Corporate Sleaze

So I woke up this morning to discover this article on my Google + feed regarding recent events concerning Hobby Lobby that you may have vaguely heard about, just as I had sort of vaguely heard about them prior to this morning.

Basically what’s happening is that Hobby Lobby is getting ready to waste people’s tax money on a Supreme Court case intended to determine whether or not their company should be allowed to decline coverage for birth control to its employees on “sincere moral grounds” or some bullshit, I’m too cranky right now to go back and reference the actual language.

I won’t dwell overly-long on this because the problems with this court case even happening seem obvious to me, but it does tie in with what I’ve been trying to talk about generally in the last few posts I’ve done, and I’m going to try to explain why it is that current events such as this are relevant to things like my post about J.D. Salinger from a few weeks ago, or the way a person like Woody Allen, and other people who like and support him, have been allowed to speak and behave in public regarding the very serious criminal sexual allegations made against him.

On a larger-than-just-individual scale, the Hobby Lobby court case is about deciding who controls cultural narrative. Narrative is something we think of as being important only in a fictional environment, and that narratives created in the real world are something that only affect individuals, or relationships between individuals. But narrative affects everything, and its ramifications in real life are as immediate and significant as in fiction.

The Vice article talks a lot in the second half about corporate personhood, a ludicrous legal concept which has already been thoroughly lampooned by many people cleverer than myself (the documentary The Corporation is one example). The idea of the narrative that’s being created here is that it makes sense for “a person,” i.e. the ostensibly personlike entity that is Hobby Lobby, to be able to express its opinion about birth control because as a “person,” it should have “freedom of expression.”

A lot of misogynistic violence occurs because of bad narratives. The bad narrative that the Supreme Court is considering about Hobby Lobby is racist and culturally bigoted beyond mere misogyny, but what ties it together most importantly with the individual human examples above is that it’s being discussed in terms of “personal expression” and “perspective,” as if these things are always equal. What’s really happening is that Hobby Lobby is expressing the desire to cause measurable harm to people, in the form of a brutal invasion into their private lives, and its opponents are expressing the desire not to be invaded and brutalized in this way. By entertaining the arguments of the corporation, the Supreme Court is treating these two expressions of “individual perspective” as if they are wholly equivalent and worthy of equal consideration.

If you talk about people having “different perspectives” or emphasize interpretive ambiguities, you are siding with the person or entity with the greatest ability to brutalize or oppress the other. You’re pretending that developing a narrative always starts from square one, when in reality, it’s a complex that is built slowly over time, like a military unit.