Clapping for Tinkerbell?

Most of us are familiar with the ending of Peter Pan, when the audience is called on to bring Tinkerbell back to life by clapping. Apparently, fairies aren't the only ones who need a little encouragement to keep going:

"Lawyers, though never popular, have hit an all-time low in public esteem," Stanford University law professor Barbara Allen Babcock wrote recently. "Books and bar speeches abound on failing faith and lost lawyers. Needless aggression and soulless unconcern about societal consequences - such is the indictment from the outside. Internally, the complaint is that our learned profession has become a bottom-line business."

A peculiar aspect of this loss of public standing is a declining influence in politics, and the California Legislature is a case in point.

At one time - a few decades ago - lawyers made up nearly half of the 120-member Legislature and dominated its most powerful positions.

Similarly, a few decades ago, farmers made up the majority of the legislature here in the cheese state, but now they don't. I think it's got something to do with the pay and the work hours, and writing silly laws about regulating cows and corn, but, um, where was I? Oh yeah.

It got me to thinking about a certain someone's absence from the cheese blog. Could it be the result of one too many lawyer jokes, like the one that opened the above article: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? Three - one to turn the bulb, one to shake him off the ladder and a third to sue the ladder company.

Or could it be the long hours of lawyerly blogging, which then must be rewritten into words, phrases and the occasional farm analogy that the masses, in their less-edified condition, require? One might well wilt under such trying circumstances. Perhaps KJ has wilted, and needs to be revived.

I know how we can help him, we can let him know how much we appreciate him. Clap, people, clap! Clap your hands and bring him back to life!