What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?Now what do lawyers do to arouse such animosity? Chiefly, the problem is that they're smart. Being smart is definitely démodé these days. It is outré. It is, above all, pas comme il faut.
A good start!What do you do if you run over a lawyer?
Back over him to make sure. Then, make another notch on the steering wheel.What do have when a lawyer is buried up to his neck in sand?
Not enough sand.
For one thing, having to acknowledge that someone other than us is smart restricts our ability to perform our duty of esteeming ourselves. Moreover, the existence of a group of people who make good money from living by their wits rather than by doing what they're told to do makes most of us feel inadequate, so we hate them.
Intelligence is also the enemy of the good life, as defined for us by giant corporations. It hinders our ability to follow the directions for living that our employers so thoughtfully send us over our cellphones and pagers, and that Oprah and other corporate giants send us over the airwaves. If we actually exercised intelligence, how could we enjoy Survivor, taking work home on the weekend, or reading all those self-help books? Lawyers are intelligent – they must want to ruin our lives.
Furthermore, lawyers are just not genteel enough. If the people had their way, life would not be marred by such embarrassments as the release from prison of Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, Guy-Paul Morin, Rubin Carter, Rolando Cruz, and on and on. When society says that someone is a murderer, the well-behaved accept its judgment.
Often our hatred of lawyers is justified as a dislike of lawyers' greed. Given the incidence of selfless behaviour on our parts these days, though, we can safely assume that this explanation is but another example of the defence mechanism of projection. Feeling guilty about our own greed, we project it onto some outgroup. Certainly lawyers place a high value on their work, and like to get paid for every second of it. On the other hand, people are willing to pay their stratospheric fees, so maybe they're worth it.
Anyway, if lawyers were that greedy, they wouldn't be lawyers. They'd be where the real money is – playing professional sports. Representing the legal interests of citizens caught up in the toils of the "justice" system, or even the interests of giant corporations, pays peanuts compared to what you can get for batting balls about. And when you bat balls about, people worship you. And you get a lot more time off.
We also justify our hatred of lawyers as hatred of their questionable ethics. Insert your own sarcastic comment about that idea here.
Perhaps I have not persuaded you. Luckily for you, society seems to be evolving in a way which will make most lawyers obsolete. People seem to be losing interest in the mainstay of lawyers' business.
Specifically, they are losing interest in democracy. They don't vote; they don't pay attention to the issues when they do vote; they vote, as Ontario voters have done, to reduce their control over the expenditure of public funds. Democracy just takes too much of our valuable time in a world full of rewarding things to do, like watching So You Think You Can Dance or searching YouTube for videos of dogs dancing the hula. Why not just leave the running of society to the experts?
Once the experts take over lawyers will become unnecessary except, of course, to the experts. At any rate you won't have to deal with them, since your rights will be thoughtfully reduced to a convenient number you can protect all by yourself - the right to pay taxes; the right to have your urine tested; the right to be denied unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and health care. And, of course, the right to tell jokes about lawyers.
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