LAWYERS GEAR UP TO TRASH THE BASHERS

They can't fool me. A lot has been written lately about lawyer bashing. The articles are part of a ruse. Writers use them as an opportunity to spread lawyer jokes, which are the currency of the bashing to begin with.

In a recent Time magazine article on this very subject, the reporter sneaks in three lawyer jokes over the course of the first seven paragraphs, especially brutal gags that put attorneys in the dubious company of toxic waste, human sperm and a particularly distasteful postage stamp.

This is some pretty shifty reporting, camouflaging a desire to repeat these jokes and give them the widest possible dissemination, all under the guise of thorough journalism.

Well, you won't find such furtive practices in this piece ... unless you haven't heard what they call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean ....

No, none of that cheap reporting here.

All of this has received a good airing lately because members of the American Bar Association and some its state chapters have taken to wearing emotions on their starched sleeves. They've grown a bit weary about the proliferation of abuse heaped on this time-honored occupation.

(It is, after all, the second-oldest profession. Who do you think represented the prostitutes in court?)

What these bar groups say is that late-night comics, frustrated politicians and basically the American rabble that repeats these incessant lawyer jokes are casting their livelihood into not only a bad light, but a dangerous one.

Last month, an armed man upset by his legal representation found his way into a San Francisco law office and started shooting. The president of the California Bar Association went before the television cameras and blamed not the gun laws or the derangement of a single individual, but instead saw it as a natural, violent progression in the rising tide of "lawyer bashing."

There ... the word has been presented. Bashing. It is the resulting action of all politically incorrect thought, and in using applying the word, the California Bar president thrusts the barristers of his constituency into the brotherhood of victims.

He also portrayed the nasty comments aimed at lawyers as "hate speech." It doesn't hurt to go a bit over the top in closing arguments, counselor, but hate speech? When the Klan holds a public rally against attorneys in Sacramento, then we'll believe it. Until then, consider yourself in the little league of bashing.

Still, the national bar group hired an image consultant (at $170,000 a year) to profess outrage any time the profession is bad-mouthed. He supposedly milked an apology from Jay Leno, an assertion substantiated only by the consultant and which had the "Tonight Show" host rolling his eyes.

An interesting strategy: First, kill all the tastemakers.

For talk-show hosts and many others in our society, lawyers seem safe targets. In the current environment of raised ethnic, gender and sexual sensitivity (What are we going to do, go back to telling Polish jokes?), it seems a benign enterprise to poke fun at a profession that is still mostly male, mostly white and mostly well-to-do. Most of society is clued in enough not to tell or laugh at jokes concerning black, homeless females.

If anyone has a beef, it is the blond-haired women of our society, who for a period of time suffered a vicious series of jokes that portrayed them as morons. (Despite the endless retelling of one, I never saw anyone put white-out on a computer screen.)

At some point, blondes will arrange a press conference during which they will decry the bashing they've taken and declare themselves before the eyes of the nation as victims.

Blonde jokes will be a form of hate speech.

And if lawyers think they have it bad, what about newspaper people? History is not on the side of journalists; scribes were smacked around on a regular basis long before Shakespeare included that line about killing lawyers.

Newspaper folks can compete easily with lawyers in terms of unpopularity. If an attorney isn't responsible some of life's problems, the news media must have played a part.

More distressing, journalists work in public more often than lawyers do, they have less opportunity to cover their mistakes and they seldom find the solace attorneys do in big paychecks.

This profession needs a support group. Like lawyers, though, no one sees reporters as downtrodden or especially put upon.

I don't believe Jay Leno's nightly taunts spurred some distraught soul to shoot up a law office any more than I believe griping about late mail delivery prompted a pattern of shootings by postal employees. Hate speech requires someone to say something and someone to hear it, and the attitude of both speaker and listener is critical to the process. But lawyer jokes, which have a limited shelf life like all jokes, are now grating on even those lawyers with a good sense of humor.

Maybe we should start picking on the blondes again. Or maybe start behaving ourselves.

As for newspaper people, we would do well to follow the lead of lawyers and turn the lemons of criticism into the lemonade of victimization. As it stands now, we don't regard it as hate speech. To us, it's just a day at the office.