David Batstone

Who are the real pirates in the music economy?

Gluttony takes a toll on the interior life.

"Think about how much of our lives we spend at work," the executive of a New York publishing house said wistfully to me.

I began 2003 in Cuba. It's a good practice to launch a new year with fresh insights. Cuba did not disappoint. It was my first visit to the island nation.

'Lean and mean' is the shapely figure to which companies are called to conform these days. It's worrisome that the mantra implies a clever business strategy.

Have you ever noticed how much of our political language relies on binary logic? "Binary what?" you say—think the North and South Pole.

Here's an axiom that's half a binary pair: Before making an appeal for political action, describe a moment when the problem did not exist, at least in the form or to the degree it does now. Creating this mental space will then enable people to make progress by looking backward, effectively re-creating a past social order.

Alternative to axiom one: Promise freedom and justice in a world that is yet to come. Although here and now life is alienated, the future will break into history and transform what we have here into an entirely new place.

Both these axioms of political language have their theological counterpart, of course. Since there is no place outside the Garden of Eden that is free from the traps of history, release from bondage can only truly occur in the realm of the ideal.

In the Judeo-Christian West, "time" was destined to become our holy grail. Redemption can be found in time past (the Garden) or time future (heaven), both of which are bound by eternity. Time so conceived has no organic link to place. The forthcoming (future) and the antecedent (past) are not contingent on the horizon of the present.

The once mighty energy trader has become everyone's favorite whipping boy. Unjustly so, I say.