“Okay,” Sal said, “we’re just coming up to our first commercial break, and when we come back we should discuss …” and he read a few lines from his outro. But as I turned toward them again, I saw the gesture that Cheryl made at me. I’m not even sure the cameras caught it. It was that exact same jiggle of the head, that I guess I made my point flap of her hair, that Grace had made at me earlier. The exact same one. I felt the bile rise up in me.
“What they did should be made illegal,” I said.
Sal stopped suddenly, and he and Cheryl just sort of stared at me.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“What they did should be made illegal.” The words blundered out of me again before I could stop them. And so did these: “The government should pass a law making what happened on Friday illegal.”
Cheryl let out a smug, choky guffaw. “You can’t be serio —”
“I am dead serious,” I said. It was like a fever had overtaken my brain, burning behind my eyes and clouding everything around me. “The scope of the catastrophe is such that the government needs to take tough and — dare I say it? — punitive action.”
“Really?” Cheryl said, twisting her girth around in her chair. “Really, Philip? You honestly think —”
“All right, guys, we do need to go to —” Sal tried to interject.
“You honestly think that would be the moral thing to do? Really? Okay, so the government takes months or even years passing new laws to make what they did illegal. And then what? What happens to your diabolical C-suite?”
“And then they should be charged retroactively.”
“Oh my God,” she said, swaying in her chair like a buoy.
“I’m serious,” I retorted. “The magnitude of this is —”
“Is what?” she barked. “Enough to override centuries of judicial law? I mean, this is really beyond the pale, Philip — even for you.”
And just like that, the fever broke and I came out of it. My eyes passed back to the control booth, and I could see Raj through the window. He was no longer smiling. His own eyes were wide, his cheeks sunken. And in that instant, I was convinced that Grace was watching me on the television. She and the kids. And also my faculty colleagues at the university. And my students. Everyone.
Oh God — what did I just say? Did I just imply that people should be arrested for breaking a law that does not yet exist? Did I just undermine centuries of enlightened liberal values, values that I had been teaching — and defending, against the barbarism of both the Right and the Left — for more than twenty years, all for the sake of sending a handful of corporate types to jail? Did I just do that — on national television?
“Look,” I sputtered, “what I’m trying to say is —”
“Okay, we have to go to commercial,” Sal said. “We’ll be back, we’ll be back.”
“Well,” Cheryl huffed as we faded out, “talk about Stalinist Russia …”
Odious
I hope you’ll indulge me, dear reader, if I backtrack now and provide some context around my chthonic journey into the hive of Canada’s finance sector. Yes, for three months in the fall of 2012 I joined the workaday masses that streamed through St. Andrew Station in downtown Toronto and up into the charcoal towers at King and York, into commerce’s everlasting orgasm at the low end of Bay Street. This was not, as certain faculty colleagues accused me of, some shallow act of anthropology on my part. I took this sabbatical not to specimen-ize a society, but to bear witness to the practical application of ideas I’d been grappling with since my Oxford days, ideas that culminated into my successfully defended D.Phil. dissertation in 1993 and its subsequent publication as my first book (Decanting Kant: The Categorical Imperative in the Age of Neo-liberalism, OUP, 1995). What to say: I was and still am an unapologetic deontologist; and I wanted to see how Bay Street’s increasingly unfettered cupidity affected real people at the level of their morals, their sense of duty to themselves and each other. ODS’s chicanery had been making headlines for half a decade by 2012, and the company seemed a fitting target for my experiment. But perhaps Cheryl Sneed was right: when I showed up for the first day of my entry-level position on their national Comms team, I was fully expecting a cruel, cutthroat environment.
So I was thrown for a loop when they gave us all laptops in the first ten minutes of orientation. The HR manager leading our pan-departmental training session handed the machines out as if they were bento boxes, while we, a cohort of about fifteen, sat in rows of tables in the classroom-style meeting room. I was parked between two young women hired as financial analysts — both of whom, I recall, having vaguely pornographic names: Tiina Cherry (spelt with two phallic i’s) and Regina Wetmore. The laptops we were assigned were the slickest I’d ever seen — putting to shame the dud I used for my work at U of T’s Philosophy department — but the girls barely blinked at the handout.
Orientation revealed that ODS was in Year Three of its latest corporate piatiletka: The ODS Way (2010–2014), the goal for which was to re-establish billion-dollar revenues by the end of “Fiscal 14.” The HR rep, using a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation full of Microsoft Visio diagrams, walked us through how this overarching mission statement was to control our behaviours in every interaction while on company time. This was more like it, I thought. A downright fascistic approach to human manipulation: the relentless sloganeering, the buzzword indoctrinations, the pressure not to use any independent judgment that wasn’t “laser-focused” on the company’s profitability. I raised several reflexively comic protests during this presentation, but my jokes fell flat. Yet despite these subversive queries, I did not achieve the pariah status I assumed I would. In fact, Tiina and Regina — who seemed to have become BFFs during the mid-morning coffee break — invited me to join them for lunch.
In the afternoon, I settled into my assigned cubicle, which was right outside the office of the communications manager who hired me. “Orientation go okay?” he asked, coming out when he spotted my arrival. He was a tall, breezy technocrat named Stuart, with thick curly hair and a meticulously trimmed soul patch, so unlike the red mass of fur that engulfed my face. He took me around to meet the rest of the team, an ensemble of marketing types and quondam journalists and social media specialists. Everyone knew who I was and why I was there — someone even claimed to have read my one confirmed bestseller, The Movable Apocalypse (Bibliophilia, 1998) — and everyone was friendly. But it was a friendliness singed by stress, by worries over looming deadlines and relentless project plans, by evening GO Train schedules forever present in the back of their minds.
Stuart and I reviewed the complex nondisclosure documents I had signed — outlining all of the proprietary elements of ODS’s business that I’d agreed would not make it into my new book — and then he set me upon the task for which I’d been hired. The company’s enormous, labyrinthine website had been written in a kind of business pidgin, and it was my job to rewrite a large section of it into lucid English. The firm was happy for the free labour, and this was exactly the kind of work I wanted during this operation, since it would put me in contact with multiple divisions of the company — its fund managers, its corporate advisors, its legal team, its various ancillary offshoots — and give me a view into their world. The job itself was a simple simulacrum of journalism: do a bit of research, go interview the relevant experts, cobble together the web copy, et cetera. Stuart even suggested I could do much of it from home, and I was tempted by the prospect: to be in my own book-lined office, a Bloody Joseph to sip, Grace beyond the closed door doing her thing with the kids. But no. My true subject matter was ODS’s corporate culture, and I needed to be in the thick of it.
And what to say of that culture? ODS believed in competition, believed it in its bloodstream. Saw it as the one agora that everyone was obligated to participate in. The next sale, the next business relationship, how one chaired a meeting or approved a business plan — it all became about beating somebody else.