Taking Exception To Sergeant Joe Friday’s Admonition – Give Me The Facts, Just The Facts

Subject: Taking Exception To Sergeant Joe Friday’s Admonition – Give Me The Facts, Just The Facts
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015
From: Robert Teets <TeetsR@gorodissky.ru>

[Robert Teets is Counsel at Gorodissky & Partners in Moscow]

A baby-boomer from Ohio, I was nurtured on an empiricism that runs deep in American character and our television’s archetype of law and order definitively declared the supremacy of that methodology. And, one of the continuing attractions of Johnson’s List, in my now 20 years of expatriate life, principally in Russia, has been David’s painstaking quest to find illuminating facts to share as well as his scrupulousness in forcing upon us the annoying reality of multiple points of view and even diametrically contradictory tabulations of those nominally pellucid facts.

As an “A-V” rated, California trial practitioner as well as a Russian intellectual property jurist, I have long been uncomfortably cognizant of our very human psychological foibles including the notorious “false memory” syndrome and the revered (while fatally-flawed) “line-up” to establish eyewitness veracity. Donald Spence, Elizabeth Loftus, and Susan Haack are but three of an eminent cadre of the scientifically-minded who have brought a vital contrary intelligence along with powerful skepticism into our 21st century.

In a recent newspaper series, the Guardian (and the Rockefeller Foundation that underwrote the financial costs) have generously given us unusually close reportage about today’s “Moscow.” They have sought to present for an English-speaking readership “the” Moscow-that exists-beyond the Kremlin’s immense and fabled walls plus vignettes of “the” millions of Moscovites who live, work, and play outside of the coterie at the political apex or even in the many tiered circles of power and its brokering.

Unfortunately, I feel that this Guardian project markedly fails just as do many earnestly written squibs that David sweeps-up and culls for our digestion. The problem is that all too often, facts are matters perceived outside of their cultural and linguistic contexts. When that occurs, great misunderstandings regularly follow. This crystalized for me after reading the Guardian’s piece about the myriad apartment complexes that march out from Moscow’s historic center and populate the neighborhoods encircling (there are four ringroads that define our urban geometry) our capital.

This conundrum is brilliantly and concisely portrayed in two cinematic projects undertaken 31 years apart-Ryzanov’s “The Irony of Fate” (Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром,! 1976) and Bekmambetov’s “The Irony of Fate 2” (2007). Unfortunately, the Guardian news team omitted any mention of this primordial duo of philosophic and artistic cinematic diamonds.

Now it is true that the lyrics of Malvina Reynolds’ 1962 “Little Boxes” seem to be reinvented (if not to be reflected) in the stick-figured animation of dancing buildings that introduces Ryzanov’s 1976 classic, but his script and dense themes very quickly go to the depths of what so many in the West miss viz., Russians-like many of their neighboring European neighbors (i.e., generally non-Anglo-Saxon) are creatures profoundly connected to the heart and the soul (as opposed to empiricism and the wallet).

In so many ways, they quest after the puzzles of reality and the subtleties of human existence with a passion that most 20th and 21st century Americans would (and do) balk at, as in they [we] by in large do not “get it.” I, myself, still struggle with this critical polarity in perspectives about “what matters” (Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2011). Even before exchanging wedding vows with my beloved Ekaterina, I confronted this profound dichotomy while earning my masters degree in Russian law at the Institute of State & Law. Yet then, as now, I took some solace in the wisdom of Justice Holmes that the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. (The Common Law, 1881).

Reinforcing that vital point, the author Minae Mizumura wields laser-sharp words describing the void that lies between all languages: “If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.” (The Fall of Language in the Age of English, 2015).

The characters in these two iconic Russian cinema classics, across generations (and even the Soviet-New Russian divide) are so rich and true that there has not been a New Year’s, since at least 1995, that the first has not had a staring, prime-time place on Russian television. And for the past eight years, the continuation sequel has had parallel (if not equivalent) ranking, exposure, and popularity.

Why? Not because they speak of particular political verities or dogma but rather they manifest fundamental and human values that I have found sparse in my American life. The father questions the reality of time and the manner of its measurement, while the son ponders the forbidden love in a modern Russian “ckazka” involving a smitten bunny rabbit (“зайчик”) and a sleeping beauty. The father’s beloved sings a paradoxical song about all the things we may have-an aunt, house, friend, dog, wife, life itself-and how each may be lost. It ends: “Think for yourself, decide for yourself: to have or not to have,” which means we each must decide what things are worth having despite the peril of their loss. These are subjects that “matter” for the countless Russians who regale in watching these films again and again.

I am without a panacea and can only reiterate the critical necessity of there being so much more talking together (not just “at” one another) as opposed to all of the political bluster and crude characterizations that proliferate from the “once-upon-a-time great” NY Times as well as our Washington on the Potomac and its European sibling, Brussels. In this quest, we all must persevere.