On "ABC World News" tonight, Steve Osunsami did a fine report on an Atlanta man who has been using 440,000 gallons of water a month–about 50 times the average usage. The Atlanta Constitution unearthed the story, now the whole city hates the guy.
What excited me about the report was first, the delight in shaming someone behaving like a complete pig–"there is no one looking the other way," Osunsami concluded. Also the socialistic comments by public officials. A Cobb County staffer said that people like the water-pig don’t care what it costs; they can afford it no matter what. And a city planner said that the challenge to municipalities is to learn to "manage growth."
I want to believe the ABC report signals a real change in culture. I’ve never believed that we’re in a war against terror because so little has been asked of the American people, for instance, rationing of oil, the liquid in question in Middle East politics. Meantime, the idea of public service has been completely trashed by the meritocracy–where winners make so much money that their kids face no risk of going to Iraq and they can afford oil, no matter the cost. The idea of a shared burden has gone out the window with the vast gulf between rich and poor, and crushing of the middle class. Even Alan Greenspan worries what this is doing to the idea of democratic consensus.
By shaming the water-pig in Atlanta, ABC re-introduced a social cost to extravagant "private" behavior. Let’s keep it up. Let’s guilt people who fly private airplanes and drive SUVs and ATVs (beginning with celebs)…. Let’s talk about how many Ivy League kids even think of serving in the military…
Indeed. Bully for them.
Hey Phil,
Aren't you a former Ivy league kid? Are you thinking of pitching in for the war effort by enlisting? Are your kids or nephews?
Sliding scale water prices for those that use a lot. Give exceptions for specific industries. Sort of like sliding scale taxation. What Warren Buffet has complained about. Institutionalized mechanisms that encourage a degree of social equality.
I think that public shaming is difficult to do and unevenly applied. But social stigma associated with specific behavior, such as that associated with smoking, is a good approach.
Careful John, Phil is your hero, remember.
Milton Friedman came up with the idea of flexible water rationing many years ago. Each household would be allowed a certain amount of water, but the rich could buy more from the water district, while the poor could sell part of their water ration to the district. Friedman thought this was fair in that it prohibited both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges.
I think in order to experience shame you have to have a moral compass and integrity. What we have of those items seems
accurately reflected in our congress, and illustrated nicely as well by those in the White House, e.g., by Dick "I had other priorities" Chaney and the President himself. One quarter of all the homeless in this rich nation are veterans, 96% of them males, mostly single, and most come from poor, disadvantaged communities, 45% suffer from mental illness, and half have substance abuse problems. Federal homelessness programs are mainly devoted to helping homeless families or homeless women with dependant children. In the colonial days they put people in the stocks and shamed them in the public square. Today we elect and appoint such people to lead us.
Behind shaming, will there be laws, and therefore, men with guns to enforce them? Will you argue for killing Water Pig? What about celebrities with SUVs? Should they be killed? The good of the many outweighs the rights of the individual? C'mon, Phil, 'fess us: you're being a little Pol Pot with these comments.
It's true, Water Pig's water can be cut off, without resorting to having LEO shoot him. But what about SUV drivers? If the government won't sanction tighter fuel economy standards, then how does public shame work, without enforcement? And if people refuse to comply, ultimately there has to be the gun (or, like Andrew Meyer, the taser). This is what you advocate?
To quote Gore Vidal, "it is dangerous to play with such fire in so dry a season."
Odd that I should check this blog and seethis subject on the same day I read about the torturer in chief, Gonzales getting $40,000 from the UN of Flordia to speak there.
There was a time in this society when people who were disgraces or had disgraced themselves were shunned by polite society…at least until they had redemmed themselves, if they ever did.
Kicking people out of the larger society in their environs works wonders as punishment and as a preventive.
Deny people like the waterpig and Gonazles any social acceptence…ones who have no regard for the rest of society shouldn't be included in it. Let them be outcast. They interact with and use their water and money for company instead.
Maybe C-SPAN should open up another channel. It could be called "Who's in the stock today?" Each day we could tune in to see the photos of the latest culprits, and for what, e.g., those
people mentioned or alluded to in this thread already. Your local news show could refer to the show daily, to drum up more interest.
To flesh out my little coffee-fueled sputtering above, I offer this perceptive bit of writing from the newly-beatified Antonio Rosmini, on the fallacy of Utopia:
"Respect for another's property is respect for that other person. Private property is a means for the person to defend himself from encroachment on the part of the state.
Person and state: the former is fallible, the latter, never perfect. And here is a famous passage taken from the "Philosophy of Politics":
"Perfectionism – meaning the system that believes it is possible to achieve perfection in human affairs, and sacrifices present goods for imagined future perfection – is a result of ignorance. It consists of an arrogant prejudice that judges human nature too favorably, basing itself upon pure conjecture, upon a postulate that cannot be granted, and with an absolute lack of reflection upon natural limitations."
Perfectionism ignores the great principle of the limitations of things; it does not consider that society is not composed of "angels confirmed in grace," but rather of "fallible men"; and it forgets that every government "is made up of persons who, being men, are all fallible."
The perfectionist neither uses nor abuses reason. And those who are most intoxicated by the malignant idea of perfectionism are the utopians. These "prophets of boundless happiness," with the promise of an earthly paradise, work busily to build quite serviceable hells for their fellow men.
Utopia, Rosmini asserts, is "the tomb of all true liberalism" and "far from making men happy, it digs an abyss of misery; far from ennobling them, it renders them as ignoble as beasts; far from pacifying them, it introduces universal war, substituting power for law; far from distributing wealth, it concentrates it; far from moderating the power of the government, it makes this absolute; far from opening competition to all in all areas, it destroys all competition; far from expanding industry, agriculture, art, and commerce, it deprives them of any incentives, blocking private initiative and spontaneous activity; far from spurring minds to great invention and hearts to great virtue, it smothers and crushes any vitality of the soul, rendering impossible any noble effort, any magnanimity, any heroism; virtue itself is prohibited, and even faith in virtue is destroyed."
How true. Just look around you. The very forces of "imminentism" and utopianism that conservatives used to denounce when they were wielded by the totalitarians of the Soviet Union, of Mao and of Hitler, are now embraced by the vile neo-cons. State-corporate fascism is their watchword, the sine qua non of their dread movement.
Today a man on Muir beach was arrested for trying to clean up after the oil spill. This is what we have become, in relegating to the state and the state alone the pursuit of Utopia.
—————–
"No good deed goes unpunished.
At least that's how Muir Beach resident Sigward Moser felt Friday after he says he was threatened with a Taser gun, forced to the ground and handcuffed by a National Park Service ranger for refusing to stop cleaning up the oily beach beneath his home.
Moser, a 45-year-old communications consultant, said he was forced to sprawl handcuffed on the wet sand for an hour before he was released and given two misdemeanor citations, one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a lawful order."
http://www.marinij.com//ci_7430910
Cal–
Just saw your post about Gonzalez speaking at UF. Disgusting. You're right–public shunning would be effective in such an instance. How wonderful it would be if no one showed up.
One thing for certain: after the terrible Andrew Meyer tasering, no one will stand and ask Gonzalez why torture is now embraced by the state. I think Arthur Silber commented on how the incident has worked it's way into the public mind. Quoting Koestler (who was amplifying George Orwell):
"The inner censor of the mind of the true believer completes the work of the public censor; his self-discipline is as tyrannical as the obedience imposed by the regime; he terrorizes his own conscience into submission; he carries his private Iron Curtain inside his skull, to protect his illusions against the intrusion of reality."
————
God Bless James Wolcott:
"In an ideal world, Alan Dershowitze and Deroy Murdock could take turns torturing each other, forging a symbiotic bond of mutual pain and symbolic need not unlike that of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint in Bernard Malamud's 'The Tenants' and sparing the rest of us their sophistic sadism."