Thought experiment.   Imagine:

Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor.  Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control.   Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.

Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time.    Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that.   Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths.   It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age.  Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.

Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning.  Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance.   He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room.  He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.  

Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions.  The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain.  He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy. 

Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision.  The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War.   Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him.  “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it.  It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain.  It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it.  There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable.  The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”

Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott.  As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations.  But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.

Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here).  The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple.  In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man.  This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro.  From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic.  Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.

Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.

Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic;  a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions.   Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate.  Your father challenges you to justify your opinion.  As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion.  Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.  

In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps.   If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.  

Afterwards, you will take the high road.  You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument.   You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question.   Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question.  Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait.  You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.   I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later..

And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit.  And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.

Thanks.  Very interesting.  I’ll think about your take on all this.  

Note:  He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.

I apologize  that our talk  got so contentious.  

Elegant, the way the passive voice was used.  This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ.  “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice.  Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’.  Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife.  You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.

You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here,  More later.

This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”.  It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party:  try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply.  What do you want from me?  This is clearly your problem, not mine.  

The bit about  I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction.   “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word.  “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.  

But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’   An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection.  “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”

And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”

Wink!