to complain that he had been unfairly treated, he spent the trial slouched in his chair, looking for all the world like Zonker in the Doonesbury cartoon strip.
        The judge asked if he was ready for sentencing.
        “It don’t matter,” the man mumbled without rising. “I don’t got no money to pay no fine anyways, and I don’t got no job.”
        “How long would you need to raise the money?” the judge asked. “Six months? Eight months? I can specify whatever would work for you.”
        The defendant just shrugged.
        It must be depressing to have a constant parade of mildly paranoid, incompetent, or utterly bewildered people passing through a court.

Adversarial outcomes
        A classmate of mine went into family law, fairly late in life. He told me over dinner that all family court lawyers watch for the “four R’s — Revenge, Recrimination, Retribution, and Retaliation.
        “The four R’s predominate in many separations and divorces,” my friend said, “despite the fact that, these days, they are not legally pertinent except where they may damage the children.”
        Even in relatively amicable negotiated separations, the four R’s almost always show up eventually. Some lawyers literally tick them off as they occur.
        As one who lives with words, I wondered why some other “R” words don’t occur – words like Remorse, Reconciliation, and Renewal. I didn’t risk Resurrection.
        “Not likely,” said my friend. “By the time you get to court, you’re into an adversarial system. For one party to win, the other has to lose.”
        I’d go further – in any adversarial system, I suspect both parties lose. In a contested divorce, everyone loses something — especially the children. No one wins a war; one side simply loses less than the other side.
        Nevertheless, I was impressed at how much the professional members of that court tried to minimize the limitations of an adversarial system and make it more humane for all concerned.
        Oh, by the way – the friend I was supporting? The prosecutor did some gentle plea bargaining with the plaintiff and defendant. No one won. But no one lost a lot, either.
        Perhaps that’s the best one can hope for.
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Your Turn



I think I got only one letter about last week’s column, on my musings about highway safety and common sense (but since I was away from my home base, other letters may well have gotten lost).

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About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

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