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May 18, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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May
18, 2002
From Here to Annuity, or With
Fiction Like This Who Needs Enemas?
by M.G. Piety
If, like many people, you're planning to read
a little didactic fiction this summer, I suggest The
Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance by Russell Roberts.
Never heard of Roberts? Well then, you must not have read his
first novel, The
Choice: A Fable Of Free Trade And Protectionism, in which
eighteenth century economist David Ricardo descends to earth
to stop the election of a 20th century protectionist president
and which Business Week praised as "a 113 page defense of
free trade." Roberts, the John M. Olin Senior Fellow at
the Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public
Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, appears single-handedly
responsible for what A.R. Sanderson of Choice refers to as "the
small but growing list of works of 'economic fiction.'"
I'd heard of "economic fiction"
(the trickle-down theory and Enron's quarterly reports being
two of my favorites), but I hadn't connected it with novels.
Certainly novels such as Cannery
Row, Sister
Carrie and The
Grapes Of Wrath (not to mention almost everything by
Dickens, Hugo and Dostoyevsky) have socioeconomic themes. I was
unaware, however, until a flier announcing The Invisible Heart
appeared, unexpectedly like a federal budget surplus, in my faculty
mailbox, that economists were had begun to diversify into novel
writing.
The subject of the novel is a romance
between Sam Gordon and Laura Silver, two teachers at an exclusive
prep school in Washington, DC. Sam teaches economics and Laura
teaches English. He's devoted to free trade, she to free verse.
He thinks most government regulation is unnecessary, even harmful.
He woos Laura through his masterful grasp of economic realities,
teaching her, for example, that if you "[f]orce people to
buy safety devices [like seat belts] for their cars . . . maybe
their kids don't go to college." Who knew seat belts cost
that much? Maybe Laura will hope for a seat belt instead of a
diamond.
Sam is not quite your typical romantic
hero. His throbbing passion is directed at what he considers
oppressive automotive safety regulations. He gets into an argument
at a dinner party with one of the other guests, a physician who
feels that air bags should be mandatory. The doctor, who works
in the emergency room, has the temerity to suggest that people
may not always be aware of what can happen to them if they are
involved in "a car wreck at sixty miles an hour."
"'Do you really think,' Sam explodes,
'that people don't know what happens to their body when it hits
a windshield at sixty miles per hour? Do you think it's a secret
revealed only to doctors and people in driver's ed. and traffic
school who watch those gory movies to deter drunk driving? We
know, doctor, we know. Maybe some people don't wear their seat
belts because their values of the costs and benefits are not
the same as yours.'"
If that speech were not enough to shame
the safety-Nazi into silence, Sam delivers a devastating ad hominem
blow: the doctor's own car doesn't have airbags!
Sam dashingly opposes what he calls "foreclosing
people's choices." He doesn't want people to be forced to
wear seat belts or to have air bags in their cars. By the same
token, he doesn't want to be forced to pay for medical assistance
for "some jerk without insurance [who] splats himself on
the highway." Apparently, in Sam's world, bodies should
simply lie rotting on the side of the highway until enough of
them stacked up to create an incentive for some entrepreneur
to negotiate a government contract to, ahem, pick up the pieces.
After all this talk of bodies splatting
on the highway (which takes place while Sam and Laura are waiting
for the subway), I wonder whether these love birds will ever
get up the nerve to go for a drive.
But Sam's not all economics and free
markets. He reveals his human side, sharing with Laura a story
from his childhood. Sam's dad got in a fight with town officials
because he refused to put up a safety railing on the family porch.
Sam's dad thought a little danger was good for people. Like father,
like son. Sam thinks there's "less delight in a world of
little danger" "Safety," he explains, "diminishes
our "humanity."
No wonder he lives in DC. Few cities
in the developed world offer the kind of humanitarian thrills-muggings,
shootings, disappearing congressional aides-available almost
any time of the day in certain parts of DC.
Sam's mother had kept quiet during her
husband's battle with the town officials. But "[y]ears later,"
Sam explains, "she told me she had been glad that my dad
had failed that night. She and my dad didn't always see eye-to-eye
on danger and delight."
Danger and delight?
"I guess we don't either,"
Laura responds.
Sam doesn't hold Laura's obtuseness against
her, though. He's a romantic. "[V]ive la difference,"
is his response to the revelation that yet another generation
of women has failed to grasp that living with danger is essential
to our humanity.
I don't know yet how the book turns out.
I've followed Sam's "free market" advice and read only
the three chapters available for free on web (www.invisibleheart.com).
Will Sam's talk eventually turn from free market to free love?
Is there some groping of the "invisible hand"? Will
he show her his widget? Will he sell her short?
If you're not convinced yet to buy the
book yourself you should hear what prominent literary critics
are saying about it. Milton Friedman calls it "[a] page
turning well-written love story that also teaches an impressive
amount of good economics" and George Will describes it as
"delightfully didactic."
The book is intriguing. I don't know
whether to hope people continue to wear seat belts so I don't
have to keep subsidizing the emergency medical treatment of people
who go splat on the highway, or to lobby for the repeal of the
seat belt law so more people can send their kids to college,
thus making my job as a university professor more secure. I'll
have to get a copy of the book to find out.
Unfortunately, one of the economic realities
of being a professor is my very limited book budget. The brochure
promises I can get a free copy if I explain I'm going to use
it in a course.
How about "Literature as Ideological
Indoctrination?"
M.G. Piety
is a professor of philosophy at Drexel University. She can be
reached at: mgpiety@drexel.edu
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