The loss of art in odd places

Basketball seasons are ending with the final championship series. When I was young, back in the late sixties and early seventies, I loved pro basketball. My first favorite team, the Boston Celtics, ended their championship run from the fifties on into the late sixties when I was on the verge of becoming a teenager. Their teams included Cousey and Sharman and Russell and K C.Jones and Don Nelson. Their series with the Lakers were like the battles of the Titans in Greek mythology. The names on those teams were filled with Hall of Famers. At the end of the sixties they were replaced by the Knicks of Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Dave Debuscherre, and Willis Reed. I loved the cool larceny of Walt Frazier. I loved the discipline of Bradley and Debuscherre. I loved the heart of Willis Reed.

The Hawks drafted Pete Maravich when I was a young teenager, a truly amazing basketball talent. Someone whose abilities were clearly a mix of genetics, diligent practice and his love for the game which took on a sort of religous frenzy. I remember watching him play for LSU on the SEC game of the week on Saturday afternoons, scoring at will from anywhere, making passed which seemed to be blindly tied to the players he passed to, his handling the ball like it was a part of his person, willing LSU to victories. His only real weakness was that he was virtually alone. When LSU played against teams with a balance of talent, like Kentucky or Tennessee or Georgia Tech, they fell short.

Unfortunately, his talent didn't translate all the time to the pro game. He was amazing quite often for the Hawks or the Jazz or even the Celtics,late in his career, but not enough to move those teams into the upper echelons of talent.

Living in the Atlanta area during the late sixties through the seventies, the Hawks were a good team, but always lacking something that could push them past the championship teams like the Celtics, Lakers, Knicks, Bucks and even the old Bullets. There were moments when it looked like the Hawks were going to push on to championship teams they had in the late fifties and early sixties, when they were in St. Louis. I remember when they drafted Tom Payne, a seven foot center from Kentucky, the first great black player to go to Kentucky. But he couldn't handle the pressure and ended up in jail for a rape charge in Fulton County. Then the Hawks drafted Julius Erving, who just happened to have been drafted by the New York Nets of the ABA. When the Nets joined the NBA, Erving was given to the Nets and the Hawks lost a Hall of Famer. There were other examples.

Nobody remembers the Hawks from back in those days. No one remembers Lou Hudson and Bill Bridges and Jo Caldwell. They were so close. No one remembers the Hawk teams with John Drew and Tree Rollins and Armand Hill. I remember one year when the Hawks took the Baltimore Bullets to seven games in the semi-finals and could have, should have won. Baltimore went on to win it all instead. Then there were the teams with Dominique Wilkins and Kevin Willis, who came close to beating the Celtics of Larry Byrd and Kevin McHale in the early eighties. As much as I loved the Celtics, I would have loved to have seen the Hawks in the championship series.

Now I must say I enjoyed the Celtics of the Dave Cowens era. The big red head from Kentucky was one of my favorites,even though he jumped ship to play college ball at Florida State. I guess he did have a coach from Kentucky there. I remember when Cowens and Alvin Adams of the Phoenix Suns squared off in the championship series. Their battles were titanic. Maybe not in the sense of Russell and Chamberlain or Chamberlain and Jabbar. But they were working hard and playing tough against each other and doing things that other centers didn't do.

But what really killed it for me were the teams that came later. I hated the Pistons with Lambeer, the Sixers with Barkley and Malone. Those teams were allowed to beat on the opposition unmercilessly. It seemed like the referees were taught to let them play to the point where there didn't seem to be a limit to the physicality. And then the average teams lost the ability to shoot jump shots. Their statistics were terrible. It just became an effort to get the ball the nearest guy above the rim, who would slam it home, without finesse or style.

I know that basketball is difficult to master. The level of dexterity required to be good is unbelievably high. At its best, basketball becomes an art like ballet or dance. The players move around in concert, working against space, movement and gravity. The movement is not orchestrated like dance,but it becomes sort of freelance version, in which the grace is held in time and becomes a crack in time and space where the body becomes an art work and the ball and the basket become tied together as if they were magically connected.

The last play that I can remember having that feel about was the move Michael Jordan made against Craig Ehlo at the end of the championship game back in the 90's. As he moved across and away from the basketball, Jordan drove his body up into the air and stopped, releasing the ball towards the basket, and time was halted as the ball moved in its trajectory toward the basket, Ehlo's body moving away from the basket as he attempted futiley to block or deflect the ball's path. But Jordan stood frozen in air, as if his body would not dare to distract the ball from its mission to find the orange circle. And finally, the ball entering the basket, without touching the rim, releasing Jordan from his frozen state to allow him to celebrate the moment.

Its what I enjoy about it. But the way they are allowed to play these days drives me crazy. No art, no magic. No rules. Thank God for March Madness.

Morning

In the morning the earliest light arrives from nowhere.
It is only later that the source of that light
Arrives in the eastern sky;
The suggestion of life
Is a soft roar in the distance,
Hinting of trucks travelling down highways
And packed suv's heading toward Florida.
The canvas is washed in black,
Defining the colors of morning with the shadow of night.
We are too early for the birds yet,
As Tex and I step carefully
Across the dewy lawn for his morning ritual.
The house is asleep, but I am here,
Marking time and taking note of the sudden appearance of others.

My position as a barometer

I was taken by the numbers of foreclosures I had to cry out yesterday. It seems as if the number of foreclosures that I have to perform in any month serves as a barometer of how bad the economy is doing at that time. In addition, when real estate closings are coming hot and heavy it seems as if that serves as an indication that the economy is going well. Cindy said that my practice seems to serve as a barometer for the economy. I suppose there is some truth to that.

Since I have been practicing law, I have noticed that a lot of what I do gives me an indication of how the economy is going. They say that an attorney's practice is recession proof, in that there is work to do no matter how good or bad the economy is going. I can say that there is a superficial truth to that; however, the truth is that we suffer just like everybody else when the times are hard. I guess the difference is that no one has sympathy for us when we suffer.

Our position in the community is such that everyone tries to avoid having to deal with us, wants to pay us as little as possible, tries to get as much free legal advice as possible, and would just prefer that we were an unnecessary part of the community. It seems like banks want to eliminate a large portion of what we do as concerns banking and real estate practice. Once upon a time, anytime someone wanted to get a loan from the bank in which the bank was taking title to real estate as collateral, the bank would hire a local attorney to search title and conduct the closing. Now the banks have taken that away from the attorneys with the exception of when there is a purchase involved in the process. Most banks would prefer to eliminate the attorneys from the process altogether.

I don't really understand this. Several years ago, the Georgia Supreme Court issued a ruling in which they stated that anytime a deed goes of record, whether it is a warranty deed or security deed, an attorney should be involved for the benefit of the parties. This ruling might as well have been an attempt to stop the wind, because most banks seem to be conducting their own closings when there is no sale involved. At one time, I provided a copy of the Court's ruling to a local bank and was met with utter silence. I wonder if the bank's attorneys even saw the ruling.

So the matters for which people come to see us continually get smaller and smaller. Then on top of that the big firms seem to grasp for a larger share of the pie. At one time law firms in Atlanta didn't venture too far outside the perimeter of Atlanta to represent clients or perform closings. Now they are a big presence everywhere in the state.

The ultimate question is whether or not people in towns like Griffin or otherwise are served better by having resort to the big law firms in Atlanta. The truth of the matter is that someone outside the beltway gets service by paralegals and other paraprofessionals for the same amount of money they would have paid the lawyers in their home towns and then have to travel to offices in North Atlanta to get the job done.

This forces us outside the perimeter to work harder and be more convenient for the people we serve. So I travel to people's houses or communities and meet with them at inconvenient times and places and spend more money to get less.

When I first contemplated becoming an attorney, I wanted to be an attorney because it seemed that they merited respect in the community. But now we are perceived as shysters and charletons who prey on the unwary. Is it fun to be an attorney? Truthfully a lot of times it is. I do enjoy my colleagues; lawyers are usually the most interesting, collegial people I know. However, the day to day stresses of this profession can weigh you down. It often makes me wonder if I would have been better off doing something else. Cultural barometer notwithstanding.

Ethics in the community

In today's entry from The Writer's Almanac, the playwright David Hare is quoted in one of his plays as follows: "[In England,] people lead shallow lives because they don't believe in anything anymore. [In Israel,] in a single day I experience events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year."

Is the depth of our living brokered away by our failure to believe in things beyond ourselves and our desire to be entertained or enriched? The surviving part of Rene Descartes' writing is "I think, therefore I am." However, the end of Descartes' equation was his proof that God exists. How many of us end our search for understanding with the simple acknowledgement that we exist and go no further?

I read a piece that my wife Cindy had saved for me out of Business Week magazine. The piece was a letter to the editor from a Journalism Professor at Washington and Lee University. The piece was written in response to an article about a cheating scandal in the business school at Duke University. The article apparently had attempted to justify or explain the cheating scandal by claiming that today's business students are taught to work with each other, even to the extent of cheating off of each other on tests, through the lessons they are taught in class about how business works in the real world. The letter to the editor mirrored the honor code at W&L and stated that lying to the professor by stating that no cheating was done in taking the tests, when, in fact, there was cheating taking place, was simply that: lying and cheating. No amount of justification or rationalization would change that.

In ethics, sometimes the simple response is the correct response. I am proud of the fact that a professor from my alma mater would write such a response. I wish the simple understanding of what is fair and equitable and reasonable was more universally understood.

Ethics requires us to look beyond ourselves to see our connections with others. Ethics is a system of rules designed to inform our actions. The basis for ethics lies in our connections to others. If we lived in this world all alone, there would be no need for ethics, because we would only be required to act for our own benefit. Since we live in a world in which we have to interact with others, the connection with others requires us to act towards each other in a certain way, toward a more communal benefit. The alternative is anarchy.

In a community, such as a university, we are drawn to act in concert with each other to enable each member of the community to strive to his or her best ability. In order to ensure that each member of the community is on an equal footing, each member must act in a manner which is fair and equitable as concerns the other members of the community.

At Washington and Lee, Robert E. Lee, as President, instituted the Honor Code, which required that each student act as a gentleman. This code, enacted when all the students were men, required a socially accepted standard of conduct which was considered "gentlemanly." It is my understanding that President Lee defined this standard of conduct as withholding any advantage one might have over others. This standard was created at a time when the social strata of the United States were more clearly defined than in modern times. Lee came from an upper class family in Virginia which had many cultural and social advantages over other less privleged citizens of Virginia. Lee recognized these differences and defined a gentleman as one who does not take use of those advantages to the detriment of his social inferiors.

Beyond the socially restricted laboratory of planter culture Virginia, we must broaden this concept to require that when one acts inside community one should not make use of advantages we might have to better ourselves over others. Now this doesn't mean that we don't take advantage of the talents and birth advantages we are given. Rather it means that we acknowledge our place in the community and treat the other members of the community fairly and equitably. This requires us to refrain from behavior which would unfairly gain us an advantage over our fellow citizens. In the university context this means we don't lie, cheat or steal. Expanding this concept outside the university means that we, as members of society, don't lie, cheat or steal from our fellow citizens.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this concept of community ethics involves the concept of "fairness" and "equity." In determining the requirements of ethics, we ultimately have to decide what actions are fair and equitable and which are not. In the community in which we live are found people with differing talents and levels of
wealth and position, based on what is given to them at birth or through accomplishment. There is little we can do to make that inequity of natural or family gift equal. It is questionable as to whether anything should be done to make that playing field equal. However, as concerns the way in which the members of the community interact, there is a lot that should be done in the way of ethics.

We acknowledge that members of the community are born with differing talents and gifts. Perhaps Marxists would argue that everyone should be treated equally and talent and social strata should not enter into the equation. However, Marxism is not strictly an ethical system. It doesn't really inform individual action, rather it works within the culture or community as a whole.

Ethics may be potentially applied to a culture or community as a whole; however, the basic application of an ethical system devolves down to the individual. In a libertarian community where each individual in the community acts as a free agent within the context of the community, the ethical system is the main determiner of conduct other than bare self-interest.

Some might argue that self-interest is the only determiner of conduct in society. However, the history of culture does not bear this out. In fact, the history of culture shows that whenever people are drawn into community, they create codes of conduct, to some degree, which proscribe conduct outside what is considered "legal". At its bare essence, what is considered "legal" is considered the "moral" thing to do, as well. In fact, it is arguable that conduct which is legal is based on conduct which is considered ethical.

For instance, most early codes of conduct proscribe murder and theft. Whether you call this unethical or illegal, the proscription is the same. From the basic proscriptions of conduct fall any number of exceptions. In the case of murder, the first exception probably involves a killing outside of the community. The next exception might involve a killing which the culture considers excusable for some reason. Different factual situations create any number of value judgments on the part of the society as to whether or not the killing should be proscribed or allowed, given the facts involved in the situation. There may be different determinations depending on the findings of the particular society involved in the action. In this way, the concept of ethics may have some fluidity depending on the society involved in the process.

The trouble really arises when we try to extrapolate this to something universal. The first problem arises in trying to determine the source of ethics. A Christian or Jew might argue that the source of our ethics comes from the Hebrew God and the Bible. A Muslim might argue that the source of our ethics comes from Allah and the Koran. A Buddhist or Hindu or other believer in a Universal God would point to their God or Gods and any holy script associated with God as the source of ethics. A secularist, no matter whether he is an Atheist, Agnostic or someone who simply tries to determine ethics outside the realm of theism has three choices: either ethics is universal or confined to a particular group or completely individual.

I acknowledge the problem created when we try to posit ethics on the backs of a theistic system. But I also see the problem created when we leave out a universal basis for our ethics. While theistic ethics is problematic for one who does not accept the theism upon which the ethics is based, it is equally true that an ethics created without resort to an outside source can become too fluid and subjective to be considered an universal system of ethics. Without the source the ethics becomes relativist and subjective.

We need a universal system of ethics to which we all must bow. Our interactions with others require us to submit to a code of conduct which informs our conduct toward others. In order to constitute a code which has universality and relevance, this code must derive from something or someone beyond ourselves.

I would submit that God is the only realistic source of such a system. My acknowledge that my understanding of this concept is based on faith and not on any scientifically demonstratable construct. However, my faith is such that I hope for an ultimate demonstration of such a construct in my experience. My further hope is for an ultimate demonstration of such construct as a universal experience. Until that time, faith and hope will stand as my basis for conduct.

Why people hate us

This morning I spent several hours in a courtroom in the Federal Courthouse (Richard Russell Building) trying to stop a railroad train. My clients were members of a class action suit involving claims against credit reporting companies who were alleged to have defrauded people concerning a credit score program. After the judge had gutted the case for the plaintiffs back in August of last year, the lawyers for the name plaintiffs and the defendants got together and worked a deal in which the defendants agreed to pay the plaintiff's lawyers and give the rest of the plaintiffs three months free credit reports from the company they had sued.

I tried to get the judge to understand how inequitable it was to settle the case and give the plaintiff's attorneys the big payoff. They tried to justify their fees ($4.1 million) by saying how much they had done for the plaintiffs. Even the judge got into it.

I hate the fact that people think of lawyers as shysters and give us so much grief for doing what we do. This whole scenario is just more fuel for the fire. Can't they see that?

Sunday, June 3

Today was a day which saw the end of a week in which we saw the end of a long life and the beginning of a new marriage and then dribbled onto a breezy Summer afternoon in downtown Atlanta in which we looked at art and crafts and listened to a band from Louisiana and wound up late at the grocery store to pick up a few things to help get us through the week.

So I start a new week. I think Sunday is supposed to be the first day of the week. So if that is so, then it began with singing in the choir, listening to George Mixon preach in church and going up to Virginia-Highlands with Cindy to look at art and crafts and listen to Mark Brussard in concert. It was fun, but I am tired and need to go to bed.

George was preaching about rest and a return as found in the person of God. It reminded me of something I read in a book. It was talking about the difficulty Christians have with the concept of forgiveness and salvation. We acknowledge it from a rational standpoint, but can't really come to terms with the idea deep down. We still want to do something to earn our salvation.

Its actually a failure of faith. Our sinfulness doesn't allow us to completely acknowledge that Jesus has paid for our sinfulness with his sacrifice. Even when we make a faith statement, our faith falls short. It is a good thing that our salvation is in the hands of God and not in our own.

This is the problem. I continually take the wheel out of God's hands. I don't feel comfortable releasing my problems to God. Sure, I acknowledge the concept and acknowledge that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is a complete expiation of my sins. But my sinful nature doesn't allow me to accept the concept in my heart. Is my sinful nature blocking the work of the Holy Spirit in my heart? Is my desire to do it myself blocking my salvation ultimately? I think not, but it is still a problem. It creates the doubt which makes my life tenuous in relation to the theology of salvation.

The most tangible way in which this works to block my desire involves stewardship. It is an act of faith to tithe. It acknowledges the source of our gifts and it shows to us that God will provide. But I find it so difficult to tithe. I want to control the means of production. I don't want to place it in God's hands. This is a real quandry. I wish I had a solution which I could live with. Instead I struggle with this concept.

This is a failure of faith. It shows my inability to trust God. Even my prayer life shows a failure of faith. When something happens that I want to resolve or go away, I go to God over and over and over. I lisp my prayers continuously. But faith tells me that God knows my problems before I see them and doesn't need repetitious prayers, asking for the same things over and over again. The trust and the hope and faith which march arm in arm are found lacking.

God gave me a brisk breeze at my back today. Hopefully, he will continue at my back tomorrow. I pray so.

Dr. Skinner at the end

We sat in the quiet and glanced at the family
In brown tones and hushed colors, and thought
And considered and weighed the evidence
And found no room for tears in this room
For he was the gatekeeper for generations
Bringing forth new life into the community
To mewl and whimper and crawl and run
And find the joy of sunshine in Summer;
But also bringing forth an unyielding sadness
When a newborn child didn't thrive
And the parents were left to mourn quietly alone
In the darkness of emotion's Winter
While the family stood outside, mutely pondering
And questioning the ultimate love of their God
Who promised them new life, but didn't deliver this time.
And so he measured the full breadth of life
From birthplace to gravesite, until even he
Found his place at that ultimate leap
And crossed over through that unknown portal
That mutely awaits us all,
A gentle soul who surely saw better than we,
And now does completely.