God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Secrets of the Money River

Vonnegut knew stuff about corporate life that most folk don't. Namely that 1) no one owns the corporation and 2) that the essence of the corporation is the separation of control (dominium in legalese) and benefit (usufructus). The corporation is essentially and magnificently useless. It is an arrangement that would have driven Roman lawyers insane, mainly because they equated control and benefit: if you got the use of something, you owned it. Breaking the link between control and benefit was to them dangerous, not to say impossible.

But medieval lawyers (mostly priests) found a way round the Roman legal tradition. So in Vonnegut's novel the shares (but not the assets) of the Rosewater Company are owned by the Rosewater Trust. The only thing the later can expect from the former is an 'equitable' flow of dividends, which is exactly what it gets. Otherwise the Trust has no say in what the Corporation does or how it does it. The Rosewater Corporation is, in itself, useless.

It is the Trust that gives the Corporation its usefulness. The chairmanship of the Trust is hereditary but that has no influence on who runs the company. An excellent summary of the modern corporate condition. As Vonnegut says about his main characters, "Almost all were beneficiaries of boodles and laws that had nothing to do with wisdom or work." They treat themselves as merely extensions of the corporation and as such useless, that is, as making only decisions of control not benefit.

The separation of corporate control and benefit opens the way for what Roman lawyers feared most: fraud. Who can say whether those in control, the corporate managers, are really doing their best for the beneficiaries? In fact what can 'best' mean when it is merely the superlative for an infinite number of quite different possible 'goods'? The opportunity for fraud is immense, and historically irresistible. This is the main theme of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: corporate fraud and how to combat it.

Fraud pervades the book: from Norman Mushari's attempts to wrest control of the Rosewater Trust to Amanita Buntline's affected passion for Beethoven, mistakenly played at the wrong speed. The big fraud of course is that those with corporate control create social benefit. They don't. As Selena, Buntline's maid says, "It’s the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors." This includes, "... the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution."

Some folk do benefit by the legal arrangements of corporate capitalism. There are "about seven" in Rosewater County, Indiana for example. But aside from them, it's the fraudsters who end up on top. Legal arrangements being what they are, the corporate world is, as the Romans knew it would be, like the "1812 Overture played on a kazoo." That is to say a false representation of something magnificent: the instinct to do something beneficial for ones fellow man.

Vonnegut suggests two options for overcoming the power of the false representation in corporate capitalism, insanity or generosity. The fact that Donald Trump is president of the United States suggests that most people, most Americans anyhow, prefer the first option.

View all my reviews