ARCHIVE OF WORKING
OPINIONS
1999
SLING SHOTS IN THE CORPORATE AGE (26 November 1999)
The court case, US Government vs. Microsoft : GO WITH YOUR FLOW, BILL GATES (9 November 1999)
The movie, American Beauty: TRUTH, BEAUTY, & THE UGLY YUCK OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE (24 October 1999)
"HARDBALL," JESSE "THE BODY," AND THE NOBROW CULTURE AT HARVARD. (7 October 1999)
CIVILIZING T. S. FLOYD (17 September 1999)
GUN LAW FOR THE ELECTRONIC NEIGHBORHOOD (13 August 1999)
13 August 1999; last updated 7 May
2003 Copyright © 1999 Richard
P. Richter
SLING SHOTS IN THE CORPORATE AGE (26 November 1999)
You may think Southern Baptists are oddball cranks for boycotting Disney products.
You may think the Clinton administration's attack on the tobacco industry is just a grab for money by a greedy government.
You may think that the government's anti-trust charge against Microsoft started mainly to advance the careers of hustling prosecutors.
Here's a further thought.
This is the international Corporate Age. Mega-corporations are in the cockpit. They are flying humankind into a new millennium in more ways than one. Corporate goals and corporate values permeate the social fabric like a gas. They get into every nook and cranny of individual lives.
The stock market boom makes all things corporate look bright and right.
Persons on the street define themselves by the logos they wear on their ties and T-shirts.
Nearly every team of any merit, it seems, sports the Nike swish. How does the Nike marker differentiate a team or player from opponents? It doesn't. It just means that "sports" is defined as "Nike." Through a political glass, this would look totalitarian. (How prone is a university to criticize corporations if its football team gets advertising fees from one of them?)
I know a ten-year-old. She makes herself up as she goes along, using the stick-ums, rhythms, and texts of the screen and street. Corporate imagery identifies her desires; corporate sales pitches then offer her their satisfaction. That ubiquitous dialectic enables her to create her Corporate Age self. It wears painted nails. It desires things not because they will satisfy its wants but because desiring them, this little person has learned, is a good in itself. In the Corporate Age, children are a market first and only incidentally persons of worth in themselves.
A postmodern truism is that a corporate organization can commodify anything--even commodification itself!
Fukuyama declared the end of history and some thought he was crazy. Mega-corporate power, luckily, has not quite succeeded in ending everything except itself. It's gaining, though.
The Corporate Age produces a romance of the good life. We see its essence in 30-second commercials, endlessly repeated. They are incredibly effective. It takes a hardened critical eye, after a while, to see them as romantic fictions designed as prayers to the Corporate Age.
Of course mega-corporations support the welfare of the human race. But without a critical voice to remind them, they will define human welfare--every time--as an outcome of corporate hegemony.
That is why the Southern Baptist boycott and the government suits against tobacco and Microsoft are important. You may or may not think their particular arguments make sense. But you should be glad they are arguing. Church communities, governments, the academy itself--all lack the clout amassed in the mega-corporation. The dominance of worship at the shrine of market reduces them all. They are Davids in a world of Goliaths. That makes their slings all the more precious.
Responsible muckraking journalism is not easy to find at the turn of the millennium. I subscribe to one on-line column that scratches sharply against the underbelly of the Corporate Age each week. Focus on the Corporation is written by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. Their acerbic analyses of the corporate romance, to me, are useful correctives. As an example, here's a recent take on "Tupperware, Disney and the Selling of the Public Space," incorporated into rpr/WORKS with their permission.
The court case, US Government vs. Microsoft : GO WITH YOUR FLOW, BILL GATES (9 November 1999)
When the judge in the Microsoft case issued his findings of fact on Friday, 5 November 1999, after the markets closed, it sounded bad for Bill. But he said it was only the beginning. The hardball legal game Microsoft has played so far against the Department of Justice (DOJ) promises to go on--and on. That promises a lot of lawyers a continuation of big fees for their advice and counsel. Here's my advice to Bill, gratis:
Dear Bill,
I'm for you.
You opened windows that were never there before.
You made it possible for our lives to be new and interesting.
You have been a heroic player in the transforming of our economy into an engine of prosperity.
The products of your ingenuity revolutionized the way we think and act.
Your company and its products are the instruments for all that you did to change our lives. I like Windows and Internet Explorer and MSN.com. They shape my day and stimulate my mind.
I applaud your spunk, grit, stick-to-it-iveness, competitive focus--all the gutsy qualities that drove you to do all that you did for us.
And I can understand your feeling of betrayal, now that your own federal government is faulting you for successes that those very qualities led you to achieve.
But, Bill, the grand events wrought by the great people are not neat affairs. They always have unexpected and unintended consequences--unforegone conclusions. Of course you did not leave Harvard Yard before graduating because you had a vision of how to break the federal law governing corporate monopoly. You had a vision of a world that no one ever saw before. Could you know how your vision would scramble the very shape and substance of modern corporate law? Could Christopher Columbus, setting out, know how his vision of a passage to India would open a New World, with all its glory and pain?
The feds won't let up on you, Bill. The essence of the situation is probably already clear to most people from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact. They’re gonna get something big out of you, one way or the other.
If you decide to continue on, tooth-and-nail, head-to-head, unto the bitter legal end, I would understand.
But my advice is—don’t take that route.
You don’t have to defend Microsoft as if it were a rock for the ages. It came into being out of the fluidity of your own inventive thinking and agile action.
Think of it as a territory that solidified out of the molten lava of your creativity. Now, there is a new source of heat; it threatens to deterritorialize your creation by forcible intrusion.
You can exhaust your remaining youthful energy by trying to preserve Microsoft as it is against the flow of public power (This may evoke in some minds the shade of King Canute commanding the tide not to come in).
Or you can expend it on the second miracle of your career. You can leave Harvard Yard one more time. You can go forth with a second new vision. Ride your own flow of creative energy on one more heroic adventure. Let it deterritorialize your own domain. Reterritorialize it in a way that even the busy little people at DOJ could not imagine.
You have an opportunity to be in the list of the 100 greatest doers of not one but two centuries. In the 20th century, for making Microsoft what it is. In the 21st century, for transforming it into the (legally passable) form that will drive the newest wave of the information revolution.
If you take the bitter route, Bill, you’ll still be twice remembered. Once for making Microsoft what it is. Once for prematurely fossilizing your own creative flow.
Jon Swartz of Forbes.com has the same opinion I do. On 12 November 1999, he advised Microsoft to break up voluntarily in an article, Breaking up is easy to do.
"Complete coverage" of the case is on-line at MSNBC (where Microsoft is a partner.)
The movie, American Beauty: TRUTH, BEAUTY, & THE UGLY YUCK OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE (24 October 1999)
When I was leaving the theater at the end of American Beauty, I overheard a moviegoer ahead of me: "I thought The Sixth Sense was the weirdest I've seen, but this makes that a piece of cake."
I guessed he was thinking about the yucky surface action of American Beauty--drug dealing, teenage sex, grown-up adultery, violent homophobia, parental sadism, masturbation, foul-mouthed teen dialogue, and, in the end, neighborhood murder. My fellow moviegoer seemed like a genial sort, but I had a hunch that, if pressed, he would have sided with Dan Quayle for family values and tighter control of Hollywood content.
DreamWorks on its website understandably took a more positive view. Its film was a "dark comedy" that took a "bold new look at suburban angst." The Cranky Critic on the web called it "a journey from fun to reality that is seamless and sobering."
Some fun, I suppose, he saw in the exaggerated antics of ordinary middle class characters stretched into cartoon shapes by the extremes of script. An example might be the day in the sales life of Carolyn Burnham. She was the frustrated wife of Lester, the protagonist who was undergoing his mid-life crisis. Carolyn showed a house that she vowed to sell by day's end. The director had a ball parading a variety of tough prospects through the house. The vignettes of their glassy eyes and bitchy retorts took Carolyn through her disastrous day. She ended without a sale and with a huge balance of sheer anger. This left her ripe for a torrid fling with the supersalesman who outdid her at the real estate game.
My problem with such "fun" was that writer Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes (doing his first-ever movie) tried to make it serve as a slice of "reality." The slide from funny to sobering, regrettably, was bumpy, not seamless. I kept listening for the intended tone of the movie. Hearing several, I concluded Ball and Mendes were not sure what they intended. Suburban farce? Sober critical analysis of failed middle class values of the end of the century? Fantasies of Generation X? Hard knocks for homophobic proto-fascism? Maybe they decided to allow their viewers to make their own choice from several options. Buy your ticket and take your pick.
However, the movie was fun to watch--as a film. Carolyn's compulsive cultivation of American Beauty roses in her back yard provided a richly visual and variegated central dramatic image. When Lester dreamed about seducing his teenage daughter's luscious young girlfriend, he imagined her bathing in a tub of rose petals, a lovely rendering in red. In the end, Lester's blood, no less dramatically red, formed an elegant design when it splattered onto the kitchen wall. It went there courtesy of the bullet sent through Lester's head by his neighbor, retired Marine Colonel Fitts. The Colonel felt shamed when he revealed his homosexual leanings to Lester and found that Lester in fact was straight. Wiping Lester out seemed like the clean thing to do. The camera work on the killing was economical and entertaining: the pistol barrel inched slowly up to the back of Lester's head as the soundtrack rolled the immensely peaceful resolution of his mid-life angst. All was well as he met his maker. This final scene was not funny, but it was a satisfyingly humorous cinematic conclusion.
The not uncomplicated plot allowed us to think for a moment after the shot that Carolyn was the perpetrator, not the Colonel. Oh, she had reason to want Lester out of her life. And she had the weapon with which to do the job, courtesy of her secret lover (only recently identified by Lester when the clandestine couple came through the drive-in line at the fast-food shop where Lester had taken a job). That bit of suspense allowed the movie maker one last pratfall by Carolyn as she entered the house and found her husband already shot.
In spite of mixed messages of intent, American Beauty seemed, in the end, to care about curiously old-fashioned issues. Roiling in each character was the ancient Socratic quest to "know thyself." The action churned through the tasteless contemporary scene to reveal the characters discovering (or not) their real self behind the shams and dodges by which they imitated real life. The truth about themselves related somehow to the beauty they might be capable of apprehending. I kept remembering the last lines of Keats's Ode On a Grecian Urn:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Beauty was in the title and drove the plot. The falling petals of the American Beauty rose crystallized the dilemmas of the adult characters. A video of a balletic plastic bag, twirled gracefully by a breeze, shot by Ricky, the brooding boy next door, crystallized the urge to find truth in beauty among the teenagers. He called it the most beautiful film he ever shot, and it did provide a breathless lyric interlude in the movie. Postmodern irony demanded that the object of beauty be a piece of litter.
Ricky, who dealt in drugs big-time and dissembled with his psychotically repressed Marine father (Lester's murderer), seemed to have the inside track on beauty and therefore truth from the get-go. His ubiquitous digital camera captured it raw. Jane, his next-door girlfriend, Lester's daughter, tried to make a statement of simple honesty to him. She bared her breasts at her window so that he could shoot her with his digital camera from his bedroom window. Angela--Jane's lying, insincere teenage friend--found the truth about herself at the lusting hands of Lester. As he prepared to take her, Angela confessed that, despite her boasting, she was still a virgin. Backing off, Lester entered his final spiritual beauty, comforting the girl as a father would.
The dirty little secret, then, of American Beauty is that it was about old, traditional values almost as much as a black-and-white 1930s production with Jimmy Stewart or Spencer Tracy. It's just that it delivered its humane concerns through the ugly yuck of today's life. And it could not decide if it was essentially funny or sober.
Moviegoers such as the one I overheard thought the movie was about the yuck and became dismayed. They wondered: "Is this where we are?" Wherever we are, it ain't pretty, that's for sure. Maybe they'll penetrate to the classical underpinnings of the film after they reflect on it. Beauty may still be in the eyes of its beholders, even when they are looking at yuck.
"HARDBALL," JESSE "THE BODY," AND THE NOBROW CULTURE AT HARVARD. (7 October 1999)
7 October 1999…Last night on Chris Matthews’s "Hardball" show, Governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura of Minnesota met the students of Harvard in a q-&-a forum. At the end of the hour, someone asked Jesse to render his opinion of Harvard after his daylong visit. He gave a politically correct and courteously affirming answer. The twinkle in his eye told us that HE knew that WE knew that he could just as easily have trashed the Yard. But good behavior was apparently the order of the day, perhaps because the other day in Playboy he had trashed a hundred million Americans who go to church.
The bright Ivy League audience rose to its feet and shouted its approval of his approval—perhaps also just good manners in the mass media mode. But perhaps not. The students just may have been exemplifying that the highbrow culture, even in its hallowed home, is dead. Maybe they were showing how the "nobrow culture" (so named in an article by John Seabrook in The New Yorker [20 September 1999]) is now the only culture. In that culture, every quality can be made into a commodity. Even political leadership, the precious legacy we have from Washington and Jefferson, in our wired environment can be commodified, packaged, and offered to a receptive market.
The late John F. Kennedy, Jr., devoted his short career to exploring the conflation of politics and popular culture in his magazine, George. Some saw his experiment as a crass grab at journalistic success. But the spectacle of "The Body" at Harvard suggests that JFK, Jr., was onto something important in the way we define the quality of public life today.
The spectacle was a TV show with a crude name and a rude host, Chris Matthews. The audience was the elite youth of the nation. The featured attraction, center stage, as if in the ring, was former wrestler, sometime-actor, Jesse. The purpose? Profit for the show, media exposure for Harvard (competition at the top is the most intense), advancement of Jesse’s entertainment career. I am trying to think about its purpose for the Citizen, but the spectacle itself—so rich in nobrow humor, so lacking in references to anything but itself—is too blinding to allow me to see it in perspective. In the nobrow culture of total commodification, there is no perspective.
CIVILIZING T. S. FLOYD (17 September 1999)
Collegeville, Thursday, 16 September 1999....He was Hurricane Floyd as he swept through the Carolinas in the early hours. He was just Tropical Storm Floyd by the time he came to our town this morning. But he kept me busy bailing cellar water most of the day. And he raised the Perkiomen Creek high enough to make major waves in the town's routine.
After the brunt of Floyd passed, I walked down to the bottom of Main Street in the dark, where the old Perkiomen Bridge takes the street across the Creek. The wind was gusting at 30 or 40 miles an hour. The torrent of rain was over but Floyd's lower edge was still spitting moisture at me as he moved on to New York.
Along the way, I exchanged a greeting with Officer Bruce Penuel. His police LTD was flashing its lights in the middle of Main Street at the Pizza Hut. Bruce was spiking red flares into the asphalt to warn drivers of the detour ahead.
A little farther down the hill at the intersection, closer to the Creek, where the Merit Gas Station lit the night, I waved at John Wentworth. He’s our premier volunteer Fire Police Officer, who lives and breathes by the siren. Bundled in his weather gear, he waved his orange-lighted wand at the occasional car, detouring it off Main Street onto Route 29. All the while he chatted with a second fireman standing nearby.
A little farther, at the water’s edge in the middle of Main Street, Police Chief Jack Clawson paced back and forth near his LTD. Jim Stewart, Editor of the town's weekly paper, followed him back and forth, talking all the way. Both eyed the flooding waters that were lapping at the sales showroom of Keyser Miller Ford. Each brought his special professional perspective to nature's phenomenon flooding right in front of them.
Beyond Jack and Jim and the little cluster around them, the stone Perkiomen Bridge, on the verge of its 200th birthday, rose empty and useless, thanks to T.S. Floyd.
The Stars and Stripes were still flying from the second-story porch railing of the recently renovated Perkiomen Bridge Hotel on the far side of the intersection. But it sat dark and dead in the rising brown waters. Next door, the Munro Muffler Shop's garish yellow face glared back at me as the Creek poured into its repair bays.
I stood on Ralph Yocum's commercial lot at the corner and with a few others watched paper bags and sticks and other debris cruising down Route 29 in front of the Hotel. We stood on the paving curb beside Ralph's building, with the water just a few inches below our shoes. Then Ralph himself came along, saying, "I can't remember seeing it this high before."
Then I walked a couple of blocks on Second Avenue to the Chestnut Street Extension. There the street drops down into the flood plain. At its foot is the small neighborhood where a special breed of folk have enjoyed and endured the Perkiomen's moods for generations. All their houses were in the water now and no doubt evacuated. Someone had left an outside light burning by the back door; it underscored the loneliness in the rushing water.
As I stood in the middle of the street at water's edge, a pick-up truck eased to a stop behind me. A familiar townsman greeted me in the darkness and contemplated the line of the water.
"See that light?" he said. "My house." He rebuilt the house on stilts after Hurricane Agnes. He spread his hands to show how much space remained between the water and their first floor when he and his wife left it an hour earlier--about two feet.
"When will it crest?" I asked. "Don't know, midnight maybe." We could see the edge of the water on the street silently inching upward toward our shoes. I greeted his wife, who stayed in the truck. She looked worried but philosophical. They had flood insurance. Then they drove away to the home of one of their children for the night. "That's what kids are for," he had said.
I headed up Second Avenue toward home. Some guys on a Collegeville Fire Company truck cruised by. Then some men on a smaller truck from nearby Mont Clare followed, their service for the night also unfinished. There were hardly any other vehicles on the street.
I've been reading Hegel. Nature to him was of no account until it entered the dialectical consciousness of human beings. Then it became part of History. People took it into their consciousness and thus into civilization, which resulted from their acts and words.
T.S. Floyd was a no-account phenomenon up from the South. But the folks in our town took the Hegelian view of him. They got him by the neck and talked him into their lives. He'll remain there--a new piece of lore for the guys at the Police and Fire Departments and the rest of us to remember. The new owners of the Bridge Hotel are likely to paint a high-water mark near the bar--a conversation piece for patrons after they repair the damage. The civilizing of T.S. Floyd in Collegeville is just getting started.
GUN LAW FOR THE ELECTRONIC NEIGHBORHOOD (13 August 1999)
Yes, make new law to reduce the number of guns floating around. No, don't expect that in itself to reduce violence in America--by kids or on kids.
The main benefit of passing new gun control law will be to remove guns from the center of our national conversation about how to make a civil society in an electronic neighborhood.
When we finally disobey "Moses" Heston's commandment to worship guns, we will be able to talk better about other causes of violence--in a neighborhood that now extends from shore to shore and on around the world.
Actually, the talk right now that fills the 24-hour news shows is a start. The incessant chatter and hand-wringing on the tube regrettably may stimulate some sick person to say, "Aha!--that's how I'll get my moment of fame." But the chatter and hand-wringing are necessary (at least unavoidable) in the electronic neighborhood. The talking heads at CNN and the networks stand in place of the village gossips who rocked on their porches of yore and kept the local norms alive.
What the heads and their parade of guests say is of passing importance. THAT they are talking about the need for reducing violence is most important. The chatter in itself underscores the priority. It gets the whole neighborhood--the global village--going on what to do to stop all this. Hence the current fury of talk about controlling guns through new law.
But of course the problem is not just guns. The problem is how to create a civil society in an electronic neighborhood. We need to invent new ways to value persons we may never literally know but who are intimately involved in our lives--and we in theirs--in the newly connected world. The chatter needs to turn from controlling guns to creating a new gentleness in a silicon world. So, control the guns and get on with the real business.
NATO's campaign against Milosevic will have a deep-seated effect on Balkan attitudes comparable to the effects of WWII on German and Japanese attitudes. WWII turned Germans and Japanese into pacifists in the post-war period. By the time a united NATO carries out its programs in the aftermath of Milosevic crying "uncle", Serbs, Albanians, and other ethnic groups will be sick to death of their inheritance of hate. NATO will motivate them with material wherewithal to abandon hate and go for prosperity without bloodshed. What unconditional defeat did to German attitudes and Hiroshima to Japanese attitudes, NATO's unprecedented intrusion will do to Balkan attitudes. A European society is coming into being on the wings of information technology, mega-corporate dynamism, and political cooperation. The nationalist, ethnic, religious hang-ups of the Balkan peoples look ridiculous in this context. I think that the Balkan folk will finally see that feeding their grudges is not worth it anymore. This new day will begin to dawn for all the Balkan peoples as soon as NATO squeezes Milosevic out. The Russians in the end will not be an obstacle.
