Stranger Things . . .

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, Space, and Salvation

For ECD.

Jubal Harshaw is a grumpy old man who surrounds himself with beautiful women and an electric fence in an Edenic retreat in the Poconos in
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing,
since he has an uncanny talent for irritating almost anybody, redeemed
by a keen wit and a nose for the sweet spot in a bargain. When there
is blood in the water, Harshaw smells it. The key clue, among quite a
few, that this balding contrarian is a stand in for author Heinlein
himself is that he largely makes his living by spontaneously dictating
short stories. Although his periodic pontifications on the nature and
history of almost anything gives the game away almost as easily.
Harshaw, among other roles, serves as the chorus expounding upon the
themes of sex, freedom, stories, and salvation that comprise the major
themes of the book. The book is technologically uninspired but
conceptually bold; the space motif liberates the author by allowing
him to imagine a radically asexual Apollonian immortal consciousness
from Mars with which to contrast short-lived, sex-crazed humanity.

The criticism of a classic, even in such a typically underrated genre
as science fiction, is not to be undertaken without trepidation. In
this case, Heinlein's magnum opus wears rather better than perhaps his
second best-known book, Starship Troopers, in which hyperactive
soldiers in futuristic body armor combat giant "bugs" for mastery of
the universe after taking control of the earth. Much science fiction,
and Heinlein's work is no exception, is rather glandular, driven by
the kind of testosterone soaked combination of lust and aggression
most typical of young men in late adolescence. The question is
whether there is anything more.

For all his vaunted conservatism in other matters, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange land is an unqualified endorsement of free love, at
least, ahem, so long as it takes place between men and women, in fact,
the more women the better. Big busted, round hipped, conventionally
sexy women, mind you, although there is the occasional deviation, such
as the carnival woman who is tattooed with religious imagery from head
to toe. She becomes one of the central female figures in the book, a
kind of sideshow earth mother who heads up the cult of Mars.

And why not, after all, since the carnival is also one of the central
themes of the book? Not the Mardi Gras, but the fairground sideshow.
The book is clear that it regards all organized religion as variations
on the sideshow, scams run for suckers. The twist is that the book's
hero, Michael Valentine Smith, may be expropriating religion's carny
methods to lead mankind to a higher truth. Smith, abandoned on Mars
as a baby and reared by Martians, possesses uncanny telekinetic
powers, bodily self control, and mental discipline beyond the wildest
aspirations of an Eastern mystic. In addition, the Martian culture he
comes from is one in which communitarianism is so advanced, indeed so
intrinsic, that notions of money and property do not exist and radical
self-sacrifice is as normal as self-preservation in our society. On
the parched surface of Mars, interdependence and intimacy is
symbolized through the sharing of water; offering a stranger a drink
makes him (or her) a lifelong blood-brother, or rather, water brother.

But the root of the power of the Man from Mars lies in a total
comprehension and mental assimilation of ideas and matter under the
rubric of "grokking". "Grok," which at least among the readers of
science fiction has passed into the common vocabulary, signifies
variously completely understanding an idea, experiencing a feeling,
assimilating an object. When the Man from Mars reads an
encyclopedia as part of his early education, he "groks" it by
simultaneously memorizing, understanding, and expounding upon it
within days. He "groks" objects so thoroughly that he can either move
or disintegrate them at will, thus making him an unusually difficult
target for those who wish him ill, to no avail since he is also able
to "grok" their intentions while they are well out of range.

In the end, it is no wonder that Stranger in a Strange Land became a
kind of "Hippie Bible" (See Wikipedia) when it came out in the
sixties: organized religion is revealed as a con game; free love is
the order of the day; property is a primitive evil; self-discipline
and self-sacrifice are the paramount values. For all its tang of
adolescent sexuality, Stranger in a Strange Land leaves one with the
sense that humans need to be more loving, giving, and tolerant toward
one another, because no one else is going to do it for us. In the
end, there are worse words to live by than Jubal Harshaw's favorite
toast, "To our noble selves, damned few of us left."

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Law and the Long War: The Subversion of Democracy

It is a shibboleth of the Right that anyone more liberal than Rush Limbaugh is a "traitor" to his country; the egregious Ann Coulter even wrote an entire book about liberal "Treason." The shrill rhetoric and exaggerated alarums over the bogeymen of the Left betray a deep-seated unease about American democracy, however. Modern American democracy is committed above all to the orderly transfer of power through stable institutions designed to express the will of the People. Secondarily, American democracy is committed to the proposition, familiar to every student who ever dipped into the Federalist Papers, that no one locus of power is ever to be trusted completely. A government of limited powers can best be preserved by encouraging each of the three branches of government to jealously guard its prerogatives and ensure that no other branch overstepped its authority.

In contrast, modern American conservatism, as repeatedly expressed in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, is infatuated with the cult of the man on the white horse, the strong central executive who will put all to rights because he is not bound by the petty considerations of law or morals that bind lesser mortals. (See Bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Terror.) The Party panders in the pursuit of power to the racaille of the American South, who have historically been the pillar of slavery, segregation, States Rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy and who now form the electoral core of the rump of the party of Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller, but the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in fulfilling the will of the people. Rather, theirs is the paternalism of the plantation owner and the corporate executive, the "Quality" who will ensure that the teeming swarthy masses do not threaten white privilege in America, endowed upon the white man by grace of God, the gun, and the smallpox. The alternative would be to recognize equality and welcome participation in the political process by all Americans. (Anyone who doubts the overtly exclusionary tendency of the contemporary, conservative American South need only review the disproportionately anti-Obama vote of white southerners compared to the overall vote in their own states and to whites in other parts of the country, or anecdotally the interview footage of white Southerners in Kentucky before the election.)

The first two chapters of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War starkly illustrate this modern tendency in the modern politics of the Republican Party. Proceeding under a theory of the "unitary executive," the Bush Administration sought to consolidate the emergency powers it had assumed immediately after the crisis of 9/11 on a permanent "wartime" basis. In his first chapter, "The Law of September 10," Wittes seeks to show not only that there was some continuity between the anti-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but also that there were some theoretical precedents dating from World War II (or earlier) for the Bush Administration's insistence that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it needed no authorization from Congress to regulate its treatment of those captured in the wake of 9/11. In particular, Wittes points out that Guantanamo had been used prior to 9/11 for the indefinite preventive detention of HIV positive illegal immigrants, and that the Clinton administration had pioneered on a limited scale the practice of extraordinary rendition, or "outsourced torture," that later became a staple of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Wittes concedes that the Bush Administration was totally lacking in legal justification for its actions in only one area: its decision to disregard the jurisdiction of the FISA Court over the conduct of electronic surveillance.

Wittes explains the readiness of the Bush Administration to disregard legal and moral norms in pursuit of the so-called "War on Terror" precisely in terms of the Bush Administration's public insistence on casting the conflict almost entirely in wartime terms and its concomitant contempt for any argument that legal guidance or Congressional authority was relevant to prosecuting the conflict.

While Wittes' attempts to show legal continuity and at least theoretical justification for the Bush Administration's disregard of legal and moral norms in its prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" seem a little strained, he is quite persuasive on the legislative and political dynamics that guided the Administration's actions. Wittes' formulation has almost the ring of a Greek tragedy. Persuaded in their hubris that any request for legislative authorization from the Congress would diminish the inherent power of the "unitary executive," the (Vice) President's men, particularly David Addington, strongly resisted any suggestion that they ask the Congress for legislation to regulate the custody of terror suspects and adjudication of their cases. Wittes identifies three important consequences of the Administration's arrogance. First, they failed to recognize that whatever small quantum of executive authority might be lost to the Congress, the authority of the executive is vastly magnified when bolstered by statute, as Justice Jackson long ago pointed out. Second, they failed to recognize that the supine Congress — Republican or Democrat — was ready to give them anything they requested. Third, they underestimated the willingness of the Supreme Court to step in and fill the vacuum left when the Administration bypassed the Congress, resulting in a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions that in fact undermined executive prerogative and enhanced the reach of the Court.

In Wittes' view, the normal dynamic of American democracy should be that the President proposes, the Congress legislates, the President executes, and the Courts, if necessary, adjudicate. The Bush Administration turned this dynamic on its head. The President, recognizing no limit on his authority, was brought up short by the Court, and then sought to control the damage by seeking legislation from the Congress to limit or overturn the Court's rulings. Such a course of action is not only woefully inefficient, but it drastically undermines the Administration's moral authority for any action it might take, particularly when the rebuke comes from a notoriously conservative Supreme Court. It is one thing to take action with the full endorsement of the nation's deliberative and legislative bodies; it is quite another to suffer public rebuke from the nation's highest court and then to be seen frantically manipulating a rubber-stamp Congress in order to proceed with a course of action that has been roundly condemned. Moreover, proceeding in such a manner is a course of action that, once the immediate fires had been extinguished, could only be undertaken by men with a fundamental contempt for representative democracy and a complete lack of concern for the damage they might do to our institutions and our freedom.

Software Find of the Week

Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani's todo.txt-cli, which I learned about via hunch. com is a very cool LInux command-line utility that allows one to quickly write, update, and maintain a todo list on the command-line of a terminal. With small adaptations, it can be displayed on your desktop using Conky and accessed by iPhone via a webserver.

The Promise of Infocard

Information Cards, also referred to by the moniker InfoCards or the Microsoft brand name Cardspace, have been a long-promised (and little implemented) addition to the identity and security landscape for some time now. The idea is essentially that they would work like a personal digital ID card that would securely sign you in to any site you to which you belong. Rather than memorizing dozens of usernames and passwords, you could just plug in your handy digital ID and 'Open Sesame." In general, Infocards are touted as being more secure than passwords because they are highly encrypted. To keep your card safe, you would only need to know one password, stored locally on your computer or thumb drive, so that your co-worker or other random person couldn't pirate your card. The piece of software used to store and deploy InfoCards is known as an Identity Selector; there is a new one available that works with Linux and Firefox 3.5 called openinfocard.

Don't Miss the Showdown in Chicago!

The Glory of Emacs

In the rush to eye candy, it seems sometimes that the most important part of written communication -- the words -- is sometimes forgotten. In the niche of the information society occupied by crusty Unix/Linux diehards, however, the word is still at the core of their communications. In some ways this is not surprising, since one of the distinguishing features of LInux is that its configuration files are virtually entirely human-readable text, as opposed to the obscure codes locked in the bowels of the Windows registry. Naturally, a operating system based on text needs a text editor -- or two, and a decades-long intramural rivalry among GNU/Linux users continues to bubble along over whether the vi editor or the emacs editor should be one's editor of choice. Of course, in some ways it is a false dichotomy; as one emacs proponent recently stated, it is like "comparing apples and combustion engines."

To my mind, you would be hard pressed to find a neater, cleaner piece of software than the vi text editor, whose beauty was forged in the crucible of the severe constraints of the early computer industry. With a minimum of code and a minimum of memory, vi was designed to be present on every Unix system so that programmers could edit text over achingly slow connections as the pea-brained monsters of the paleolithic computer world slowly emerged from the torpor of the punch-card era. VI had to be elegant and powerful; elegant so that it would gobble a minimum of precious computing resources and powerful so that it could efficiently edit significant amounts of code with great precision.

If vi is a surgeon's lancet, emacs is more like the fat Swiss Army knives that used to enthrall teenage boys with multiplicity of their blades -- a stainless steel tool for any occasion just waiting for a junior MacGyver to push it to its true limits. Emacs may not have the elegance of single purpose that vi does, but it does have the beauty of complexity and the fascination of what it is difficult (as the twentieth century's greatest master of text put it).

I have flirted with both vi and emacs over the years since I first encountered vi as an undergraduate, but I only began to use vi seriously about a year ago. It's a beautiful text editor, but I am finding now that I want to extend my reach beyond simply editing text. The new spark in my emacs romance initially flared as a result of my interest in a free self-validating XML editor. However, I was immediately diverted by emacs, built in news reader. Although USENET is largely a relic of the past, it turns out that the gnus news reader in emacs is well adapted to managing email. It took me almost two days to get the email/news function up and running on both my laptop and my desktop, but I think that the installation and configuration is now complete enough so that I can really begin to play with the email. The possibilities of a program designed for editing, with a powerful search engine based on regular expressions, and the capacity to thread and prioritize common themes in a fast text-based interface are enticing at the very least. It may not be the engine that associates all one's data with the email on the screen envisioned (and patented) by a friend of mine, but it would be a delicious irony if a decades old program were in fact the next leap forward in managing email.

The Joy of Email

Email, like sex, should be a pleasure not a burden. (That does not mean that one cannot get enough of it!). And in both cases keeping it fun and safe, without killing spontaneity, requires a little planning and the right equipment!

To the possible disappointment but not the surprise of anyone reading, I am going to discuss email, at once one of the greatest and most abused inventions of the twentieth century. Indeed, former University of Chicago Professor Bruce Redford once credited it with reviving the lost art of personal correspondence.

Personally, I maintain five email accounts, as follows:

1. My personal account, which I reserve for correspondence with friends and family.

2. My Gmail account, with which I take advantage of Gmail's search, sorting, scripting, and storage capabilities. Apart from personal correspondence (and a few system messages), I funnel the vast tide of mailing lists, bills, advertisements, and site registrations to Gmail, to be promptly labeled, sorted, stored, and, occasionally, read (mostly just the bill reminders).

3. My hushmail account, which lets me send encrypted mail from workstations and my iPhone.

4. My Yahoo account, which serves mainly as an OpenID for access to other Yahoo services.

5. My work account, for, well, work. It is an Outlook/Exchange system.

My software of choice, when I have a choice, is Thunderbird on the desktop. My mail client is configured to take advantage of both S/MIME and GPG encryption. For those more technically inclined, I also use the excellent Horde Project for groupware on my home server running Ubuntu Linux. This gives me web access to my email, among many other excellent features, wherever there is a browser connected on the 'net, while storing my mail on my server rather than in the cloud. I prefer to use IMAP rather than POP servers, so that whether I access my mail on my iPhone, my laptop, my destop, or a remote desktop, it is always the same.

Gmail is in some senses sui generis owing to its unique design, but I approach both my personal and work accounts from the same set of principles. These I have derived as closely as I could from David Allen's justly celebrated modern classic Getting Things Done.

In order to process my email, I have five primary folders: Inbox, @Reply, @Archive, @Pending, Spam, and Trash. Of these, the first one and last two are automatic and self-explanatory. The first goal, as often as possible, is to bring the Inbox down to zero. This can be done by immediate response and filing or immediate filing for future response. In either case, the email can either be trashed or archived. If it needs a reply that you cannot prepare until later, put it in @Reply and be sure to scan the folder at least daily. Label and sort replies by urgency and then by date, if possible.

If the email refers to something someone needs to do for you, put it in the @Pending folder, which you also need to check at least once daily.

Once an email requires no further processing or response, move it to the @Archive folder. Remember, however, that eventually the archive may grow to a size that degrades the performance of the mail server. To avoid this, I use a program that allows me to remove my mail and save it in compressed form in a file on my workstation. (Outlook has an archive function built in.). On my Linux workstation, I use a program called, appropriately enough, mailarchive. I set it to run once a month and archive any mail older than 90 days to a gzipped file. Of course, this is only helpful if one can read the file, but fortunately the mutt mail client works well for this purpose.

Now I think I have some email to catch up on.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Ubuntu Open Week

A series of on-line lectures and tutorials introducing users to the Ubuntu Linux operating system begins November 2, 2009 with Ubuntu Open Week. Anyone who wants to get more out of his or computer should consider attending.

Sell Sex Now!

Having widely outraged some sensibilities with my recent unequivocal call for decriminalization of drugs, it will come as a surprise to no one that I also advocate legalization and licensing of prostitution.

The goal of bringing both drugs and prostitution out of the underworld and into the sunshine is to limit both their prevalence and their harmful effects. Ironically, the drug problem drives in part the prostitution problem, as many young women become prostitutes in order to feed a drug habit, and many pimps inculcate drug habits to maintain control over their prostitutes.

There are few social problems more rife with hypocrisy than prostitution. As a rule, we punish the largely female prostitutes more severely than the largely male customers, although even then the usual punishments are so light as to call into question any genuine commitment to ending the trade. I positively admire Deborah Jeane Palfrey and Sidney Biddle Barrows compared to the two-legged cockroaches David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer, who hypocritically condemn the very lusts in which they are most deeply steeped. Cf. Angelo in Measure for Measure. My objection, mind you, is not so much to the lust as to the loathsome hypocrisy. Ms. Palfrey should not have been the one who suffered, or at least not alone.

Mind you, calling prostitution a victimless crime is cant. Overwhelming, it appears, women sell their bodies out of economic compulsion not simply profit maximization. In doing so, they frequently suffer danger and disease, not to mention whatever psychic cost there is to repetitive, anonymous copulation. But calling for legalization, as with drugs, does not imply endorsement; it merely recognizes the futility of our efforts at interdiction and the excerbation of the costs of the behavior in question.

The first benefit of legalization of prostitution would be to undermine the element of coercion. Not only would employers be more closely scrutinized by the government, but also women who decided to engage in the sex trade would have more opportunities and greater job mobility. Moreover, legalization would hopefully undercut the economic gains of kidnapping and sex slavery. If women are to have control of their own bodies, they must have enough economic freedom that prostitution is an option, not a last, desperate necessity.

As a recent article in the Guardian demonstrates, a second significant benefit would be disease control. See http://bit.ly/2VVRAE . Puritanical South Africa apparently wants to legalise prostitution for the duration of the World Cup in the hopes of avoiding an explosion of HIV infection. Nearly half of South Africa's prostitutes are HIV positive, and without screening and treatment, authorities fear that there will be an explosion of HIV infection among the 3.2 million fans. Meanwhile, proponents of legalisation in South Africa are mainly dismayed that the country is only talking about legalisation during the games rather than on a permanent basis.

It is time for more dignity and less disease. The time for legalization is now.

Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy

Just discovered Yale Law School's Avalon Project, a collection of major historical documents from ancient times through the twenty-first century. It looks as though it will repay a second, and third, look.

Rehabilitation

Bringing anything back from a near death experience takes time, care, and patience, and this blog is no exception. I am slowly trying to work myself back into the habit of making entries at the same time that I am tweaking the code a little bit for faster loading, easier commenting, and more enjoyable reading. Patience is encouraged and suggestions are welcome. If the blog can survive work, children, and Facebook, it can survive anything.

I haven't made any decisions about how much effort I am going to put back into the a la menthe. As the more focused blog, it has always enjoyed more attention than this one, but it is more effort to keep up when one does not have actual physical contact with the country. My inclination for the moment is to let "the a la menthe" continue to lie fallow and bring any Moroccan subject matter back into A Web Undone 2. If anyone actually reads this, and if makes a difference to anyone, leave a comment, and I might reconsider.

Legal Drugs Now!

Hypothesis: Alcohol kills more people in this country than all illegal drugs combined.

Proposal: Decriminalize all drugs now. Marijuana, heroin, cocaine, LSD, meth, ecstasy, the lot. Disparage them, discourage them, tax them, treat them, but decriminalize them. Restrict sales to adults. (If you object that the kids are going to get ahold of them, ask yourself what the kids are doing now in the face of our failed interdiction policy.) Decriminalize drugs, and the end of artificial scarcity created by interdiction will drive down the price, the gangs will wither, and violence will decline. If you doubt it, ask yourself how much bootlegging goes in this country. We need to stop the enormous profits from trafficking from fueling ongoing international violence and providing a pretext for repression. We need to restore balance to the market so that some farmers will reallocate their production to to other crops. We need to get the vast number of young people guilty of nothing more than seeking a quick high out of jail. What do you say?

Law and the Long War Discussion

As I move forward with the discussion of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War initiated by bloggers Thomas Nephew and the Talking Dog, Mr. Wittes' article in the Washington Post on the President's efforts to close the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay caught my eye. In general, I find much to disagree with in Mr. Wittes' approach as I dip into his book, but I do think that he makes an important point in his recent article.

Mr. Wittes' comment that the President is enjoying a Dick Cheney moment by deciding to close Guantanamo through unilateral executive action is a cheap shot. Dick Cheney pursued a relentless effort to aggregate greater power to the executive in order to pursue an unlawful campaign of terror, murder, torture, and domestic espionage. While I agree with Mr. Wittes that it would have been preferable for Mr. Obama to have acted with Congressional cooperation, the exercise of executive power on a mission of mercy, however bad the precedent, is just not the same as its exercise for Dick Cheney's unabashedly murderous ends.

Mr. Wittes is right about one thing, however. Our approach to the treatment of prisoners is now a hopeless muddle; the tenuous structure of international human rights law shattered beyond recognition by the reckless adventurism of President Bush and his cowboys. By going to war on false pretenses, President Bush and his supporters squandered the moral authority bestowed by the unprovoked attack on 9/11, sapped American credibility, and sent thousands of young men, women, and children to needless early deaths. The Administration then used its unjust and unnecessary war to bootstrap a ruthless attack on American Constitutional rights by engaging in torture, open-ended detention, and hitherto unprecedented surveillance. As someone who works two blocks from the White House, if I die in the next terror attack I pray that I will die a free man in a free society, not the Orwellian Republic that Bush has initiated and Obama seems determined to perpetuate.

I actually agree with Mr. Wittes that the appropriate treatment of prisoners is one thing our national debating society, the Congress, might be able to get right, if it had strong and principled leadership from the White House. Frankly, I would wish for a strong reassertion and expansion of the principles of the Geneva Convention, coupled with an equally strong vindication of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. I am skeptical that this could be accomplished in this age of Chicken Little-ism in the face of the threat from the cave dwellers of Afghanistan. However, the Congress has, with strong leadership from the White House, occasionally risen above its general level of moral cowardice, as with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Perhaps it could do so again, and prove Mr. Wittes right in his contention that questions of prisoner treatment should not be left in the first instance to the Courts.

Art Scholl: Airman and Showman Par Excellence

Blog Discussion of the War on Terror

Public Affairs Blogger Thomas Nephew and Legal Affairs Blogger The Talking Dog are holding an extended online discussion of Benjamin Wittes' book Law and the Long War about the War on Terror and its deformation of United States law.

Profit Without Honor

Corporate Irresponsibility: America's Newest Export by Lawrence E. Mitchell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Corporate Irresponsibility was probably destined never to be a popular book from the day it was written in 2001. Not only did it run counter to American business orthodoxy, but it takes a self-consciously scholarly approach from the outset. Any book the first third of which is devoted to a Kantian analysis of the deontological justification of the corporate form is unlikely to garner a wide audience outside academia. This is a shame, because this book is a thoughtful exploration of deep rooted flaws in American corporate law and practice, flaws which are considerably more apparent now than when the book appeared. From the outset, Mitchell questions the fiction of corporate personhood, a creation of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century that endowed the corporation with the same legal rights as individual persons. Mitchell sees this as a tragic mistake. A corporation possessing all the legal rights of a person may incorrectly be thought to share the motivations, inhibitions, and interests of a natural person. In fact, however, the corporation, particularly in its American form, owes but one loyalty and possesses but one motivation, the maximization of short term profits and stock prices.

Mitchell questions the little examined assumption of American culture that short term profit and societal benefit are coterminous, formerly expressed in the notorious comment that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. (Not such a popular sentiment since the recent collapse of GM.) In fact, an exclusive focus on short term stock price not only blinds the corporation (and the people to run it) to such obvious externalities as pollution, but also even to the financial decisions that would be in the best interest of the corporation and its stockholders, much less employees, customers, and the public.

One example (mine, not Mitchell's) might be the Walt Disney Corporation's relentless pursuit of extension of the copyright term in order to protect its proprietary interest in Mickey Mouse. It has long been recognized, and is acknowledged in the United States Constitution, that copyright is an appropriate temporary measure to ensure that artists and writers are compensated for their work and encouraged to produce more of it. In general, however, works should pass into the public domain as soon as possible so that ideas will be widely disseminated and older works can inspire new ones. (Shakespeare might never have written a line if he had been subjected to a rigorous enforcement of today's copyright laws. The author of the ur-Hamlet would no doubt have sued!) An individual artist only needs to have an artificial monopoly on his creative work for the duration of his lifetime, or perhaps a little longer to provide for his children. This is consistent with the principle of limited copyright, and flesh and blood is likely to demand little more. Only the corporation, which exists in perpetuity, or until dissolution do us part, is likely to demand a perpetual copyright with no regard for the free flow of information or the general welfare, although it may cloak itself in the rights of the very artists it exploits through draconian distribution contracts. The corporation knows no conscience, only profit.

Under these circumstances, the incentives for corporate behavior (or misbehavior) make a real difference in light of the absence of the kind of restraint normally to be expected from individuals. Unfortunately, the corporation in its American form takes to extremes an emphasis on short term stock price and exclusive obligation to shareholders that exacerbates corporate asocial (or antisocial) tendencies. While there seems to be consensus that long-term planning is necessary for the long-term health of corporations, the insatiable demand of stockholders for short-term returns can clearly undermine the long-term health of the corporation. Obvious examples include such cost-cutting measures as slashing the research department and reductions-in-force of necessary personnel. On another level, the focus on short-term profit encourages America's takeover culture, in which companies that do not maximize their short-term stock price are susceptible to hostile takeover and leveraged buyouts that saddle them with massive debt. (The argument that performance is driven by takeover threats is, of course, tautological so long as performance is primarily measured in short-term returns.)

To address the distortions that focusing on short-term stock price imposes on corporate behavior, a central reform that Mitchell proposes is to reduce the influence of stockholders on corporate governance. Ideally, Mitchell argues, one could largely eliminate it by making corporate boards self-perpetuating. The Yale Corporation, which governs Yale University, is largely run this way (although the alumni representative is elected). Shareholders would naturally, retain the power to invest or disinvest in the corporation so as to protect their investment, although on the investor side of the equation, Mitchell also proposes a variety of incentives to curb day trading and other short-term trading that distort the market rather than improving market efficiency. Mitchell's reform of corporate law would ideally act to encourage longterm planning by corporate boards and long-term investing by stockholders. Recognizing that it is unlikely that stockholders would ever completely relinquish the power to elect the board, Mitchell offers as a compromise elections that would occur not annually, but only after the board had served a term of several years. At the same time, Mitchell proposes to extend the amount of time between reports, rather than issuing them quarterly, to encourage a longer view on the part of investors. (However, one might question whether modifying behavior by withholding information is an effective or desirable strategy.) Although the book is not long, Mitchell does deal with a host of other issues, including the disgusting tendency toward self-dealing that has lately so outraged the public, as managers award themselves massive bonuses even as their companies go under. Mitchell outlines the problem as inherent in the wide scope given board members under the "business judgment rule," under which conflicts of interest on the part of board members can be excused if they are approved by a majority of the "non-interested" board members. Given the reciprocity that characterizes corporate boards, allowing the Courts to abdicate their oversight responsibility in the name of the business judgment rule is a recipe for institutionalizing conflict of interest. Mitchell endorses stricter legal oversight of boards to regulate their conduct, but fundamentally is more concerned with how corporations behave within society than with oversight of the personal conduct of board members.

A short review does not do justice to this dense but penetrating analysis of the tectonic flaws of America's corporate structure, an analysis that has proved as prescient as it is generally unheeded. Timely today, it would have been more timely reading for America's policymakers when it came out.

View all my reviews >>

Where is Willie Stark When We Need Him?

A Last Good-bye to Bill Buckley

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Christopher Buckley's bittersweet memoir of his final year with his stylish mother and famously conservative father lends a human scale to a couple that so often appeared larger than life. Personally, I was never particularly enamoured of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s politics or even his books, despite being piqued by God and Man at Yale and amused on occasion by the capers of fictional CIA agent Blackford Oakes. However, from the time I was a small boy who loved big words, I was flattered to be compared favorably to the legendarily eloquent Buckley, for whom it was perfectly natural to toss off a word like "postprandial" when one intended to take a stroll after a lunch. (Despite his legendary command of the English language, it was apparently his third language.) In addition, although no sailor myself, I have always had an outsized admiration for anyone who could captain or navigate a wind-borne vessel. Ironically, I have not read Buckley's celebrated sailing books, but I have admired his exploits on the water based on second-hand accounts. Finally, anyone who is able to make a good living through his pen earns a certain amount of admiration from me. As Samuel Johnson famously said, "No one but a blockhead would write except for money."

There are few more difficult ways to grow up than as the son of a famous father and a socialite mother. Winston Churchill is perhaps the most notable example, having admired from afar his imperious, syphilitic father and fashionable, flirtatious mother -- reportedly a consort of no less than than the King of England. Christopher Buckley, similar in kind if not degree, seasons his admiration for his famous parents with a clear-eyed and painful acknowledgment of their many shortcomings public and private. Patricia Buckley, once one of New York's most celebrated hostesses, apparently frequently found it impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction on topics as diverse as her reasons for not finishing her college education at Vassar to visits from the Royal Family in her youth. Christopher's Buckley's relationship with his mother was often stormy, but his complex blend of admiration and antagonism toward his father is the potent cocktail that really fuels this story and carries it to its poignant conclusion. Bill Buckley's Olympian detachment from quotidian concerns resulted in over 90 books, thousands of pages of articles, hundreds of television appearances, and friends and acquaintances among the most celebrated persons of the day. Coupled with Buckley's steadfast convictions, conservative views, and Catholic certitude, Buckley's sense of himself could be alternately entrancing and insufferable. And his personal recklessness in his boat and in his car whether his family was aboard or not bespeaks a level of self-absorption that contrasts sharply with moments of familial generosity. Ultimately, of course, laboring as an author in the shadow of your more famous father, subject to criticism alternately enthusiastic and capriciously cruel, is a cross no son should have to bear, even if it is assumed voluntarily.

Christopher Buckley, despite the traces of bitterness that lace this confection, writes with wit, grace, and self-awareness of his attempt to reconcile himself to the complex emotional inheritance bequeathed to him by his parents. In doing so, he seems ultimately to come to terms with the repeated betrayals inflicted on him by his prevaricating mother. The wounds left by a half century of fighting and making up with his father require a slower reconciliation, brought about in part by his father's slow physical decline and the constant devotion it evoked. To his credit, the senior Buckley, whose unfailing mental acumen carried him through the completion of biographies of Goldwater and Reagan even as he succumbed to kidney failure, diabetes, skin cancer, and general physical enfeeblement, was mostly good-humored and gracious toward his son as he approached his end. In the end, the younger Buckley's vocation as a humorist and the elder Buckley's personal civility and generosity shine through the tangled emotions of this real life soap opera featuring one of America's first families.

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Lest We Forget

I honor the memory of the 9/11 dead and grieve for the horrible deaths inflicted upon them. I was not at ground zero (although some of my relatives were very, very close), but I was a couple of blocks from the White House, as I am every work day, when the Pentagon was hit. I understand that having been hit once, we could be hit again.

However, I am also incensed that the tragedy of 9/11 has been misappropriated by the Republican propaganda machine to justify war abroad and repression at home. This kind of politicization of a tragedy dishonors the dead.

I also think that the horror and immediacy of 9/11 have created a loss of historical perspective. Tragic and horrific as 9/11 was, it was not Nagasaki or Stalingrad. I suggest that as we remember the tragedy of 9/11, we also remember other great and tragic historical September events. I suggest this not to diminish what happened on 9/11, but to caution against a self-absorption that distorts our place in history and the world.

Other Noteworthy September Events

1792 September Massacres initiate the Reign of Terror
1812 Battle of Borodino, 70,000 casualties, French capture Moscow
1862 Battle of Antietam, approximately 20,000 Americans die
1863 Battle of Chickamauga
1886 U.S. crushes the Chiricahua Apaches with the capture of Geronimo
1914 Battle of the Marne, first trenches dug
1915 British use gas at Loos, kill 60,000 of their own men
1916 Battle of the Somme continues, eventual casualties equal 1,000,000
1917 Passschendaele continues, eventual casualties equal 700,000
1939 Germany invades Poland, unleashing the Second World War
1940 Italy invades North Africa, beginning the North African campaign
1943 Allies invade Italy
1945 Surrender of Japan
1962 James Meredith enrolls at Ole Miss
1963 Birmingham Church Bombing

Sources
http://french-history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_reign_of_terror_in_the_french_revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Borodino
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/tl1862.html
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/civilwar/p/chickamauga.htm
http://www.historynet.com/geronimos-last-surrender.htm
http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/
http://history.searchbeat.com/worldwar.htm
http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Civ%20Rts.html

Calling Out Congressman Joe Wilson

My note to Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) after he interrupted the President's speech on Health Care Reform by shouting "You lie!"

Dear Sir:

I wish simply to state that I believe that you are a disgrace to the United States Congress. Your state in particular bears a heavy legacy for the centuries of bloodshed, oppression and slavery that it has plunged this country into. You would think that you would have the decency to treat the country's first African American President with a modicum of respect, whatever dark thoughts you may harbor in your heart. One would think, in particular, that a former aide to the notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond would be particularly careful about perpetuating Thurmond's, and South Carolina's, racist legacy. Tonight you have shown that that racist legacy flourishes still in South Carolina and among Republican Southerners, who have clearly learned nothing and forgotten nothing since at least 1964, if not 1864. Truly, sir, if there were ever a tradition of Southern gentility, it has died in you and your swinish colleagues.

Very truly yours,

Charles W. Day, Jr.