Corporate Personhood: Fact or Fantasy?

One of the delights associated with newspaper reading is the random encounter with an article whose headline might not have drawn you to it online, but which, with idle page-turning, happens to catch your attention for no reason other than pure serendipity.

Religion sections having become an exotic species in newspapers of late, my curiosity was piqued by a headline in the Cape Cod Times: Do Corporations Have Souls? The author (The Rev. Edmund Robinson) starts out with a Halloween peg about the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain, during which "the veil between this world and the other world was said to be at its thinnest, allowing the fairy folk to escape the sidhe, or fairy hill, and wander about in human villages."

It was but a short narrative leap from those shades and spirits to the incorporeal entities now frighteningly empowered to fund election campaigns anonymously, courtesy of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, a case which infamously declared corporations to be persons under the law, and therefore entitled to all of the free speech protections of the 1^st Amendment.

Robinson then proceeds to demolish the premise of corporate personhood as a theological absurdity, a compelling perspective not previously encountered in my readings on the subject.

We may of course choose to accept or reject his doctrinal arguments according to our own religious convictions, but there is no getting around his essentially humanistic contention that corporations are not people because they are not mortal, and, consequently, neither die nor harbor fear of death, a uniquely human imperative that existentially influences our behavior, hopefully for the better.

I commend the complete article to your attention.

Promises, promises

So amazed was I to encounter on the front page of our local newspaper a headline stating that one of our congressional candidates has an actual "plan" to offer, rather than the usual mix of glittering generalities and ad hominem calumny, that I hastened to read the article.

Alas, t'was not to be. It seems that the candidate's plan relies heavily for implementation upon passing two Constitutional Amendments, despite the fact that in the 222 years since the Bill of Rights was ratified, over 10,000 Amendments have been offered and only 17 have passed (the ERA having been on life support since 1923).

One must therefore reluctantly conclude that we are, as usual, being offered only what those of us old enough to still be reading newspapers call "pie in the sky".

We is Sarah

Without becoming unduly obsessive about the essential witlessness of Sarah Palin, her most irritating trait may well be her insistence on referring to herself in the 1st person plural.

Acceptable use of the imperial we is pretty much restricted to sovereigns and heads of state, and, even then, is generally derided in democracies as an affectation; especially when utilized by someone holding no public office whatsoever.

Journo Knocks Jock Pols

Robert Lipsyte, the justly-celebrated veteran sportswriter, writes (on Huffpost) that ex-athletes make lousy politicians. He sets up his premise thus:

Keep in mind that the sports-industrial complex tends to produce narrow-minded, self-centered, ethically-challenged mercenaries who are deeply submissive to established authority while being fiercely dedicated to winning by any means possible.  Or as one of my old political advisers, Sam Hall Kaplan, a former New York Times and Los Angeles Times reporter, puts it: "A pol who learned as an athlete just who ultimately butters his bread can be counted on to continue to wave to the crowds while doing the bidding of the owners." And the owners these days, thanks to the umpires (... er, Supreme Court) are likely to be unnamed billionaire warlords donating to right-wing candidates through dummy organizations that have no requirement to open their books to the voters.

Read the entire article here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beware of Greeks

As skeptics have long suspected, "ancient Greek civilization" — and its attendant cultural baggage — has been exposed as a fabrication artfully constructed by renegade historians. Coming as it does just before mid-terms, the news elicited a collective sigh of relief from overstressed Ph.D candidates, nationwide.

Read about this astonishing hoax here.

Intel Insider

Carrying a Beijing dateline, the influential Borowitz Report noted yesterday that China will soon begin dismantling its widely envied domestic intelligence network in favor of Facebook.

Contacted by this column for corroboration, a high-level PRC government spokesman revealed that the Ministry of Public Security's elaborate intelligence-gathering apparatus has become a "runaway monster", diverting revenue that could be more productively used to buy U.S. Treasury bonds.

"It's astonishing to us that people will voluntarily put their most private thoughts and activities up for public scrutiny in order to be perceived as being 'with it'", noted the spokesman. He went on to say that "the amount of personal information available on Facebook staggers the imagination. As long as self-involvement remains the 21^st Century's most defining human trait, our office need only sit back and mine the data."

There are unconfirmed reports that other intelligence agencies around the world, including our own NSA, CIA and FBI, are closely following developments, lest the Chinese run away with advanced Western technology, yet again.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, was unavailable for comment, according to a publicist newly hired to cope with recent Zuckerberg-connected media excesses.

Queries to the Xinhua news agency and the Chinese search engine Baidu seeking further corroboration met only with the usual oriental inscrutability, an irritating cultural artifact rapidly being undermined by the internet. But, coupling the ministry's frank statement with Borowitz .com's usual reliability, we've decided to run with the story anyway.

See http://www.borowitzreport.com

The Ortolan and the Omnivore: A Tale of Gluttony

I see by the London Telegraph that France's League for the Protection of Birds hopes to have French authorities pronounced guilty of flouting a European ban on hunting the endangered ortolan (emberiza hortulana), a tiny bobolink-like songbird that – force-fed and drowned in Armagnac — has long been coveted by gastronomes of the Gallic persuasion as an exquisite delicacy; all the more enticing because its trapping is forbidden.

Traditionally, ortolans are eaten with one's head covered by a napkin because: [1.] (sensual) the exotic aroma is thereby captured, concentrated and savored, and/or, [2.] (spiritual) God cannot see you engaging in such flagrant gourmandise (French for gluttony), one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Ortolans occupy a storied place in the culinary history of La Belle France (see Mitterrand, François: Last meal of), and – as I am reminded by the Telegraph article — at least once in America as an object of the appetite and pen of the late New York Times restaurant critic, and mid-20^th Century doyen of food writers, Craig Claiborne.

Back in 1975, when people were still reading newspapers, Claiborne bid $300 at a public television charity auction and, having won, got his pick of a restaurant meal for two anywhere in the world, with no limit on the cost, courtesy of American Express. He chose to eat (with his friend Pierre Franey as his guest) at the Parisian establishment, Chez Denis. Their 31-course dinner took five hours to consume and was washed down with copious quantities of Chateau Pétrus and other legendary-label wines. Claiborne wrote about the meal in The New York Times of November 14, 1975 under the title, "Just a Quiet Dinner for Two in Paris: 31 Dishes, Nine Wines, a $4000 check"; a paean to conspicuous consumption seldom equaled in the annals of gastronomy.

Ortolan – need I note —was on the bill of fare.

The article ran on the Times' front page and created an instant international sensation, the gist of which was best summed up by Pope Paul VI, who pronounced it "scandalous". But the payoff came four days later when Times columnist Russell Baker wrote a scathing send-up of Claiborne's review called "Francs and Beans". It is near the top of my list of favorite parodies of all time.

So side-splittingly funny was it, that, as I read it on an early morning breakfast flight from LaGuardia to Toronto, tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was choking on my scrambled eggs, much to the puzzlement of the other suits on board who were unused to seeing someone cracking up while reading anything in "the old gray lady", especially at 7am.

You can (and should) read it at http://studentweb.hunter.cuny.edu/~murrayj/humor/francsandbeans.htm.

For a couple of bucks you can also read Claiborne's review in the NYT archives at http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30713F7355D137B93C6A8178AD95F418785F9&scp=6&sq=craig%20claiborne%20chez%20denis&st=cse