2005 – Page 2 – Jonathan Rowe

Product Bias: The End of the Romance

You’ve heard about the new iPod video player and believe me, this is big. Now kids will be able to watch movies behind their textbooks in class. They’ll have another way to sit in the back seat and ignore their parents on family car trips. I mean, we wouldn’t want parents and kids actually to talk with one another.

That’s not all. The iPod has spawned a host of devices that enable people to use them while driving. Harmon-Kardon makes one called the Drive + Play, which includes a remote screen you stick on the dashboard and a sort of mini-joystick to put near the gear shift. (Cost: $199.00) I don’t know if this works with video iPods – yet – but the audio version is bad enough.

The Concept of the Fall

There is a dimension of tragedy to the events unfolding in Washington – tragedy in the classic sense. The White House’s woes are not the result of the usual partisan scheming. The President’s party runs the entire government; even the prosecutor is a Republican. Unlike Watergate, moreover, the protagonist in this case is not a crusading press.

What’s happening instead is tragedy in almost pure form. It was the hubris of the President and his aides, their belief that the rules did not apply to them, that has summoned forth the enforcement of those rules in a most unlikely way. Rarely in Washington has there been such a sense that the characters behind the deed, rather than their pursuers, were themselves evoking the punishment for them.

This Land is Their Land

There is a grim symmetry to the gasoline act that recently passed the House of Representatives, in particular the provision to make old military bases available for oil refineries. Take land once used to defend the nation, and use it to feed the habit that makes much of that defense necessary.

That’s the dance that has defined much of the Bush Administration: oil, defense, and then more oil. In this the public lands – our lands – have played a central role. Much as junkies rob their mothers’s purses, the Administration and Congress have been pilfering the public lands to help the oil industry string the nation out a little longer.

Who Owns the Beach

Some seventy percent of the earth’s surface consists of oceans, and we all own it. But getting access to what we own isn’t always easy. Or even possible.

Here’s the basic math. Half the population of the U.S. lives within 50 miles of the coast. But 70% of coastal land is privately owned; and the percentage is increasing all the time. A relatively small group of private owners constitutes a blockade to a much larger group of common owners. What gives?

Harriet Miers and the Market Stalls of Manila

The hounds are sniffing for a paper trail on Harriet Miers, the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court. Yet a matter of great significance is out in the open, in her official biography, and most opponents don’t seem to notice. Ms. Miers was a corporate attorney in Dallas. Her clients included Microsoft and Disney, and her specialties included what is called “intellectual property.” This deserves a look.

Microsoft and Disney have been leaders – if that’s the word – in pushing the boundaries of the copyright laws far beyond what the Founders intended. They have helped to criminalize the ordinary act of sharing with a friend; and they have set in motion what seems destined to become a property police state. In the process they have helped to stymie the very engines of creativity that the copyright (and also patent ) laws were intended to advance.

Sissifying the West

Theodore Roosevelt must be a tempting icon for the White House message crew to invoke. A virile Republican, a man’s man who carried the banner of imperialism with pride and the white man’s burden that went with it. Who said children of privilege couldn’t be tough?

Look closer, though, and you can see why a comparison with the Republican Roosevelt is not one the White House is eager to invite. TR didn’t just play act about patriotism, for example. He laced up his boots and faced the bullets, at age 40 no less. He stood up to corporadoes; and he had the kind of stubborn rectitude that would have served as insect repellent to a Karl Rove. Most inconvenient of all, TR was a lover of nature. “Roosevelt had a profound, almost Indian veneration for trees,” his biographer Edmund Morris observes. “Walking on silent, moccasined feet down a luminous nave of pines, listening to invisible choirs of birds, he came close to religious rapture.”

What if the Customers are Wrong?

This is a story about a coach, and also about the market, and the tragedy it can work on the moral influences in the lives of kids.

Partisans of the market applaud the way it turns us into consumers. This for them is the preferred social role in pretty much all our life dealings. As consumers we know our self-interest. As consumers we choose wisely; and the aggregate of our individual choices therefore is the greatest possible common good. But we sagacious consumers suddenly turn stupid when we become voters and citizens. We make bad choices, or are easily duped. So it is better to keep that role to a minimum – to ratifying the market, sort of the way shareholders ratify management.

How to Pay for Katrina

In the psychodrama of market theory, capital is the Promethean force. Its capacity to produce human betterment is without limit. It can surmount any obstacle, extricate humanity from any woe, so long as government does not dispirit it with taxes or bind it with regulations. Mere work is a piker in comparison.

What then about flips? Flipping is the practice of buying real estate in an up market, and then unloading it a few weeks or months later at a big gain. In some jurisdictions the flipper doesn’t even take legal title to the property; he or she deals in contracts to buy, so as to avoid recording and transfer taxes. Apologists invoke “market liquidity” and the like in an attempt to include such scheming in the heroic drama of capital.

Looting, Necessity and the Community of Goods

We reveal ourselves in our instinctive response to another’s need. When the President received reports of people breaking into stores in New Orleans, he saw a threat to property rather than a desperate need for food and water. Enough said.

In truth of course both were involved – lawless looting and desperate need. The extent of the latter became more apparent, when it came out that even the police had to break into stores to get crucial electronic equipment. A hundred miles north of New Orleans, a hungry man threatened to get his gun if the manager of the local Wal-Mart didn’t open it for business. How many of us wouldn’t do the same?

What Greenspan Can’t See

The President’s response to his administration’s ineptitude regarding Katrina has been to distance himself from it. He’s calling for an “investigation,” as though someone other than himself was in charge. His helpers meanwhile are mounting an attack on his critics and shifting the blame to local officials – red letter moves from the Karl Rove playbook.

I’m not sure it will fly. The story has gone pretty far beyond the White House spin. When the President appeared in staged photo-ops with his arms around children of color, it just reminded people of how little he has done. Then again, the Washington media is both obedient and gullible. Plus, the President’s critics haven’t done a great job of framing the issue either.