The (Sometimes) Thin Line Between Advice and the Slammer

By Jamie Freveletti

While working as a lawyer I handled some white collar criminal cases. My law firm specialized in food, drug, and medical device issues, and many of the cases involved pharmaceuticals. For my part, most of the so called “criminals” were just regular people involved in regular jobs that during a particularly stressful time stepped over the line from good judgment to bad.

Sometimes really bad.

Remember that scene in “The Firm” where an attorney dies in a boating “accident” and Tom Cruise as Mitch goes to the house of an older associate to express his condolences? The man is sitting in his garden, unmoving, while the lawn sprinkler is systematically spraying his pant leg on each pass. I loved that scene, because it’s the first time that Mitch gets a sense that something is not quite right in his new firm. It’s understated; quiet, but you see the other lawyer’s numb despair and it leaves you worried for Mitch and wondering what’s actually going on in this firm.

There’s a whole lot that Grisham did right in that story. The other young lawyer characters were friendly, filled with camaraderie, and yet also trapped. You liked them, but knew they weren’t going to help Mitch out of his troubles. Grisham could have made them all unrelentingly evil, but in my opinion that wouldn’t have worked as well. It matched the world of white collar crime, where the criminals are essentially con men and women in suits and they can move among society a lot easier than a gang member in droopy pants. (An FBI agent once told me that in general white collar criminals cave under pressure from his office remarkably fast, but that's a blog post for another day).

I also liked that some of the older partners were evil but showed glimpses of grim determination tinged with regret. Several of the actors, especially Hal Holbrook as the white haired managing partner, were pitch perfect. They expressed that “I regret to inform you that I’m going to kill you” attitude that is the hallmark of a wonderful, menacing performance.

I’m fascinated by the group mentality that convinces smart, moral people to do stupid, immoral things. The lawyer who writes the memo suggesting ways to avoid revealing the defect in a car (Toyota), or the one who gives a legal opinion that allows for multiple layers of corporations be used to shuttle money around within an entity to give the appearance of productivity (Enron). Were you able to pull these people out of their suits, sit them down at their kitchen table and ask them to do the same, many would squirm and hedge, and some would flatly refuse. Yet, take them off to the job and have a fee paying client demand the same thing, and these “smart” people apply their not insignificant intelligence to do just that. Often it involves a blind adherence to the corporation that baffles me, but that I saw over and over in my years as a litigator. Grisham must have too, because he wrote it beautifully.

I use the blind adherence principle in my own writing. It requires painstaking set-up, because the reader needs to see the trajectory of the white collar criminal as he takes each step down the path toward that line between legal and illegal, but the payoff for a crime writer is great. It’s a bit of reality that lends a feeling of truth and makes for a great read.

"I'm so glad I'm a Beta"

Brave New World, where all the babies come from test tubes, and the oxygen to their embryonic brains is carefully calibrated so that the majority will be happy doing the service jobs that make life easy for the few Alphas, who get all the brains and all the perks. The children in their color-coded uniforms say in unison, "I'm so happy I'm a Beta," or Delta, or Epsilon.

We can 't do that here: that would be genetic engineering, which is immoral, unchristian. We have to create our Deltas and Epsilons the old-fashioned way, by depriving them of words and thought. Welcome to No-Child-Left-Behind World.

I had a long and troubling e-mail from Pat Robinson, who has taught high school English for 15 years in Meeker, Colorado. Her job has been eliminated because she taught English by having her students read novels. No longer. Meeker wants its little Deltas and Epsilons to be happy members of the service world--they'll fight our wars, flip our burgers, make our beds. We can't have them reading, reflecting, thinking about the world they're growing up in. No English class in Meeker can include literature: that distracts the students from test-taking.

Pat says: This "is the Enron of education where we hiding the lack of knowledge behind good test scores. It is the easy fix of diet pills that loosing weight is good whatever the cost to the body. It is a disaster. The private schools will flourish and people with money will see that their children get a good education. I started in inner city San Diego and moved to rural Colorado with one driving force: to teach students (who may not have the wealthy background) to be great people and real students. I have been successful and have many awards but now test scores are all that count."

She adds that there are eight topics English teachers will be allowed to cover, and that reading will be limited to one-or two-page extracts which students read over and over--thus guaranteeing that they will not be interested in the written word. But they don't need the written word to go to Iraq, or McDonalds: they can be happy Deltas with their minimum wage jobs and no health insurance.

You and I don't need soldiers, we need readers. What can we do as writers, as important leaders in the culture of this world, to save kids in Meeker and elsewhere.

by Sara Paretsky

P.S. If you want to read Pat's full letter, e-mail me and I will forward it to you.