Jonathan Rowe – Page 26

The Williams Way

Ted Williams’s body lies in a place called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, which freezes corpses for potential future use. His children are fighting over what comes … More

Book Review – The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly

The Divine Right of Capital
by Marjorie Kelly
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $24.95, 230 pages, 2001

It’s an old story: the child rebels against a parent and then turns out just like him or her. It can happen to a nation too, as Marjorie Kelly shows in her wonderful new book. The American colonists rejected Mother England and everything it stood for: aristocracy, special privilege, inherited wealth, the divine right of kings. Then they created a republic that—despite their best intentions—bred those very things, in the form of the modern corporation.

This is the back story in the Enron fiasco, the one the mainstream media won’t touch. Sure, we care about shareholders who lost their life savings. But what about the rest of us, our communities, and the planet? Kelly’s title is not facile populism. She means it. The modern corporation and its largest shareholders occupy a place in our society that royalty occupied in the one we supposedly cast off.

Tollbooths of the Mind

If one thing is central to the idea of America, it is the ability to breathe freely in the atmosphere of the mind. Thomas Jefferson was the champion of this ideal, and he saw that government was not the only threat to it. Taken too far, private property could shackle freedom, too, as the slaves from Africa knew only too well.

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property,” Jefferson wrote, “it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.”

Our Neglected Wealth

For a preview of the next big turn of the political wheel, we might consider a drama that is unfolding in the realm of computers and the World Wide Web.

For years, tech gurus touted the Web as a new frontier of freedom. Yet something very different has occurred. Fences and toll booths are going up all over. Marketers collect dossiers on us without our knowledge. Ads assault us at every click. The push increasingly is not to liberate information, but rather to contrive new ways to make us pay for it.

Relationship Between Silence and Progress

I suspect I’m not the only person who read about Father Llopis and thought, ‘Good for him.’ Probably I’m not the only one either who often wished that I, too, could jam the cell phones on a train, in a coffee shop or sometimes just walking down the street. So perhaps it’s time to ask some questions about those cell phones and noise and this strange thing the experts call ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’ I mean, what gives people who use cell phones and the corporations that operate them the right to fill our air with their noise? The air belongs to all of us. So how come those who want to fill it with their yakking and beeping get first dibs, and how come those of us who want to keep the quiet have to suffer in silence?

Here’s another thing. The device the priest used to block the cell phones in his church, it’s not legal in the US. Police departments use them, according to a manufacturer, and probably the Defense Department and the CIA, too, but you and I can’t. Why is it legal to use electronics to fill the air with noise, but not legal to use electronics to reject that noise? Why should those who trespass on our peace go free, while those who try to keep the peace could go to jail? It’s the same with the economy in general. It’s what’s happening with this whole big thing called ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’

Jeepneys are a Commuter’s Dream

Freedom can mean different and even opposite things. It can mean the freedom to emit muck into the air, for example, or the freedom to breathe clean air. In regard to transportation, it can mean the freedom to drive a car or the freedom that comes from not needing a car.

A beacon of that latter freedom is an unlikely place – the Philippines, a nation known mainly in the US these days for political melodrama and Muslim rebels. In the Philippines you can get virtually any place you need to go – from downtown Manila to the most remote rural barangay (village) – with little waiting and for very little money, without a car.

Our Factory of Need

The beliefs we most need to question are generally the ones we don’t notice, because they are so embedded in the drone of daily life. Wars and disasters tend to have unforeseen consequences for this very reason. They disrupt the drone, and so prompt questions that wouldn’t arise otherwise.

No beliefs are more entrenched in the United States than those regarding the economy. A couple of weeks ago I saw a banner headline in the local paper. “San Francisco Retailers’ Plea: Shop ‘Til You Drop,” it said. “Economy needs holiday spending.”

Clotheslines

My friend John Francis maintains that we must be the change we want to see. When he witnessed an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in the early 1970s, he swore off motorized transit for almost 20 years. When he saw people spouting opinions but not listening, he stopped talking, too, so that he could learn to listen better.

John walked and listened all the way across the United States, and down most of South America as well. He observed how changes in himself rippled out into his surroundings. Since he wasn’t talking, family and friends had to communicate by letter – a small step, as it were, for literacy. Since he walked everywhere, others had to adjust their pace to his. Life slowed down where John went. So, when we first spoke about recent events, it was not surprising that John didn’t dwell on feckless jingoism and the rest. Instead, the talk turned to clotheslines.

Is the Corporation Obsolete?

Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America Ed. Jack Betty
Book Review

Washington Monthly
July 1, 2001
By Jonathan Rowe

It is a sign of immersion that the thing immersed doesn’t notice. The fish, famously, is not aware of water. Dick Cheney and George W. Bush cannot see past their allegiance to the oil industry because it’s all they know–their water.

So it is with the corporation. Over the last century and a half, the corporation has become the dominant institution of American life, the “envelope of existence,” as one writer put it. It defines work, entertainment, politics, transportation, the way people think about their bodies and the world. Increasingly it dominates the cognitive environment of daily life. For all the kvetching about government, the corporation permeates our lives in much more basic ways.

The Hidden Commons

My wife grew up in what western experts call, not without condescension, a “developing” country. The social life of her village revolved largely around a tree. People gathered there in the evening to visit, tell stories, just pass the time. Some of my wife’s warmest childhood memories are of playing hide and seek late into the evening while the parents chatted under the tree — or on a neighbor’s porch, which was another version of the same thing.

The tree was more than a quaint meeting place. It was a productive asset — an economic asset in the root sense of that word. It produced a bonding of neighbors, an information network, an activity center for kids who ran and played and invented their own games. It provided a bridge between generations. Older people could be part of the flow of daily life, and children got to experience something scarce in the US today — an unstructured and noncompetitive setting in which their parents are close at hand. In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on everything from community centers to kiddie videos to try to achieve those results, with great inefficiency and often much less positive effect.