by Justice William W. Bedsworth
On the Third of September in 1862, Charles Darwin wrote in his diary these deathless words: “I am languid & bedeviled & hate writing & hate everybody.”
Been there. Boy, have I been there. Hell, I’m there today.
Well, maybe not the “hate everybody” part. Hate requires a lot of energy. I only have enough for a few people. Hating “everybody” exceeds my limited capacity—especially when I’m languid and bedeviled.
But I can manage the rest of Darwin’s September Third lament. Even the “hate writing” part.
That may come as a surprise to you. I’ve been writing as an occupation and as an avocation for over sixty years. I was writing as a pastime in high school. I’ve been writing this column since Ronald Reagan was president. Non-writers tend to assume that people like me write because they like doing it.
And sometimes that’s right. But mostly it’s because we have to. Writing is like a bad gene or a long-dormant disease: once it expresses itself, it can take over your life. You find yourself writing not because you want to but because you have to.
As it says at the bottom of every one of my columns, I write this to get it out of my system. You know how some people sometimes have to smoke a cigarette or take a drink. I sometimes have to write.1
And it’s not always easy. Writing clearly requires thinking clearly. Or at least it always has.
But that may be changing. The dumbing-down of America may make writing a lot easier. We no longer teach driving in our schools. We no longer teach civics. And now we’re cutting back on teaching thinking.
The University of Texas has decided the whole thinking thing is just too darn difficult. A lot of us think Texans themselves made that decision many years ago. My dad was a Texan and he was careful to avoid thinking whenever possible.
But it still seems remarkable to see the state’s university adopt non-thinking as its official policy. According to the Los Angeles Times, “The University of Texas System’s Board of Directors has unanimously approved a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying ‘unnecessary controversial subjects’ despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.”
Honest.
And why are they doing this? What are the subjects they don’t want to confront? Here’s what the chairman of that board—a board entrusted with the higher education of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens—said about it: “We are in difficult times. Vagueness can be our friend.”
Oh, hell yeah! This’ll work great.
“What does the contract say, counsel?”
“Your Honor, this is an area where vagueness can be our friend. If we allow ourselves to be hamstrung by the actual words of the contract, we lose the flexibility necessary in these difficult times.”
“Counsel, your lawsuit says Defendant failed to live up to the terms of the contract. How can we determine that without looking at the contract?
“Your honor, that kind of controversy can only cause us stress and undermine our ability to resolve our differences. If you’re going to insist on that kind of internecine analysis, I’m going to need to lie down for awhile. Can we take a recess, please?”
Come on! Get serious. Vagueness can be our friend? What kind of snowflakes is Texas gonna turn out with this “no controversy” approach?
Thomas Jefferson repeatedly stressed the necessity for a well-informed citizenry to make a democracy work. “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”
It’s just common sense. If the people making the decisions by their votes are not well-informed, they can’t be counted on to make good decisions. If you don’t read the “no trespassing” sign, you’re liable to blunder into the pasture where the ill-tempered bull is kept.
I don’t like UT’s new policy because it means their citizenry will only get the easy questions right. Having no experience dealing with hard questions, they’ll be no better than a coin flip to arrive at the right answer on those. So I think this is the kind of conflict avoidance that can only lead to more and greater conflict.
But the English major in me2 is excited by the possibility this may result in a revival of our interest in literature, especially poetry. So many great non-controversial answers there. So much spectacular vagueness.
“Counsel, can you explain the cause of action in Count 16 to me?”
“Of course, Your Honor. ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.’” Hard to argue with Lewis Carroll, Your Honor.3
“And what were plaintiff’s damages?”
“‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’4 It was horrendous, Your Honor. ‘Rude spirits of the seething outer strife, Unmeet to read her pure and simple spright, Deem, if you list, such hours a waste of life, Empty of all delight.’5 It was ‘an agony in Eight fits,’6 Your Honor. I’m not sure I can go on.”
“I’m sorry, Counsel. I had trouble following that; could you rephrase it?”
“Certainly, Your Honor; in the words of the great legal scholar e. e. cummings—a big favorite at my alma mater, the University of Texas—my client’s condition ‘is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea.’”
“I see. Well, I’m feeling a little moonly myself right now. We’re going to take a recess, Counsel; I need to lie down.”
“That’s fine, Your Honor. We did that a lot at the University of Texas. Hook ‘em, Horns, Your Honor.”
BEDS NOTES
- Or have pineapple upside down cake.
- All you do in college English courses is deal with controversy. “Is this good writing or is it overrated?” “Did Shakespeare really write all this stuff or was it Marlowe?” “How many think Hemingway was great? How many think he writes like a sixth-grader?” It’s a miracle we survived.
- This is Jabberwocky. That’s not a description, it’s the name of the poem. Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym—and you can begin to see why from this excerpt. He wrote Alice in Wonderland.
- James Joyce. Vagueness was certainly his friend.
- Lewis Carroll again. He’ll show up in briefs more than Prosser and Witkin combined.
- You should already have guessed this one: Lewis Carroll. This is the subtitle of the work the last quote was from. Reading briefs in the court of appeal was a day at the beach after reading this stuff.
William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.
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