I'm a Stranger Here Myself (24 page)

I don’t understand most things. I really don’t. I am full of admiration for people who can talk knowledgeably about household wiring or torque ratios on their car engines, but that’s not me, I’m afraid. I remember years ago, after buying my first car, being asked how big the engine was. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, quite sincerely. “About this big, I suppose,” and I spread my arms to the appropriate dimensions. It was about then I realized I was not cut out for technical discourse.

So when I say I don’t understand most things, I am quite sincere. I don’t understand chemistry, anatomy and physiology, mathematics beyond what is necessary to make small change, geophysics, astrophysics, particle physics, molecular biology, or newspaper weather maps, among much else. I don’t know what an enzyme is, or an electron or proton or quark. Don’t have the faintest idea. I don’t even know my own body. I couldn’t begin to tell you what my spleen does or where you would look to find it. I wouldn’t know my own endocrine glands if they reached out and goosed me.

Nearly every technological marvel of our age is a source of mystery and wonder to me. Take the mobile telephone. I cannot for the life of me conceive of how these things work. Imagine for the sake of argument that you are in New York and I am in a wheat field in Nebraska and you call me up on my mobile phone. How does the signal that you have generated in New York know to come beaming down to me in a wheat field in Nebraska? And where exactly are our voices when they are traveling back and forth between the two phones? And why don’t we have to shout to be heard? And if modern science can get a voice to travel through thin air and come out clearly thousands of miles away, why can’t they deliver pizza in the same way? And what am I doing in a wheat field in Nebraska anyway?

You see what I mean? I just don’t understand most things. Here are some other things I have never been able to figure out:

What did insects do at night before there were electric lights?

Why is it that the more hair I lose off the top of my head the more grows in my nostrils?

When the phone rings, why does someone always say, “Is that the phone?”

How do aquarium fish get so much energy out of a few little flakes of food? And what are those flakes made out of, precisely? And how did anyone ever determine that that is what they want to eat?

Why do elevators have signs that say “Maximum load 1,200 lbs” or something similar? And why do they always put the signs inside where it’s too late to do anything about it? And what are you expected to do with this information anyway? Are you supposed to turn to the other occupants and say, “I believe I’m about 210 pounds. How much do the rest of you weigh?” Do you ask the heavier people to step off until you have completed your calculations?

Is it actually possible that there are people who can eat I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and not believe it’s not butter?

Why is it that the less leather there is in a woman’s shoe the more it costs?

How did anyone ever invent solitaire? This has been bothering me for years. You could give me a pack of cards and all the time in the world, and still it would never occur to me to lay them out in seven unequal piles, and to turn the remaining cards over three at a time, and to array those cards in descending order by alternate color, and to make four additional piles up on top and put cards there in ascending order by suit, and all the rest of it. That would just never occur to me. Never.

Why do we thank someone from the bottom of our heart? Why not the middle of our heart? Why not, indeed, the whole heart? Why not the heart, lungs, brains, spleen, etc.?

Why couldn’t Dick Vitale have found something quieter to do for a living?

Why, when we do something foolish, do we say, “That will teach you to do such and such,” when what we mean is, “That will teach you not to do such and such”?

Why is it that phone calls in the middle of the night are always wrong numbers?

Why are planes, trains, and buses on time when you are late and late when you are on time?

How is it that no matter how carefully you examine potted plants before purchasing you always choose the one that has a terminal illness?

How can my computer know when the clocks change between normal time and daylight saving time every spring and fall, and yet can’t figure out that when I want to italicize one little word I mean just that one little word and not everything that follows? Also, why is it that every time I switch it on, it is as if it has never been switched on before? Why can’t it come on instantly like a radio or stereo system and just do its business? Why does it have to check its innards and announce everyone who has ever had a copyright interest in it? Why, above all, when I try to switch it off, does it put up a little window that says: “Are you sure you want to switch off?”

Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that we are head over heels about something when our head normally is over our heels? Why can you slow up but not speed down? Why do we say that something that is in rapid motion is moving fast, but something that is not moving at all is stuck fast? Why do we say our nose is running? (Mine slides.)

How is it that we live in a world in which we can measure the farthest stars, travel at twice the speed of sound, and probe the ocean’s depths, and yet they still can’t make a pencil sharpener that isn’t completely useless?

Finally, and above all, why would anyone in a free society choose to become a dentist?

I have a friend in Britain, an academic, who was recently approached by the lawyers for an American company to be an expert witness in a case they were handling. They told him they wanted to fly the lead attorney and two assistants to London to meet him.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper if I flew to New York instead?” my friend suggested.

“Yes,” he was told without hesitation, “but this way we can bill the client for the cost of three trips.”

And there you have the American legal mind at work.

Now I have no doubt that a large number of American lawyers—well, two anyway—do wonderfully worthwhile things that fully justify charging their clients $150 an hour, which I gather is the going rate now. But the trouble is that there are just too many of them. In fact—and here is a truly sobering statistic—the United States has more lawyers than all the rest of the world put together: almost 800,000 of them, up from an already abundant 260,000 in 1960. We now boast 300 lawyers for every 100,000 citizens. Britain, by contrast, has 82; Japan a mere 11.

And of course all those lawyers need work. Most states now allow lawyers to advertise, and many of them most enthusiastically do. You cannot watch TV for half an hour without encountering at least one commercial showing a sincere-looking lawyer saying: “Hi, I’m Vinny Slick of Bent and Oily Law Associates. If you’ve suffered an injury at work, or been in a vehicular accident, or just feel like having some extra money, come to me and we’ll find someone to sue.”

Americans, as is well known, will sue at the drop of a hat. In fact, I daresay someone somewhere has sued over a dropped hat, and won $20 million for the pain and suffering it caused. There really is a sense that if something goes wrong for whatever reason and you are anywhere in the vicinity, then you ought to collect a pile of cash.

This was neatly illustrated a couple of years ago when a chemical plant in Richmond, California, suffered an explosion that spewed fumes over the town. Within hours, some two hundred lawyers and their representatives had descended on the excited community, handing out business cards and advising people to present themselves at the local hospital. Twenty thousand residents eagerly did so.

News footage of the event makes it look like some kind of open-air party. Of the twenty thousand happy, smiling, seemingly very healthy people who lined up for examination at the hospital’s emergency room, just twenty were actually admitted. Although the number of proven injuries was slight, to say the least, seventy thousand townspeople—virtually all of them—submitted claims. The company agreed to a $180 million settlement. Of this, the lawyers got $40 million.

Every year over ninety million lawsuits are filed in this extravagantly litigious country—that’s one for every two and a half people—and many of these are what might charitably be called ambitious. As I write, two parents in Texas are suing a high school baseball coach for benching their son during a game, claiming humiliation and extreme mental anguish. In Washington State, meanwhile, a man with heart problems is suing local dairies “because their milk cartons did not warn him about cholesterol.” I am sure you read recently about the woman in California who sued the Walt Disney Company after she and her family were mugged in a parking lot at Disneyland. A central part of the suit was that her grandchildren suffered shock and trauma when they were taken behind the scenes to be comforted and they saw Disney characters taking off their costumes. The discovery that Mickey Mouse and Goofy were in fact real people inside costumes was apparently too much for the poor tykes.

That case was dismissed, but elsewhere people have won fortunes out of all proportion to any pain or loss they might actually have suffered. Recently there was a much-publicized case in which an executive at a Milwaukee brewery recounted the racy plot of an episode of
Seinfeld
to a female colleague, who took offense and reported him for sexual harassment. The brewery responded by firing the man, and he responded by suing the brewery. Now I don’t know who deserved what in this case—it sounds to me like they all wanted a good, sound spanking—but the upshot is that the dismissed executive was awarded $26.6 million, roughly four hundred thousand times his annual salary, by a sympathetic (i.e., demented) jury.

This sort of thing goes to the highest level. As I write, the estate of Richard M. Nixon is suing the government for $210 million—let me just repeat that sum: $210 million—to compensate the Nixon family for lost earnings from papers and other documents that the government seized as evidence in the Watergate case. You understand what I am saying, of course. A president of the United States, after acting with the crassest illegality, is driven from office in disgrace, and twenty-four years later his family is asking for $210 million of the nation’s money. The day cannot be far off when Bill Clinton will be suing for the mental trauma suffered from having oral sex while trying simultaneously to run a nation. That must be worth at least a couple of billion, surely.

Allied with the idea that lawsuits are a quick way to a fortune, whether deserved or not, is the interesting and uniquely American notion that no matter what happens, someone else must be responsible. So if, say, you smoke eighty cigarettes a day for fifty years and eventually get cancer, then it must be everyone else’s fault but your own, and you sue not only the manufacturer of your cigarettes, but the wholesaler, the retailers, the delivery company that delivered the cigarettes to the retailer, and so on. One of the most extraordinary features of the American legal system is that it allows plaintiffs to sue people and enterprises only tangentially connected to the alleged complaint.

Because of the way the system works (or, more accurately, doesn’t work) it is often less expensive for a company or institution to settle out of court than to let the matter proceed to trial. I know a woman who slipped and fell while entering a department store on a rainy day and, to her astonishment and gratification, was offered a more or less instant settlement of $2,500 if she would sign a piece of paper agreeing not to sue. She signed.

The cost of all this to society is enormous—several billion dollars a year at least. New York City alone spends $200 million a year settling “slip and fall” claims—people tripping over curbs and the like. According to a recent ABC television documentary on America’s runaway legal system, because of inflated product liability costs consumers in the United States pay $500 more than they need to for every car they buy, $100 more for football helmets, and $3,000 more for heart pacemakers. According to the documentary, they even pay a little on top (as it were) for haircuts because one or two distressed customers successfully sued their barbers after being given the sort of embarrassing trims that I receive as a matter of routine.

All of which, naturally, has given me an idea. I am going to go and smoke eighty cigarettes, then slip and fall while drinking high-cholesterol milk and relating the plot of a
Seinfeld
show to a passing female in the Disneyland parking lot, and then I’ll call Vinny Slick and see if we can strike a deal. I don’t expect to settle for less than $2.5 billion—and that’s before we’ve even started talking about my latest haircut.