Machan's Musings - A Writer's Vicious Prejudice
by Tibor R. Machan
My favorite books and movies are court room dramas, but this day and age it’s nearly impossible to find good ones. I did read a very fine one a while back, titled Grand Jury, by Philip Friedman, and there have been a few others—The Soloist, by Mark Salzman, comes to mind.
When I have tried the popular ones, such as John Grisham, I have found many of them annoying because of the author’s technique of stereotyping characters. All people in business are greedy bastards, the leading attorneys dedicated professionals, many politicians devoted public servants, and so forth.
Just the other day I tried to read J. J. Freedman’s Key Witness (1997) and was making a little hopeful progress until I came across this line, delivered by the protagonist: "I haven’t defended an actual human being in ten years—only corporations…." It simply made it impossible for me to go on.
Never mind that one of my children is a corporate attorney. Forget that. Simply try, however, substituting "orchestras," or "ball clubs," or "universities" for "corporations" in that sentence and you will see what I mean.
Corporations are every bit composed of human beings, just as these other groups are. Consider, also, that this novel was published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., and the work previous appeared in a Dutton edition—all huge corporations. Are we to suppose that they were all populated by robots or ants or puppets, not human beings? Mr. Freedman’s publisher, publicist, copy editor and main editor must all have been some kind of machine, certainly not human beings, seeing that they work in a corporation.
J. J. Freedman is evidently a smart guy, having penned a bunch of novels, but he clearly has a basic flaw—a mental block that’s very nasty. If he had his hero say anything against priests in general, or educators or athletes, the politically correct vice squad would probably have nailed him before the book could be published. Editors would have been all over his case and purged the manuscript of such infelicities.
But not so when it comes to the human beings in corporations, people who strive to prosper and in the process make jobs for millions, human beings who are producing goods and services for billions, who think hard so as to do their work creatively and intelligently (even if there are those, too, who are lazy bums, just as this is so in universities, conservatories, or police departments). Why was this sentence not redlined by Dutton’s or Penguin’s copy editors?
Probably because it is nearly a knee-jerk attitude of thousands and thousands of people in the fiction-writing business—and yes, it is a business!—to think badly of people, you guessed it, in business! How pathetic, how sad, how tragic, in fact. Why can’t these folks see what they are doing?
Once again Ayn Rand’s concept of "the sanction of the victim" comes to mind, whereby the very people being treated badly by others completely accept this treatment as if that is what they are due. Mr. Freedman is a corporate professional, making a very good living (residing in Santa Barbara, California, of all places, which costs a penny or two and is made much easier if you are working for prosperous corporations). Yet he is knocking corporations, spreading the utter nonsense that corporations are something other than organizations of human beings embarking on the task of producing goods and services and trying to make a living that way.
It is just because of this despicable outlook that I once co-authored a book, The Business of Commerce, Examining an Honorable Profession(1999). In it, Jim Chesher and I look into why this business-bashing attitude is so prominent, even in the United States of America where commerce has made life better for nearly everyone. Well, the bottom line is that the answer is pretty much the same as it is to the question, why did so many academics and people in general applaud the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center? Because business is unabashedly directed at improving life here on earth, something that millions of people find distracting from allegedly more important pursuits, intellectual or spiritual.
In any case, it is a vile prejudice, that is what it is, and I’ll just forgo reading such muck even if the author is otherwise a clever writer—as I am sure Mr. J. J. Freedman is, what with his many best-sellers. Too bad people read him so uncritically.
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