Corporate-Think and the Dog Killer, Michael Vick
Filed Under In the News, Porchy, Sports | 7 Comments
The Michael Vick thing in general and a commenter on my last post on this subject has had me thinking about three separate topics. While I would prefer just to burn right through all three of them, you deserve not to read a 15,000 word essay on three loosely connected themes. So here is the first in my three-part Michael Vick-inspired blogarama. (The other two will be: The Legality of Morality and Animal Rights).
A recent Salon column mentioned that most of the animal rights activists screaming for Vick’s head were white, while the voice of democratic restraint was heard from the black segment of the population. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I am white and I am screaming for Vick’s head. So there’s that. And now that voice of restraint is being focused on Nike and Upper Deck for their pre-trial decisions concerning the infamous footballer. So the question I’d like to move to is whether or not Nike should have pulled his sponsorship deal and whether Upper Deck should have yanked his trading cards. The animal rights activists, like me, say yes, absolutely. Crimes against animals are so woefully under-enforced we have little recourse but to depend on corporate vigilantism to deal any punishment at all. We hardly give a thought as to whether we would support a similar corporate action dealt to, say, a person fired from his job due to allegedly inappropriately and illegally protesting the circus. In that instance, we, like the defenders of Vick’s due process, might start shouting for some due process of our own.
Therefore in order to properly deal with the issue of corporate punishment being dealt prior to a court ruling, we have to separate the particular crime from the question and ask something broader: Are corporations morally obliged to or morally prohibited from punishing someone for a crime they may or may not have committed? But first we should answer a somewhat simpler question: Why would a corporation want to punish an employee (or contractor) prior to a court decision?
- Corporations aren’t governments, specifically they aren’t democratic governments and “due process” is a democratic concept. Corporations are money-making entities beholden to no one except their investors and customers and to no thing except the law. Corporations do not go to heaven or hell when they die. They do not feel bad when they step on an ant. Corporations do not have a conscious that is not the conscious of the group of decision makers at the top. The company has only one imperative: to provide a good or service at an acceptable rate of exchange.
- In ideal world a company would magically create their good or service from their air and magically transport it to their customers for an outrageous fee. In this way the company would fully maximize its profits, no employees, no factories, no trucks, no offices, etc. Sans magic, corporations minimize its expenditure while maximizing the amount it can reasonably charge, keeping in mind that at each stage in the process there is a company on the other side doing the same thing.
- Now, corporations have to obey the law, but unlike humans they never have to concern themselves whether a law is just or moral or not. If a company determines that a law costs them money, they have the right, like people, to try and convince legislators to change that law. They may also encourage legislators to pass laws that hurt their competition, but these laws are not laws based on morality.
- Codified in statute, the company has an obligation to the consumer to produce quality goods. Subject to the laws of supply and demand the market will determine the fairest price. The board of directors or senior leadership will do everything in their power to raise that price and/or lower the cost of running the company.
- Now, just because a corporation is not required to have a moral stand on any give issue, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have one or that they don’t. It also doesn’t mean they don’t recognize when their consumers might have a moral stand.
- By law corporations are individuals and like individuals they can choose who they associate with. In the same way that you may choose to avoid certain people because of their reputation, corporations may do the same. Of course we know that corporations may refuse to hire someone if that person has been convicted of a felony, but they may also not hire them because of their GPA, the school they attended, the person that recommended them for the position, or comments made by previous employers. Despite the fact that none of the these indicate criminal behavior, they are considered acceptable variables in the hiring process. Likewise any of these, should they come to light after the hiring process, would be considered acceptable variables in the firing process.
If you start to combine these motivations a clear path of action begins to form: companies are not obligated, by law or conscious to retain an employee and are free to let them go. Since they are not democratic institutions they have no commitment to democratic concepts like “due process.” And they have a customer base that does have a moral code and links the actions of the employee with the company that associates with that employee. Given the only corporate compulsion is toward higher profits and the only obligations are toward the investors and the consumers, it seems logical that, based on public character assassination, the employee would be let go.
Of course, my friends in Labor are ready to jump out of their seats and so I turn to them: yes, corporations have obligations to their staff too. Each employee is “selling” the product of their labor to the corporation and therefore deserve to have their wages determined by the same laws of supply and demand that the corporation’s good or services are. They are also obliged to provide a safe (physically and psychologically) work environment.
However, obligations to staff are 1) secondary to the profit margin and 2) moral rather than corporate, although many studies show that corporations that are highly respectful of their staffs’ needs tend to have more productive staffers…which serves corporate ends as well.
Furthermore we are not talking about issues where a staff member misbehaves or breaks a law because of mistreatment, although we might be talking about a corporate obligation to “stand by” their staffers when they face personal obstacles. We may prefer a company to do that but I don’t think there is an effective argument why they should. If the employee were valuable to the company and were reasonably the victim of an unwarranted smear campaign, then it might be in the company’s best interest to do publicly defend him. If Michael Vick were reasonably innocent and was still making those companies a lot of money, they might stick by him now in order to gain his employee loyalty at a later date when he might be confronted with an opportunity to leave. Or maybe they could renegotiate his salary downward (so that he would make them the same amount of money but costs them less). And it while it could be argued that Vick is still a major earner for all his endorsers, Nike is facing pressure from another segment of their customer base which told them it might not be in their best interests going forward.
And here’s the more important part: Michael Vick is not innocent of this crime.
I know, I’m supposed to be an advocate for democratic processes and here I am acting as jury and judge for Mr. Vick. But let’s talk about grand juries and how and why they work.
Prosecutors get to pick which cases they prosecute. They receive the criminal allegation from the police and begin an investigation. What kind of evidence is there? Are there witnesses? How many? How good? What do they know? Etc. If they have a strong case they prosecute. Prosecutors, even against paid, private lawyers should have pretty high win ratios. And they do. Not because they’re great lawyers (although some of them are) but because if a case is weak, they don’t have to pursue it and often don’t.
When a case is high profile or for some reason volatile, the prosecutor may request a grand jury. During the grand jury the prosecutor’s job is to convince the jury that he has enough evidence to go to trial. The defense’s job is to convince the jury that the prosecutor’s case is based on hearsay or is circumstantial or is in some way flimsy and undeserving of a court date. During the hearing the prosecutor does not release all of his evidence, just enough to convince the jury that his client is probably guilty. If the jury agrees, the defendant is indicted. Michael Vick has been indicted.
Let me rephrase. By the time someone is indicted, a jury has already agreed that the alleged culprit, in this case Michael Vick, is probably guilty. The real jury is just going to get more of the same evidence. When a person gets indicted they typically don’t get determined not-guilty. They might get off because the prosecutor chose “first degree murder” when the jury would have preferred “second degree.” But normally they are let go on a technicality if they are let go at all. A technicality in this Vick’s case would not be the equivalent of a “not a dog killer.” It would mean that someone erred in the investigation or arrest….we already know he kills dogs.
At this point, already losing sales and faced with the future of losing more if they don’t act appropriately, Nike and Upper Deck did the right thing in responding to their consumer’s moral outrage now rather than wait for the inevitable.
Apple Alla Alogies
Filed Under About my lover, In the News, Porchy, Random, Travel | 7 Comments
No real blog today. I took the day off to spend with an old friend in town from Boulder, CO and I had to do a quick edit on a report I wrote for work and now the house is all hectic with the screaming laughter of videos streaming from the Milk and Cookies site. So here’s a short list of things I’m thinking about right now.
I’m house sitting and the lady who owns the house has a hibiscus tree outside that occasionally attracts a hummingbird. Have you seen these things fly? I am completely convinced that hummingbirds were the first source of the fairy myths.
The Whitest Kids You Know are capital H eelarious. (you can find them on that Milk and Cookies site and elsewhere in the intertubes)
Astronauts are just like regular pilots but they go into SPACE. There seems to be a lot of controversy and surprise over this but c’mon, after nearly 40 years of regular space, isn’t it about time for intoxicated space?
My girlfriend looks real pretty in her long white skirt.
I need to get back to Méjico.
I need to get another house where I can have a garden because fresh lemon balm and mint tea is amazing. Also, I need more zucchini bread. Homemade zucchini bead.
I still can’t shake the awful grace of the House on the Rock.
I have friends that have worked at bars and coffee houses and both have complained about the tastings they have to go to. I love tastings so much I should start hosting them.
Also, I have friends that are sales reps for big companies. They never do anything but complain about “sitting through lectures all day” at their sales conferences. And yet, for some “strange” reason, they balk at my going in their place. Could it be that these things aren’t as boring as they say?
Which leads me to believe that youth is not the only thing wasted on those who can’t appreciate it but also good food and travel.
Ron Paul: Phantom Candidate
Filed Under Domestic Politics, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Politics, Porchy, USA, Way too Preachy | 7 Comments
Maybe I will echo the voices of the 2004 disbelievers of Howard Dean’s campaign when I say Ron Paul stands as much chance of winning the Republican primary as a salt lick has lasting the summer in the deer infested forests of the upper Midwest. I am aware of his growing bank account. I am also aware of his internet superstardom. But I am also aware that he is a raving nutball that the establishment will go after like gangbusters if he even gets a whiff of the Big Podium at the Xcel Energy Center next September. Professional political newshounds pursue every candidate as viable, at least in terms of reporting, if not in forecasting. As a result there is a lot of good information about Ron Paul. But I am not a professional newshound of any stripe although I read slightly more political cruft than the average citizen. If, like me, you are strapped for time I encourage you to follow my lead and ignore the heck out of a Ron Paul candidacy despite whatever the intertubes may be encouraging you to do.
You see, it goes something like this: Ron Paul is an intelligent guy. He went through medical school and whatever specialty training required to become an Ob Gyn (which is an abbreviation and not an acronym despite the fact that people pronounce it Oh Bee Gee Why In and means Obstetrician/Gynecologist…there might be a slash in the abbreviation too). At any rate there is a rhetorical flaw, I can’t think of the official name of it, but it’s where people equate smartness in one field with smartness in another. You don’t have to be a genius to become a doctor. I’m sure it helps but, like any other academic pursuit, to cut the mustard you only have to work hard, really hard. That means that the D and R that is allowed to go before “ron” and “paul” meant he read a lot about diseases and body parts, it doesn’t mean that he is a very economist or political scientists or, for that matter, a very good politician.
I’ve read and heard interviews with him and he seems like a very good, honest, simple man with admirable virtues across the board. That’s one the of great things about Libertarians (and hippies) they often have very strong virtues, virtues we have been taught in Western society in general, and in America specifically, to respect: a dedication to hard work and self-determination, a respect of privacy and excellence of the individual, and a day-to-day policy of non-interference and do-no-harm. I like all of those. But both political libertarians and hippies are anti-establishmentarians and anti-systemic. Which are both fancy ways of saying that they have no place in a political system. Their beliefs and opinions are prescriptions for individual life. There is no room in them for public life. A libertarian, in some ways, is like a hippie that finally said “Look, I’m so sick of the government telling me what to do that I’m going to join the government and not tell anybody to do anything!”
Well, you can’t blame a guy for a trying.
But the task is Sisyphean at best and that is saying quite a lot. At its core the political life of a libertarian is flawed because it is contradictory. It’s not that libertarians don’t believe in a role for government it’s just that their vision of government is unsustainably small. There is a fundamental compromise in democratic governance between personal rights and the government’s obligation to interfere in personal affairs. Different politicians have drawn that line at different places and other politicians have come after them to redraw it closer to where dictates their interpretation of that compromise. No one has ever decided to draw it as far back as libertarians do. Libertarians say that the reason other politicians draw their line in such a way that it violates so many individual freedoms is because they want power. Some of them do; I have no doubt. But in reality those lines are drawn where they are because of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of trial and error (depending on the line). Progress in politics has always been slow. The biggest development in politics in the last 6000 years was the development of American-style democracy and we can trace its roots back 2500 years.
There are two fundamental flaws with the libertarian worldview. First of all, power is not a zero sum game. Which means that if you take power from one person, that act does not necessarily make anybody more powerful (although it often makes someone else relatively more powerful). Wealth, on the other hand, has to go somewhere. If it leaves one bank account or national shore it has to wind up somewhere. That subtle difference makes economics and politics fundamentally different sciences no matter what similarities they may share. So to say that politicians are removing power from citizens so they can themselves be more powerful doesn’t make any sense in any objective way. Sometimes there is a one-to-one ratio in power, most of the time there is not. Pretending that power transfers from one person to another in this one-to-one way obscures the truth and makes it easier to swallow the libertarian doctrine.
The other fundamental flaw is that wealth (and the natural resources on which it is ultimately founded) is limited. You see, like it or not, there are other nations in the world. There are 5.7 billion people that are not American. We are competing with them for access to capital and labor. Ron Paul in his interview with NPR yesterday even said that he would like to disband the United Nations in favor of expanding trade. Under policies of free trade like Ron Paul mentioned yesterday this global competition is only going to get worse. Now trade, also in a like it or not way, is related to American diplomacy. Businesses, to some extent, will always be effected by the ebb and flow of domestic and foreign policy. If the American government decides that American businesses should not do business with Sudan, for example, then Pepsi-Cola will have to find a different trading partner to obtain its gum arabic or move to a country that doesn’t have such a ban. And government, like it or not, should hold this normative power over its profit-margin obsessed home industries that are not obligated to be driven by human ideals or enlightened self-interest.
Furthermore, diplomacy has always been and will always be linked to a country’s ability and willingness to go to war. That is not to say that we won’t eventually live in a war-free future, but we will never live in a world that is free from the threat of war. Therefore Ron Paul’s genius strategy of pulling out of NATO is simultaneously naive and…er…welll naive again. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Communist empire collapsed there was a lively debate over whether or not NATO had a role in the post-Cold War world. America and our friends in Europe agreed it did. Just like Ralph Nader before him, Ron Paul seems to think that individuals make decisions alone. In the real world we get together with our friends and allies all over the world and hash this stuff out. The reason we do that is because today’s friends may be tomorrow’s enemies. Why make tomorrow today? America was particularly pleased to continue NATO because it gives us a modicum of control over European forces which means that we have a say on whether or not they go to war. We have a say on whether or not we go to war with or against them. It also means that we have larger bargaining (read: diplomatic) power with those countries that may pit themselves against Europe (or us).
The neat thing about having a large military presence around the world that can induce our enemies to play by the rules of international society is that it affords American businesses the kind of stability they need to take risks at home and abroad. A volatile political environment anywhere in the commodities chain means hampering profits by hampering risk-taking. (I like this phrase so I will use it again) Like it or not, the UN, NATO, and other international units provide the kind of global stability that big business likes. They also provide the kind of domestic stability that governments like.
And while we’re at it, can I mention that libertarians like Ron Paul expand the legal definition of corporate individuality in such a way that eliminates almost all government regulation of business. There is some argument to be made that there is too much government interference in the free market. I agree and so do businesses. But businesses also like protectionist tariffs and tax abatements. Furthermore, I also know that we used to live in a world with looser government regulations on corporations and the results were catastrophic. We’ve tried it their way and I don’t want to go back.
So while Ron Paul has a lot to bring to the public discourse, and all the hippies, libertarians, and open source technonerds of the virtuaworld may like him, his chance of convincing the establishment that he won’t completely collapse modern economic and political stability is zero. All the good hearted but politically naive people in the world can scrounge and save and send every cent to the Ron Paul cult but when big business and the big political machine start to feel threatened, expect his political campaign to stop resembling a shiny, red balloon and start resembling the Hindenburg.
I would have gone about continuing to ignore his campaign and his ever-rising internet superstardom but he keeps appearing on talk shows and NPR and he keeps not coming off as a nutball. I fear that people are ignoring crucial issues that sound good as anti-establishment chunks but in reality pose disaster if taken seriously. What do you think our enemies will do when we stop aiding other countries’ efforts at political stabilization? What happens when we stop helping other countries track international arms dealers and terrorists? What happens when they stop helping us because we stop helping them?
The world loathes a big target and America is the biggest target there is. We have become the biggest because of exactly the kind of international alliances and domestic corporate controls that Ron Paul despises. The rest of the world may jump up to destroy us if Ron Paul is elected but lucky for them, they won’t have to, Ron Paul will do it for them.
Be American or Get Out!
Filed Under Conservatives Hate Education, Cultura Latina, In the News, Patriotism, Politics, Porchy, Travel, USA | 13 Comments
In the description for this site that I posted on Technorati, I said I was a “Southern boy turned Yankee [who] blogs about the cultural flotsam and jetsam that alternately washes up and is washed away by the main- and alternative streams.” On two counts bi-lingual education fits the bill. On the one hand whether or not new immigrants should “learn the language or get out” won’t cease to be an issue for some time and it’s a subject that is about as close to “culture” as you can be without actually talking ethnographies with Margaret Mead. But it’s also one of those issues, like driftwood and coral, that is tossed on the intellectual beach and later is pulled back under the waves.
While still in Indianapolis last Friday at the start of our recent roadtrip through Milwaukee and Madison my roadmates and I were privileged to pull behind an SUV proudly bearing the mark of the bigot with a bumper sticker that read “Learn the Language or Get Out!” I tickled them by recounting this post on Language Log which is only tangentially related, but humorous enough for conversation’s sake.+
It has been estimated* that by the time we are all 22-years old we will have been personally assaulted by an angry language nativist. I would nearly have passed the deadline had I not moved to San Diego a mere couple months before turning the mandatory age. While outside a Vons near my apartment I spied a table with a banner that read “English First.” Unaware of the anti-foreign language advocacy group but aware that I was a jobless English major in a major metropolis, I got closer, and as it turned out, too close. My curious gaze fondling the pamphlets and slogans on top of the unfolded card table was like blood in the water for these advocacy sharks. “Would you sign our petition to eliminate Spanish in our public schools?” I confusedly glanced around and coolly responded, “No, I don’t think I can sign your petition.”
I went to college in Muncie, Indiana which in the late 90s was about as far as you could be from a latinoamericano, I’m pretty sure. I went to high school in Evansville, Indiana and I have to tell you, bi-lingual education just never came up. That is all to say, I really hadn’t given the topic of forced monolingualism much thought; but, legally limiting what tools are at teachers’ disposal certainly feels wrong. As I walked away from the table and toward the Ramen noodles and Wells Fargo ATM the advocates became enraged and began yelling after me. I wish I could remember what ridiculous verbiage they used, but it was lost in the determined rapidness of my escape. All I know is that if that had happened today they would have used the word “terrorist,” but this was 1997 and terrorists only blew up airplanes and Lebanon back then.
Most recently Governor Schwarzeneggar has decided that, because he was an immigrant that had to learn English, he has the answer for the millions of Mexican immigrants living in California: turn off the Spanish TV and learn English. That’s it; it’s that simple. It doesn’t seem to matter to the Governor that people arrive to this country with different language proficiencies, different needs and wants, different support networks, different economic and temporal options.
I could fill this post with statistics about how few Americans know a second language and how long it takes to be fluent, how many Mexicans live here and for how long, what level of schooling they received before entering the country, and how many of them speak Spanish and a serviceable amount of English on top of it. The end result of that lecture would be that Americans should be ashamed that of the millions of Mexicans in this country most of them can perform most of their daily tasks in two languages despite the fact many of the Mexicans that arrive have less than a 6th grade education and not a small number of them are functionally illiterate. But I don’t want to do that because I think Americans who chant phrases like “Learn the language or get out!” should be ashamed for more important reasons than the injuries received to their national pride. And that reason, of course, is that they should stop trying to find excuses to be jerks which is all this “English first” stuff is about. It’s like guys who drive Ford trucks hating guys that drive Chevys. Let’s be honest, which truck you drive says far less about you than the fact you drive a truck at all. I’ll judge you by the bumper stickers you put on the back instead. Which language you speak says far less about you as a person than the things you use your language to say. I’d rather be friends with a Spanish speaker who works hard and uses words to say pleasant things than with an isolationist blowhard who screams and screams about what makes America great when he clearly doesn’t know.
It is true that no wave of immigration shares the qualities of the Mexican(/Latin American). Immigrants from Latin America arrive in quantity; they arrive continually; they stay for short periods of time; they work in menial tasks; they have large support networks. These qualities discourage rapid assimilation as we’ve understood it before. But in the same way that those early German-speaking Americans weren’t any less American than our hero Benjamin Franklin (who proposed German as a national language despite his English heritage). Those Americans born speaking Yiddish, Slovak, or Japanese also aren’t any less American. I did not become any less American when I learned Spanish.***
The facts just don’t support the nativists. Even native Spanish speaking immigrants learn English, or have kids that do, or grandkids that do. Even as culture accommodates speakers of other languages the fact of the matter is that if you want a job that makes a good wage, if you want to go to a good university, if you want to enjoy a movie the day it arrives in the theaters, if you want to shop at the mall you have to know English.
I know this may sound like liberal poppycock, but if it is such a determined reality that there will be so many Spanish speakers in this country that you might have to know Spanish to complete your daily errands and if learning a second language is so easy that you don’t need school to do it…why don’t all these yellers and screamers just learn Spanish?Of course their response is “I shouldn’t have to.” But they do. There is no law that says that business has to be conducted in English in this country. And, even if there is a law, the reality is, with all the murderers and drug dealers and rapists and music pirates there won’t be enough prison space to jail every baker that wants you to order “pan” instead of “bread.” A law prohibiting language use or language sharing is bound to fail. Not just because of the enforcement problem, but because that’s just not how language works. Or as my friend Special Agent Dale Cooper so eloquently says on his blog,
You can’t walk on water and you can’t hold culture. Like water, it is a liquid – it spills, it seeps, it evaporates, and if necessary it will wear slow holes in whatever contains it. Eventually water and culture will get away from you.
The reality is instead of making foreign language harder to learn (you see, English is a foreign language for some people) they should be making it easier. The real problem is that being anti-Spanish is a cover for being anti-Mexican. Being “English First” is code for being a white supremacist. No amount of patriotic rhetoric will erase that cold, hard fact.
Dale is talking about how music grows and adapts and changes based on who likes it decides to carry on the tradition, albeit changed, but his sentiment holds true here too. If English is the more useful language for business, art, science, etc, it will remain the dominant tongue. Spaniards did not always speak Spanish (of course they weren’t “Spaniards” back then either). They spoke a form (or two) of Gaelic. After the Romans invaded and made Latin the official language of business (and art and science), Latin became dominant. It evolved, changing pronunciations, added words from Arabic (because of the 700 years of Arab occupancy on the Iberian Peninsula), and somewhere along the line, turned into what we now recognize as Spanish. English nativist aren’t calling for a return to Chaucer’s English or middle English which is the earliest form of the language that is remotely recognizable as English by the average contemporary reader. Nor are they calling for a return to the English of Beowulf, which is flat out another language altogether. They aren’t even calling for a return to Shakespeare’s English. They simply don’t want Spanish speakers nearby. They say that if immigrants just spoke English and “assimilated” or “participated in American life” they would be happy. But they will also tell you that policies that allow Spanish-speaking business “just encourages” immigrants to move to those places. And if all of America adopts an accepting policy it will be flooded by Mexicans.
What these people fail to understand is that America is about accepting immigrants. America is about adaptation. America is about freedom of choice not the limiting of choice. America is about rule of law and equality. America is about Christian values like “do unto your others…” I know it doesn’t always practice what it preaches but those are our ideals. America has always had its share of bigots, elitists, isolationists, and me-firstists but thankfully they are more often on the losing end of our struggle toward reaching our human potential.
When the conversation moves from the issue (English First) to the ideal (Protecting Our American Way of Life) there is always someone chimes in with, “You have the right to voice your opinion and I have the right to voice mine. It’s in the Constitution” That’s true. But bigoted isolationism is not an opinion, it’s a way of life and its a way of life that is antithetical to the American Way of life you they are trying to take advantage of by using public “debate” as a way of advancing theiranti-Ameircan agenda. As a matter of fact it’s against the Constitution that they are using to defend their right to be a jerk. My standpoint is consistently American. So I, more than the English First crowd, have the right to say, “Be American or Get Out.” You want Mexicans to assimilate by learning English? I want you to assimilate by learning your own history as an American.
Americans will keep being Americans and America will keep being America even if it speaks Spanish occasionally in the produce aisle. It isn’t so very patriotic to think that a few foreign language speakers are enough to sink the nation.
And remember, kids that know more than one language perform better…not worse…on standardized English tests.++
+They were not tickled and only found it humorous to humor me.
*By me.
**Except that we know for sure that it’s recursive and that seems a marginal improvement over non-recursive languages.
***Of course, un-Americanism might not kick in until after a certain degree of fluency I haven’t achieved.
++And it is humbling of course, to remember why that is.
Where Madness Lies
Filed Under Familiar Essay, Porchy, Random, Review, Travel | 8 Comments
Whoever it was that first wrote of the banality of evil* got it wrong. Evil, as Milton, Lovecraft, and Cronenberg would tell you, is far from ordinary it is, in fact, extraordinary. Madison, Wisconsin is an effusively polite, pastoral, ordinary college town. It is most famous, as far as I can tell, for not being Milwaukee, which in its own right is the clean, orderly, and polite version of Chicago just about an hour to the southeast. Home of Al Capone and H. H. Holmes, Chicago seems the more apt place to find “evil” as it is traditionally understood but in fact true madness lies about 40 miles due west of the intersection of W. Washington Avenue and N. Fairchild Street in downtown Madison, in a place aptly named Spring Green. Specifically one house there because that is how these stories go. That house is Alex Jordan’s House on the Rock.
St. Francis of Assisi was so beatific, so serene and compassionate, it is said, that the natural world around him bent itself to follow him. Flowers sprang to life behind him and timid forest denizens reached out to him to shower him with love. Alex Jordan Jr, the architect behind the house on Deer Shelter Rock, also overflowed his psychic cup; but what splashed out of him onto the world below was not compassion and mercy but the arrogant spite he inherited from his father and his own glorious dementia.
As the story goes, Alex Jordan Sr. was so enamored with Frank Lloyd Wright’s post-Prairie House designs that he sent or showed Wright plans for a house that incorporated similar features: waterfalls, stonework, concrete etc. Wright, sensitive to the concerns of humanity replied, “I would not hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop.” Based on the result, the reply can hardly be considered too harsh. The finished product, defiantly located just miles from Wright’s Taliesin Studio, also in Spring Green, is a memorial to something twisted and ancient inside of humans, something that most major advances in art and science have arisen to reverse or erase. The dark hallways twist and curve around uncomfortable living spaces. Little natural light permeates the cavernous, low-ceilinged rooms and passageways. Walls and counter tops are dark, rough cut limestone. Grotesque Asian statuary spot lighted throughout appear suddenly like the nightmare faces that form, deform, and unform in the minds of children as they lay in dark rooms for the first time far from the comfort of their parents. An unofficial biography of Alex Jordan Jr** unfavorably compares him to the paranoid and agoraphobic Howard Hughes. It is not hard to see why. Brochures at the house mention that the original blueprint, like the Wright houses it was based on, had more windows opening up to incorporate the lush south central Wisconsin hardwood forest. Jordan Jr sealed those off so the House on the Rock feels forever like the House in the Rock and there is nothing ordinary about it.
But the House is not the only attraction here. Tour 2, goes through “The Streets of Yesterday” and Tour 3…well I better wait to describe Tour 3. If the exhibit “The Streets of Yesterday” was accurate it would go a long way to explaining the weirder aspects of our modern world. If Jordan Jr believed that “The Streets of Yesterday” was accurate it goes a long way toward explaining the House on the Rock. “The Streets of Yesterday” is an actual street, lined with various fake stores with fake insides. Sometimes the fakery compounds itself and confounds the spectator. Take for example the story of Joaquin Murieta.
To some people in the American Old West, Joaquin Murieta was a sort of Robin Hood, but deadlier and uglier. The legend has that he stole from rich whites and gave to poor Mexicans. But he was also a rapist and a murderer. One story has him lining up an entire posse of men. Joaquin rode his horse down the line, slitting the throat of each man in turn without stopping. Murieta could not be stopped. His legend, it is believed, contributed largely to the more genteel legend of Zorro that came later. When the bounty on Murieta’s head was finally paid, the head itself (literally) was put in a jar and then sent on tour. However the legend proved too popular to kill. Mexicans denied the head was really the head of Joaquin. To prove it was him the authorities gave the tour an opening act, the hand of his lieutenant, “Three-Fingered Jack,” also in a jar. While Murieta’s face continued in death to lack the scar it had in life, the hand of Three-Fingered Jack unmistakably lacked the two fingers that lent the criminal his nom-de-guerre.
A fake Murieta’s head and a fake hand of Three-Fingered Jack both appear in the fake window of a fake sheriff’s office*** on the fake street under the House on the Rock. But if the “real” head of Murieta was also fake…where does this rabbit hole end?
The whole exhibit is filled with strangeness such as this and more: strange penny arcade animatronics that “dance” to broken calliope tunes, entire rooms set up with real instruments that play Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” amateurishly carved mastheads and then finally, the exhibit to end all roadside exhibits: A sculpture as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall of a giant squid grappling with a deformed sperm whale. The massive tidal waves crash over the head of the whale as he attempts to swim away, the remains of a dinghy sit shattered in his deadly jaws 30 or more feet above the tiny spectators. A staircase lined with miscellaneous nautical paraphernalia spirals around the sculpture to give the witnesses a 360 degrees view of the epic struggle from underneath, behind, and above. In its twisted vision, the “I” of this story, me, this narrator, saw the true mastery of God at work. Make no mistake about it, at least the second Alex Jordan, and probably both, were more than what southerners call “touched.” I think they may have been mad, completely and utterly mad. The madness splashed from them and filled the house so that all those that visit briefly go mad too. The labyrinthine pathway through the house, the chiaroscuro lighting, the disconnected hodgepodge of decorations all conspire to revive the dark psyche that started it all. The madness of the dark gods of this house is alive for anybody to witness and relive for $26.50. The giant squid and the whale, two symbols of the two kinds of madness that battled in the minds of the Jordans, are now frozen here for us all to witness. The calm placidity of the Asian motif–the umbrellas, carp, and exotic birds, the lacquered table tops and paper walls, the Infinity Room which instills simultaneously the peace of great distances and the anxiety of knowing your infinitesimal smallness–battles with the angry Cthulu-like genuine madness of the very deep–the choking tentacles of the giant squid that drove the architect to blot out the windows, to use dim lights, to make low ceilings, to turn every nook nookier and every cranny crannier.
Tour 3 reveals the winner of that battle.
Entering into a room so large you are certain you must have walked miles from where you started. A room this large would have been visible from the highway for sure…or it doesn’t exist at all. Gigantic whiskey stills and copper pipes fill the vision. Do they work? Did they ever work? Behind you, several clay moonshine jugs hang like skulls on the catacomb’s walls. The room is dark, it is red and gold and there are strange statues of lions and the goddess Diana. Here a pile of typewriters rest under giant clock whose gears are naked behind walls that aren’t there. Is that the right time? It must be. Over there an old milk delivery truck, or a tank. It’s hard to tell because you’re eyes have moved to the 65 foot cannon. You’re walking and the room is so large, the statues and sculptures so far apart and close at the same time, you can feel your sense of perspective physically slip away. You are a character in a movie that has just been slipped a mickey. You suddenly remember a sign you saw on the Streets of Yesterday, a newspaper headline that read “Surrender Complete.” “Yes,” you reply as you stumble on vaguely aware that you still use feet to move around. Then you realize that you haven’t seen that newspaper yet, but you will. Could that be true? From this point on, nothing is new, everything is horrible and familiar. She was right after all. Who? Hannah Arendt, in that book, evil is banal. It is every day. It is normal. It is trite. It’s everything you’ve heard before. Now you’ve walked downstairs; you’re outside. It’s very bright and sunny and people are telling you to check out the bathrooms at Inspiration Point. “You’ll be amazed,” they say. What? The bathrooms? Could that be right? You mutter something in reply, “Will do,” something you’ve said a million times before, “Will do,” but it sure sounded like somebody else. The voice of Alex Jordan Jr. Who was he talking to when he said “Will do.”? And then there’s a sign on the wall, “Check out the bathrooms at Inspiration Point!” it says, “Be AMAZED!!!” And then there they are, the bathrooms, my god! It’s limestone walls and a waterfall. There are stuffed grizzly bears just like in the restroom in the lobby where you bought your tickets. I’m back in the House on the Rock. What somehow freaked me out hours ago is strangely touching, comforting, like a smell you remember from your youth. And then the trail leads back into the huge red room. Did I mention you got to this room initially by going through a Hell Mouth that stood silent next to the world’s largest working carousel? Because you did. And you get it. You can’t leave. Now you’re in another room and then back into the big room. Then you go see the circus area, as if this place needed one. And you’re back in the big room. Then you move down a hallway filled with intricate and huge dollhouses and giant dolls that could never fit in them no matter how big they got. And then your back in the big room. But this time you are passing a doll carousel. Did we see that doll carousel before? Is it modeled after the world’s largest carousel? I think I recognize that horse with Cortez’s head. I think I recognize that naked woman with the glowing eyes and the goat legs. Up and downstairs, around corners, there’s the big clock again but now we’re below it and there are more angels from the carousel room. Did they follow us here? Where was that display room with all the jewelry store displays? A big sign declares “Final Exit.” It might mean home or oblivion, both are better than this. You walk on. If a giant ravine appears on the other side of this last door it will seem reasonable to jump into it. There is nothing new down there.
But you’re outside, and that was the best time you will ever have for $26.50.
Jordan was mad but he was a genius. The oompahloompahs that currently manage the estate and continue adding to the delirium are geniuses too. This place is a museum but also completely not a museum. The madness is engrossing and, as strange as it may seem, is exactly what you are purchasing for your Jackson, Lincoln, and your three Washingtons (one green, two shiny). Somewhere in there, you’re brain stops working and something visceral and entirely you takes over. The logical mind cannot make the connections required to enter the House on the Rock and survive. That is pure zen; that is pure breathing. Some zen master once said that in order to be enlightened you only have to be quiet for one moment. Somewhere in that broken carnival, I left Jordan’s mind and entered my own. At the end of the dollhouse exhibit in front of the banner advertising the Frog Girl, I experienced a quiet so sudden and real and complete I might have been there for a hundred years, I might have been there for ten seconds and then my friends showed up to rescue me.
If you are anywhere near Madison, Spring Green, Arena, or Sauk City, you simply have to see this place. As my mythology teacher told me ten years ago when talking about the importance of reading the Bible, I don’t care if you want to or not, it’s simply part of your culture to know the stories. The same holds true for the House on the Rock.
* Hannah Arendt in 1963 in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
** House of Alex by Marv Balousek, which I didn’t read. There is also one approved biography of Alex Jordan, Alex Jordan: Architect of His Own Dream by Doug Moe, which I didn’t read either.
***For a picture of the fake head and hand, check out this site.
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