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Richard Dooling

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The Baby Boomers Are Arriving In Montana

The Baby Boomers Are Arriving In Montana

By Richard Dooling Originally published in the Wall Street Journal In the 1950s and ’60s, when televisions had three channels, the “Davy Crockett” series about the fearless frontiersman was so popular that Disney sold 5,000 imitation coonskin caps a day. I wore one of those caps for several summers. My wife, Kristy, didn’t wear a Polly Crockett cap—same coonskin design made of faux white fur—but we were both fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books and the “Little House on the Prairie” series based on them. Later we read Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” John McPhee’s “Coming Into the Country” and Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild.” As retirement loomed, our inner John Muir and the mountains were calling and we had to go. We wound up in a real-estate office in northwestern Montana, where we introduced ourselves to Nichole, the agent on duty. We were from Omaha and curious about moving to the mountains to “get away from it all.” Nichole helped us focus. Get away from what all? If we were escaping humanity, how far from humanity did we want to live? Just us and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “The Revenant”? Also, we were a two-headed client called a couple. […]

Book jacket of Richard Dooling

Has A Witch Spirit Taken Over Your Soul?

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The issue, then, is whether a witch person, or witch host would always know he or she had a witch spirit. The Mende disagree on this point, and so do the anthropologists. Some say that when a witch enters a village, it is like a powerful sound in a room filled with tuning forks. Or let’s use a Mende proverb: Hinda a wa hinda. ‘Something brings something,’ or, even better, ‘Like brings out like.’ In the Midwest, they might say, ‘If you plant corn, you get corn,’ something like that. Anyway, some forks respond to the frequency, others don’t, and those responding can ‘feel’ the frequency—they know they are witches, even though they will always deny it. But others say that often a witch host sees only malice, chaos, destruction, and evil all around him. As time goes on, he senses that the evil seems always to be linked to him. Then, perhaps he has a dream, or is skillfully questioned by a looking-around man or a witchfinder. Suddenly the witch host realizes that the darkness he always so quickly saw in others is really only his own dark powers reflected in the looking glasses of their innocent hearts. He […]

Two monkeys plugging their ear and not listening while trying to cover the other

Justice Holmes Teaches The First Amendment

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal. The more certain you are, the more you should resist the temptation to silence those who disagree. If you are absolutely certain that President Trump is or is not an idiot, that climate change is or is not the most pressing problem of our age, that abortion is or is not murder, that football players should or should not be allowed to kneel during the national anthem, that our nation needs more or fewer gun laws, welcome! Most of us feel the same way. Absolute certainty is common, as is the suspicion that anybody who is absolutely certain of the opposite view must be evil, ignorant or a gullible consumer of fake news. Along with absolute certainty comes the understandable impulse to regulate or ban the speech of your opponent. Why allow evil and ignorant people to infect others with falsehoods and dangerous ideas? Why not take away the licenses of broadcasters whose news departments have the wrong slant? Why not make hate speech illegal?  Almost a century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , wrestled with similar questions in a pair of Espionage Act cases. Holmes was absolutely certain that in most […]

Most Of These Guys Are Lawyers, Right?

Recent posturing by politicians hoping to censor their political opponents with obviously unconstitutional laws against speech remind me that there is nothing new under the sun. I wrote this piece for the New York Times back when online pornography, not vaccine misinformation, was the fear. NYT Op-Ed, June 15, 1996, by Richard Dooling Just how much Government time and expense went into drafting, debating and passing the Communications Decency Act, which was declared unconstitutional by a Federal district court last week? Imagine a second-year law student presented with this question on a constitutional law exam: Q. May the Government make it a crime punishable by two years in prison and a $250,000 fine to transmit to minors on the Internet “indecent” material — without defining “indecent”? Trained to be suspicious of the obvious, our student panics. The statute couldn’t be “void for vagueness,” could it? This couldn’t be the “overbreadth doctrine” learned on the first day of class, could it? Too easy! Must be a trick question. It belongs on a high school civics test. Yet politicians from two branches of government (President Clinton, a Yale law graduate, signed the bill) spent the last year posturing for the camera, providing […]

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