The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
‘I don’t think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that’s what they’re ingeniously designed to do. It’s ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations.’
‘But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers’ obligations are to the executives, and the executives’ obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO’s obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board’s obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-customers they’ve been fucking over in their own name. It’s like a fugue of evaded responsibility.’
‘You’re leaving out Labor Unions advocating for labor and mutual funds and the SEC’s effects on share-price over basis.’
‘You are a complete genius of irrelevancy, X. This isn’t a seminar. DeWitt’s trying to get at the heart of something here.’
‘Corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents. They can’t vote or serve in combat. They don’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines. I don’t have any problem with that. I think it’s absurd to lay moral or civic obligations on them. Their only obligations are strategic, and while they can get very complex, at root they’re not civic entities. With corporations, I have no problem with government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience function. What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it’s illegal or there are direct practical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.’
‘I’m regretting this conversation more and more. It—you like movies?’
‘You bet.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Nothing like cozying up on a rainy evening with a Betamax and a good film.’
‘Suppose it was determined that the increasing violence of US films correlated with a rise in violent-crime statistics. I mean, suppose the statistics weren’t merely suggestive but actually demonstrated conclusively that the increasing number of graphically violent films like Clockwork Orange or The Godfather or The Exorcist had a causal correlation with the real-world rates of mayhem.’
‘Let’s not forget The Wild Bunch. Plus Clockwork Orange is British.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Define violent, though. Can’t it mean vastly different things to different people?’
‘I’ll throw you off this elevator, X, I swear to God I will.’
‘What would we expect the Hollywood corporations that make the movies to do? Would we really expect them to care about their films’ effect on violence in the culture? We might posture and send nasty letters. But the corporations, underneath all the PR bullshit, reply that they’re in business to make money for their stockholders, and that they’d give one fart in a stiff wind about what some statistics say about their products only if the government forced them to regulate the violence.’
‘Which would run into some First-Amendment trouble, big-time.’
‘I don’t think Hollywood studios are owned by stockholders; I think the vast bulk of them are owned by parent companies.’
‘Or if what? If ordinary moviegoing people stopped going in droves to see ultraviolent movies. The movie people can say they’re only doing what corporations were designed to do—meet a demand and make as much money as is legally possible.’
‘This whole conversation is dull.’
‘Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment, X.’
‘My point is this. And I’m sorry, X, because if I knew more about what I was talking about I could make the point faster, but I’m not used to talking about it and have never been much able even to put it into words in any sort of order—the whole thing is usually more a tornado in my head as I’m driving in in the morning thinking about what’s on the docket for the day. My only point on the movies is this: Would these statistics cause much of a decline in the crowds that go to see these ultraviolent movies in such droves? They wouldn’t. And that’s the craziness; that’s what I mean. What would we do? We’d bitch at the water cooler about these damn soulless corporations who don’t give a shit about the state of the nation but only care about making a buck. A few of them might write the Journal Star’s op-ed page or even their Congressman. There ought to be a law. Regulate it, we’d say. But come Saturday night, they’d still go see whatever damn violent movie they and the Mrs. want to see.’
‘It’s like they expect the government to be the parent that takes away the dangerous toy, and until it does they’ll go right on playing with it. A toy dangerous to others.’
‘They don’t think of themselves as responsible.’
‘I think what’s changed somehow is they don’t think of themselves as personally responsible. They don’t think of it like that their personal, individual going and buying a ticket for The Exorcist is what adds to the demand that keeps the corporate machines coming out with more and more violent movies to satisfy the demand.’
‘They expect the government to do something about it.’
‘Or corporations to grow souls.’
‘That example makes it a lot easier to see your point, Mr. Glendenning,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure The Exorcist is the best example. The Exorcist isn’t all that violent so much as sick. Now The Godfather— that’s violent.’
‘Never did see The Exorcist, because Mrs. G. said she’d rather have all her fingers and toes cut off with dull scissors than sit through a piece of trash like that. But from what I heard and read it was damn violent.’
‘I think the syndrome is more the not-voting one, the I’m-so-small-and-the-mass-of-everyone-else-is-so-big-what-possible-difference-does-what-I-do-make, so they stay home and watch Charlie’s Angels instead of going to vote.’
‘And then they bitch and moan about their elected leaders.’
‘So maybe it’s not a sense of the individual citizen not being responsible so much as they’re so tiny and the government and rest of the country is so big they’ve got no chance of having any kind of real impact, so they just have to look out for themselves as best they can.’
‘Not to mention how big corporations are; like how is one guy not having a Godfather ticket going to influence Paramount Pictures one way or the other? Which is all still bullshit; it’s a way to rationalize not being responsible for your tiny part of which way the country goes.’
‘All this is part of it, I think. And it’s hard to peg just what the difference is. And I’m wary about doing the old-fart move of saying people aren’t civic-minded like they were in the good old days and the country’s going to shit. But it seems like citizens—whether on taxes or littering, you name it—did feel like they were part of Everything, that the huge Everybody Else that determined policy and taste and the common good was in fact made up of a whole lot of individuals just like them, that they were in fact part of Everything, and that they had to hold up their end and pull their weight and assume what they did made some difference the same way Everybody Else did, if the country was going to stay a nice place to live.’
‘Citizens feel alienated now. It’s like me-against-everyone-else.’
‘Alienated’s one of those big sixties words.’
‘But how did this alienated small selfish make-no-difference thing result from the sixties, since if the sixties showed anything good it showed that like-minded citizens can think for themselves and not just swallow what the Establishment says and they can band together and march and agitate for change and there can be real change; we pull out of ’Nam, we get Welfare and the Civil Rights Act and women’s lib.’
‘Because corporations got in the game and turned all the genuine pri
nciples and aspirations and ideology into a set of fashions and attitudes—they made Rebellion a fashion pose instead of a real impetus.’
‘It’s awful easy to vilify corporations, X.’
‘Doesn’t the term corporation itself come from body, like “made into a body”? These were artificial people being created. What was it, the Fourteenth Amendment that gave corporations all the rights and responsibilities of citizens?’
‘No, the Fourteenth Amendment was part of Reconstruction and was intended to give full citizenship to freed slaves, and it was some corporation’s sharpy counsel that persuaded the Court that corporations fit the Fourteenth’s criteria.’
‘We’re talking C corps here, right?’
‘Because it’s true—it’s not even clear now when you say corporation whether we’re talking about Cs or Ss, LLCs, corporate associations, plus you’ve got closely-helds and public, plus those sham corporations that are really just limited partnerships loaded up with non-recourse debt to generate paper losses, which are basically just parasites on the tax system.’
‘Plus C corps contribute by double taxation, so it’s hard to say they’re nothing but a negative in the revenue sphere.’
‘I’m giving you a look of complete scorn and derision, X; what do you imagine it is we do here?’
‘Not to mention fiduciary instruments that function almost identically to corporations. Plus franchise-spreads, flowthrough trusts, NFP foundations established as corporate instruments.’
‘None of this matters. And I’m not even really talking about what we do here except in the sense that it puts us in a position to see civic attitudes close up, since there’s nothing more concrete than a tax payment, which after all is your money, whereas the obligations and projected returns on the payments are abstract, at the abstract level the whole nation and its government and the commonweal, so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man’s civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms.’
‘Wasn’t it the Thirteenth Amendment that blacks and corporations exploited?’
‘Let me throw him off, Mr. G., I’m pleading with you.’
‘Here’s something worth throwing out there. It was in the 1830s and ’40s that states started granting charters of incorporation to larger and regulated companies. And it was 1840 or ’41 that de Tocqueville published his book about Americans, and he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen’s sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers.’
‘De Tocqueville is also talking about capitalism and markets, which pretty much go hand in hand with democracy.’
‘I just don’t think this is what I was trying to talk about. It’s easy to blame corporations. DeWitt’s saying if you think the corporations are evil and it’s the government’s job to make them moral, you’re deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You’re making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother’s supposed to keep off you at recess.’
‘De Tocqueville’s thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of.’
‘What’s interesting in a depressing way is that tacit hypocrisy—I, the citizen, will keep buying big gas-guzzlers that kill trees and tickets for The Exorcist until the government passes a law, but then when the government does pass a law I’ll bitch about Big Brother and getting the government off our back.’
‘See for instance the cheat-rate and the appeals percentage after audit.’
‘It’s more like I want a law to keep you from gas-guzzling and seeing The Wild Bunch, but not me.’
‘Not in my backyard is the hue and cry.’
‘Lady gets stabbed over off the river, houses up and down the block hear her screaming, nobody even sets foot outside.’
‘Not get involved.’
‘Something’s happened to people.’
‘People saying those damned tobacco companies while they smoke.’
‘It’s not fair to put down any critique of the corporate role in this kind of civic decline as just a simple knee-jerk demonization of corporations, though. The corporate agenda of maximizing profit by creating demand and trying to make demand inelastic can play a catalyst role in this syndrome Mr. Glendenning’s trying to limn without being the devil or bent on world domination or something.’
‘I believe Nichols has another two cents here.’
‘I think he’s trying to say something.’
‘Because I think it goes beyond politics, civics.’
‘I’m listening at least, Stuart.’
‘Not even on a tree but more like leaves on the ground in the wind, blown this way and that way by the wind, and each time a gust blows it the citizen says, “Now I choose to blow this way; this is my decision.”’
‘With the wind being Nichols’s corporate menace.’
‘It’s almost more a matter of metaphysics.’
‘Yee ha.’
‘Hoo doggy.’
‘Say what we’re in now is some transition in the economy and society between the age of industrial democracy and the stage that comes after, where what industrial democracy was about was production and the economy depended on constantly increasing production and the democracy’s big tension was between industry’s needs for policies that abetted production and citizens’ needs to both benefit from all the production and still have their basic rights and interests protected from industry’s simpleminded emphasis on production and profits.’
‘I’m not sure where the metaphysics comes in here, Nichols.’
‘Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’
‘Anybody got the time? How long we been in here, three hours?’
‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produc
e, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.’
‘This is supposed to be news to us. News flash: We’re going to die.’
‘Why do you think people buy insurance?’
‘Let him finish.’
‘Now this is depressing instead of just boring.’
‘The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire.’
‘I smell Rousseau at the root here, the same way you were talking about de Tocqueville before.’
‘As usual DeWitt’s way ahead of me. It probably does start with Rousseau and the Magna Carta and the French Revolution. This emphasis on man as the individual and on the rights and entitlements of the individual instead of the responsibilities of the individual. But corporations and marketing and PR and the creation of desire and need to feed all the manic production, the way modern advertising and marketing seduce the individual by flattering all the little psychic delusions with which we deflect the horror of personal smallness and transience, enabling the delusion that the individual is the center of the universe, the most important thing—I mean the individual individual, the little guy watching TV or listening to the radio or leafing through a shiny magazine or looking at a billboard or any of the million different daily ways this guy comes into contact with Burson-Marsteller’s or Saachi & Saachi’s big lie, that he is the tree, that his first responsibility is to his own happiness, that everyone else is the great gray abstract mass which his life depends on standing apart from, being an individual, being happy.’
‘Doing your own thing.’
‘That’s your bag.’
‘Shaking off the shackles of authority and conformity, of authoritarian conformity.’
‘I’m going to need to use the head very soon, I’m afraid.’
‘That’s more the sixties than the French Revolution, man, then.’
‘But if I’m getting DeWitt’s thrust, the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generation you wanted to impress and get accepted by.’