It is Saturday, early, and I’ve got my coffee (Seattle’s Best, House Blend) and an article titled “Good Talk.”
“Good Talk” (New Yorker, March 20) explores the lost art of face-to-face conversation by saying, …
“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves. In those moments of unpredictability and serendipity, we confronted difference. There were no smartphones, message boards, or online factions. Maybe because life moved at a slower pace and every interaction wasn’t freighted with political meaning, we had the opportunity to recognize our full humanity.”
In the early days of my legal career, I did criminal defense work that involved going to the Courthouse and seeking a deal — a plea bargain.
In those long gone days there was no criminal roster so one didn’t know when their case would be called. That decision rested entirely with the Solicitor. We lawyers had to arrive with our client in tow, the Solicitor knowing that the looming likelihood of a jury trial “concentrated the mind” of all concerned.
In the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of hanging around; time to talk; and those courtroom conversations involved anecdotes that centered on shotguns, bird dogs, rattlesnakes, the arrival of Cobia in the Broad River, and inebriated hunters falling out of duck blinds.
I was at a disadvantage in these conversations — often involving the Circuit Judge himself — because I did not own a shotgun, a jon boat, or a pair of Bean rubber-soled boots. I did not have a portfolio of stories that involved somebody mistakenly shooting a barn that had wandered into their line of fire; or blasting a hole in the bottom of their boat.
But those early morning, coffee-fueled conversations — stories that connected the Solicitor, Circuit Judge and the defense lawyers — were an important prelude to the plea negotiations that followed. One needed to have self-deprecating, shotgun-centered anecdote to establish one’s credentials.
But the New Yorker piece, titled “Good Talk”, is not a self-help essay — or one about listening instead of talking — it is about disagreement. It reviews the book, “Good Arguments” (Penguin Press) and starts with the antique notion that conversations of “elegant and intelligent design” will lead to inescapable conclusions and to persuasion. The piece meanders a little before getting round to political discourse.
The New Yorker essay takes us back to Bill Clinton and to Barack Obama and their call for a “national conversation” on race, abortion and universal medical care.
Most of us remember Bill Clinton’s call, in 1997, for a “conversation on race”. We also remember a young Barack Obama who believed that a discussion on heath care in the United States need not to devolve into anger where facts — self-evident and clear — would emerge making universal, single-payer health care a reality.
But many Republicans remained skeptical about those facts and the Covid pandemic showed that facts (even those supported by the scientific research) are never indisputable.
In the last 100 years, the U.S. medical community has developed antibiotics, vaccines and its research has put gene re-purposing therapy within the realm of clinical use for a host of diseases including Parkinson’s Disease. The research backing up these discoveries involves trials in animals, trials in humans, and papers published (and reviewed) in medical journals like JAMA. This process has, until recently, kept medical treatment immune from social media disparagement and above the political fray.
With the Covid pandemic, that immunity evaporated. Now there are those who question germ theory; means of transmission; vaccines; therapies; and the necessity for the “lockdowns” that follow infection.
When I was younger there was the unspoken belief that Americans possessed an uncommon capacity to find compromise. Notwithstanding the Civil War, we were a people who could sit down, face-to-face, and hammer out legislation that gave everyone a piece of the pie.
Lyndon Johnson, Tip O’Neill and other arm-twisting dealmakers could get people into a room — and after some screaming, shoving and shouting — make what they called “sausage,” legislative sausage.
If we ever had that ability to agree on the facts; or to compromise in the interest of finding a solution; we seem to have lost that ability.
The New Yorker piece ends by saying:
“Its the imperfections we offer one another that make such endeavors worthwhile. We keep talking, knowing that it brings us closer to one another as it simultaneously casts us apart, and that the conversation is never over.”
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
