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Does Berry suggest that no great institution is worth the pain that made it possible? I have a hard time reading this passage any other way. All such entities, created by capital accumulated by making other people’s lives hard, must be counted “fruit of a poisonous tree,” as lawyers call evidence gathered by improper methods. No Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to do good work against malaria. Because the logic of this passage is that in a better world, a world that is just and respects hard work and Nature, there would be no Duke University. It’s hard to dispute this view from the farm, until we remember that there are other interests in the world, and other people. If you can appropriate for little or nothing the work and hope of enough such farmers, then you may dispense the grand charity of “philanthropy.” The connection was my grandparents and thousands of others more or less like them. The man thus commemorated seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy. On the other side is another single word: PHILANTHROPIST. On one side of his pedestal is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. He holds between two fingers of his left hand a bronze cigar.
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He stands imperially in bronze in front of a Methodist chapel aspiring to be a cathedral. Duke in his dignity, his glory perhaps, as the founder of that university. On my first visit to Duke University, and by surprise, I came face-to-face with James B. Duke, whose fortune was made, Berry writes, by ruining the livelihoods of thousands of tobacco farmers: He is recounting the moment when he was walking about the Duke University campus and came upon a statue of the school’s namesake benefactor, James B. Consider this passage from Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture last month at the Kennedy Center in Washington. And the fallacy isn’t confined to political propagandists. Yet when the subject shifts from personal life to public affairs, we’re invited to take seriously the claim that there are no lights and darks mixed together in the life of institutions. All of us over the age of 7 know we have done some good and some bad in the world. This idea is, of course, ridiculous, and everyone knows it, at least in the conduct of their private lives. But Haberman zeroes in on the crucial lie at its heart: The claim that a bad action means its performer must be a bad actor-if Brookfield did a bad thing by evicting OWS, then Brookfield is bad in all that it does. This statement has many dumbbell passages (like the one saying its signers have just learned at the Festival’s end that Brookfield is a Festival sponsor, when it has in fact been one since 2005).
#ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES FREE#
The Festival, said the statement, shouldn’t let this bad company rebrand itself as a friend of free expression. It criticized the festival for accepting support from Brookfield Properties, because that company, as landlord of Zuccotti Park, evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment there. The trigger for Haberman’s exasperation is a statement issued at the end of last month’s Tribeca Film festival, signed by 30 artists.
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It’s bad for society when people pretend that in our public life, Good must associate only with Good-no ambiguity allowed. As he writes here, this kind of thing isn’t merely annoying. Clyde Haberman came across an example the other day and used it to call b.s. It’s all theatrical political hooey, which has about as much relationship to a real human emotion as a waxwork Prince to the real one. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit of slimy hells unless I sign a petition or contribute at least $25 to someone’s campaign for a vital office in Wisconsin or Nebraska.