The Big Picture and the Closeup

Time to rid ourselves of some laws that block up the hallways of our national home and impede the country’s progress. I have three that I would suggest hauling away.

The rule of law is a fine thing, when it’s not stupid law. Amnesty would eliminate one kind of stupidity. And my law-abiding ancestors would take no offense at modern immigrants getting the same deal (show up and come in) as they did.

When government acts, people’s lives change, both for the better and the worse. The three layers of government programs (the Santa Fe tracks, 66 itself, and I-40) sometimes simultaneously visible from Route 66, exemplify that.

There is an overlay of mutual incomprehension in the struggle over the Innocence of Muslims video. But I would submit that both sides still have pretty clear ideas about what is at stake.

It is true enough, then, that the subsequent move from serfdom to contract, towards a world where one only assumed voluntarily “the work of making productive” someone else’s land was a glory of Western civilization. But it is arguable that the feudal distinction between one’s own land – or workplace – and someone else’s was not so glorious, and it wasn’t reversed in the move from status to contract, in fact it became perpetuated. The union movement seeks to restore in modern workplaces not merely bargaining power but some of the stakeholder status pre-feudal workers had earlier enjoyed. Recognizing that unions seek to offset an ancient imbalance provides at least an argument for the indignation they seek to invoke against non-union shops.

During the three-year stretch in which Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein II’s South Pacific and The King and I reached the Broadway stage, theatrical expressions of support for the equality of black and white were a dicey proposition, courting charges of Communist sympathies. And yet in these two musicals, lyricist and librettist Hammerstein found a way to voice that support. However, in keeping with the times as well as his temperament, he did so by indirection, and also with what might be called camouflage: presenting the “destabilizing” message about race relations in a matrix that included remarkably conventional and reassuring, even retrograde, messages concerning the relations of the sexes and colonialism.

We can all agree that historical understandings of the dividing line between war and law enforcement do not fit well the kind of conflicts our nation faces today. But the solution to that quandary should not be to cede all discretion to an Executive that works in the shadows. There are other unaddressed needs at work, among them the imperative to cut the public in on the discussion and the decision-making.

Trust me, you do not want to work in or help create such an workplace. Despite the great prestige and the nominally higher pay that shops like that offer you, you will be much happier if you can be somewhere where you and everyone involved can feel the rubber meet the road. If you are in a firm, you want everyone to share in the ups and downs, to have a fair financial stake and a recognition and a say.

When, at his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts claimed his job was just calling balls and strikes, he was being disingenuous. The very concept of balls and strikes presupposes a strike zone, and constitutional interpretation is full of competing strike zones. In fact, there aren’t even reliable rules for choosing among these strike zones.

The Hunger Games plays it safe, riffing equally on narratives of both left and right in our country, in a way that gives everyone something to like and little to hate. It will resonate for you, whatever you believe.