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"After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, and innumerable histrionics, this Court is left to conclude that with this lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'"

And so the federal district judge would shut the drawer on the 1996 scandal known as Filegate.

While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs' allegations that their privacy had been violated  ? and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act ? after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode ? about which they do have cause to complain ? was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.

By the way the there that wasn't there for Gertrude Stein was Oakland, California, which really does exist. She just didn't think much of it. I'm not sure what that says about Filegate.

Ever since Gertrude Stein wrote that there was ?no there there? during a return trip to her childhood home in Oakland, California, her words have been distorted to imply that Oakland was a ?nowhere,? a dissing along the lines of Neil Young?s ?Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,? which was funny for Young, a transplanted Canadian singer, to write for an U.S. pop market, because Young had really been a Californian before he transplanted himself to California, as Stein had been really been an American in Paris long before she left the U.S., and returning to her ?there is no there there,? she later clarified that the Oakland of her childhood was gone, she was commenting on her great theme, not just hers, of course, a great thread in American literature concerning place and memory, we all lose the place of our childhood, and in adulthood clutch that place, or more accurately, a complex tangled image of that place, close to our bosom, as Cather did with her....

Hey, wait a minute. I see what he's doing there. That sentence goes on for 1,316 words more. Essay dismissed.

Full post as published by Althouse on March 09, 2010 (boomark / email).