Chapter 33: Monday, Dec. 18

I'm not sure why I bothered to go, but I found it fascinating once I got there. Standing on the stage in Holmes Hall, Mr. Dearth started out saying that he was resigning his position as the Leona Von Beaut Professor of Litigation Development and Situational Ethics. He tore up his law degrees and littered the podium with the pieces.

"The law," he said, in that crabbed hauteur of his, "to paraphrase Karl Kraus on another matter, is the disease of which it purports to be the cure. Look around you. Read the papers. Look in the Yellow Pages. Why so many lawyers? Why this ubiquity in every aspect of our lives? Because the more lawyers you have, ladies and gentlemen, the more you need. It's the natural progression of self-catalyzing growth battening on a host organism.

"Trust me, I know. Lawyers are the parasitical class par excellence. They contribute nothing to society, to the economy, to culture, except as the source of bad jokes about themselves. They are the real mafia. They operate a system of extortion imbedded so deeply in our culture that we now fail to realize what it is. We no longer have justice, only lawyers.

"After much thought, I have concluded that if our medical services were run like our legal system, you would get shunted from one useless procedure to another. Seeing a doctor would mean both a lingering death and bankruptcy. Doctors would keep their patients sick and wretched as long as they could, extorting money from them at every step of the way, taking them for everything they could before letting them die a miserable death.

"I'm serious about this. If car mechanics acted like lawyers, we would all be driving around on three wheels with no brakes spewing oil all over the road.

"If restaurateurs acted like lawyers, you would get nothing for days but putrid slops; you would leave the table starving; and you would have to pay an enormous bill. Or get in trouble with the law.

"It's no joke that when a lawyer takes Viagra, his whole body gets larger."

Judges, he said, are no better. They are merely lawyers in long robes who insist on being called "your honor" because honor is precisely the quality most of them lack.

He went on in that vein for some time. He suggested that there be a "million-lawyer" march on Washington culminating in a public apology to the nation. He stopped short of advocating that lawyers be rounded up and shot. But he did say a significant percentage of the nation's lawyers should be encouraged to commit suicide either singly or in groups. To that end, he urged that hot lines be set up to assist in counseling and giving practical advice.

He said a law degree should disqualify anyone from holding any public office above that of volunteer firefighter. He urged that all but a handful of law schools be converted into homeless shelters, and that the faculty be retrained to work as urban gardeners or something as equally useful to society.

Lawyers, finally, as individuals and as a group should be socially shunned by all decent people. Any young people indicating an interest in the law as a profession should be sent immediately to one of those remedial boot camps.

What surprised me in talking to my friends at the dance was the extent to which decent, thoughtful people agreed with him. About time someone spoke up, was the most common observation. But the Reverend Lopes, resplendent in tux with Geneva tabs, did opine that decriminalizing the killing of lawyers was going too far.

Korky, I was glad to see, met a young friend and left the party early. I lingered and drank too much, turning wine into water at a miraculous rate. Rather than drive, I left the car in the parking lot, declined several offers of a ride, and walked home under a cold clear night, looking up at the heavens, a speck on a speck, thinking about Elsbeth.

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