THE SUPREME COURT SPEAKS

Constitutional law is one of my hobby-horses, so I naturally read with care both the majority and the minority (Stevens) arguments in the recent case which allows corporations, labor unions & other such bodies to support their particular ´causes´. The fundamental argument rests on that great American fetish, ´free speech´.

As we all know, there are certain exclusions from this amendment in the Bill of Rights, the most recent of which is sanctioned as ´hate speech´, which would seem to be a sort of extention to the prohibition of shouting out ´fire´in a crowded theater. I would guess that we all would defend virgorously our right to say what we want, to publish it and diffuse it, no matter how unattractive we may find it: as in some forms of pornography, obscenity, etc.

But if I follow Mr. Justice Stevens argument, which fairly represents my own opinion, the entire Bill of Rights assumes that these rights inhere in individuals. In you and me. It is quite clear to me that a corporation, in both the technical sense as in Alcoa or Exxon, and in the broader sense of any large body organized to a single purpose, such as most labor unions, is not an individual, for no individual within that organization cam wield that corporation´s power or express its opinion. Corporations do not have a license to drive a car; unfortunately, a corporation can´t be jailed, nor can it vote, get a grade in college or, to descend the scale, make love and procreate real heirs and heiresses. Corporations do not go out for lunch,. their executives do, for unseemly hours. They are not people at all, they are a persona sole. It is a fiction designed to limit liability, something that private comopanies have to assume. If you sue a limited company for a defective product, the individual directors are liable up to the pre-established limit of that liability. While those of you who have ever had to deal with a corporation know that no human being is every likely to talk to you or respond.

That being so, how can a corporation (and unions are of the same breed) be protected by the same right as an individual? No doubt Mr. Obama´s objection, with a beady eye drawn on Justice Alito (the Majority opinion was written by Roberts), is that corporations (a) by the nature of their wealth and (b) quite possibly against the desires of some or even a majority of their shareholders, can exert an excessive power at certain times -- e.g. in the last fortnight of the Massachusetts election. To me, that argument does not stand. We have individual billionaires (protected by the First Amendment) who can and do spend just as much. There, reform would mean weaning the public of its dependence on advertising and feeding it doses of education to enable it to spot phoneys all on its lonesome.

Stevens´ dissent should be read. There are defects in the law which the Supreme Court was reviewing, but these Congress could remedy. But as Stevens argues, the First Amendment´s guarantee of free speech is applicable only to individuals, and to say otherwise will certainly further limit the freedom of individual speech.

STATE OF THE DISUNION

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.

BY WAY OF EXPLANATION

Assiduous readers of my blog will have shaken their heads and thought I might be dead, remarrying, cavorting, washed out to sea from my house or. . . None of the above is true. The intermittencies they will have perceived have to do with a month spent in the archives at Yale and the Harry Ransom Center, a month in which, wherever I went or whatever I did, I froze. After my barefoot years at nine degrees north of the equator, the shoes I brought with me did not fit, etc. That is one reason.

Another is a certain Mr. Hogares, a furtive thirtyish semi-crackhead who loiters with a companion along the sea-front and, if he sees you duck into the loo for a quick one, will abstract your computer in no time at all. This little creep, I would have you know, had already stolen six other computers along my road in Cahuita. This, I am told, is standard practice among Costa Ricans: you are a foreigner, a gringo, and thus obviously rich and fair game. No matter that Mr. Hogares has been battered with baseball bats (how dare gringos attack a man in the exercise of his profession? even if that profession is thieving?) and hospitalized for two weeks, he needs his goodies.


This might seem curious to you, but the fact is that we all know him. We know where he lives, what he does for a living, his methodology. So do the police. So does our D.A., known as the Fiscal of Talamanca, a man who makes his living by releasing paedophiles, thieves, and other sundry criminals. But Costa Rica for some fifty years has been living in the ideal consitutional world dreamt up -- when this was a sleepy country and the rich were the abusers of the ¨rights of the people¨-- by the esteemed Jose Figueres. I met him long ago and a fine democrat he was too. But he was president of a backward little country that no one, and certainly the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico, cared much about.

Since Figueres, I fear, it has all been downhill, as it is with all places that are so democratic and fair that workers and criminals alike can do pretty much as they please.

The downhill slope, of course, goes quickly from equity and fine feelings, to corruption -- the one commmodity, besides natural beauty, bananas and coffee of which Costa Rica has a sufficiency. As you would expect -- God knows the United States has its share in the government and big business -- corruption is not a creation of Costa Rica´s people, who are largely honest, affable and hard-working, but filters down from On Top.


Add to that that my very own Talamanca is something like the Wild West of Costa Rica and that we have neither government nor justice here, and you will understand the intermittency caused by Mr. Hogares to my blog. Here we don´t let the police into the house, lest they case the joint; here drugs are sold from a caff on the main road in the plain sight of all, no doubt with a cut for the authorities in our county seat in Bribri; here our Sindaco gets himself elected by deliveries of sacks of rice to the indigenos who live in the mountains behind me; and here Colombian speed-boats drop their supplies a few hundred yards out from my beach. It may sound like hell, but in fact it´s a little forgotten paradise, and all I´m doing is explaining why I have not blogged as reguarly as I would like.

THE MASSACHUSETTS ELECTION

That in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts Ted Kennedy, that stalwart swain of Chappaquidick, should be replaced in the Senate by a former hunk and current red-neck follower of he fashionable Tea Party sort, might well cause consternation in many quarters, but his election is neither surprising nor undeserved. I cannot, however, bring myself to believe that Mr. Brown's election means that the Bay State has finally had enough -- if not too much -- of that family of bootleggers and bullies, a royalty that goes back to the jolly Boston rule of Honey Fitzgerald. Would that it were so, but I doubt it.

The unalterable fact is, however, that two things result from Tuesday's election: the first is that the voters of Massachusetts have repudiated the politically ultra-correct Special Interest party's sole spend-and-rule domination of their government; the second is that they will live to regret being represented in Washington for six long years by the senator from Fox News Glenn Beck Land. Add to this one further, and welcome fact: that at least they have been spared Martha Coakley. It was, I admit, good fun to see and hear Mr. Obama embracing yet another routine party hack and claiming for her a career of fearless struggle against Big Business and Special Interests. That is palpable nonsense. I was in Boston when she trampled on the civil rights of the Amirault family in pursuit of her divine right -- despite the courts and against all evidence -- to launch against them a Salem witch-hunt for the pleasure of the headlines it offered her. No, butter would not melt in her mouth; it would scald.

Some good, therefore, will come of this election: the Democratic juggernaut, which has long thought governance was a mere matter of taxing the public to spend on behalf (qv. Governor Duval Patrick) of every special interest that could maintain the status quo. It is surely notable that the only party bastions that held up against Senator-Elect Brown were the most radical and privileged segments of Massachusetts, places like Barney Frank's Fall River or the Peoples Republics of Cambridge and Brookline. Where ordinary folk live there were too few to shore up the Coakley business-as-usual campaign.

True, she was a miserable candidate; true, she ran a miserable campaign. But were the sovereign people of Masschusetts wrong to discern that Coakley was entirely absorbed in the belief that the senate seat held by Teddy Kennedy was hers by right, and vox populi was not and should not be heard?

There is, however, a down side to Populist rule -- preferable as it is to Machine rule: populists do not want this or that, they don't know what they really want, nor have they the means, intellectual or otherwise, to determine good legislation from ill, they do know what they do not want, and that is to be told how to live their lives. It is ignorant not to recognize that the American health system is among the poorest and most corrupt in the developed world, but there are also many ways in which populism can and does defeat its own ends. The voting public is all too easily swayed by specious arguments, rigged polls, lobbyists and Money.

After all, as I pointed out immediately after the election of Barack Obama, his populist appeal, his rhetorical skills and even his good intentions, could not and should not conceal the fact that he came out of the Machine and still lives within it. What once seems wondrous, as we all know, often crumbles like stale biscuits; its appeal is magical, bewitching; its results tend to be drab and routine. Politics is not a love affair, but a dirty hard trade, which men and women take up for the power and privilege it affords. Beware, then, the Golden Tongue, and beware any promise of Change. The interests are entrenched, as they are in marriage. Fine words will not dislodge either insurers or drug companies or banks. Or, for that matter, politicians.

A Small Earthquake in Chile used to be what was thought the least interesting headline a newspaper could banner: yet that was what we have just seen in Masschussets and will see in Washington. Words are the nosegay the bride throws the aspirant maidens outside the church. So Mr. Brown caught one. Bravo! And then?

In Breve

First the Good News. Fox's new pundit (from the Indian pandit or learned man, or woman), Sarah Palin's first appearance opposite a discountenanced and wary Bill O'Reilly -- let's give him credit for wondering how the devil she turned up -- setlles the matter once and for all: the 'fair and balanced' Murdoch network has now gone public as a home for Boobs and Folly. A nice confirmation of the Obvious. A 'news' service that hires a former candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States is in fact an enlarged Op-Ed Page for yet another loony of the right. Further good news is the thought that Palin will perforce learn a little geography and be launched into the Fox orbit where no fool fears to tread. She and Hannety (or is it Hannity?) make an ideal couple: were they otherwise without ties.

Roughly at the same time another enormity of Nature, a powerful earthquake, struck Haiti. I hope that everyone who reads this contributes, for Haiti is one of the world's marvels, a nation at roughly the same time as the United States, it has always been tormented by open warfare between black and mulatto, yet has also produced a remarkable culture (Roumains, Alexis) and a proud people. I feel privileged to have known many Haitians: an upstanding people whose prophet, Toussaint Louverture, was left to perish in a frigid prison in Joux by the selfsame 'revolutionaries' in France. To build his mountain fastness, the emperor Christophe had stone mounted by gangs of a hundred rolling logs uphill; the more perished in the task, the harder the remainder had to labor. Good times have been few. In Puerto Rico I knew some Duvalier acolytes and some opponents, exiled to the borough of Queens. A fine, a desperate people.

But America remains America, and the news had, until the earthequake, focused on the Great American Problem: Messrs Leno and O'Brien. I watched bemused, never having watched either of them. Just how important news are two performers whose every word is scripted beforehand? Just how are they worth their millions and their celebrity?

APOLOGIES?

Truth need never repent.

This NOTE will be succinct: When a senator feels it necessary to apologize. that's a good reason to send him into retirement. What Senator Harry Reid said of then-candidate Barack Obama -- that he stood a good chance to make it to the presidency because he was light in color and didn't speak in Negro dialect -- was no more than a statement of obvious fact. His color and educated speech were an undeniable factor in his election: both for the things he was and the things he was not. What sane man would deny that? So what is this mania for public apology that drove Reid to un-state what he said in his book?

T0 append a little context, reflect on the Turkish gentleman who attempted t0 assassinate Jean-Paul II, Fresh out of his his two jail sentences, we hear that he is currently flogging his memoirs to TV and the movies. I doubt not of his success in this curious world. A crime can be detailed without any need for a public apology for 'inappropriate' language. So why not a sensible political observation?

HOMELAND SECURITY

Recent events (Division of Nigerian Foreign Affairs) have alerted me to the ever greater perils of daily life. There I was trolling my way through my e-mail when I glanced at the advertisements which so grace the Google pages. And there were three ads for degree courses in Homeland Security at various 'universities' of the mail order sort.

Of course it is my view that we lost the War on Terror as of 9/11 (so much more euphonious than the European 11/9). Quite simply, the sheer cost of protecting each and every one of us from those whose ambition in life (and death) is to blow us up, is a major factor in bankrupting us, giving us a set of national jitters to go along with joblessness and failed health care and insistently greedy bankers, and generally causing a slowdown in national life. A million-strong new bureaucracy of 'security' experts -- recruited only God knows how -- is now enthroned with the power to interfere in our private lives such as would never have been admissible a mere twenty years ago. I mean, did you know that any one of these people can seize your computer? confiscate you hard drive? delve into your correspondence?

Bet you didn't! But it is paradigmatic of American life that there is no niche or want that will not be filled by the Academy. Forget qualifications for degree-by-email courses: not even basic literacy is required. Some early morning hours have been spent considering the sort of curriculum a new-minted professor of Homeland Security might introduce. Here are a few sensible suggestions.

HS 101: Psychological Profiling of Terrorists: perspiration levels, bodily exudations, beard-analysis, Oedipal conflicts, criminal shiftiness.

HS 102: Linguistic Analysis: Basic Muslim, Arab oaths, translating explosive tracts, the hermeutics of stuttering, Body Language.

HS 201: Adanced Visa Studies: Detecting Voids in multiple applications, Buzz Words, detecting altered (edited) documents, Consular Analysis.

You get the picture. Background reading (for candidates who are able to read) include Kafka, Conrad, the Quran, Sharpton, Halliburton (the company, not the pre-war explorer), Basic English for Dummies, Coriolanus, Koestler.

I know this is all exaggerated, but so is the eagerness of the Education Business to pick up on every opportunity to make a buck.

MEDIOCRITY

Since I find myself wandering about in the snow under which my old haunts in Boston lie, and since this causes a problem -- should I venture forth to Barnes & Ignoble which lies a steeping hill below my room just to get a little paper cup of espresso, ever lukewarm and Starbuck's, a brand I usually pass by? -- I would rather, I think, pass on two reflections from the new year, derived from old friends in Academia.

Well, how are things? I ask an old friend, self-exiled from what was once Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. He teaches to crowded classrooms in a local university and recalls for me the bad old days in his native land. 'What always struck me so forcibly,' he says, 'was what happened to my old friends. We were all young, then, and in firm agreement that we had a government of shits and we fought against it with the pawky means at our disposal. It was the most vociferous among them who began, year by year, to retrench. Aided and abetted by Common Sense, they had reached the age at which they really ought to leave the parental cramped apartment and enter Real Life. That meant they would need to have an apartment of their own in which to accommodate the young women they were about to marry. They would also need to have regular jobs and, if possible, escape the penury their Opposition to the regime enforced on them. It was amazing to me how firmly they moved towards "understanding" the government and its problems and how consistently they began the brown-nosing of those they had spent their lives excoriating! They had scorned, hated and despised X. Now they could not say enough good of him. People like me who still opposed the regime were first abandoned by them, then bit by bit began to be scorned, hated and despised as X once had been.'

But how does this relate to your daily life? I asked him. 'Academia,' he replied, is very much like one of those sorry East European states. There is a shuffle at the top and Professors X, Y and Z suddenly find themselves loving those they had very recently despised etc.. Brown-nosing has fresh territory to sniff.'

In short, when the mediocre triumph over their betters, sound minds consider their own advantage, their needs -- those apartments, those appointments, promotions and perquisites. Nothing new to that. I pass on as comment what is the way of the world.

At this selfsame university, which was once mine, I asked a crotchety old friend why it was the case that in Academia, a fraught eastern nation occupied by Soviet look-alikes -- boring people in suits, dull minds with dachas -- real talent was so often opposed and mediocrity so often rose to the top. 'Resentment,' my friend replied. 'There are three classes, here as elsewhere. There are the truly first-class, a second-class that wants only safety and survival, and a third class that has ambitions. Third-class people -- which a good university seeks to weed out -- wants to have what the first class has. While the middle plods on, this rabble seeks to undermine what the first class does.'

If you put Mediocrity in charge, as has happened at my old university, the Middle will plod on, the top will emigrate, and the rabble will rise. That too is the way of the world. And not just in Academia.