One of the advantages of a legal education — at least American legal education, based on the case method — is that there’s a story behind every case, with real people behind it. (My Civil Procedure professor, David Shapiro, said this on the first day of law school — and qualified it with the observation that in Civ Pro, actually, the cases can be kind of dull.) Having a story is especially true with the federal court rule against “advisory opinions” — courts prefer to (and in some cases can only) rule on an issue when an actual real-life result rides on the outcome.
It turns out that the Russian singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-80) — a very gritty songwriter who wrote a lot about blue-collar life, criminals, and the like, and who of course was an alcoholic and died young — discovered the same idea, in his song The Penal Code:
We don’t need complicated subjects and plots —
We know it all, whatever you give us.
For instance, I think our Penal Code
Is better than any book on earth.And if I’m restless and can’t sleep
Or if I’m dead from a hangover,
I’ll open the Code on any page,
And I can’t help but read it to the end.I never gave my comrades advice,
But I know robbery is a great honor with them.
Well, I just read about this:
“No less than three, no more than ten.”Just think about these simple lines, —
Why do we need the novels of all times and lands?
There’s everything in them — barracks as long as terms,
Scandals, fights, cards, and betrayal.I wish I’d never seen these lines in a hundred years —
Behind each one I see someone’s fate!
And I’m happy when the section isn’t too bad:
Someone may yet get lucky.And my heart beats like a wounded bird
When I start reading my own section.
And the blood in my temples bursts and pounds so,
Like when the cops come to get you.
Yes, I know, he’s talking about statutory law. But still. By the way, Vysotsky also has a song about the siege of Leningrad (I Grew Up in the Leningrad Blockade), which my father lived through as a small child — also told from the perspective of a troublemaker. I’m afraid my literal translation doesn’t give much of the playfulness of the song (yes, it’s actually dark humor), but here goes anyway:
I grew up in the Leningrad blockade,
But I didn’t drink or go out back then.
I saw the burning of the bombed-out food warehouses,
And I stood in line for a bit of bread.Brave citizens!
And what were you doing back then,
When our city wasn’t even counting its dead?
You were eating bread with caviar,
While I was using for cigars
Cigarette butts off the platform, half mixed with God knows what.The birds didn’t even fly from the frost,
And the thief didn’t have anything to steal,
My parents that winter were taken by the angels,
And all I cared about was not falling down.We were up to here
With the hungry and the dystrophic —
We were all starving, even the D.A.
And you, in the evacuation,
Were reading the news
And listening to Walter Cronkite on the radio.The blockade got long, too long,
But our people kicked its enemies’ asses —
And now we’re living snug as a bug in a rug,
Except that the cops keep getting in the way.I’m telling you gently:
Good citizens with your neighborhood watch badges!
Keep your filthy paws out of my soul!
As for your private,
Unpatriotic life —
The DOJ and CIO already know all about it.
For those of you who are interested, here are some translated Vysotsky lyrics, though you really have to listen to it to get the flavor: at the very least, imagine it in the voice of Tom Waits. Here’s a funny song about reincarnation, written in the actual rhyme and rhythm of the original. Not only is it pretty funny, but you can also get the audio by clicking on the top-left link in the Russian version, and sing along in English. But since it’s funny and has nothing to do with criminals, it’s not classic Vysotsky.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader Michael Guerzhoy for notes on the second translation.
UPDATE 2: About the song about reincarnation: the Russian version I link to above has the following line in Russian, in the second line of the last big stanza: “S uma soshli genetiki ot gen i khromosom,” or “Geneticists have gone mad from genes and chromosomes.” But the English translation says, “He who was no one shall be all, just think what that implies!”
What’s going on here? An alternate line in the Russian version — in fact, the version in which I first heard this song, on a Vysotsky videotape — says: “Kto byl nikem, tot stanet vsem — zadumaisia o tom!”, meaning “Who was no one will become everything — think about that!” This is funny because “Who was no one will become everything” is an old socialist slogan from The Internationale, a line which sadly didn’t make the English version (but see the South African version which does contain the line).
So the version on the official Vysotsky site is the less controversial one, but also the less funny one.
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