Institutional Idiocy

David Brooks has a wistful paean in today's New York Times extolling traditional institutions' affect upon our lives.  He ends by praising traditional institutions for often saving us from our weaknesses and giving meaning to our lives.  Putting aside for a moment the question of whether I want to be saved from my weaknesses or if I give a rat's ass about vacuous concepts like life's meaning, I can go both ways on his nostalgia for traditional institutions.

As a member of the bar, I find much that is useful in the traditions of my profession that I embrace.  For instance, I'm a big believer in our adversarial system of justice, where opposing parties duke it out in front of allegedly neutral fact finders.  I like the skeptical bent of our common law evidentiary system with its distrust of all things outside the scope of a witness's personal knowledge.  These traditions take a lifetime to master and profoundly change you as you learn them.  But one also has to remember that all traditions were new at one point, which means at some time they were an innovation supplanting another preexisting tradition.  And there are plenty of idiotic institutional traditions that should be obliterated but survive because they have powerful lobbies  of persons who have mastered their arcane byways and profit from knowing something that most find impenetrable.

Much of Anglo-American property law is a good example of this.  Why the basis of our modern property laws should consist of French & Nordic feudal law imported into England during the Norman conquest is beyond me.  Really, where else in modern life do you still refer to another person as your Lord, as you do whenever you refer to your landlord?  To a large degree our property law in this country is based on an agrarian world view that viewed land, as opposed to the buildings on it, as what was important. Without boring you with the details, the clash between the feudal agrarian world view and the modern world view causes the courts to make so many ridiculous contortions trying to reconcile the two world views that we'd all be better off if most of traditional property law was abolished and replaced by much more straightforward and modern contract law.  (I am not the first person to suggest this.)  But this won't happen anytime soon because that would put all those who've made their living learning the arcane byways of feudal property law out of a job.  

Which leads me to what I think is the problem with embracing tradition too tightly.  As often as tradition is rewarding and enriching, it also rewards and enriches entrenched interests who smother innovation with the outworn utilities of a bygone era.  Thus I would argue that it is better to engage and innovate within your tradition, sometimes even casting aside your tradition and starting anew, than to reanimate what is dead and of little use to anyone but the few who wring their profits from selling old wares.   

Wicked Economic News

I was a bit disturbed by an opportunity that came my way the other day but quickly got over it to take advantage of what is another informal sign of just how bad this financial crisis is. I was offered free tickets, through a stage manager friend on the show, to the hit Broadway show Wicked.   Now, being a downtown Beckett man, Wicked is not the type of show I'd normally see but I'm not above enjoying a well reviewed Broadway musical, particularly when the tickets are free.  But what occurred to me after I accepted the offer is that it's a show that has always been impossible to get comps to.  I have a lot of connections in the theater business and can usually get "house seats" (full price tickets held back for cast and crew) to any number of hard to get into shows, but getting comps to a show sold out months in advance like Wicked is not a normal state of affairs.  If there was going to be any recession proof show on Broadway, Wicked, and maybe Jersey Boys, was it.  And the fact that I'm getting unsolicited comps of previously hard to come by tickets makes me worry about the fate of my beloved New York City even more. 

The Architect's Turd

Karl Rove's defense of Bush's Presidential record in today's Wall Street Journal is a prime example of Rove's spinning technique: righteous moral indignation woven together with simple truisms presented as a tapestry of indisputable truth. If the piece wasn't the most read and emailed piece in today's journal, it wouldn't be worth reviewing, but it is, so it's worth tugging at the loose threads of this frayed fabric.
First off, I don't really care that Rove thinks that Bush is a decent man. This is an eminently debatable point that turns on one's subjective moral views as to what makes someone decent. Since 2001 I have thought that Bush was puerile,fatuous, vindictive, and petty, but that is neither here nor there anymore than what Rove considers decent. Let's review some of Rove's more objective claims of Bush presidential success.

1. "Mr. Bush was right about Iraq." Really? He was wrong that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, he was wrong about how much the war would cost in blood and treasure, and he was wrong about how long the war would take. Furthermore he failed to comprehend the geostrategic consequences of bogging us down in a discretionary war that has empowered the Iranians by liberating Iraq's Shia majority, vitiated our troop strength in our necessary war in Afghanistan, and distracted us from the real threat of the weapons of mass destruction developed by North Korea during our bungling in Iraq. If Rove thinks that Bush was right about Iraq because the surge worked then this just begs the question why Bush didn't deploy large numbers of troops in the first place when many, most notably General Shinseki, advised him to do so. It was only after years of bungling that Bush found the right strategy- the one he had ridiculed in the first place.

2. "Mr. Bush was right to establish a doctrine that holds those who harbor, train and support terrorists as responsible as the terrorists themselves." Is that why we supported dictator Musharraf for so long? Is that why we invaded Pakistan? Is that why we invaded Saudi Arabia, ground zero for terrorist financing? Oh wait, we didn't any of those things. N'uff said.

3. "At home, Mr. Bush cut income taxes for every American who pays taxes. He also cut taxes on capital, investment and savings. The result was 52 months of growth and the strongest economy of any developed country." This claim is my jaw dropping favorite. All I can say is, have you checked your 401(k) lately?

Rove is right that Bush deserves some credit for combating AIDS in Africa, let's give some credit where credit is due. The rest of the conservative fluff in the piece isn't really worth addressing, although I still doubt to this day that Bush ever has read the Constitution, so I don't know how you can credit him with picking judges that strictly interpret something he has never read or understood. Furthermore, the phrase "strict construction" is only salient for those with a weak grasp of the Constitution. Please explain to me how you "strictly construct" the 9th Amendment, or the Privileges and Immunities" clauses. Get real. But that's a rant for another day.