Dave Badtke’s Blog

The concept of lawyers’ billable hours is so ridiculous from all perspectives except those of the lawyer that I was sure that the practice must have dated back to King John’s 1215 Magna Carta when I could well imagine that there was a lawyer in the King’s court who explained that while he agreed with the concept that all, including the king, should be subject to law, and while he was all for drafting a document that would be the seed from which glorious law and democracy would grow, he wouldn’t be able to draft such an historical document on the cheap, but would need to charge by the hour since he didn’t know how long it would take.

But this was not the case. If fact it seems, according to the NY Times, that billable hours began, in the U.S. at least, in the 1960s. And now it may be that law firms are having to rethink the logic of charging hundreds of dollars (do you believe $800 in some cases, maybe more) because the economy is deep in the toilet and we haven’t even got to the flush.

Yes, for that reason — sure, sure, sure, to quote Paul Newman in The Hudsucker Proxy — but also because they can make more money if they don’t bill by the hour, this according to author Scott Turow:

Greed may also encourage lawyers to change their payment plans. Law firms are running out of hours that they can bill in a year, said Scott F. Turow, best-selling author of legal thrillers and a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago.

“Firms are approaching the limit of how hard they can ask lawyers to work,” he wrote, in an e-mail response to a reporter’s query. “Without alternative billing schemes, lawyers will not be able to maintain the rapid escalation in incomes that big firms have seen.”

Now this reasoning I can understand in a culture in which $18 billion is paid out in bonuses to executives of failed businesses, in which the Governor of Illinois tried to sell Obama’s Senate seat, in which Bernie Madoff could hold his head high while economically destroying lives, in which President Obama is forced to be the teacher who explains that corporate jets aren’t a good purchase decision when times are bad. Certainly rapid escalation in incomes makes sense in a culture that rarely seems to consider more to ever be enough.

The upside to the ever worsening drought is a clear evening sky that was spectacular last night, with Venus in the southwest above a waxing moon that will be full on February 2. If tonight matches predictions and is cloudless as well, the scene should be repeated at sunset with the moon above Venus until about 10 when they’ll both have dropped below the horizon.

In this link there is some introductory material on the civil rights movement followed by Maya Angelou commenting on Obama’s victory.

Links to the inaugural address:

Obama taking the oath and delivering his inaugural address. During the oath Obama started off too soon, so he and Chief Justice Roberts got off on the wrong foot, and then Roberts munged the words just a tad — faithfully was the problem– but Obama smiled and remained cool, and today Roberts dropped by the White House to re-administer the oath just so everything was on the up and up, don’t you know, between these two Constitutional scholars.

• Steven Pinker suggests in today’s NYTimes that the issue is split infinitives. Roberts is a grammar tyrant, even changing quotations in his written decisions to match his sense of grammatical rightness, which makes sense since he seems to be doing the same with the Constitution, though how he sleeps given the grammatical problems presented by the Second Amendment I don’t know. Some have suggested that Obama did the right thing by following Roberts’ bungled lead. But Pinker hopes that Obama will be more forceful in the future, leading us in a new direction even when it comes to grammar. Of course Obama’s smart and seems to know how to pick his fights, grammar being important, I would imagine, only when it’s a question of life and death, not just because the world is watching.

Text of Obama’s inaugural address.

Links to Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Inauguration”:

The YouTube video of her reading the poem.

Text of her poem.

Links to Dr. Joseph Lowery’s benediction:

The YouTube video.

Text of his benediction.

Link to performance of John Williams’ “Air and Simple Gifts” by Yo-Yo Ma on cello, Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet:

The YouTube video.

And a few laughs.

My daughter-in-law Mina recently sent me a copy of Jonathan Raban’s article in the Wall Street Journal “All the Presidents’ Literature” (WSJ 1/10-11/2009), in which Raban suggests that Obama is that rare politician who seems to formulate his thinking and actions by reading and writing. As E. M. Forster wrote, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Raban mocks those critics of  Obama’s literary achievement who should know better since Dreams from My Father has been received, he claims,  by “the literary profession as if it were the Comstock Lode: He wrote it himself! Every sentence has its own graceful cadence! He could as easily be novelist as a politician!” But the fault of those who interpret Obama does not extend to the president himself:

In politics, “realism” is usually just another term for pragmatism, or Realpolitik. But Dreams From My Father suggests that for Obama the word is rooted less in a political than in a literary tradition, where it has a far richer meaning. It signifies the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer’s imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world. It’s not much to go on, but, so far, naming his cabinet and organizing his inauguration, incorporating into the narrative characters and voices quite different from his own (like Hillary Clinton’s or Rick Warren’s), Obama has demonstrated an impressive consistency between his instincts as a writer and his performance as president-elect. He reminds us that novelists, no less than apprentice politicians, are in the business of community organizing.

Joan Didion seems mindful of Raban’s concern in the December 18th New York Review of Books where she avoids exclamatory support herself by claiming that Obama’s dreams, his ability to give us what we seem to want, have pushed many, pushed many of those who support him, into an irony-free zone:

Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate’s behalf by their children. Again and again we were told that this was a generational thing, we couldn’t understand. In a flash, we were back in high school, and we couldn’t sit with the popular kids, we didn’t get it. The Style section of The New York Times, on the Sunday after the election, mentioned the Obama T-shirt that “makes irony look old.”

Irony was now out.

Naiveté, translated into “hope,” was now in.

Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.

Partisanship could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism. . .

While the media has been sensitive to the thought that they were drinking Obama’s “Kool-Aid,” the phrase Didion uses and a fear I heard expressed more than once during CNN commentary, I’m appreciative — finally! — that we now have a president of the United States who will make science a cornerstone of our government and who in Dreams from My Father, which I’ll be teaching this semester in my English 1 class, can write the following about his African father whom he only knew for one month:

There was so much to tell in that single month, so much explaining to do; and yet when I reach back into my memory for the words of my father, the small interactions or conversations we might have had, they seem irretrievably lost. Perhaps they’re imprinted too deeply, his voice the seed of all sorts of tangled arguments that I carry on with myself, as impenetrable now as the pattern of my genes, so that all I can perceive is the worn-out shell. My wife offers a simpler explanation — that boys and their father don’t always have much to say to each other unless and until they trust — and this may come closer to the mark, for I often felt mute before him, and he never pushed me to speak (Dreams 66).

This will fit nicely with my class’s exploration of identity formation, which tends to founder in distrust as Michelle Obama suggests, like Sherman Alexie’s character Victor Joseph in Smoke Signals, until understanding and forgiveness lead to something like trust between father and son even when the father is no longer present.

On the topic of mother-daughter and father-daughter relations, Dreams is so far mute, but we’ll now have the opportunity to watch these develop during Obama’s presidency. Should Obama be president for eight years, Melia will be 18, Sasha 16 when he leaves office.

The first chapter of the 8th edition of Discovering the Universe is now available online. The books should be available in the bookstore by Tuesday.

It’s sobering to realize that I haven’t written in this blog since August of 2007 at the end of the summer before the fall 2007 semester. As we get older, time flashes by, and so much can happen in what seems like an incredibly short time.

While the war in Iraq isn’t killing as many Americans, though more than 4,200 have died in Iraq and Afghanistan,  I don’t have a good feel for what this means for Iraqis when even one violent death corrupts the living. How many thousands or hundreds of thousands have died? How many more have been injured?

And the economy is getting so bad that in the back of the plane one flight attendant on my return trip from New York City to see Joe and Mina couldn’t stop talking to the other attendants about contract disputes and retirement. I was flying economy, of course. First class didn’t hear the sometimes panicky, other times angry tone of their concerns that didn’t extend to passengers who could hear everything at a distance even over the roar of jet engines. After all of the greed and corruption and collusion and self-serving rationalizations, we’re all worried about our jobs and money.

But hope returned again with the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the child of a white woman from Kansas and an African man from Kenya, who will become our 44th president in one week, a reality after a magical campaign that I would have attributed to a Hollywood happy ending if it weren’t actually happening. Now intelligent discourse will return to our lives. Now science will play a prominent role again in solving our problems. And maybe war will decline, health will increase (because of health care, not my exercise plan no matter how hard I commit to change), and education will gain a new ascendancy because Obama, as is clear from the books he has written — I’ll be using Dreams from My Father in my English 1 class — knows how to think critically in a way I haven’t experienced in a president since JFK.

It should be quite a year.