Dangerous readings

by Judy Ferro

Editor’s note: As you can see by the above box, Alliance Book Editor Jody Grant has moved on. After whipping the newspaper’s book section into shape, Jody has decided to tidy up Central Asia. Last month she left for a two-year assignment with the Peace Corps in Ajerbaijan. We wish her the best of luck. We also want to thank Judy Ferro for stepping into the breach and welcome her to the Alliance family.

Did you notice that title? I love it. It leaves no doubt what this book is about. Yet if it was up to me, it would be replaced with this question from the front flap, “How did corporations get more rights than people?”

That’s what we want to know, and that’s what Nace tells us: first corporations played the states off against one another, then they placed supporters as judges and court clerks and, more recently, they bought the Congress. Nace traces the development from the Constitutional safeguards which the Founding Fathers gave us through years of erosion to their virtual abolishment since 1971.

Gangs of America: The rise of corporate power and the disabling of democracy By Ted Nace Behret-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2003. www.GangsofAmerica.com Cloth / 296 pages / $24.95 ISBN: 1-57675-260-7

Had you heard that the Boston Tea Party was a protest against the East India Company, not the British king or parliament? And it wasn’t over taxes. That international corporation was setting up its own retail outlets and bypassing colonial merchants. It was a small business vs. corporation fight! (Did Charles Beard miss that?)

I’ve got no reason to doubt Nace though. Gangs of America is not a tirade, but a well-documented, indexed work — the end notes run over 20 pages. Tables list the pre-Civil War restrictions on corporations and the comparative rights of corporations and people. People lose, 18-11, with corporations having gained such rights as “perpetual existence” and “compensation for regulatory takings.”

Chapter 13 deals with “Speech = Money,” my own pet peeve. He finds the reasoning behind the Supreme Court’s assertion that “expenditures of money by immense business entities in political campaigns” deserve the same protection as utterances by human beings as “highly artificial.” Does a corporation have a conscience? A civic duty? He points out that the ability of corporations to smother human utterings with million-dollar campaigns mocks the principle of “open competition” on a level playing field of ideas.

Okay, what do we do about it? Nace supports, but doesn’t see much hope for, a Constitutional amendment to deny Bill of Rights protections to corporations. He is a little tongue-in-check in proposing we apply Asimov’s three laws for robots to these other artificial humans. (Remember? Number 1: “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”)

Instead Nace foresees a long fight — generations long — of incremental victories. On the positive side, he points out that 82 percent of Americans believe corporations have too much power (Business Week/Harris Poll, 2000). And the goal isn’t so much to eliminate the beasts, but to stop the stampede and break them to halter once again. (Sorry, that Western twist just snuck in.)

It’s easy to be pessimistic about this, but, if one is unwilling to give up on democracy entirely, one must believe that 82 percent can prevail.

• • •

Now that The American Prospect (June 2006) has documented that the Bush administration turned down peace overtures from Iran in 2003 and continues to develop possible modes of attack, I’m glad for the insights this 368-volume gives into life in a nation largely veiled from American view.

Reading Lolita in Tehran By Azar Nafisi Random House 2003 Paper/384 pages/$13.95 ISBN: 0891297106X

I certainly didn’t pick up Reading Lolita in Tehran because I was a fan of Nabokov’s novel. Previews of Hollywood’s versions of Lolita suggested it was simply another male wet dream. Nor did I seek insight into the works of Fitzgerald, James or Austen, which strike me as sour-tasting medicine for an ailment I don’t have. I wanted insight into the lives of educated women in Iran.

I wasn’t disappointed. By writing of her students, as well as herself, Nafisi reveals a wide range of experiences in a culture as foreign to me as that of The Hitchhiker’s Guide. While the rebels wear bright clothes under their robes and risk beatings — or worse-by polishing their fingernails or even carrying lipstick, the traditionalists suffer most: Who are they now that everyone wears the robes and follows the rules?

Gradually, I grasped a mindset I had not imagined before. These women weren’t robed to shield them but to protect others. A girl’s scarf slips so a male student sees the curve of her neck or a strand of loose hair, and he is the victim, distracted from his work and filled with desire through no fault of his own. Nafisi’s students were beaten, jailed and raped for offenses little greater; their unmarried status alone representing one of society’s greatest threats. Nor is the role of men easy. Nafisi is angry that her husband doesn’t share her outrage, even though she knows if he did so, he would no longer be able to support and protect her.

It had not always been this way. Nafisi was not just a literary scholar, she was the latest in a family heritage going back four centuries. She earned her doctorate in the U.S. and there was no question that a faculty position was hers upon returning to Iran. She joined other women in easily defeating the first attempts to take women’s rights. Victory was theirs.

Then Iraq attacked and public support for the women dissolved. Couldn’t they see that the war was more important? That this was a time for unity? The walls go up and creep steadily inward.

Ultimately, Nafisi gives us more than a look at Iran; she gives us a warning.

(To appreciate the real irony of the title, know that the fictional Lolita was 12; today, Iranian girls can be legally married at 9.)

Also recommended: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. A good look at Afghan society prior to the rise of Islamic fundamentalists. Not a major woman’s role in it — and fiction, not memoir-but powerful, and a reminder of how recent and devastating the rise of Islamic totalitarianism has been.