CHAPTER 40: The Forks take a holiday pause while Professor T scrambles to recover from his unfortunate holiday kick in the nads.
In the wake of the judge’s disastrous decision for the plaintiff, Abigail Weiser, Professor T woke up to find the local newspaper’s Sunday Edition had included a report/commentary focused on the absurdity of the matter in stark terms. The author was fairly well known in Professor T’s local area as a razor wit, with very little tolerance for puffery and pretense. He called the affair an exhibition of the great American farce. He said the proceding had offered a spectacle so perfectly distilled in its idiocy that one is forced to marvel anew at the sheer, unadulterated buffoonery of the human animal. That the case of Professor T and Abigail Weiser could stand as a gleaming monument to the contemporary battle of the sexes…a gladiatorial contest wherein the irresistible force of modern female vindictiveness collides spectacularly with the immovable object of male blockheadedness.
Not mincing words…here, read the rest of the column:
Observe, if you have the stomach for it, the plaintiff. Ms Weiser represents that uniquely modern breed of emancipated professional woman who, having loudly proclaimed her absolute equality and fierce independence, immediately retreats to the Victorian fainting couch the moment a bruised ego can be monetized. Harboring a simmering resentment over a romantic rebuff from the good Professor, she did not challenge him to a duel, nor did she simply seek out the company of a man with functioning eyesight and a pulse. Instead, she tripped into the defendant’s arms in his private office, waited for the exact moment of maximum awkwardness, and then summoned the weeping sisters of the Title IX industrial complex. Here we witness the crowning achievement of modern feminist jurisprudence: the magical alchemy that transforms the mundane indignity of unrequited crush into a $350,000 claim for “career stagnation.” It is a grift so transparent, so beautifully cynical, that one almost wishes to applaud her, were she not so entirely devoid of the charm required to pull it off.
But let us shed no tears for Professor Thompson, a man who proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that a string of advanced degrees is the surest armor against basic common sense. As a specimen of the American male, he is a pedagogical monk of the first order, wandering through life with the oblivious entitlement of a man who believes the universe is a purely logical mechanism. Confronted by an obvious extortion racket engineered by Ms Weiser, he responded not with the ruthless cunning required to survive the modern American workplace, but with a naive, bleating faith that ‘truth and justice’ would prevail. What manner of colossal boob still expects truth and justice in an American courtroom? He is a man who absent-mindedly waltzes into a women’s locker room, utterly blind to the absence of urinals until confronted by a towel-clad fury, handing the professional puritans and culture-war hysterics their favorite ballyhoo on a silver platter. He went into a legal knife fight armed with nothing but the belief that his sheer innocence would shield him, neglecting even to prep his own character witnesses. He is the architect of his own public flaying, a martyr to his own magnificent hubris.
The trial itself, naturally, was a carnival of faux-moral outrage, presided over by a judge already emasculated by a spouse who makes her living shrieking about bathroom invasions. Into this circus strode the true masters of the Republic: Francis Scheizer and Brian Bok, a pair of ambulance-chasing pettifoggers who possess all the ethical grandeur of tapeworms. Bok, an Ichabod Crane figure hiding behind his fleshy partner, lobbed cheap provocations while Scheizer wept crocodile tears over the ‘utter villainy’ of a man whose primary sin was failing to return a crush. The legal profession has always been a refuge for scoundrels, but these two mountebanks elevated the shakedown to a high art, preying on the judge’s biases and the gallery’s insatiable appetite for witch hunts.
And so, the gavel fell, and the great wheel of cosmic comedy completed its turn. The judge, functioning less as a jurist and more as a high priest of the prevailing moral panic, awarded the plaintiff seventy thousand simoleons. But the climax of this sordid little drama is where the true genius of the American system reveals itself. Professor Thompson, suddenly locating his spine only after his head had been severed, pledges total financial ruin rather than part with a single dime to this judgement. Consequently, the victorious Ms Weiser finds herself abandoned on the battlefield, clutching a worthless judgment while the jackals of Scheizer and Bok turn their ravenous appetites upon her for their exorbitant fees.
The man loses his fortune and reputation to a phantom grievance…the woman faces personal and professional ruination at the hands of the very bloodsuckers she hired to soothe her bruised vanity. It is a flawless symmetry of mutually assured destruction. The battle of the sexes rages on, and as always, the only clear victors are the lawyers, while the rest of us are left to enjoy the unparalleled comedy of a civilization eagerly tearing itself to pieces over hurt feelings and misplaced faith.
As you might guess, this column was received with whispers and chuckles from Professor T’s hometown “coffee shop congress.” But, as a side effect, the columnist’s perspective gave Professor T an occasion to give Abigail’s motivations some deeper consideration. That said, it was a brief pause. He quickly snapped out of this reverie in the pool of compassion, and so then focused his ire toward the office of Scheizer & Bok. How to confound their rascally deeds… how to get revenge.
These are the conditions with which poor Mork T had approached the holidays. A sad state of affairs, indeed.
NEXT WEEK:
Buck Wellstone offers a different perspective on how Professor T can confound the extortion plot, reconcile with Ms Weiser, and avoid the enormous burdon of the court’s verdict over damages.
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