Excuse Me While I Rant

I recently encountered a commenter who, seeing a reference to a child-support-related lawsuit in an earlier post and knowing nothing whatever about me or any of the circumstances or even whether the charge is true, accused me of child abandonment. I don’t remember the last time I honestly wondered whether you really could slice someone from crotch to sternum, but if that person had been present I’d have considered conducting the experiment. That this person claims to be an attorney does nothing to raise my estimation of his or her worth.

No, I’m not going to go into the circumstances. It’s long ago and far away, none of your business, and anyway far too long a story for this sort of format. Let it suffice for me to say that any residual guilt I feel over the whole thing is – at most – sharply attenuated. Oh … Also that my only child has been grown and gone for years, and that before moving out on her own she lived with me, not with her mother. That’s all I have to say about it, and even that's too much.

That’s not all I have to say about attorneys, but I’ll keep it short. The principal skill of a lawyer, it seems to me, is the ability to weave simple falsehoods out of complex truths. It doesn’t matter – to many lawyers it literally doesn’t matter – which side of an argument he’s on. Truth and justice are meaningless concepts. The only thing that matters is whether you can twist the law, or failing that whether you can twist mere rhetoric, to advance the interests of the side you represent.

I don’t care that sometimes this is used to further the interests of the innocent. The concept and practice of it is simply contemptible. As far as I’ve ever been able to determine from my reading of such things, it always has been.

What sort of person seeks such a life? What sort of person would make such an accusation of a stranger, just for the sake of a little Internet snark? It is appalling.