May it please the Court.
I recently had my first argument before a federal court of appeals. The merits of our claim are exceedingly weak and the client isn’t one of our paying ones, so the case was a good setting for popping my cherry. My boss held no reasonable expectation of my success and—aside from the remainder of the client’s life being theoretically on the line—no cognizable interest (from the firm’s standpoint) depended on my strong performance. So the argument came and went and I think it generally went well. Two of the appellate judges on the panel had been old-school colleagues of my partner when they were all federal prosecutors for the Northern District. This, combined with the fact that we had been appointed pro bono counsel, gave them ample grounds to cut me some slack. The final member of the panel was Judge Posner, who’s acknowledged as someone that’s smart enough to have been appointed to the Supreme Court, but too much of a political neophyte to have obtained a nomination. Posner is at heart an intellectual, and in today’s day and age of highly-politicized judicial nominations, Posner isn’t as result oriented as Bush and company would have liked (or at least not in the results that social conservatives are interested in). That and he’s written some fairly crazy shit as part of his law and economics scholarship. The New Yorker ran a long profile on Posner back in 2001 which detailed, among other things, Posner's fixation with baboons.
I also think of the article from time to time when I’m exasperated by my Mom, or otherwise doubting whether familial bonds are truly the bonds that tie. Claire is devoted to her parents in a way that I am not. I’m not that troubled by my cold-heartedness, but Posner’s appallingly rational views on the topic have always made me sad because there’s something in the depths of me that may, in the end, reluctantly agree:
When Posner grew more conservative (he thought of himself as a liberal until he was thirty or so), his mother was horrified. "We had terrible fights," he says. "I became really furious at her. See, she was one of these bright fools, my mother-quite a bright person, but very limited. The other thing that annoyed me about her was that I worried about her politics interfering with my career. Every time I got a government job, I always felt obligated to tell the authorities that I had this mother who had probably been a Communist. It was an annoying piece of baggage. Then eventually she became senile and forgot about politics and actually became very benign. Both Charlene and I breathed a sigh of relief." Looking back on his red-diaper childhood, Posner considers his parents hypocrites. "It was just talk," he says of their radicalism. "They wanted me to live the same conventional life that they lived."
Both Posner's parents lived into their nineties. "My mother, in the course of her decline, broke her hip," Posner says. "In the olden days, people broke their hips and died, which was great; now they fix them." After his mother broke her hip, his father found it difficult to take care of her, so his parents moved to assisted-living facilities in Chicago. When his father grew very frail and sick, Posner asked the gerontologist what the point of keeping him alive with all these procedures was; the doctor informed him that termination of care had to be voluntary. "Because my father was more or less compos mentis and wanted treatment, you couldn’t deny it, Posner says. Growing up the way he did, struggling the way he did, the notion of giving up, not fighting to the end, was anathema to him. I hope my generation can be a little more rational about this. I'd like to choose my own time of exit.
"I don't know if this is true of everybody;" Posner says, "but I loved my parents when I was growing up and they were really the sort of parents you should be grateful to-my mother gave me great cultural enrichment, and my father helped me buy our first house, so they were ideal parents. But my thoughts about them are dominated by their old age. I don't make allowances: when I think about them, there's no affection. Charlene thinks I'm a little bit unnatural about my family. But so many people have these decrepit, horrible old parents, and then they're so upset when they die at ninety; and regard it as a medical failure that the doctors didn't do this and didn't do that. My father was even annoyed when my mother died-he thought the doctors hadn't tended her carefully enough-though by the time she died she couldn't speak, she couldn't use her hands, she wasn't human. And it's not as if you had a cute animal with the same mental ability-when you see human beings like that, you don't think, Well, she's on the level of a chipmunk." Asked what he felt when both his parents had died, he looked puzzled, as though the question didn't make sense to him. "I don't have any feeling about it," he said.
When Posner grew more conservative (he thought of himself as a liberal until he was thirty or so), his mother was horrified. "We had terrible fights," he says. "I became really furious at her. See, she was one of these bright fools, my mother-quite a bright person, but very limited. The other thing that annoyed me about her was that I worried about her politics interfering with my career. Every time I got a government job, I always felt obligated to tell the authorities that I had this mother who had probably been a Communist. It was an annoying piece of baggage. Then eventually she became senile and forgot about politics and actually became very benign. Both Charlene and I breathed a sigh of relief." Looking back on his red-diaper childhood, Posner considers his parents hypocrites. "It was just talk," he says of their radicalism. "They wanted me to live the same conventional life that they lived."
Both Posner's parents lived into their nineties. "My mother, in the course of her decline, broke her hip," Posner says. "In the olden days, people broke their hips and died, which was great; now they fix them." After his mother broke her hip, his father found it difficult to take care of her, so his parents moved to assisted-living facilities in Chicago. When his father grew very frail and sick, Posner asked the gerontologist what the point of keeping him alive with all these procedures was; the doctor informed him that termination of care had to be voluntary. "Because my father was more or less compos mentis and wanted treatment, you couldn’t deny it, Posner says. Growing up the way he did, struggling the way he did, the notion of giving up, not fighting to the end, was anathema to him. I hope my generation can be a little more rational about this. I'd like to choose my own time of exit.
"I don't know if this is true of everybody;" Posner says, "but I loved my parents when I was growing up and they were really the sort of parents you should be grateful to-my mother gave me great cultural enrichment, and my father helped me buy our first house, so they were ideal parents. But my thoughts about them are dominated by their old age. I don't make allowances: when I think about them, there's no affection. Charlene thinks I'm a little bit unnatural about my family. But so many people have these decrepit, horrible old parents, and then they're so upset when they die at ninety; and regard it as a medical failure that the doctors didn't do this and didn't do that. My father was even annoyed when my mother died-he thought the doctors hadn't tended her carefully enough-though by the time she died she couldn't speak, she couldn't use her hands, she wasn't human. And it's not as if you had a cute animal with the same mental ability-when you see human beings like that, you don't think, Well, she's on the level of a chipmunk." Asked what he felt when both his parents had died, he looked puzzled, as though the question didn't make sense to him. "I don't have any feeling about it," he said.
