The language of dissent

by Leigh Hafrey

Is war bad for business? Find out now.

"It’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity." I heard that phrase when I first started teaching at a business school. It seemed then—and still seems—a clean, clear way of getting at the pragmatism necessary to do business, or for that matter, just about anything. It suggests engagement, and affirmation, and those are very good things; but a recent chance encounter reminded me they may not suffice, and some opportunities are, by definition, problems. This is a column about war, and the business of war.

Last fall, Katzen Arts Center at American University gathered three small exhibits under the rubric "ART of CONFRONTation." I did a quick sprint through two of them, as I had an appointment elsewhere, but ground to a halt before a sketch in the third, perhaps the smallest item in that show, labeled "Ice Cream Parlor." It depicted a soda fountain with nine figures, all sitting facing the viewer, while the soda jerk had her back to us. At first, it seemed a pastiche of that loneliest of diners in Edward Hopper’s "Nighthawks," a work far more familiar to the world, I thought, than this one.

Then I got closer to the drawing, close enough to realize that three of the figures were only silhouettes, not faces, and that the silhouettes framed cartoon-like scenes of war: ships firing their guns, planes falling, palm trees exploding. The silhouettes resolved into a sailor, a flyer and a soldier, respectively, and suddenly I knew this was war, with the artist capturing what goes on inside a veteran’s head when he or she returns to civilian life—think Gary Trudeau’s "Doonesbury" over the past four years, or last year’s scandal of veterans’ medical care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Nothing could have felt more familiar.

The date on "Ice Cream Parlor" was 1943, though, and the artist was Irving Norman. Born Isaac Noachowitz in 1906 in Vilnius, Lithuania, Norman became a serious painter after serving with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Think Escher, Munch, Robert Crumb and the Mexican muralists, a blend to which Norman brought his left-wing politics and a thorough-going artistic critique of big business. In canvasses bearing titles like "Laissez Faire Industrialism" and "War and Peace," Norman gave us urban landscapes teeming with tortured souls dominated by skyscrapers that double as missiles. The logos and ads were everywhere: "Profits Unlimited Corporation," a winged horse with the word "OIL" beside it and at ground level, of course, "SALE." Now, think "The Matrix" trilogy, or Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner."

Yet when one combines the pathos of those hollow military figures in "Ice Cream Parlor" with the current, daily, deepening rumble of questions about contractor corruption, mismanagement and unbridled profit-taking in Iraq, Norman’s vision seems much more real than science fiction. Moreover, the fact that his critique of half a century of American conflicts still matters (Norman died in 1989) speaks, on the one hand, to the continuing willingness of the American people to take on the challenges of global intervention, and on the other, to our apparent ability to forget lessons already learned about business in time of war. Why that oblivion?

For the past 10 years, I have routinely used a short story by a prolific 20th-century Irish writer, Liam O’Flaherty, who shared Norman’s leftist politics. One of the founders of the Irish Communist party, O’Flaherty both understood and reflected on the impact of larger market forces on individual lives. In his short story titled "Two Lovely Beasts," a young, would-be entrepreneur, Colm Derrane, succeeds in breaking free of his subsistence-economy background to, as he puts it, "rise in the world." His formula? War profiteering, the rewards of which he regards as a sign of God’s grace.

I have discussed this story with many groups, with participants in their mid-20’s to mid-70’s and of many nationalities. I always ask how Colm succeeds, and the group often struggles to identify the economic formula by which Colm makes good; and yet, these are business people. They routinely think about logistics, supply chains, profit and loss and the ability to seize the moment. At a recent seminar in Asia, where lack of native English may have contributed to the group’s reticence on this issue, one of the seminar participants approached me after the session and asked: "But is war always bad for business? After all, Japan got back on its feet thanks to the Korean War, and Korea became what it is today thanks to the Vietnam War."

Being neither an economist nor a scholar of East Asia, I was not in a position to debate the sources of economic success for either Japan or the "Asian tigers" in the last half of the 20th century—and that is only part of the problem. We would also have to make a case-by-case distinction between profits per se and the abusive or excessive profits implied by the term "profiteering," unless we assume some of both forms of gain in all cases. In an environment where you never know how much you need, where competition is a constant and circumstances change, it is hard to say at what point enough really is enough.

As the investigation of contractor corruption in Iraq continues, today’s socially responsible business community will have increasingly to address the matter of how it operates in time of war. Naomi Klein speaks of "the rise of disaster capitalism," the systematic generation of corporate opportunity from major catastrophes, whether natural in origin or manmade, deliberate or accidental. Both Norman and O’Flaherty would, I think, argue that disaster capitalism is nothing new, and that we delude ourselves in thinking that capitalism only promotes, and only thrives on, peace and social justice.

Theirs is the language of dissent, derived at least in part from a rival system of political belief and economic practice, but also from a deep-rooted sense of the dignity of man that transcends time and geographic boundaries. Under the rubric of corporate citizenship, we should certainly address the 21st-century challenges of reducing our carbon footprint and helping those who stand to lose the most from globalization, but we also need to address the age-old enthusiasm for profits generated in confusion and strife. You do not have to believe in the war in Iraq, or believe we should get out of Iraq, to make that commitment.