The Advantages of Treating People Decently

Conservative and neoliberal ideologues in the U.S. claim that the welfare state has become obsolete in an era of globalization. Then they use this claim to justify cutting taxes for the rich and cutting public services for the rest of us. Consequently, the infrastructure for the U.S. is eroding, and many Americans lack decent educations and affordable health care.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, that Toyota chose to place its new assembly plant in Ontario, Canada rather than the U.S., even though several Southern states offered huge financial incentives to lure Toyota there. Why did Toyota execs choose Canada over the U.S.? Too many American workers were functionally illiterate, and the cost of providing health care in the States, where we've got a bloated private health-care bureaucracy, was too high.

Comparing America, where "basic health insurance is a privilege," with Canada, where "it's a right, " Paul Krugman suggests that "treating people decently is sometimes a competitive advantage."

I think I can already hear the right-wingnuts decrying Krugman for being a "Pro-Canuck Commie." Amongst certain circles, of course, it's considered heresy to suggest that that "we, the people" want our government to work for us by raising the quality of life for everybody.

More Krugman: "Funny, isn't it? Pundits tell us that the welfare state is doomed by globalization, that programs like national health insurance have become unsustainable. But Canada's universal health insurance system is handling international competition just fine. It's our own system, which penalizes companies that treat their workers well, that's in trouble."

That last line reminds me of a piece I read in the New York Times last week about Costco's success, which has been attributed in part to its implementing pro-worker policies that make it a sort of "anti-Wal-Mart." Apparently, Wall Street greedheads want to see benefits for Costco employees, who make something like $17/hour, reduced.

Primate Pensioners Enjoy Chimp Haven

Since Social Security is under attack, the people in my generation who aren't wealthy have been told that we'll probably have to work until we die. No wonder, then, that I felt a bit of envy as I read about Chimp Haven, a retirement home for chimpanzees. As a bard once put it, "Apes love that shit"...

From the description, Chimp Haven almost makes it worth enduring the indignities suffered during the production and promotion of 'B.J. and Bear' and other homo sapien entertainments.

Stanley Fish: 'Intentional Neglect'

Just came across this op-ed piece by Stanley Fish which explains why different labels for interpreters of the Constitution such as "originalist," "strict constructionalist," "textualist" and "judicial activist" are misleading. Fish's claim is that anyone who is in the business of "intepreting the Constitution - as opposed to rewriting it" is an "interntionalist." Fish proceeds to use his piece to articulate his "intentionalist" position regarding textual meaning.

If you've followed Fish's work at all, you've heard his arguments about why all meaning is necessarily intentional before. The following passage encapsulates the core of Fish's position: "if you're not looking for what is meant, the notion of something being said or written is incoherent. Intention is not something added to language; it is what must already be assumed if what are otherwise mere physical phenomena (rocks or scratch marks) are to be experienced as language. Intention comes first; language, and with it the possibility of meaning, second. And this means that there can be no "textualist" method, because there is no object - no text without writerly intention - to which would-be textualists could be faithful."

Whatever you think of Fish's claims, and I will admit to being convinced by his argument and the need to distinguish between a text's meaning and it's effects, you have to admire his prose. I've had Fish as a professor, and he has a real knack for unpacking (and knocking down) the claims made in dense and difficult texts.

Here is how Fish is identified at the end of his essay: "Stanley Fish, former head of the English department at Duke University, is a university professor of law at Florida International University." Did Fish intentionally neglect to mention that he recently stepped down as the Dean of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago? Whatever the case may be, I bet that position at Florida International U. is a phat one.

Ian McEwan on Terrorism and Collective Memory

I'm filing this Spiegel interview with Ian McEwan, arguably England's foremost novelist, now for use in my Fall Engl 105 class on English and American Fiction. Students will be reading McEwan's Saturday, and I expect that they'll find a lot to reflect upon and discuss in his McEwan's remarks.

One issue I want to dwell upon at some length in my class is the notion a people's "collective memory" can be a source of strength during trying periods in history. In the course of discussing Londoners' generally calm response during and after the terrorist bombings on 7/7, McEwan notes that the city has a "collective memory" of IRA bombings and the Blitz, in which 43,000 died. This collective memory of previous bombings, he suggests, could explain the "relative lack of panic and terror on the streets" immediately following the attacks.

Having implied that Londoners might be conditioned (not sure that this is the right word) to respond calmly bombing threats McEwan then proceeds to distinguish between the bombing of London during the Blitz and the bombing of Dresden. The primary difference being that the total destruction of Dresden made the "spirit of resistance" effectively impossible. This comparison should provide a way for us to begin discussing Jonathan Safran Foer's treatment of Dresden in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Some reviewers have taken issue with the parallel that Foer's book seems to present between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Allied bombing of Dresden.

Now, I wish I'd assigned Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to read along with Foer and McEwan's novels. I may have to contact the UIC Bookstore to see if I can change my book order. It's not too late to do some syllabus revising.

A larger issue we'll be thinking about in my class is the degree to which it makes sense to talk about a collective memory. Does such an entity even exist. That is, can we define what constitutes a people's collective memory? And if so, how is it shaped? Literary texts, novels in particular, are often discussed as being archival forms that function as a sort of memory. I'm interested in taking this metaphor seriously and asking why we should take a blatantly fictional mode of discourse such as the novel seriously as a type of memory.

Aside from the subject of collective memory, I also want to look at McEwan's criticisms of the anti-Iraq war movement and his condemnation of the free-speech policies that have made it possible for radical Islamic clerics to preach hatred. McEwan predicts that the tolerance of such speech will have to end: "Inevitably, we're going to start seeing around the preposterous political correctness that allows us to have radical clerics preaching in mosques and recruiting young people. We have been caught too much by a sense that we can just regard these clerics as being like English eccentrics at Hyde Park Corner. But the problem is that their audience has already been to [terrorist] training camps."

Random Searches on the NY Subways

The fallout from the London bombings continues: the NYPD begins random searches of subway passengers with bags and backpacks.

I don't see how these searches could be constitutional -- where's the probable cause? -- though I suppose if random traffic stops to check for intoxicated drivers are permitted, these searches will be allowed as well.

Of course, I'm all for making our public transportation systems safer, but I worry that the long-term effects on civil liberties will be dire. If these random searches are deemed constitutional, what sort of legal precedent will these searches establish?

One possible scenario: We the public will be subject to increased monitoring by the government, whose police powers will infringe upon the privacy rights that may become obsolete. At the same the federal government will continue to neglect and underfund public transportation in US urban centers.

A serious question: How will the NYPD insure that the searches will be truly random, as police chief Ray Kelly has promised?

The bottom line: If one of the terrorists' aims is to "attack our freedom and our Western way of life," as President Bush and others have suggested, then the implementation of random searches can be regarded as a victory for them.