I won't claim to know much about the Jose Padilla trial that prompted this essay, but Garrison Keillor has written a wonderful and humorous piece on the dangers of writing for unknown readers and the hazards of being (mis)interpreted....
We are invisibly linked through words I have written, and yet the meaning of those words, as determined by a jury of twelve men and women good and true, could be far, far from what I intended, and as I sit there at the defense table in the Miami courtroom, smelling the musky cologne of your idiot attorney, looking past him at you, you wretched cretin, as the linguistics expert for the state, a tall bunheaded woman with a Ph.D. in literary deconstruction, testifies that the subtext of my column in question was a command that you plant an explosive device in the heel of your cowboy boot and try to run through airport security hollering "I'm a-comin', Mama!" I am going to think back on my life and wish I had become a gardener. Nobody was ever indicted for watering plants.
0 comments:
Post a Comment