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 I’m on strike. I’m in the WGA, the Writers’ Guild of America (East), and I’m on strike. That means no writing for money, no working Guild jobs, no crossing picket lines, no scabbing. I can write for this show, because it doesn’t pay. What I can’t do is research anything for any reason, because that research could become knowledge that I might one day use in a script written as part of a Guild job. Or worse, I might accidentally divulge that knowledge to a scab, who might then write something based on that knowledge—so it’s safest if I don’t learn anything new. It’s too much of a threat to our collective bargaining power.

Obviously, no one can remain entirely ignorant of what’s going on in the world. Not even the President. It’s unavoidable then, that, here and there, this or that might leak out of the zeitgeist and into my brain, on strike though my brain may be.

Case and point: a friend of mine told me Alan Dershowitz had an op-ed in last week’s Wall Street Journal defending torture. Ordinarily, my learning such information might constitute a breech of union solidarity. I might begin to wonder what sort of defense Alan Dershowitz had come up with for torture, and there would begin the inevitable process of fantastical and fabulistic invention and imagination—exactly the thing I’m on strike from. I might even be tempted to read Mr. Dershowitz’s op-ed to find out what his argument is.

Luckily, none of that is necessary. I mean, it is, after all, an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz defending torture. It not as if someone has figured out something persuasive to say about why torture is a good thing. There can be no fabulistic invention or imagination, because there is nothing to spark it. There can be no flights of fancy, because for flight, one needs air, and there can certainly be nothing as substantial as air, not even hot air, in an op-ed by Alan Dershowitz defending torture. Dershowitz cannot possibly have presented anything new or insightful or remotely worthwhile. It’s plainly inconceivable.

And don’t you dare call me closed-minded. It’s not that I would be unwilling to be persuaded by a persuasive argument written by Alan Dershowitz, it’s just that Alan Dershowitz is zero-percent certain to present one. Think about it. Be honest. Do you really need to read... read more