2005 – Page 3 – Jonathan Rowe

The Levees Around Us

I don’t go along with the view that the devastation of New Orleans was God’s punishment for the moral failings of some of the people there. I say that not because I don’t take scripture seriously but because I do. Jesus tried over and over to shake his disciples from the Old Testament belief that misfortunes in the external world betoken the hand of a wrathful God. The disciples wanted to know for example whether a particular man was blind because of his own sins or those of his parents.

But Jesus wasn’t into blame. He said, in effect, “That’s irrelevant. Shut up and heal him.” Another time, and more to the present point, he asked them whether they thought the people who died when a tower fell in Siloam “were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem.” Jesus answered his own question. “Nay,” he said. “But, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

Traffic School

It is the nature of evil to wear us down. The drip-drip-drip of injustice and institutionalized greed, leave us both resigned and numb. Or else it insinuates itself into our lives until it becomes a new normal, and we cease to notice. Dictators understand this; Hitler turned the screws slowly. So too do corporations, which push the boundaries of the acceptable inch by inch instead of all at once.

This helps explain the generational aspect of dissent. To feel outrage, one must be able to remember — or at least imagine — something different. (Not for nothing do dictators and corporations seek to enlist children.) A Vance Packard could write with outrage at the psychological wiles of the modern advertising industry because, in the 1950s, he could remember when commerce was simpler and more straightforward.

Build It and They Will Sit

I doubt Garrett Hardin ever met William H. Whyte but he should have. Hardin of course was the academic who, in abstract and theoretical terms, declared the commons inherently “tragic, “ He backtracked later but it was too late. The tag stuck.

Whyte was the writer who spent years observing how people actually act and interact in public spaces. He walked the streets, sat with notebook in plazas and parks, set up cameras in unobtrusive places and spent endless hours studying the results. He could have told Mr. Hardin a thing or two.

Junk Law

The President has declared war on what he calls “junk lawsuits,” but the only kind of legal action that seems to bother him is when ordinary people seek justice from large corporations. When the shoe is on the other foot — when the corporations are siccing their lawyers on you and me — there seems to be no problem.

Take Ma Bell. Not the telephone company; it doesn’t exist any more. I mean Michele Yontef, a private investigator in Tucson, Arizona, who searches for missing children and the like. Ms. Yontef goes by the name “Ma Bell,” in part because her father used to sing to her the Beatles’ song “Michelle,” which includes the line “Michelle, ma belle.”

Stuff the Suits

We’ve all heard the justifications for the emerging property police state — the copyright term extensions, the international jihad on infringers, the government mandating of anti-copying technology and the rest. It’s to protect the “creative process,”, the inspired artist laboring away in a basement or garage.

To listen to the whining from the film and recording industries, it is a wonder that a Charlie Chaplin ever bothered to pick up a camera, or Frank Sinatra to croon a song, seeing that the term of copyright was much shorter in their days than it is now.

Train

She said something about Josh, who was asleep on my shoulder. Such a sweet boy. Those eyes. I thanked her, asked if she had kids. A daughter, she said, eighteen. Was it hard, her daughter leaving home? Yes. When she looked at her did she still see the three year old the daughter used to be? Yes again.

I think about that a lot, I said, how one day I’ll look at Josh and wonder what happened to the little guy who called me Dadda and fell asleep on my shoulder. She could get choked up over this, she said. Our eyes retreated into our own thoughts.

Reptilian Economics

What do you say about people who define “rationality” as a myopic focus on the self and its desires, and who regard the well being of others as an “externality”in the drama of life? What do you say of people who can’t tell the difference between price and value, and who think that when a kid sits on a couch and plays video games and feeds his face with junk food, and then needs medications for obesity and attention deficit, the result is a “virtuous circle” of consumption that betokens prosperity and “growth”?

If you are such a person — ie an economist of the conventional sort — then you call this Nobel-worthy brilliance. You heap accolades upon a Gary Becker, the economist at the University of Chicago who wrote a book analyzing interactions within a family in terms of this self-seeking model. (“Ten dollars tonight dear? Fifteen?”) If you are a member of the news media, then you quote such lights as oracles of great authority.

News Flash: Right Embraces Precautionary Principle

Politicians need to be careful about invoking large principles to get themselves out of political jams. The principle they thump the tub with today might be the one they want to run from tomorrow. In for a little, in for a lot as the old saying goes.

Ideologues are especially prone to this temptation, since they fancy that every thought in their noggins and every utterance from their lips comes from on high. The invasion of Iraq has been a case in point, in particular the current mess regarding Karl Rove and his Tricky Dickery. The Right has tried to extricate itself by, among other things, harkening to high principles of national security and prudence. In the process they have backed themselves into agreement with advocates of action on global warming and other environmental threats. They just don’t seem to realize it yet.

Corporations, Constructed Strictly

The President says he wants Supreme Court justices who will interpret the Constitution as it is written, not according to what they wish it says. It’s a good speech line, but I don’t think the President really means it.

People on the Left generally assume that “strict construction” is Right Wing code for overturning Roe v. Wade, environmental protections and the like. And indeed it is. But it’s also more. Ideologically the doctrine cuts both ways, because “judicial activism” has cut both ways. It was a blatant act of judicial activism, for example, that took the protections of the Bill of Rights, which Jefferson et al intended for real people, and extended them to artificial persons called corporations.

Free the Seeds

The U.S. military is in Iraq to fight for the freedom of the Iraqi people. That we all know. It is not the only thing they are fighting for. On some days, such as those that followed the bombings in London, the troops are there to fight terrorists, who conveniently have congregated in that country so that the U.S. might rid the world of them more easily. But basically, the U.S. is in Iraq to fight for freedom.

But of what does that freedom consist? What powers and choices will Iraqis enjoy that justify the shedding of so much of their blood? Who will decide what those are? A partial answer starts in an unlikely place — the California State Legislature. It suggests that freedom isn’t what it used to be, unless you are a global corporation bent on laying claim to the world’s remaining commons.