Pitkin (standard:other, 986 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 08 2007	Views/Reads: 3398/2167	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The view from last century -- has anything really changed?

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of a few thousand lawyers just to lend tone to the reform; and Hughes 
for knowledge as to what to do constructively after the big clean-up.  
This triple genius lives not." 

Recently, I read about the booming business in "Kill All the Lawyers"
T-shirts -- but this is 53 years after Pitkin wrote those words.  Could 
he have foreseen the Stalin purge?  Hitler's rise to power?  He goes 
on: 

"....legal costs and legal delays are the largest preventable item in
all business waste in the United States." 

Pitkin was so right, he was wrong: "In 1975, or even sooner, we may find
half as many lawyers ... as we have today -- and one-tenth as many 
law-suits being fought to a finish in the courts."  He was so wrong! 

"As the masses of America become better educated ... our adults will
demand ... more and more straight news on the news pages.  If 
newspapers do not furnish it, people will get it over the radio or 
through some other channel." 

Why did he use the word "channel?"  Was he foreviewing television? 

In Pitkin's view, "A very small group of highly competent officials
would run the nation's business fifty times more efficiently than it is 
now run.  Their advisers would be the Best Minds (in the country).  
Below these would be a huge army of government workers carefully chosen 
as being the very lowest grade of persons who could do their appointed 
tasks properly." 

There is room for controversy here.  The incompetency of government
officials is legend -- it even gave rise to a delightful TV series a 
few years ago!  On the other hand, is it not true that an elite 
oligarchy of lobbyists runs each government like an iron hand wearing 
the velvet glove of Diplomacy? 

In effect, Pitkin's sarcastic writing style becomes a two-edged sword:
If he predicted rightly, was he being altogether sincere?  And, if he 
predicted wrongly, was he using sarcasm as a weapon to bend the 
reader's mind in the direction of his argument? 

Seattle WA 98102 July 25, 1991 Gerald X. Diamond


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