I think of myself as a healthy person, but airborne contagion doesn’t care what I think, and it doesn’t care if I go to fitness class or run marathons. It’s an equal opportunity disrupter. A neurologist once told me that some people are more vulnerable to diseases of the central nervous system than others. He thought I was one of them because in my time on the planet I have uploaded viral meningitis, polymyalgia rheumatica, transient global amnesia, two episodes of myasthenia gravis and what a pediatrician diagnosed as a mild case of polio. I’m lucky that they’re all in the rear-view mirror now.
Archive for Film/Television – Page 5
It was a different time and a different contagion, but the set up was eerily similar. A mysterious microbe, the Andromeda Strain, was loose and threatening life on the planet. It first appeared in Arizona where it wiped out most of the population but left two survivors – a dyspeptic old man and a bawling infant.
Back to the future… in 2020 we see a dyspeptic old man and bawling infant rolled into one golden combover and the arrival of a new contagion. Will Donald J. Trump with both ends of the Andromeda spectrum covered help us survive the coronavirus?
I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the spring and summer of 2012. M and I were living and working in Saigon, far away from the bickering and embarrassment of the Sarah Palin/Tina Fey show. Obama looked like a shoo-in, though it was likely his second term would be handcuffed by Mitch McConnell and a Republican Senate. The campaign was in full swing, but we were on the sidelines an ocean away. If we wanted to know what was happening, we bought the International Edition of the New York Times. But even that was rare.
It’s easy in the later stages of life to look back at memorable events, performances, and personalities encountered on our journey and lament the loss of those who still seem very much alive because of the way they and their art affected us.
Last week M and I spent an evening with Sam Shepard at the Seattle Rep and he was very much alive during a performance of True West, his rollicking roller coaster ride of a play where the audience is pulled into the action as two very different brothers trash each other and their mother’s home on the stage in front of them.
The foundation of the American system of criminal justice is the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial and the best defense available… but justice is not always blind. Race, wealth, age, prior history, and the integrity of the lawyers can all skew those principles and affect the outcome.
Standard 4-1.2 of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Standards for the Defense Function, paragraph (b) states:
Defense counsel have the difficult task of serving both as officers of the court and as loyal and zealous advocates for their clients. The primary duties that defense counsel owe to their clients, to the administration of justice, and as officers of the court, are to serve as their clients’ counselor and advocate with courage and devotion; to ensure that constitutional and other legal rights of their clients are protected; and to render effective, high-quality legal representation with integrity.
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