"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."
-Edgar Allan Poe
What to discuss this gray, cool morning?
Well, there's always the war, isn't there? Putin aims to leverage the only thing he has left, Europe's extreme addiction to Russian oil, to bring his western neighbors to heel. If they want to keep buying, next week they'll need to do so in worthless rubles, forcing a currency exchange that he hopes will revive the cash flow that last year accounted for forty percent of Russia's GDP.
Will it work? I doubt it. Putin's managed to scare the bejeezus out of the Europeans, who'd fallen into mass complacency as they told themselves they were all too civilized to find themselves in 1914 or 1939 all over again. But here we are. The direct knowledge that their fuel purchases are paying for the murder of their neighbors, and putting their own populations at risk, seems to have jarred them back to cold, Hobbesian reality. But will it last?
A former CIA agent writes in the WSJ this morning that the Ukrainian debacle will likely lead to a surge in helpful new spies over there, if past is experience is instructive.
He observes that espionage in the Soviet era likely averted an invasion of Poland by a desperate, sclerotic Soviet Union in 1980. Putin's level of desperation likely grows by the day, knowing that the barbarous history of his country suggests defeat means he'll probably reach the end of his mortal coil with a bullet and a lime pit to destroy the evidence. We are going to need all the help we can get to avoid a decision by Putin to take us with him.
Meanwhile back home, a cabal of Ivy League educated populist Republicans have wrapped up slandering an extremely well-qualified nominee for the Supreme Court, accusing her of complicity in pedophilia that is red meat for their addled, QAnon constituents. Were you aware that three out of ten Republicans believe the Dems are running a secret child sex trafficking ring? Hard to have a functioning democracy when so many among us have gone completely mad.
In happier news a little closer to home, Chris and his sidekick Ashley managed to paint the master bedroom in one day flat, shocking P and me with their speed.
It's the same color Peg and Lori picked for the condo, so we'll have the same calming blue-green in both venues. Now for Steve to replace the ugly ceiling fan with the groovy chandelier sitting down in the living room right now. Peg hates ceiling fans in bedrooms. Who knew? She's always something of a mystery.
The most interesting piece I encountered in my meander through the digital news was this article regarding the disconnect between speech and reality.
We lawyers have always recognized the importance of word choice to shape perceptions, which in turn shapes the factfinder's reality. I've observed before how my retelling of encounters with hostile fire during Desert Storm has rendered them unreal over time--I have the words, always more-or-less the same words, and now those are the sum of what happened, rather than the events themselves.
And, of course, selecting one descriptive over another is the essence of oral advocacy. Perhaps the most fatuous example I recall from my days litigating car wrecks early in my career was the battle over what to call the event when two automobiles ran into each other. I was in a deposition one day with a lawyer who'd always been a nice guy, but definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He tended to mask his incompetence with attendance at lots of trial lawyer seminars, where he'd come away with some bon mot that he'd bring home and try to apply in his practice.
On this particular occasion I was deposing his client regarding the circumstances of what we of the defense bar used to call a "MIST" case, for "minimum impact-soft tissue". The fender-bender at the stop light that barely nicks the plaintiff's rear bumper, only to lead to apparently excruciating neck injuries invisible to the most sophisticated radiological apparatus.
So, I ask this middle-aged lady across the conference table from me, "Where were you going on the day of the accident?" It strikes me as a fairly anodyne question.
"Crash! It's called a 'crash'!" her earnest counselor insists.
I proceed, following up with a question regarding what she remembers about the accident.
"I object! It's a 'crash'! You have to call it a 'crash'!" Now he's starting to get a little flush, excited about the impact on a jury if he can cow the bored fighter pilot turned lawyer into using a word that connotes flying shards of broken glass and bodies strewn on the pavement. I have no doubt this new verbal tic was the result of something he learned at one of those trial lawyer seminars of which the plaintiff's bar is so fond.
"I will call it whatever the hell I want. Your standing objection to the word 'accident' is noted for the record."
That seemed to shut him up. It was asinine. I'm pretty sure that case settled later for something like $15,000.00, which is probably about $10,000.00 more than it was worth, dripping wet.
The article I linked above includes the most provocative thoughts regarding language I've encountered in some time, from a pair of physicists considering how language shapes reality:
Language makes truth-seeking hard. Physicists have argued for more than a century as to whether it is possible to know reality, or whether we only ever deal with our descriptions of it—where these descriptions are necessarily framed in words. The physicist David Deutsch said that languages are theories which are “invented and selected for their ability to solve problems.” As the physicist Sean Carroll says, our ways of talking are “an absolutely crucial part of how we apprehend reality.”
Language as a theory of reality. It follows that we as a species have concocted hundreds of theories of reality embodied in our words. The Greeks of the Roman era had what, four different words for "love"? The Christian God is the "logos", the "word".
And if words are the theoretical construct through which we cram our life experience, turning those felt moments into something different as we process them (shades of quantum physics and the behavior of observed photons here), how likely is it that we can understand and address behaviors like the recent invasion, assuming that our internal conversation, all in English (mine, anyway), provides the objective reality our counterparty is experiencing?
This has digressed into a conversation that sounds like something you'd have heard in a dorm room at Bard College after the third bong hit on a Thursday night. Time to head downstairs and see if it's the cats or the ghosts who are making all that racket, then clean myself up for a day light on appointments but abundant with time to think and plan for the dozens of cases that demand my attention these days. And to take a break over lunch, as I've done daily over the past week, to absorb a little of the Portuguese lingual theory of reality in preparation for a vacation there in a few weeks.
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