Djelloul Marbrook

An industrious hairy woodpecker and the fate of the Internet have prompted me to question the nature of ownership. George W. Bush envisioned what he called an ownership society—now laid waste by crooked lenders and developers, a vision fatally flawed by greed.

As I ran outside to throw a green tennis ball at a hairy woodpecker that had already inflicted hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage on our house by drilling into a corner board for the larvae of carpenter bees I wondered, Who owns this house, the woodpecker, the bees or my wife and me?

Oh get a life, I said to myself. But the question persisted. The deer that dine on my landscaping, the bees that bore into our eaves, the drumming woodpecker, they don’t think we own this house. They don’t care about quaint titles, they have real concerns unfettered by silly notions.

The law forbids me to kill the deer, except in season and in authorized places. The law forbids me to kill the woodpecker, although I could probably get away with it. But I can kill the bees and other insects, and probably ingest some of the poison myself.

What makes sense here? Does my method of enunciating my rights trump the woodpecker’s method of enunciating his? Do I have any real rights or just some trumped-up conceits?

And what about the Internet? Who will own it? The people whose tax money developed it or the communications giants who daily bribe and pressure our duly elected representatives in an effort to gain control of it? The giants say they have a right to own it because they’re enabling us to use it.

We have always had to cope with limited freedom of the press, because commercial interests have always exerted advertising pressure on the press to avoid certain lines of inquiry. How else would the supreme mortgage crisis have ambushed us so frightfully? The lenders and developers bribed the press to remain silent. Of course the press will never cop to this, but what other explanation makes sense?

The giant corporations, the kind that played such a big role in bringing us to the current economic brink, see in the Internet a threat to their ability to shape the news, to define it. The news is characteristically not what we think it is, not what the media tell us it is. Corporate America’s very high priority is to get control of the Internet, make no mistake, and if Congress hands it over to them our republic is cooked, because our freedom depends on the viral exchange of ideas.

One thing is certain about news, it’s almost never where the media say it is. The real usefulness of a story that is being overplayed is that it strongly suggests something is going on out of sight. Take Iraq. Endless talk about weapons of mass distraction and surges, but what was really going on was a flabbergasting grab for money by contractors, and to this day the Defense Department can’t give an accounting of where all the money went.

Let me give you another example. The public shows signs of fearing that a public health option—a public care provider that would compete with private providers and create benchmarks for service—would interpose bureaucrats between patient and doctor. But that’s exactly the situation we have now—a faceless bureaucrat in an insurance office bankrupting us by withholding payment for care that our doctor wants to give us. So why is the story about our fear of government bureaucrats standing between us and our doctors when we already have insurance bureaucrats making sure we don’t get the care our doctors want to give us?

How has this misperception, this distortion, thrived? It has thrived because the media derive advertising revenues from those insurers with their faceless armies of paper pushers and trained nitpickers.

And this has happened during the tenure of our so-called free press. How much worse will matters be if corporate America is able to price us out of the Internet and dictate what gets on it and what doesn’t?

Corporate America thinks it has a right to kill the woodpecker, and the deer and the bees. Corporate America thinks it has title to our future and must only keep on telling us how wonderful things are and how anybody who wants to change things is a commie rat bastard. We know things aren’t wonderful. We know we’re overweight, underpaid or jobless, and facing bankruptcy, but we’re even more afraid of commie rat bastards.

The hairy woodpecker is untroubled by such concerns. I can wave my title to my house in his face and it won’t impress him as much as a well aimed tennis ball. He has no idea what I’m talking about when I talk about ownership, but he’s grateful I’ve provided him with a house to eat. Where the Internet is concerned we’d better side with the commie rat bastard woodpeckers.—DM