by Colin Marshall

“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to “All good films are the right length,” the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.

The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.

Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid “epics” the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.

Having said that, I'll tell you what happens in Jeanne Dielman. Bear with me. The titular widow's precisely scheduled days have her cooking breakfast, polishing shoes, buying ingredients, preparing impressively bland dinners out of those ingredients, eating those dinners in near-silence with her son Sylvain, reading letters from relatives in Canada, and unfolding and refolding the sofa bed. Each afternoon, she makes the time to let a different man in the front door, take him into the bedroom, and not come out until the sun sets. It's not altogether clear at first what's going on with that last bit, though Jeanne does drop a few bills into a jar on the dining table after each visit.

“A-ha,” you might say to yourself as the first day ends. “The loss of her husband has forced this poor single mother into prostitution!” To be sure, nothing in the film refutes that interpretation, but almost everything in the film hints at a deeper, stranger, far less identifiable depravity. If you're looking for indicators of homes in chaos, mothers selling sex would seem promising, yet Jeanne, whose face at certain angles looks like a death mask of domestic efficiency, could hardly have regimented her household further. Each weeknight has its dinner — Wednesdays are veal — from which there can be no deviation. Jeanne and Sylvain step out of the apartment and into town at the same time every evening. That cleanliness reigns goes without saying; even right after seeing a “client,” Jeanne takes a bath that would do an obsessive-compulsive proud.

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Why Do We Have Heads At All?
—on Daniel Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head

“The head presents an evolutionary paradox,”
says Lieberman, “The roof of the orbits
is the floor of the brain.” And I imagine a room
in which a miracle sponge sits soaking up
what it means to be alive while other skulls
orbit this particular one which,
a la Ptolemy, imagines it’s a sun

This head’s tenant thinks it knows
something of the world. It sits in its domed room
sometimes as if it were a church in a cloister
somewhere emanating wishes. It wonders if
somehow it'll ever change its world. It hopes that
someday all sapient heads will in
some way plumb the paradox, lay it bare, and
sum up what they find in pithy words without in
any way diminishing the comfort of brain's appendages

“I’m not ready to ditch fossil fuels, and war's good for business,” says Id.
“Why does the head look the way it does,” asks Lieberman?
“Why do we have heads at all,” asks Jim?

by Jim Culleny, 1/9/11

In the third week of November in 2004, I dialed up to the Internet on a cellphone for the first time, then actively searched for blogs to read and bookmark. Though six years have passed, I clearly recall the first post I read through on 3quarksdaily.com. It was this one, a brief report after a trip to Karachi by Abbas Raza.

For disparate reasons (which might become clearer in future columns) the post struck some chords with me. I felt immediately sympathetic to the author and his viewpoint – a feeling since reinforced by years of devoted reading of this blog – and I was also immediately touched by his recollection of a lost “culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive” Karachi.

Now, it is true that I have never been to Karachi. But bizarre as it may seem to many of you, large numbers of Goans cherish their connections to the city. This is because from 1850 or so, it was where we made good in numbers.

Meet May Cordeiro (b.1912), sitting with poise between her much-older siblings. She will describe herself all through her life as a Karachi girl, and will assume a lifelong posture of disdain towards everyone who comes from everywhere else.

The Cordeiro family came to Karachi from Saligao, a modest village in Goa which has never been reknowned for agriculture or natural beauty or anything similar. Instead, Saligao has distinguished itself by exporting people.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

There were only two Nigerians in TIME Magazine’s ’60 Years of Heroes’ special issue in 2006: Writer Chinua Achebe and musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Apart from being artists both men were politicians too – drawn, when democracy beckoned in the late 1970s, onto that treacherous terrain by the prospects of providing an alternative to that god-awful brand of leadership Nigeria throws up with the constancy of clockwork.

Last November, I encountered both men in the United Kingdom – Fela as a reincarnated being in a National Theatre Musical (the Musical first opened on Broadway, earlier in 2010), and Achebe in flesh at Cambridge University, at a lecture he delivered in honour of Audrey Richards, the founder of the University’s Centre of African Studies.
I have written about my Achebe encounter elsewhere. Here is where I will pay my tributes to Fela, arguably the greatest musician to ever come out of Nigeria.

On the National Theatre stage in London, Fela came alive. But only just – in my opinion as a Nigerian speaker of pidgin, the corrupted version of English that served as the universal solvent for Fela’s lyrics and philosophy.

The “Fela” onstage clearly didn’t speak pidgin, he merely learnt it for the performance. And so his awkward handling of it kept getting in the – er, my – way. Fela’s pidgin (in which he delivered his trademark yabis – stinging verbal attacks on the political class, business elite and religious leaders) was as crucial to his persona as his saxophone was. Using a non-native pidgin speaker to play Fela was for me the equivalent of putting a violin in the maestro's hands.

But it was an ambitious performance, the kind one hardly ever sees in Nigeria – detailed costuming and stage set-up, and the accompanying band combined to (re)create a convincing setting. The scene in which Fela’s ‘Kalakuta Republic’ base is invaded is so well done you feel like you were a fleeing bystander on that horrible February day. Hundreds of soldiers stormed the premises on February 18, 1977, brutalising Fela’s band members, dancers and hangers-on.

By the time the soldiers were done, Kalakuta lay in ruins, and Fela's much-beloved mother, Funmilayo – the first Nigerian woman to drive a car, a woman who had left a revolt that deposed and popular monarch in the 1940s and, in defiance of the colonial authorities, visited the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s – lay dying. The soldiers had thrown her out of an upstairs window. She would die soon after.

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By Namit Arora

(An excerpt from a longer work of fiction.)

It has been a month since they first slept together. He wondered why their verbal sparring had increased in recent days. Just this morning at her place, Liz set off on the youth-obsessed American culture and the skinny ideals of female beauty manufactured by the consumer industry—a conspiracy, she said, to keep women down. ‘That’s true but what’s also true,’ he argued, ‘is that there will always be some power that will try to contain us, define us, or gain from us. Did earlier ages not have oppressive ideals of beauty? In this culture, power is exercised mainly through marketing. Fortunately, women here also have the power to free themselves from the narrow ideals of beauty impressed on them.’

‘Easier said than done,’ she retorted. ‘You don’t know the pressure this culture puts on women, how it ruins their self-esteem, causes them anxiety and self-loathing, not to mention eating disorders and health problems. These days many college sororities even have puking contests after dinner. You don’t know because you are not constantly evaluated by the shape of your tits and butt, are you?’

‘That may be because I don’t have tits,’ he tried to inject some humor.

‘What pains me more,’ she ignored his remark, ‘is the knowledge that so many women don’t see the big picture, and become co-conspirators with men in their own oppression.’

‘Co-conspirators? Wait a minute. Are you saying that men conspire to oppress women?’

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(Wherein we dump the obsolete Adam and Eve tale of the Advent of Consciousness for a more radical and contemporary one based on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience)

by

Fred Zackel, Ph.D.

“Something fell out of the mirror.”
“Did you hold it upside down?”
“Yes.”
“Did you shake it?”
“Yes.”
“After I told you not to?”
“I got curious.”

We must congratulate ourselves. Name another animal capable of creating its own meaning for its existence and then imposing it on the universe. We might even be the ones who most delay their own extinction.

Yet inside the mirror is the abyss inside us.

Let me tell you about Gregory of Nazianzus (330 – c.390) who later became Gregory, the Archbishop of Constantinople. He was known as “the Trinitarian Theologian” for his preliminary work with the emperor Theodosius on imagining the Trinity at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.

What? You think this Trinity popped out of the Church’s head full-blown like Athena out of Zeus? You think the Word became Flesh (snap!) just like that?

Gregory of Nazianzus argued just as we cannot look directly at the sun, we can know about it by seeing it reflected in water. So too we can know the Divine.

Our species may have gained self-awareness this way. We saw our reflection in the water hole. The word “epiphany” means seeing our place in the Great Scheme of Things.

∞

One day many millennia in the past, we human beings, each of us, one after another, saw our reflections at the water hole and for the first time. Oh, not all at once, of course. Each of us saw it independently. Some of us much sooner than others. And some of us needed it pointed out to us. But each of us saw ourselves and at that moment each of us became aware of our Self. Each of us, one after another, discovered self-awareness. Each of us had an epiphany and we learned we had individual identities, and thus, one after another, we saw our place in the Great Cosmic Scheme of Things.

What we saw was either a mirage or a miracle.

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I grew up with a mysterious man. He talks about depleting natural resources, the concept of class, Sweden’s welfare state, religion, Kyoto, corporate influence in politics, monarchy in Saudi Arabia and AIDS. And he kills people. Many, many people. I don’t understand him. I’ve never met him. I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore. I heard about him precisely on the morning of September 11, 2001. I was eleven, just starting to see the world.

I went to Peshawar in the aftermath of 9/11, an eleven-year old child, roaming the commercial streets and realizing, astounded, that the only posters as popular as the semi-naked Bollywood actresses were the close-ups of a bearded man with a raised finger, proclaimed as the “soldier of Islam”- Osama bin Laden.

I listened to my mother’s friend, sitting in our common room, speaking in hushed tones, around the end of 2001, guiltily admiring Osama, infatuated and defending, asking, after all, what had he done so wrong?

To my brain, it didn’t make sense when someone declared that if Osama bin Laden came knocking on his door in the middle of the night he would rather give him the security of his house than give him up to American troops.

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Justin E. H. Smith

The Internet, it seems, is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world now appears shabby, neglected, left over.

It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: TVs, stereos, telephones, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores, universities, banks, happy hours, travel agencies. Teleconferencing is increasingly obviating the need for travel; Wikipedia is now vastly superior to anything Diderot could have imagined (and unlike the Encyclopédie, Jimmy Wales's creation is perpetually improvable). As a friend recently put it to me: to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything.

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Capela dos Ossos
—on a Chruch of Bones, Evora, Portugal

We pray in a church of bones
in which skulls outline graceful arches
of low vaults and whose columns are ladders
of stacked femurs. We admire its capitals
of craniums

It’s walls, unlike the idealizations
of Michelangelo, are not fantasies
romanced in fresco but the real thing:
stony remnants of once-respiring
antiquity

We pray in a church of bones
whose windows look out
beneath an osseous calcium dome

Our chapel of once-articulating skeletons
—a reliquary of calcium phosphate—
rises over a promontory like a lighthouse
warning the world of muscle and breath,
spit and sweat, bile and blood
to steer clear of the promises of ghosts
and constantly sound to avoid being
beached in mud

We pray in a church of bone
We hope in a field of dreams
We hate or love between
unknown and unknown

by Jim Culleny
Jan 1, 2010

The Church of Bones

By Jenny White

December 31, 2010 — Today on the cusp of renewal, I read a singularly deflating article in The New York Times by Susan Jacoby who, on this sunny final day of the new year, took the opportunity to remind unsuspecting readers that we are going to get old and probably do so badly, and then die. Well, I, for one, had been planning to refashion myself in the new year — more yoga, fewer pounds, a new boyfriend, a mortgage-busting advance on my next novel. Won't work; Jacoby has that covered. It seems healthy living will not protect us from Alzheimer's, one of many left hooks the indifferent cosmos jabs in our direction. And forget that “late-in-life love affair” or “financial bonanza”. What awaits us is “unremitting struggle”, Jacoby warns, and we'd better get busy identifying a health care proxy.

But why tell us now? Why not in February, when we're sunk in darkness and cold, our backs thrown out by shoveling, primed to believe the bad news? Or November, when crumpled husks of leaves cling like forlorn bats to the naked branches. I'd be willing to contemplate mortality then. Not now when the gates are flung wide open. Of course it's important to plan for the worst. But it's just as important, I would argue, to hope and not to expect the worst. Hope lights the fire under our butts that keeps us moving, even as our energy fades to black. Yeats said it better (naturally):

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.

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Last month, late at night, searching for a painkiller for my wife I came upon an old stock of tablets I had been prescribed for a muscle injury. It was a combination peculiar to India, and among other drugs it included Paracetamol and Diclofenac. Since she was still breastfeeding I took care to check the tablet only to find the combination I had taken for over a week was banned in several countries due to the possibility of a life-threatening reaction.

I had been prescribed the medicine at one of many new private medical hospitals that have recently sprung up in India. The old government hospitals gave off an intense smell of phenyl (a once ubiquitous disinfectant), patients would usually spill out of the wards on to long dingy hospital corridors, wastebaskets would be overflowing with discarded injections and bloodied dressings and even a dog or two roaming the wards wouldn’t be taken amiss. They were among the few places where the existence of the Indian elite couldn’t be completely cut-off from the reality of this country.

This is no longer the case. The private hospitals are run according to the same insurance driven model that funds medical practice in the US. They cater exclusively to the post-liberalization elite and medical tourists from other countries. In look and feel they resemble the four and five star hotels that have mushroomed in the country at much the same time and pace. Over the past three years I have had reason to observe them up close as my father has gone from a healthy middle age to radiotherapy for a malignant prostate, a gallbladder removal, three major surgeries for a persistent subdural hematoma, a mild stroke, all the while requiring monitoring for his diabetes and his weakened heart. All things considered he has come out of this rather well, but now on my mobile phone instead of a single number for a general practitioner I carry the contact details of a host of specialists who individually deal with the brain, heart, prostate and other assorted body parts.

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Our visual system to seamlessly informs us about and guide us through the outside world so that we typically hardly notice its actions. However, our brain has limited processing capacity, and must filter visual input to extract the more biologically meaningful features from the totality of the visual scene. Optical illusions, in which a perception about an external scene does not match the physical reality, emerge from this filtering process. Illusions thus reveal a dissociation between the physical world and our perception of it, allowing a glimpse into the workings of the mind.

The Ebbinghaus illusion is a widely studied optical effect in which the perceived size of a circle is affected by circles of a different size surrounding it. In this illustration, most people perceive the orange circle in the right hand group as larger than the orange circle on the left. This perception is variable among individuals, with the strength of the Ebbinghaus illusion reflecting both developmental and environmental influences. The effect is absent in young subjects and in some individuals with autism, and it also varies in strength among subjects from different cultures. It can also be abolished entirely if the central circle is an object of known scale, such as a coin.

A report from last month’s Nature Neuroscience (Schwarzkopf et al.) reported an intriguing correlation between the strength of the Ebbinghaus illusion and individual functional variation in the brain. Visual information enters the body through the retina, where it is partially processed and relayed toward the primary visual cortex (V1) at the rear of the brain. The surface area devoted to V1 is known to vary by up to threefold in the general population.

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Famed ice-hockey scholar and literary critic Michael Bérubé has written in several places about the notorious Science Wars, but not always to my satisfaction, especially as we both march under the banner of post-Rortyan pragmatism. We've gone a few rounds in the past, and I haven't yet been able to make my objections clear to him; but his recent article (see also here, for an invigorating comment thread) gives me a chance to try to do better in this space.

One of Michael's concerns is to defend “theory” and “science studies” in a broad sense from its attackers like Alan Sokal (of Sokal Hoax fame). He admits that things got a little out of hand in the 80s, what with the pony-tailed left-academic brigade making the humanities look bad with (in Michael's sublimely witty rendition) “their queering this and their Piss Christ that and their deconstructing the Other”. The Hoax seemed to many to burst that Theoretic bubble and restore sanity to the academic realm, or at least provide a clear criterion for same (which, alas, not everyone meets, even now). But what is its real significance when science seems now to be threatened from another front?

As Michael relates, “[i]n my academic-left circles, Sokal’s name was mud, his hoax an example of extraordinary bad faith” while “everywhere else […] Sokal was a hero, the guy who finally exposed the naked emperor.” Michael's verdict, and mine, is more mixed. In our view, Sokal got them good, no question: anyone who knows what the axiom of choice is (or the axiom of identity, or even non-linear dynamics), would catch the joke immediately. And they didn't. This sorry result corroborates Sokal's charge that, as Michael puts it, the Social Text crowd “were overstepping their disciplinary bounds and doing 'science studies' without any substantial knowledge of science.” This is a problem, because if this is right, then they can't be familiar enough with the practices of science to say anything useful about it theoretically, as they claim to do.

On the other hand, Sokal and his fans seem to think that the hoax proved a graver charge than mere ignorance and Dunning-Kruger style hubris: that is, that among the “howlers” inserted by Sokal but missed as such by Social Text were blatantly nonsensical claims, self-refuting in the familiar way, by goofy French types like Derrida and Lyotard to the effect that objectivity is a phallogocentric myth, that there's no real world, and so on. This failure supposedly established that science studies types are soft on, or even sold on, the sort of anything-goes relativism (again supposedly) found in English departments and across the Channel.

Michael wants to preserve a role for Theory's constructive claims, so he provides a corrective designed to acknowledge the former of Sokal's charges and deflect the latter. If successful, this will allow the academic left to overcome its tradition of self-laceration long enough to confront its common enemy: right-wing irrationalism and its politicized attacks on evolutionary theory and climate science. In a way, this means that he is trying to do well what Sokal did poorly, which is to show that it is not the very idea of science and rationality, but instead adolescent rebellion against same, which — especially now — serves anti-progressive aims. This is better, again, in Michael's view, because it leaves room for the real contributions socially-minded theory can provide, rather than discarding them as pernicious nonsense and ceding the entire task to the sciences.

I will focus here on one promising but elusive slogan in Michael's corrective; but in true hermeneutic fashion, I will insist that, well, it depends on what he means.

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Imagine someone named Sue finds herself in possession of some information about Bob that he would prefer she not reveal to anyone else. So she offers him a deal: “Pay me $10,000 and I’ll keep my mouth shut.” Is that wrong?

Most people intuitively feel the answer is yes. But it’s surprisingly tricky to explain, in a coherent, consistent manner, why that should be the case. The paradox of blackmail has bedeviled legal scholars and philosophers of law for years: while it’s typically legal to reveal information about someone, as long as that information is accurate and legally-obtained, it’s illegal to threaten to do so as a way of soliciting money from him.

Unlike with extortion, where the perpetrator is threatening to do something illegal if she isn’t paid (e.g., “Give me $10,000 or I’ll burn down your house”), with blackmail the perpetrator is threatening to do something legal. If the act itself – revealing the information – isn’t bad enough to be criminalized, then why is merely threatening to commit the act so terrible?

This paradox is often expressed in terms of blackmail being a criminal act composed entirely of uncriminal parts. Telling someone you'd like $10,000 isn’t a crime; revealing someone’s secret isn’t a crime; and yet, telling someone you'd either like $10,000 or you're going to reveal his secret is a crime. How can that be?

Some scholars have countered that there is no logical reason to think that several unobjectionable parts can't add up to an objectionable whole. Philosopher Saul Smilansky, in the book 10 Moral Paradoxes, makes this case using the examples of bigamy and prostitution: It’s legal to marry one woman, and it’s legal to marry another woman, but it’s not legal to marry both. It’s legal to give someone money, and it’s legal to have sex, but it’s not legal to give someone money for sex. Blackmail may not be a complete aberration.

However, Smilansky acknowledges, even if there's no contradiction entailed by blackmail being illegal despite its component parts all being legal, we still need some explanation for why this particular combination of parts produces an objectionable result. He writes, “The way in which the ‘alchemy’ of the novel emergence of badness or wrongness operates in ‘ordinary blackmail’ remains mysterious… If one may threaten to do what one is (otherwise) allowed to do, offering not to so act in return for monetary compensation does not seem capable of bringing forth the sense of radical and novel heinousness that blackmail arouses.”

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Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing data to Wikileaks, allegedly did so while listening to Gaga:

(2:14:21 pm) Manning: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history

Audio is a most seductive medium. In 2004, when the IPOD was but a finicky, clicky-hard drived baby, New York Times reporter Warren St. John went to New York’s streets to chart what effect the device had on the urban landscape and the human relationships within. Were New Yorkers becoming as atomized, as isolated, as Californians were in their cars? Baristas and bagel bar owners were quoted lamenting that Ipod listeners were holding up the line, not hearing the cashier shout “Next!” New Yorkers love their imagined tribes, and one likened Ipod owners to one, identifiable only by those little white wires. Another tribal said the machine “makes him feel as though he is in his own music video.”

This last idea is the only one in the article that still seems relevant: somehow our bagel lines move smoothly again even if we’re all plugged in, but the idea of creating one’s own little cinemascape, audience of one, is stickier. The listener St. John quoted isn’t at all concerned by the idea of being in his own music video. It is rather an empowering, joyous thing, one any urban dweller who moves through the city freely and possesses such a device might relate to. Indeed, the idea that the Ipod might have a pernicious, or at least complicated side, struck Apple as “wacky” in St. John’s article ''it's a little wacky to look at it that way, when the iPod has brought so much happiness into people's lives.''

The social aspects of music enjoyment – at a concert or a club, or even through Ipods and mobile phones (Wayne Marshall's teenagers “clustered around a tinny piece of plastic broadcasting a trebly slice of the latest pop hit”), are recognized as important, or demonized, parts of the urban tapestry. There’s a lot being said about what this all means for the public space. Here though, I want to focus on the private space: that more intimate, profoundly antisocial relationship, between oneself, one’s music, and one’s earbuds. When you’re not sharing, when its just for you. What does it mean to be in one’s own music video?

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“The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept.
The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about.
…God is present when I confront You.” *

Modern Times
by Jim Culleny
……………………
I and Thou (stern and bow)
may have plowed from then to now
(but can’t make way from now to then
through angry seas) split apart
end from end
……………………..
I and Thou must make amends
and join ourselves bow to stern
one with one from now till now
—as of now! or we will burn
………………………..
I and Thou, one with one
into the red eye of the sun
—being we, being now
being one, you and
I I
and Thou

Let’s forgive each other darlin’, let’s go down to the greenwood glen
Let’s forgive each other darlin’, let’s go down to the greenwood glen
Let’s put our heads together, let’s put old matters to an end **

* Walter Kaufmann; prologue to I and Thou by Martin Buber
** Bob Dylan; Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Modern Times

by Jeff Strabone

Why is it that people who argue against the government's role in the economy don't likewise advocate for the flip side: that corporations should not be allowed to influence government? Is there an industrialized democracy more in need of checking corporate power over government policy than the United States? I expect that in any society, in any era, the powerful will have more sway over the making of laws than the powerless. Here in the U.S., corporate influence does not just distort our laws: it distorts our land. The power of the petroleum and automobile industries is inscribed in our very topography, and recent decisions by Republican governors to scuttle federally-funded rail projects suggest that their power to warp the landscape remains as strong as their power to warp democracy. The two go hand in hand.

Corporate power leaves its mark on the world in many ways. Coalmines and mercury-poisoned rivers are the most obvious examples. But what about strip malls and highways and the everyday landscape that many people take for granted as they drive a few miles to the nearest supermarket? Aren't they as American as the amber waves of grain that are the stuff of national song? Let us ask ourselves, how did they get here and what do they tell us about our national inability to build the high-speed rail lines that are the pride of so many other countries?

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