WHEN A NATION LOSES ITS MORAL AND POLITICAL MIND

Frederick Brown, The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 (New York: Knopf, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "The Embrace of Unreason picks up where Brown's previous book, For the Soul of France, left off to tell the story of France in the decades leading up to World War II." "We see trough the lives of three writers (Maurice Barres, Charles Maurras and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle) how the French intelligentsia turned away from the humanistic traditions and rationalistic ideals born out of the Enlightenment in favor of submission to authority that stressed patriotism, militarism, and xenophobia; how French extremists, traumatized by the horrors of the battlefront and exalted by the glories of wartime martyrdom, tried to redeem France's collective identity, as Hitler's shadow lengthened over Europe." Might America be tending toward its own "embrace of unreason" in the decade and a half since 9/11? Think Tea Party. Think anti-immigration sentiments. Think Patriot Act. Think Ferguson, Missouri, and race relations. Think Citizens United.).

READING MY LIFE

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014) ("Though you can retire with an injury, you can't walk away because you feel bad." Id. at 65. (Also see Holly Bass, "How It Feels to Be Black in America," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/28/2014.).

GLOBAL CORPORATIONS, PRIVATE GOVERNMENTS, AND DECLINE OF THE NATION-STATE

Franklin Foer, ed., Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Political and Culture in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

This is a collection of pieces from The New Republic. As the collection's editor notes, this "is more than the greatest hits of he magazine. [] It was put together in the spirit of the magazine that it anthologizes: it is an argument about what matters." Id. at xxvi-xxvii. Due to my being in the process of putting together a course on International Trade Law to teach next fall, thinking about International Law generally, and regularly teaching Corporation Law (or Business Organizations), a passage from Hans J. Morgenthau's November 9, 1974 piece, "Power and Powerlessness: Decline of Democratic Government," struck a note. Perhaps Citizens United is also in the back of my mind.

"It has become trivial to say--because It is so obvious and has been said so often--that the modern technologies of transportation, communication and warfare have made the nation-state, as principle of political organization, as obsolete as the first industrial revolution of the steam engine did feudalism. While the official governments of the nation-states go through their constitutional motions of governing, most of the decisions that affect the vital concerns of the citizens are rendered by those who control these technologies, their production, their distribution, their operation, their price. The official governments can at best marginally influence these controls, but by and large they are compelled to accommodate themselves to them. They are helpless in the face of steel companies raising the price of steel or a union's striking for and receiving higher wages. Thus governments, regardless of their individual peculiarities, are helpless in the face of inflation; the relevant substantive decisions are not made by them by by private governments whom the official governments are unwilling or unable to control. Thus we live, as was pointed out long ago, under the rule of a 'new feudalism' whose private governments reduce the official ones to a largely marginal and ceremonial existence.

"The global corporation (misnamed 'multinational' is the most stroking manifestation of this supercession of national governments not only in  their functional but territorial manifestations, For while the territorial limits of the private governments of the 'new feudalism,' as first perceived about two decades ago, still in great measure coincide with those of the nation-state, it is a distinctive characteristic of the global corporation that its very operations reduce those territorial limits to a functional irrelevancy.

"The governments of the modern states are not only, in good measure, unable to govern, but where they still appear to govern (and appearances can be deceptive) they are perceived as a threat to the welfare and very existence of their citizens. [] For it is the great political paradox of our time that a government, too weak to control the concentrations of private power that have usurped much of the substance of its power, has grown so powerful as to reduce the citizens to impotence."

Id. at 243, 247-248. Anyway, this is a very worthwhile anthology to read reflectively. It provides an opportunity to appreciate the changing face of 'American Liberalism,' in a world that has greatly change but, unfortunately, has remained the same.

THE PRINTING PRESS

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, with an introduction by Jean-Marc Hovasse (New York: Everyman's Library/Knopf, 2013) ("In the fifteen century, everything underwent a change. Humanity discovered a means of perpetuating thought more lasting and durable than architecture, and even simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. To the tame letters of Orpheus are to succeed Gutenberg's letters of lead." "The book will destroy the building!" "The invention of printing was the greatest event in history. It was the supreme revolution. It meant the complete renovation of humanity's mode of expression, the discarding by human thought of one form to reclothe itself in another, the complete and final casting of the skin of that symbolic serpent, which, since Adam, had served as the representation of intellect." Id. at 174-175. Somehow I don't think the Internet has quite replaced the Book.).

THE RELEVANCE OF HOMER

Adam Nicolson, Why Homer Matters (New York: Henry Holt, 2014) ([M]y Homer is a thousand years older. His power and poetry derive not from the situation of a few emergent states in the eighth-century Aegean, but from a far bigger and more fundamental historic moment, in the centuries around 2000 BC, when early Greek civilization crystallized from the fusion of two very different worlds: the semi-nomadic, hero-based culture of the Eurasian steppes to the north and west of the Black Sea, and the sophisticated, authoritarian and literate cities and places of the eastern Mediterranean. Greekness--and eventually Europeanness--emerged from the meeting and melding of those worlds. Homer is the trace of that encounter--in war, despair and eventual reconciliation at Troy in the Iliad, in flexibility and mutual absorption in the Odyssey. Homer's urgency comes from the pain associated with that clash of worlds and his immediacy from the eternal principles at stake: What matters more, the individual or the community, the city or the hero? What is life, something of everlasting value or a transient and hopeless irrelevance?" Id. at 2. Also see Bryan Dowries, "Songs of the Sirens," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/28/2014.)

REFLECTIONS ON MUSLIMS IN AMERICA

Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York & London: NYU Press, 2014) (From the backcover: "Islam Is A Foreign Country explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslim: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? [] By examining the tension between American Muslims' ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.").

WE ARE NO BETTER THAN OUR ACTIONS, AND THE ACTIONS OF OUR AGENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary, edited by Larry Siems (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("'You are not a man! I am going to make you lick the dirty floor and tell me your story, beginning from the point when you got out your mother's vagina,' he continued. 'You haven't seen nothing yet.' He was correct, although he was the biggest liar I ever met. He lied so much that he contradicted himself because he would forget what he had said the last time about a specific topic. In order to give himself credibility, he kept swearing and taking the Lord's name in vain. I always wondered whether he thought I believed his garbage, though I always acted as if I did; he would have been angry if I called him a liar. He arrested big al Qaeda guys who talked about me being the bad guy, and he released them a thousand and one times from prison when they told the truth. The funny thing was he always forgot that he arrested and released them already." Id. at 181. From the book jacket" "Since 2002, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In all these years, the United Stats has never charged him with a crime. A federal judge ordered his release in March 2010, but the U.S. government fought that decision, and there is still no sign that the United States plans to let him go." "Three years into his captivity Slahi began a diary, recounting his life before he left his home on November 28, 2001, and disappeared into U.S. custody, his 'endess world tour' of imprisonment and interrogation, and his daily life as a Guantanamo prisoner. His diary is not merely a vivid record of a miscarriage of justice but a deeply personal memoir--terrifying, darkly humorous, and surprisingly gracious. Published now for the first time, Guantanamo Diary is both a document of immense historical importance and a riveting and profoundly revealing read." Also see Mark Danner, "No Exit," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/1/2015.).