SO WHERE HAS CRANKY BEEN?

So where has Cranky been? Well, he’s been on Sabbatical. He observed that election we just came through. And he watched his modest investments become his pathetic investments. And he attempted to offset his financial decline through a new profession: document reviewer. And he contemplated the meaning of it all.

As for the election, wasn't it great how the party of self-righteousness, narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and anti-intellectualism got its comeuppance? I mean really, the Republican party of today is not the broad tent of Cranky's youth, which was back in the 1950s. Maybe the defeat will help it find itself and reconnect with the center of American society, culture, and economics.

Concerning the financial turmoil, the important question is, have we reached the bottom? That is also the unanswerable question. How did we get here? Well how about greed, ideological rigidity on the part of a sizeable portion of the nation's leadership, and stupidity? Wait, weren't similar characteristics in the preceding paragraph?

And document review? This is the unpleasant underbelly of the legal profession. It is a product of the computer age. Computers may have eliminated a tiny bit of paperwork, but their electronic records have made up the difference and added exponentially more garbage to the world. So big legal cases require worker bees to wade through hundreds of thousands—even millions—of assorted computer detritus: emails, memoranda, spreadsheets, whatall. The worker bees are an eclectic group of recent law school graduates, part-timers, between-jobbers, trying-to-find-themselves’ers, retirees, and other assorted riff-raff. They sit at computer terminals on long tables, supervised by young lawyers talented enough to get hired by a big time law firm but inexperienced enough to barely have a clue. But the pay ain’t bad, the jobs are temporary, and you get to see how the upper crust lives.

As for the meaning of it all, maybe another Sabbatical is in order.