Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Cute, furry animals, such as seals and otters, that you see in Walt Disney nature movies, but never around your house. Large animals, such as elephants and boa constrictors, that live on other continents. Plants that produce flowers or eat insects. Turtles.

I have already embarked on a personal ecology effort to preserve Bob. I have resolved that, despite the great personal sacrifice involved, I will no longer mow my lawn.

Most of us learn how the United States legal system works by watching television. We learn that if we obey the law, we will wind up chatting and laughing with attractive members of the opposite sex when the program ends, whereas if we break the law, we will fall from a great height onto rotating helicopter blades.

Some television shows explain the legal system in greater detail: they show actual dramatizations of court trials. The best such show was

“Perry Mason,” which starred Raymond Burr as a handsome defense attorney who eventually gained so much weight he had to sit in a wheelchair.

“Perry Mason” was set in a large city populated almost entirely by morons. For example, the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, was so stupid that the people he prosecuted were always innocent. I mean always. I imagine that whenever Hamilton arrested a suspect, the suspect heaved a sigh of relief and hugged his family, knowing he would Soon be off the hook.

Now you’d think that after a while Hamilton would have realized he couldn’t prosecute his way out of a paper bag, and would have gone into some more suitable line of work, such as sorting laundry. But he kept at it, week after week and year after year, prosecuting innocent people. Nevertheless, everything worked out, because in this particular city the criminals turned out to be even stupider than Hamilton: they always came to the trials, and, after sitting quietly for about twenty minutes, lurched to their feet and confessed. The result was that Perry Mason got

a reputation as a brilliant defense attorney, but the truth is that anyone with the intelligence of a can of creamed corn would have looked brilliant in this courtroom.

The major problem with “Perry Mason” is that it is unrealistic: Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger usually speak in understandable English words, and by the time the trial is over everybody has a pretty good grasp of the facts of the case. In real life, of course, lawyers speak mostly in Latin, and by the time they’re done nobody has the vaguest notion what the facts are. To understand why this is, you have to understand the history of the U.S. legal system.

In the frontier days, our legal system was very simple: if you broke

a law, armed men would chase you and beat you up or throw you in jail or hang you; in extreme cases, they would hang you, then beat you up in jail. So everybody obeyed the law, which was easy to do, because basically there were only two laws:

No assaulting people. No stealing.

This primitive legal system was so simple that even the public understood it. The trials were simple, too:

SHERIFF: Your honor, the defendant confessed that he shot his wife dead.

JUDGE: Did he admit it freely, or did you have your horse stand on him first, like last time?

SHERIFF: No, sir. He admitted it freely.

JUDGE: Fair enough. String him up.

The trouble with this system was that it had no room for lawyers. If a lawyer had appeared in a frontier courtroom and started tossing around terms such as “habeas corpus,” he would have been shot.

So lawyers, for want of anything better to do, formed legislatures, which are basically organizations that meet from time to time to invent new laws. Before long, the country had scads of laws—laws governing the watering of lawns, laws governing the spaying of dogs, laws governing the production and sale of fudge, and so on—and today nobody has the slightest idea what is legal and what is not. This has led to an enormous demand for lawyers. Lawyers don’t understand the legal system any better than the rest of us do, but they are willing to talk about it in an impressive manner for large sums of money. In today’s legal system, the frontier murder trial would go like this:

SHERIFF: Your honor ...

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I object. In his use of the word “your,” the witness is clearly stipulating the jurisprudence of a writ of deus ex machine.

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: On the contrary. In the case of Merke v. Barnbuster, the Court clearly ruled that an ex post facto debenture does not preclude the use of the word “your” in a matter of ad hoc quod erat demonstrandum.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Oh yeah? Well Carthaginia delendo est.

This goes on for several hours, until everybody has forgotten what the trial was about in the first place and the defendant is able to sneak out of the courtroom, unnoticed.

I like to cheer myself up by pretending that my Mail actually screams when I throw it into the wastebasket:

Dear MR. BARRY:

You have almost certainly won a trillion dollars. We’re dead serious, MR. BARRY. We’re a gigantic publishing company and we just woke up this morning and we said, “By God, let’s send one trillion dollars to

MR. BARRY, no strings attached.” That’s just the kind of gigantic publishing company we are. And frankly, MR. BARRY, you are under no obligation whatsoever to take a six-week trial subscription to a new Magazine called PhOtograPhs of homes That Are Much Nicer Than Yours, because all we really want to do, MR. BARRY, is send you one trillion ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Resident of the 15,924th District:

This is the first of an interminable series of newsletters I’ll be sending you at your expense so that you’ll have photographs of your representative in Washington representing you by eating breakfast with the President. I recently had an opportunity to exchange views with the President during an informal working orientation breakfast for the 742

new congresspersons, and the President and I agreed that one of the most important issues facing the nation, including the 15,924th district, is mineral resources on the ocean floor. I am pleased to report that I have been appointed to the influential Manganese Subcommittee of the House Special Select Committee on Grayish-White Metallic Elements, and I’m planning a fact-finding trip to ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Friend:

Every day, all over the world, innocent children with large, soulful eyes are getting terrible diseases. Also, countless furry little endangered species are being dismembered by industrialists wielding chain saws. This is all your fault. So we want you to send some money to ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Electric Customer:

Due to inflation, we have been forced to apply for a rate ... No, wait, forget that. We can’t use inflation anymore. Uh, let’s see ... Oh yeah. Due to the fact that our new Harbor Vista nuclear generating plant, if we ever get it finished, may have some piping problems that would cause it to emit a deadly cloud of radioactive gas the size of Canada, we have been forced to apply for a rate increase so we’ll be able to afford a really top-notch lawyer with his own jet and everything. We realize that, since we just got a rate increase last week, this may seem

...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Mr. Barry:

In a recent column, you stated that Abraham Lincoln ran the hundred-yard dash in 8.4 seconds, and that ice fishermen have the same average IQ as mailboxes. As an avid ice fisherman, and chairman of the History Department at Myron B. Thalmus Junior College, I would like to know where you get your ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear MR. BARRY:

Really! We mean it! One trillion dol ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE