Review by Ed Quillen
Legal system – September 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
Me and the Law: The Philosophy of a Common Man
by Lindell Cline
Published in 1995
by Voice of the Common People, P.O. Box 200, Buena Vista CO 81211
ISBN 0-94644042-0-6
If you like cracker-barrel philosophers (with all that implies, for better or worse), then you’ll enjoy an evening or two with portions of Me and the Law. Across 400-plus pages of essays, reminisces, and poetry, Lindell Cline argues for what he calls a “reasonablist” position: “One whose philosophy is based on reason and who believes reason will ultimately prevail.”
And often, he does offer a voice of sweet reason, as when he points out that all systems eventually become self-serving, in that their original purpose gets left behind as other matters demand more attention. Schools are a good example. They’re supposed to educate children, but at any school board meeting you’ll hear a lot more about bus schedules, lunches, employee benefits, playground sod, and leaking roofs than you will about whether kids are learning anything.
But on the other hand, Cline’s belief in reason sometimes seems questionable. For instance, he states that “no attempt has been made to place the blame where it belongs for our present health-care problems: on the backs of those who propose to reform it.”
Now, reformers might make things worse instead of improving things. That often happens.
But reformers certainly can’t be the ones responsible for the current system — they’re the people who want to change that system, not the people who designed it. Cline seems so angry that he doesn’t care where he aims, reason or no reason.
Anger, more than Cline’s beloved reason, infuses much of the book, with hostility directed at many familiar targets: lawyers, evangelists, police, government, repressed-memory syndrome, schools.
In book-sized doses, all this anger is hard to digest. In bite-sized chunks, Cline presents some lively writing and good argument from time to time. Some culling by the author, or an editor, would have produced a shorter but better book, one that would be provocative and interesting, rather than so overwhelming in its rage.
— Ed Quillen
