Dan goes after Newsweek for labeling all of us in the PRC stress cases:

But when one out of 1.3 billion Chinese loses it and commits murder, there are apparently all sorts of things we can and should extrapolate. In "Murder at the Drum Tower," Newsweek uses the knifing of the Minnesota couple inside Beijing’s drum tower during the Olympics as evidence of China being on the verge of a total meltdown.

While I agree with him, you can’t really fault reporters for sensationalizing a nice juicy murder. A good stabbing, shooting or (dare I say it) a defenestration is highly entertaining. Going a giant step further and fantasizing about an entire nation of psychos is extremely appealing, particularly if you are on the foreign affairs beat. Sounds like Pulitzer material to me.

I’m not sure if merely living in China qualifies one to be a psycho-in-waiting, or whether it is some sort of ethnic thing. It doesn’t really matter to me since my profession eats, drinks and inhales stress as a matter of course. Stress among lawyers is romanticized in many nations, and divorces and psychotic breakdowns are just a sign that you are a hard worker. Those are the guys that get promoted to partner.

Noting this about lawyers, one wonders why there are not more incidents of attorneys going postal. I haven’t heard of a lawyer going on a murderous rampage in a long time. Odd.

This is just speculation, but since lawyer rage is so easy to predict, perhaps long ago governments and bar associations worldwide got together and started doping all of us with a combination of lithium, valium, and LSD. This explains my general lack of energy (evidence: sporadic blog posting) and those psychedelic moments I had last week during that contract negotiation. I thought that opposing counsel was Thor, and every time he gestured at me with his pen, I juked to the side to avoid what I thought were lightning bolts coming at me from his pen, which had either "Mont Blanc" or "Mjollnir" written on the side — I couldn’t see clearly. Apparently Nixon was correct about the madman strategy as they agreed to everything I wanted during the negotiation.

If you want to understand more about this nefarious lawyer doping program, go out and see the movie Jacob’s Ladder. The original story was about lawyers, but the facts were changed before the movie was released because lawsuits were threatened. Damn lawyers.

Some of us cope with stress better than others, of course. Dan, for example, manifests his lawyer stress psychosis with a pathological hatred of Billy Joel. All in all, this is fairly benign compared to some lawyers I know. I used to work for a partner, for example, who when faced with a demanding client would revert to a fantasy existence where he thought he was a hamster — also fairly benign, but I did get tired of following him around and picking up all those little . . . well, you understand.

I’ve stressed myself out from writing this. Better go have a beer.