There's no Corpse in Corporations

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.

--  Robert Frost

At my all-male Jesuit high school, the senior retreat was a major life event.  (Those of you who have read the sermon given at Stephen Daedalus’s retreat in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will understand why.)  But our retreat was no fire-and-brimstone jeremiad.  In fact it began with an ode to logic.  The theme of the opening sermon was “Pigs is pigs” – an odd choice of text for 200 boys from New York City. 

What our retreat leader meant was that things are what they are, and no amount of wishful thinking should be allowed to obscure their reality.  An example he gave may seem arcane, but it certainly made sense to us.  “When a baby or a young child dies, people often say ‘Now he’s an angel in heaven.’  No he’s not.  He may be in heaven, but he’s no angel.  He’s still a human being, and human beings and angels are entirely different things.”  (This was largely to set us up for the theme of not deceiving ourselves into thinking wrong was right just because it might be convenient or desirable that it be so.)

But the idea always stayed with me not just in the moral sphere, but in everyday life as well.  For one thing, it and other experiences like it convinced me that the Jesuits had an undeserved reputation for crafty thinking when in fact they simply had a methodical way of looking at the facts.  More important, it helped me perceive logical leaps made in the service of personal preferences or beliefs, whether or not these were strictly of a moral nature.

I find it strange, therefore, that a Supreme Court with two Jesuit-trained members can so often disregard common, even universal, facts in order to bolster a dogmatic conclusion.

This week we’ll take up one such instance. Borrowing from that old Jesuit, we’ll begin with a simple tautology: “Persons are persons.”

Many of us were surprised to learn in 2008 that corporations were now persons, as this had been a contested view even up to the term of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.  For two centuries Americans have debated where corporations should be treated as persons, but only in the last few years has the blanket “corporations are persons” (or people) become a plausible statement.  If you doubt this, try Googling “corporations are people/persons” with and without adding Mitt Romney or Supreme Court to your search.  Of approximately 3.19 million hits for the phrase, less than 1% of all the citations occur without reference to the court’s 2008 decision or Romney’s recent comments.

Occasionally we do learn that something is other than what we thought it was,  but those shifts come almost entirely because of new knowledge: influenza is caused by bacteria, colds by viruses, the sun is a star, matter is atoms, etc. etc., all are agreed to be true because we found out something heretofore unknown.  Similarly, sometimes we learn that something should be re-categorized because we finally take in the data in front of us.  That non-whites are people, for example, was self-evident from anatomy and biology, but it took centuries for certain racial prejudices to give way before the facts.

            But in the case of corporations no new discoveries abut respiration, procreation, motility, or any other aspect of personhood, or life, have been recently been made by examining GM, AT&T, or Walmart more closely.

            In fact, except as a legal fiction, there is hardly anything about corporations that is even faintly human.  Corporations don’t have human bodies, can’t ambulate on their own, have none of the senses that people have.  They can theoretically live forever in the physical world (or at least on paper), and “procreate” by splitting themselves, like amoebae and other non-human forms of life. 

            Further, we don’t normally treat them like people.  You can kill a corporation and not fear arrest.  When they die, there’s nothing to bury, cremate, or otherwise show reverence.  They don’t serve on juries or practice religion, nor are they able to hold office, even if they were born in the United States.  And, as one observer recently noted, if people can own them and compel their service, then they are slaves, and slavery is unconstitutional.

            But of course what proponents of corporations are people mean is that they are legal persons for certain aspects of civil and criminal law.  When a corporation enters into a contract with a person, another corporation, or another entity, say a government agency, that contract is enforceable.  They have to pay their debts – though unlike people, they can be punished by corporate “death” for failure to do so.  They can be fined for crimes or other violations of regulation, and can be made to make reparation for damages, and can sue or be sued for damages. 

            But if it all comes down to money or its surrogates, that still leaves a distinction.  The most renowned current defender of the peoplehood doctrine is Mitt Romney, whose argument goes as follows: “Of course corporations are people.  Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”  Quite aside from the fact that the statement disproves itself (if money goes from corporations to people, then it’s clearly going from one kind of entity to another), it doesn’t constitute a proof at all. Let’s take the case of horses, for example.  Horses do work, whether by hauling people and goods, powering traditional mill wheels, water pumps, and other devices, and most lucratively, by running, jumping or trotting.  All the money the horses make ultimately goes to people, but that obviously doesn’t make them people.  (We don’t euthanize people who break an ankle, do we?)  We might even say the wind and the sun make money when they power windmills and solar panels, and that money goes to people, so even natural phenomena would be people under Romney’s argument.

            Romney’s statements clarify the core issue – money.  All the areas where we treat corporations similarly to persons are based on money: contracts, fines, monopolies, safety standards, and so forth, are rooted in the corporation as an economic entity.  If one believes that economics is the sole, or paramount sphere of civil life, then the position makes some sense. And of course the hot-button issue regarding corporations is their right to spend money to promote their (meaning of course their shareholders’ and other beneficiaries’ ) goals in the political arena.  Does anyone argue that any of the non-economic amendments or sections of the Constitutional – the number of seats in Congress, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, the limits on presidential terms, etc. --  apply to corporations? The sole area of disagreement is whether corporations have the same speech rights as persons, and that means the right to spend money to influence legislation. (We’ll avoid the second paradox involved, i.e. that “money is speech” at least until another time.)

            The legal debate turns on an interpretation of the Constitution. But as Abraham Lincoln saw clearly, the moral foundation of the United States rests on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. For the corporatist view to prevail, therefore, it will need a new Declaration as a foundational principle.  We conclude with a draft of its opening, in the words of Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone “offered for your consideration”: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Corporations are created equal, that they are endowed by their Articles of Incorporation with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Existence, Influence, and the Pursuit of Profit. – That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Corporations, deriving their ‘just’ powers from the consent of the Corporations – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Corporations to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Power and Profitability.”

P.S. For Holiday Corporate Caroling, click on Hallelujah Corporations

           

Ground Zero, An Alternate Reality

Just as America opened its Ground Zero memorial and shifted into the second post-9/11 decade, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission appeared and was quickly hailed as the finest work to date that directly considered the attacks and their aftermath.  Since I was about to visit the Ground Zero site and meet the memorial architect, as I mentioned in the last blog, it seemed ideal to read the novel at the same time.  I did have some concern that the fiction would pale before the encountered reality.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

As many of you will already know, The Submission takes place several years after 9/11.  The New York jury selecting a memorial design from a number of anonymous submissions chooses one – a walled and treed garden quartered by shallow canals -- by a young architect with the ominous name Mohammed Khan.  The controversy that ensues, and its effect on a number of characters, together with Khan’s ultimate choice, make up the rest of the book.

Obviously, we already know the actual designer and design.  Most of us have seen it, if not in person, then in the media.  We also know that a different conflict over a nearby Muslim community center occurred during the construction of the new memorial. And unlike such subjects as “if the South had won the Civil War” or “if Germany had won World War II,” the World Trade Center story is still living history to all of us over the age of twenty.  So how can a counterfactual novel, coming so close upon the reality, help but seem either derivative or wildly implausible?

I can only share my own experience, which might best be compared to one of those “young woman at her toilette or an old crone?” or “goblet or two profiles?” optical illusions.  Despite my knowledge and actual presence at the site of the reality, my mind easily slipped between what I knew had happened and an utterly plausible alternative reality.

How did Waldman achieve in so many readers such a willing suspension of disbelief?  In part ,because she brings to bear in this first novel skills drawn from real-world reporting, and uses these to create a remarkably persuasive narrative fabric.

As a former journalist, Waldman has an ear for the public statement, whether from an interviewee or a reporter.  During the height of the controversy she give us perfectly voiced shrieking from the New York Post – “MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS: ADDING ISLAM  TO INJURY – as well as nuanced challenge from The New Yorker: “We should judge him only by his own design.  But this is where matters get tricky.  In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs.”

There is just enough direct connection between Waldman’s imagined world and actual post-9/11 events to enhance the alternate one’s reality.  The runner-up design, for example, is “A towering black granite rectangle, some twelve stories high, centered on a huge oval pool.”  Not Michael Arad’s creation, certainly, but enough like it to draw the two worlds together, especially when a leading character focuses on the most common element between the two: “The other night I dreamed about that black pool around the Void, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it.”  This parallelism later appears ironically. As I looked over the railing at the enormous dual waterfalls descending into the abyss where each tower once stood, I smiled to recall the contention made by consultants hired to critique Khan’s design that “The canals were also a safety liability.  ‘One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.’  They recommended scrapping them.”

And, although Waldman has said she had completed a draft of the novel before the beginning of the falsely-termed Ground Zero mosque controversy, these arguments from her “Save America from Islam” coalition meld immediately into our real-world consciousness: “Muslims build mosques wherever they’ve conquered.  They could never get away with putting a mosque at this site, so they’ve come up with something sneakier: an Islamic garden, this martyr’s paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis.”  (Careful readers will recall that in the book’s opening pages, the jury’s spokeswoman for the artistic community had objected to the design on the grounds that “Gardens are fetishes of the European bourgeoisie.”)

Many of Waldman’s characters are draw from obvious stock.  Her 9/11 mourners include the suburban widow of a businessman, the blue-collar brother of a deceased fireman, and the widow of a Muslim janitor hired illegally by a building subcontractor.  There is also the over-aggressive reporter, the hate-mongering talk show host (“I Slam Islam” is his credo), the manipulative state politician, and Muslim attorneys and community activists at once fearful, indignant, and self-serving.  But these characters have additional facets, and some shift roles and perspectives in surprising ways through the course of the story.  As a seasoned New Yorker, Waldman subtly gives shape to her figures.  The memorial jury’s chair, for example, thinks to himself just before opening the fateful envelope, “To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or the governor…What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed?” 

The implications  layered, especially since the  main designers of the World Trade Center memorial and site reconstruction are both Jewish and have both been the subject of antisemitic diatribes by those who persist in seeing 9/11 as a Jewish plot.  But even upon immediate reading, isn’t it strange that the Jewish Rubin is named after two of the key figures in the New Testament, including the notorious convert Paul?  Later, when we meet Rubin’s sons, Jacob and Samuel, the anomalous interweaving of assimilation and identity becomes even more obvious.

The book’s title is so clearly multivalent that few reviewers have commented on it, whether because they don’t see it (highly unlikely), or because they fear being accused of stating the obvious or of flaunting their textual skills (about equally likely).  So let’s just get it on the table:  the submission of a design by a supposed disciple of the religion whose name means submission leads to a battle in which the architect must decide whether to submit to pressure and withdraw his submission. 

Of course, Mohammed Khan stands at the center of the story, and if he were not a convincing and complex character, the novel might have failed.   Fortunately, he holds the reader’s attention from outset, when he finds himself, like so many others, stereotyped in the immediate days after 9/11, to the surprising conclusion, where we find him looking back over a long career of which his Ground Zero design was both a false start and a catalytic event.  As he embraces a heretofore peripheral identity (he is, after all, American-born and non-practicing when we first meet him), then backs away from both his opponents and his apparent partisans, he is given a strong voice, though only one of many.  One of the great virtues of the novel is that few characters are allowed to remain static figures who keep our admiration, sympathy, or disdain.  In the book’s final pages, in fact, we connect in surprising, and surprisingly satisfying, ways to many figures from the heart of the decades-old controversy

[See "Nine Years After" under "Recent Articles and Reviews" for a piece on other 9/11 writing]