The Phonies of Cornish, New Hampshire

If you really want to hear about it, people in Cornish seem a lot like those phonies at Pencey Prep of Catcher in the Rye fame.

You know the worst thing about the January 27 death of J.D. Salinger? It’s all that lousy stuff about how every single resident of this boring town protected the privacy of the reclusive novelist, how they cleverly thwarted outsiders’ efforts to find Salinger’s home, how they and not the tourists really understood him, how great it was that a famous writer was just another regular at church suppers, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

It’s hard to begrudge Salinger his decades of solitude – though it’s tempting. Sixty-five million copies of Holden Caulfield’s story enabled his creator to live out his days in isolated rural splendor. Did he have to be so crumby to people were so crazy about Holden that they went to the trouble of hunting down his creator? As Holden himself said, “What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

On the other hand, some people are only interesting when they’re young. At least J.D. knew when to disappear, for Chrissake. And Louis Brandeis got it right in 1890 when he said in the Harvard Law Review that the right to privacy is more important than “idle and prurient curiosity.”

But such curiosity is what makes life worthwhile for some people. Take Ackley for example. He was the guy down the hall from Holden at Pencey who had “sinus trouble, pimples, lousy teeth, halitosis, [and] crumby fingernails.” Just like Ackley barged in on Holden “about eighty-five times a day,” Salinger had Ackerman – Mike Ackerman, that is, the UPS man.

Eventually Ackerman couldn’t just deliver Salinger’s crumby packages, so he bought the general store nearby and, as he told the Valley News, had a great time fooling visitors who wanted to find Salinger’s house. “It really depended on the attitude of the person coming in how much fun we would have with that person,” said Ackerman to the paper.

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera,” said Ackerman. Oh – sorry. That was Holden again. Would it have been too much to ask for the owner of the Cornish General Store to be nice? He could have just said “old J.D. doesn’t want visitors,” for Chrissake.

You can’t really give directions in Cornish anyway, since they don’t have any landmarks. Nothing to see but the Augustus Saint-Gaudens historical site. Sure, there used to be some artists’ colony -- but that was ages ago and the museum about it isn't even in Cornish. It's across the river in Vermont.

A few doors from J.D.’s place is Peter Burling, who says that fooling “the annual parade of English majors” was “one of the most enjoyable municipal conspiracies ever.” I like Burling – you could start missing him, now that he’s not a state senator anymore. But someone from Washington, D.C., who went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School, isn’t too far from that parade himself. He just got to Cornish sooner than the rest of them, for Chrissake.

And speaking of enjoyable municipal conspiracies in Cornish, you know who was really a phony? Old Clark Rockefeller. He couldn’t even give his real name, for Chrissake. He just sort of shows up, doesn’t mention that he’s really some German guy named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and gets Burling to just give him the historic church Burling bought and fixed up. In exchange, ‘Rockefeller’ donates $110,00 to the town – money he got from his rich wife.

Today, Rockefeller is in jail somewhere. “What Clark figured out,” Burling told the New York Times in 2008, “was the truth that novelists sometimes find and write about. That the power of a name can blind you to the behaviors that would otherwise make you say, ‘This is nuts.’”

So even old J.D. would have had to admit that Cornish knows all about phonies. Maybe it just rubbed off on them, for Chrissake. At the end of Catcher in the Rye, Holden admits he’s going to miss everyone. But I won’t miss all that crap from people in Cornish about phonies and privacy. I really won’t.

[The above replaces an earlier version. The folks at the Valley News read the first edition and asked if I would like to rewrite it a bit for publication. It ran in the February 6, 2010 edition of the paper. If you really want to hear about it, I liked the newer version better. So don't complain that I got rid of that crumby old version, for Chrissakes. And don't bother telling me that my wife, who works at Mount Ascutney Hospital, was actually slightly acquainted with old J.D. herself. Nobody told me about it until after I wrote this goddam thing. Next up: A disquisition on Vermont Yankee, written in the manner of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."]

Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm'n: An Occasion for Dancing in the Streets

Okay . . . Perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement, however tempting it is to invoke the famous assessment by First Amendment scholar Alexander Meikeljohn in reference to the Supreme Court's landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan.

But count me among those who do not see this week's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision as the democracy-ending disaster most progressives have proclaimed the 5-4, conservative vs. liberal justice classic.

The idea that corporations have First Amendment rights is hardly new. The idea that we abhor outright bans on speech is hardly new. The idea that people ought to be able to associate freely -- be they organize themselves as Cub Scout troops or publicly traded corporations -- is likewise not new.

What is new, after the Court's ruling, is the end of any pretense about the influence of wealth in the political realm. The wealthiest and most powerful among us organize themselves into corporations (or at least engineer things so they control corporations). These corporations, meanwhile, have had to busy themselves in recent years finding ways to circumvent campaign finance laws. Does anyone doubt their success?

Moreover, it is no small thing that the Citizens United decision also applies to labor unions. Could this be the advent of a new era in which those who feel overwhelmed by corporate power realize that unions represent a great way for (if you will pardon the use of Marxist phraseology here) labor to rebut capital? One could make a similar point about cooperatives, which are also entities of the sort covered by the Citizens United principle. They are a great vehicle for workers and consumers to pool their wealth and deply it democratically.

This week's national hand-wringing about the Citizens United decision offers a splendidly teachable moment about corporations. The concept of corporate "personhood" is actually rather unexceptional. Think of it this way: The New York Times v. Sullivan case that we revere, because it vindicated the constitutional right to subject public officials to nearly unfettered public scrutiny -- was brought on behalf of a corporation. It only makes sense that if the owners of the New York Times have First Amendment and other constitutional rights, they should not have to relinquish those rights just because they choose to exercise them through their corporation. The notion of corporate personhood is really just an unfortunate shorthand for this entirely reasonable concept.

If you think about it, what's irksome about corporations -- or at least potentially irksome -- are their other, non-personifiable, qualities. A corporate charter is a huge gift from the state, because it limits the liability of shareholders to their investment, no matter how notorious the corporation's behavor or how much damage it causes. Think of the tens of thousands of deaths from the 1984 Bhopal diaster caused by Union Carbide and imagine the victims being allowed to go after Union Carbide's shareholders individually. The limited liability principle says they cannot.

The state -- by which I mean the people -- extracts precisely nothing in exchange for this limited liability gift. A related gift is that of perpetual life -- a quality unrelated to personhood if ever there was one. Still a third is the right to own corporations -- which has the effect of further isolating victims of corporate malfeasance from those who might reasonably be held responsible. Have you ever noticed how many layers of subsidiaries -- corporations owning corporations -- separate nuclear power plants like Vermont Yankee from their ultimate owners?

One can imagine all sorts of ways that corporations should have to justify their initial, and ongoing, receipt of these nearly priceless gifts from the government. In all likelihood, it probably comes down to the need to demonstrate some net positive contribution to the greater good, as opposed to merely maximizing return on shareholder investment. It is the lack of this public accountability that is far more socially dangerous than any monster the Citizens United decision might unleash -- for that rough beast has long since slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

Freya von Moltke (1911-2010)

I did not know my Norwich neighbor Freya von Moltke, who died on New Year's Day at the age of 98. I only learned today that she and I had in common the honor of serving as a board member, Nominating Committee chair, Vice President, and President of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society. (We were also both trained as lawyers, though she apparently didn't ever practice the profession.)

The small tribute the Co-op placed in today's Local Daily Newspaper attributed this eloquent statement to Mrs. von Moltke:

"I have always believed in cooperatives. I consider them to be one of the basic forms of human organization for a group of people wanting to achieve a common object, getting things done through trial and error, learning and teaching, exchanging different opinions in the democratic way. The Co-op is there to serve its members. Such an organization, however, should also be used as a tool to further the interests of the community and consumers in general."

It would be fair to say that when Freya von Moltke decided to comment on how people can work together to achieve a common object, furthering the interests of the community thereby, she spoke with real moral authority.

Here is her Boston Globe obituary. It describes a woman who was a prominent member of the resistance movement in Germany during the Nazi era, along with her husband. The Nazis executed him; she eventually ended up in Vermont.

This is an occasion to remember how rooted the cooperative movement is in European culture. And it is also an opportunity to reflect on how, from Hanover, New Hampshire to Hannover, Germany, visionary people saw during the economic turmoil of the 1930s that cooperatives could be a compelling alternative to then-popular social movements of a more disturbing character, including but not limited to the one the von Moltkes are remembered for resisting.