Palintology Part I: Curiosity Kills My Better Judgment

Installment 1 of a 3-part saga...

I am doing this so you won't have to.

This is the moral justification I arm myself with in anticipation of those moments when Sense and Reason demand to know why I am reading Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah Palin's ghost-written attempt to forge a conservative reply to Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Neuroscientists posit that watching too much television renders our synapses inert, transforming tender brains from complex decision engines into passive receptacles for anti-cerebral garbage. Before I considered launching into this inarguably stupid project, I figured that Palin's five-chapter quasi-memoir-of-sorts would have the same stunting impact on its readers. Its mind-altering effects could prove doubly damaging to an ex-Republican like myself, much like a single shot of whiskey would send a reformed alcoholic tumbling off the right side of the wagon.

Yet something latent in my soul demands that I determine what, exactly, makes this woman tick. After three years at a liberal law school, I grow tired of choir-preaching. I have read and heard plenty to reinforce my own "worldview", to borrow from the ex-Governor's evangelical parlance. I have purposefully avoided gazing through the looking glass at what remains of the Western conservative realm from whence I came. It is stunting my growth. It is time that I make an effort to try and comprehend the teabaggers and insurrectionists who constantly insist upon being physically present in our fair city whenever Michelle Bachmann calls upon them. Consider this an exercise in socio-political exposure therapy. I want to re-discover what, exactly, makes the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President tick, and, more to the point, what about her drove so many Americans who otherwise appear to be stable and balanced so bat-guano crazy. This is a journey into the whimsical world of Dittoheads and Beckophiles, of Birchers and birthers alike.

So, on behalf of my progressive readers, I embark on a missionary voyage into a savage heart of darkness that would have even given Marlow pause. And on behalf of my conservative readers, all of whom probably live nestled at the foot of the Sierra Nevada (and stopped reading two paragraphs ago), I lend you a moment of my consideration.

With some caveats.

First, I have not purchased (and will not purchase) this book. In fact, I haven't even flipped open a page or even perused the flyleaf yet. I won't buy it for two reasons. Reason Number One - I do not wish to contribute to what amounts to the Palin 2012 political action committee. Ms. Palin has deceived herself into believing that she is presidential material, and I firmly believe that any penny spent on this book could potentially be spent on a campaign ad demanding Obama's birth certificate. Reason Number Two - I do not wish to be subject to a Northwest D.C. "eye-shaming" by bookstore patrons who are decidedly to my left would rather buy ethanol directly from Hugo Chavez than be caught dead with Palin's book. Upon conducting a keyword search at a monitor somewhere near the Self-Help section at Borders, the computer cheerfully announced that it was likely in the store, but that I would have to "see an associate for assistance". A-ha. A witness protection program for conservatives. They are a persecuted minority in this neighborhood. I don't know how George Will survives here. Turns out, they took down the display and relegated the book to a small segment of the best-seller shelf.

Second, I am a bit weary that by reading Going Rogue, I am effectively legitimizing the growing apparatchik that follows in Ms. Palin's wake. Liberal readers, you may think that Sarah Palin is already among the large swath of those who are famous for no reason, and you would be partially right. This book review will only provide another (albeit small) platform for the woman who is credited for single-handedly defining democracy downward. Why more attention? I can also hear my conservative readers (Dad and maybe one or two others) scoffing at yet another attempt to persecute this poor woman.

I aim to do neither. The review will serve as neither a grandstand or a guillotine. I can't imagine making much of a dent in Palin's popularity one way or another, and, in either event, I will treat her fairly. In the spirit of full disclosure, I deeply dislike her. I think she is vapid, dense, and bad for America. She is also a human being, and while I giddily malign her inability to name a major newspaper, her faux populism, and her bridge to nowhere, I won't engage in the same personal potshots about her family life deployed by crass cultural snobs. I think it is disgusting, and a profound strategic mistake, to delight in Levi Johnston's accusations that Palin called her Down's Syndrome child a "retard". It is not necessary that we enlist his "help."

And now, I turn to acknowledge the Elephant in the room. I just can't ignore it anymore. Especially when it's wearing lipstick...

1-0

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following entry in The D.C. Diaries concerns real legal events. Although attorney-client privilege does not prohibit the revelation of public details concerning a client's case, I have opted to give my client a pseudonym and re-invent certain details about her life in order to protect her personal privacy.

My heart pounded in my chest as I scrolled down the page. Curse the Board of Law Examiners, I muttered internally. Why is this page so long? I imagined that the caffeine-addled patrons of Borders could hear both my internal dialogue and the rhythmic thumping that accompanied it. They paid no heed. I courageously pressed forward to find my seat number, among the last of 1,583. Finally, with a stutter-step of my breath, there it was. Bold and cold, set amongst dozens of others in a table invariably copied-and-pasted from a Word document:

"1433 - Pass"

No exhilaration. No celebration or triumph. Just a wave of calm relief. Oh, thank God, I whispered as I exhaled. I wrestled with the Maryland Bar Examination, and I prevailed. It was 4:32 in the afternoon on a Friday, and I promptly dialed ten digits on my cell phone.

"Hello?" my father replied on the end.

"I'm a lawyer."

I suppose now that I am. But believe it or not, passing the bar exam was not really a cause for celebration for me. More than anything, I'm just glad that I don't have to fight with that beast again. No, passing the bar is a means to an end. In a sense, it was a formalization of an end that was reached eight days earlier. "1433 - Pass" was nice to read, but the following words were even nicer to hear:

"...the respondent has met her burden of proof..."

My co-counsel Priscilla and I sat numbly in a small courtroom on the 13th floor of a mid-rise office building in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. The Immigration Judge reclined attentively as the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) read aloud a prepared statement. Behind us sat Adaline, a short 30-year-old African woman. As the DHS attorney moved through the elements of the case, Elizabeth, our supervising attorney, gently took Adaline by the hand and began interpreting in clean, unbroken French. I was too exhausted to feel anything, and I had actually braced myself for defeat. I turned to Priscilla and whispered what I never expected to say that afternoon:

"I think we just won."

Priscilla didn't respond. Instead, she stared through her glasses, likely in shock. It took her some time after that to form a complete sentence.

The DHS counsel continued: "Your Honor, upon seeing and hearing the respondent's testimony today, in light of the evidence on the record, including expert medical and psychiatric evaluations and the corroborating testimony of three sworn and notarized affidavits, the government concludes that the respondent has met her burden of proof that she has a well-founded fear of persecution upon return to Burundi, on account of her dissident political opinion, such that she is unable to return and avail herself of the protection of its laws."

The Judge turned and sternly looked at Priscilla and I, a wry smile creeping up the side of one lip.

"Mr. Daniel, do you object to the government's finding?"

I'm normally fairly quick on my feet when speaking publicly. It took several guffaws before I was finally able to blurt out, "Sure, Your Honor." Nice.

The Judge chuckled. " 'Sure', it is. Then I'll adopt the government's position as dispositive in this case. Asylum is granted."

I heard Adaline begin to weep deeply. I had seen and heard her cry before, mostly out of unfathomable sorrow as she recalled trauma from the darkest recesses of her memory. This cry was of a different genus and species. From a different place in her heart. I quickly scribbled on a note in French, tore it from my legal pad and passed it behind her.

"Bienvenue aux Etats-Unis," it read. "Welcome to the United States."

Adaline, a French-speaking native of Burundi and a victim of severe political persecution in the form of a machete, was my first client as a student attorney with the International Human Rights Law Clinic during my third year of law school at American University. Before Adaline arrived in the United States four years ago, she had endured beatings, imprisonment, and death threats in her native country simply for her dissent against government policy. Her original application for asylum was denied on "credibility" grounds by a faceless bureaucrat. She was placed in immigration removal proceedings. The stakes were nothing less than her right to live. Win, and she can stay in the United States indefinitely, apply for her green card, and perhaps, down the road, citizenship. Lose, and she is as Daniel cast back into the lion's den from whence she escaped.

We were originally slated to argue her asylum claim in October 2008. A procedural snafu resulted in the continuation of the case until October 2009, well after Priscilla and I were scheduled to graduate. We opted to continue with the case on a pro bono basis, as the Immigration Court does not require bar passage, only a J.D., to practice. Otherwise, Adaline would have a third set of brand-new student attorneys working her case in the span of little more than a year.

And now Adaline is free to live, work, and play for the rest of her life in the United States. Her children will soon be granted legal status in the U.S. under a grant of derivative asylum. That still hasn't set in yet. We saved her life. There is no rhetorical eloquence or poetic oration that can possibly describe what our victory means.

And so, in a little over two weeks, I will be sworn into the Maryland Bar at a ceremony of pomp and circumstance at the Court of Appeals in Annapolis. Soon after, I'll begin my practice, winning and losing cases of varying degrees of magnitude. But I'm sure that nothing in my career will equal our victory for Adaline last month.

So, as far as I'm concerned, I am now and will forever be 1-0.

Smartness, and Other Trivial Pursuits

Being unemployed clearly comes with a list of downsides.  Hovering at or near the top of that list is what materialists might call a lack of "cash flow".  I actually disagree with that.  There is plenty of money flowing through my life.  It is flowing in a unilateral direction away from my checking account.

But, hell, I'm an unbridled optimist.  I like to believe that all things happen for a reason, and that the closure of one door portends the opening of another.  So I've decided to brave my perfect storm of joblessness and impossible debt by utilizing my time in the wisest possible manner, to navigate the rudder of my ship of life in a new direction.  I have decided to renew a lifelong quest that long ago fell dormant under a pile of casebooks.

I will accumulate more useless knowledge than any other person on the planet.

This expedition was inspired by a book I picked up earlier this week at Borders, which sits amidst the six-figure retail icons mentioned in my last entry.  It's called The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.  The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a writer for Esquire magazine and later went on to publish the best-selling The Year of Living Biblically, in which he spends an entire year attempting to follow the Bible as literally as possible.  I'll read that volume later, as it is essential to my own quest.  In The Know-It-All, Jacobs sets out to accomplish the nerd's equivalent of scaling Mount Everest a hammer, nail, and dental floss: he intends to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover-to-cover.  Every word of every entry on every page of every gold-embossed leather volume, from a-ak to Zywiec.  It is the sort of epic adventure that can transform your everyday polite house nerd into a remarkably maladjusted pile of Social Anxiety Disorder.  And I'm jealous.

I'm jealous because I once believed, as did Jacobs, that I was the smartest human being alive.  I had proof, too.  Count the trophies.  Third-place in the Washoe County Spelling Bee in sixth-grade, runner-up in the Sierra Pacific MathCounts competition in eighth.  Never mind the fact both of these trophies indicated that there were at least three people in my age group in Northern Nevada who apparently knew more than I did.  Narcissus never saw anyone else hogging his reflection, and neither did I.

Like an academic Linus, I clung to my intellectual superiority as a security blanket.  It was my perverse and ill-advised way of clawing my way up the public school pecking order.  I didn't have much else.  Sure, there was my stint as the class clown in fifth-grade (Ms. Davis, for the fortieth time, I am sooooo sorry for running around the classroom with scissors).  Other than that, I was a slightly above-average athlete with below-average social skills.  Knowing shit was my investment in a brighter future, one in which I would arrive at my high school reunion in 2010 driving a BMW with a supermodel wife.  I am clearly behind schedule on this plan.

Admittedly, the whole "I know a whole lot of useless crap" motif didn't work well for me socially in Reno.  I don't think I scored any points with the Bully's waitress after a softball game in which I, under the moderate influence of Killian's, recited who won and lost every World Series from 1903 to the present.  But in D.C., this sort of aversion to social connection paradoxically works.  Washington is easily the most educated city in the United States; some might say that it is over-educated.  It is not difficult for me to imagine a scene at Sidwell Friends High School where the chess champion shoves the quarterback into a locker.  And in this up-is-down, black-is-white, right-is-left, nerds-are-in and jocks-are-out town, it's time for me to utilize my strengths to climb the antisocial ladder, a ladder climbed only through the accumulation of useless trivia (see any Irish pub in D.C. on a Wednesday or Thursday night).

It irks me to no end that this pyramid of geek-hood is dominated by those, like A.J. Jacobs, with an "Ivy League education."  Oh yeah?  Well watch out.  Because I have a degree from the Western Athletic Conference.

Unemployed in Greenland

For those of you who are somehow impressed by my life's accomplishments, I would like to invite you into my world at the moment.  As I write this sentence, it is 5:46 p.m. on a Tuesday in October.  Three years ago, I would have told you that, at this very moment, I would be wearing a well-tailored suit, ironed shirt and tie, and a newly polished pair of dress shoes, perhaps hunched over the latest issue of The Washington Post Express as I ride along the Metro on my way home after a hard day of work.

Close.  Very close.  I am planted firmly on my ass in the middle of a mattress mounted on a cheap IKEA bedframe, wearing a white tank top and a pair of blue pajama pants hunched over my Macbook while episodes of Lost: Season 1 play on a loop in the background.  Sexy, I know.  But sexy is a luxury I can't afford right now.

Which is ironic, considering where I live.  About a month ago, I moved into a new apartment in the swanky, upscale Friendship Heights neighborhood of Upper Northwest D.C.  For the uninitiated, Friendship Heights sports a Saks Fifth Avenue, a Williams-Sonoma, and a Neiman-Marcus.  Say no more.  I may be in Friendship Heights, but I am definitely not of it.  My humble abode sits atop a row of brick townhouses.  It's nice and quaint, but it doesn't have the turbo-charged luxuries of some of the other places around here.  For example: there is no natural sunlight in the living room.  Well, there is a skylight that illuminates about a third of the room, giving it the ambience of a solitary confinement cell in a 19th-century French penitentiary. 

This is not to say that I don't like the apartment.  I actually love it.  But it also highlights the fundamental problem with my life right now.  You see, a few days ago, I lost my job.  Which is actually impressive, because it implies that I had a job.  It was a temporary job with a residential real estate company involved in long and protracted litigation.  I signed on, ostensibly through January, as an independent contract attorney.  Sounds glamorous, I know.  Over the course of three weeks, I was sent thrice to Atlanta, Georgia and environs to review files.  Mountains and mountains of files.  The job specifically required a J.D., but I am inclined to believe that the necessary skill level was that of a lobotomized orangutang.  But I got to wore that suit I talked about, walk briskly through the airport glancing at my watch to convey busyness, stand in light at rental car counters, and basically feel more important.  Plus, I got paid.  Not much, but enough.  And that's all a guy can ask for right now.

Until it isn't.  I got laid off on Saturday, hours before a 25th birthday party.  Celebrate good times.  Turns out that my job isn't necessary anymore, so I got the proverbial pink slip.  So now, instead of playing moderately affluent adult with a shirt-and-tie, I am back to Square One, playing the moonlighting blogger with a degree, debt, and a dearth of time on my hands.  That is why I am at home on a Tuesday wearing a tank-top and PJ's while a block away The Real Housewives of Montgomery County spend their husbands' green at Bloomingdale's.

Such is life.  Unemployed in Greenland.

A person of a darker disposition might be deterred or daunted, or delve into the depths of deriving depressing drivel from D words like it were D-Day.  Dude.  I won't make you read a sentence like that ever again.  But I digress (*grimace*).  Things aren't so bad.  I don't have to deal with the exhausting burdens of business travel every week, and maybe I can spend a little more time on things I find enjoyable but haven't had the time to.

Like reading books.

Or watching Lost for the billionth time.

Or looking for another job (eh).

Or blogging.

Unemployed in Greenland.  Thumbs-a-twiddle.

Zen and the Art of Market Cycle Maintenance

I'd like to share with you all the two events that tie for the scariest moments of my life.  Conveniently for my word count, they were essentially the same event that happened twice.  They both happened on the beach.  That's awful.  Beaches shouldn't be the setting for bad things.  In theory, people shouldn't die at amusement parks, either.  But I guess reality doesn't respect the artificial barriers we like to erect to insulate ourselves from its nasty bite.  That's right - reality bites.  Ask Janeane Garofalo.

Anyway, to the setting: either Zihuatenejo, Mexico, in November 1987 (5 years old) or Ka'anapali, Hawai'i, in August 1989 (7 years old).  In both instances, I'm on a family vacation, minding my own business, playing with Micro Machines and/or G.I. Joes while building immaculate sub-prime sand castles, right on the shoreline where the water laps onto the beach.  You know, the spot where you can just stand and let the surf pound the coast and sink your feet deep into earth.  It's late in the afternoon as the sun prepares to set over the pristine waters of the Pacific.  If my vocabulary at the time had been enhanced, I would have thought the setting serene.  Given my youth, we'll go with "mega-fun".

As the sun begins to set, the waves begin to crash harder as the moon begins its shift.  Most other children at the beach must have had a stronger survival instinct; they cleared out like cockroaches from a blast radius.  Me?  Courageously stupid.  I decide that now is the time to hop into the water and go for a little swim.

Given that I am approximately one-fourth of the size of my 2009 self, the Sea sees what I am doing, thinks to itself, "WTF? It's never this easy!", and hones in on me as its next, easiest target.  As I big-arm my way through the water, confident in my Parks & Rec-developed swimming abilities, I fail to account for the Sea's secret weapon: Captain Undertow.  Unlike the chlorinated bodies of water I was used to, the Sea likes to throw curveballs at its visitors.  So it decides to grab me by the ankles like a rabid shih tzu on steroids and pummel me into the ocean floor.  After a few eternal seconds scraping the roof of my mouth on the sandy bottom, struggling against the tide in sheer penultimate terror, my subconscious overrules my logic and causes me to relax, and let the Sea do its worst.  Granted, in retrospect, this seems like a counter-intuitive strategy.  Then again, so is the idea that you should stand still when a T-Rex breathes down your neck.  Your gut instinct, in that unlikely instance, is to shed your internal organs and run like crazy in the opposite direction.  Fight or flight, our instincts tell us.  This is the logical way.

But I finally choose to relax, let go, and let the Sea have its way with me.  Within moments, the undertow sucks me underneath the waves and, like a knuckleballer in full windup, flings me back toward the shore.  I ride the waves back in head-first at high velocity.  The surf smashes me into the turf at an awkward and embarrassing angle.  I may have blacked out for a brief moment, then quickly pop up, dazed, confused, and woozy.  The lining of my lungs are coated with salt and, somehow, a terrified starfish clings to my left temple, holding on for dear life.  After I stagger around for a moment and re-gather my bearings.  My subpar Daniel eyes readjust to the light and I notice that I am the length of a football field away from my sand castle sub development on the other end of the beach.  Then, a peak experience, a rare moment of self-actualization - I have escaped a brush with death.  I had nearly drowned.  This was even more surreal the second time around in Hawai'i...I should know better, I've been through this.  I'm seven now!  Then, the crocodile tears of self-pity.  I sprint in the general direction of "home" and find Mom surveying the water to see where the sharks have dragged me.  I quickly jump into her arms with tears streaming down my face.  She kisses me gently on the cheek, wraps me in a towel, and carries me away from the water.  And then I forget all about it.

Everything I have said above is true, and it did happen twice.  Well, I did make up the starfish part, but I think we all needed that comic relief after going through that horrible ordeal, didn't we?  Anyway, the resolution of my near-drowning-in-the-Pacific experiences, in which I ultimately yielded to forces beyond my control in order to regain it, has emerged as somewhat of a metaphor in my life recently.  I think we all can relate to that feeling.  Since September 2008, many of us have been tossed to and fro by the brutal tides of the recession as banks started to collapse like flan in a musky cupboard.  Home foreclosures, massive layoffs, bailouts of the automotive and financial sectors.  Previously alien terms like "sub-prime mortgage" and "credit default swap" have rapidly become prominent in our common parlance.  And with these words has come a sense of sheer panic and anxiety.  Never in my life have I seen so many Americans quickly re-adjust their economic behavior in accordance with news headlines.  We have stopped spending, stopped borrowing, stopped lending and, as a consequence, stopped working and stopped living.  

I guess I'm no exception.  I picked the worst possible job market to graduate into.  I placed all of my eggs in the clerkship basket, had a couple of near-hit interviews, but have ultimately come up short.   Thus, a mere matter of weeks before my law school graduation, I do not yet have a job and face a six-figure debt monster looming on the horizon.  It's enough to make one panic and struggle, wrestling against forces beyond either our understanding or control to find solutions both desperate and drastic.  This is also accompanied by intense psychological turmoil, complete with the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

As I am caught in this latest undertow, I can hear the muffled sounds of fellow swimmers also caught by the waves..."Join the pity party!" they invite me with bloodshot eyes as they swim in three-piece suits, a rescinded job offer in one hand and a bottle of self-medication in the other.  As I float on through the turmoil, I remember that I have been here before.  And both times, I survived.  So I turn to my fellow sufferers and sternly reply, "No thanks."  As my friends and colleagues struggle themselves further into the depths of the waters, I take a deep underwater breath, close my eyes, and let the Sea take me.  It's time to go recession surfing, and just ride this one out.

This is nearly blasphemous in the context of the Washington legal culture.  This is a city of striving; high-strung anxiety is as necessary as eating, drinking, and breathing to my peers.  It is the necessary primal emotion for survival in a dog-eat-dog ladder-climb to the top.  And in the context of what is going on now, it is understandable.  I have certainly experienced my fair share of it over the past few months as I struggle to find my footing in order to prepare to pay back Uncle Sam.  

But such anxiety is damaging.  We succeed when we focus, and we can only focus when we relax, because in the end, we have to come to grips with the difficult idea that some things are beyond our control.  This includes the decisions of hiring partners and judges, the reactionary decisions made in the halls of Congress, and the tight purses and harsh punitive actions of consumer creditors.  If, as the likes of economists from Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan have alleged, the market is guided by the force of an Invisible Hand, then it stands to reason that a hand we can't see is a hand that we can't understand.  I certainly don't get all of the nuances of why the world is crashing all around us, in spite of my best efforts to educate myself.  All I know is that none of it is worth sacrificing my sanity on the alter of frayed nerves and unmet expectations.

It is with this attitude that I enter the home stretch of my law school career, into the Maryland Bar Exam, and ultimately into the job market.  I can safely say that I have never faced anything scarier in my life; I also have to admit that I can do little to nothing to fix my circumstances.  So I've decided to forgo the struggle, to smile, breathe, and go easy, to relax and let the undertow have its way with me.  I will affirm within my spirit the prayer of serenity, to put my hopes, dreams, and curriculum vitae into the hands of my Creator with the unwavering belief that I will come out okay on the other side.

You can trust me.  I've been through this before, and I am still here.  Let the Forces of Nature do their work.  I invite you all to let go.

I'll see you on the beach.