From Harper’s October 2025 Findings:
Peacock tail feathers can be treated to emit laser beams.
The one word that sits in my brain every second of every day: why? The second question about this item is, is it the whole peacock or just its feathers that have the potential to emit laser beams?
No, back to the only question: why?
So much in this world depends upon character that attention has to be paid to bad character even when it is not deserved.
— Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle’s School
“Our whole business system would break down in a day if there was not a high sense of moral responsibility in our business world.”
Spoken by Herbert Hoover on the campaign trail in 1928, and quoted by Jill Lepore in her superb, sui generis history of the United States, These Truths.
I don’t care when this was said because, in their stunningly simplistic way, today’s GOP is in essence saying the same thing and paying the same devoted attention to the wrong dichotomy in the U.S. Any politician who thinks or says something like this is operating with only half a mind, or has only half a mind. Now I can see why the Republicans since Hoover fixate on supporting business: it’s intellectually lazier than comprehending the whole panorama of American dynamics.
As we all know, business (call them corporations or whatever you like) has one single and simple purpose. To make a profit out of whatever they’re selling. Hoover’s bizarre “moral responsibility” doesn’t exist, not even on the verge of businesses. There is a permanent void in the structure and mission of businesses, and that is morality. Ethics.
By the way, Hoover made His Statement shortly before 1929, and its big event, the Great Depression, when, you might have learned, “our whole business system…broke down.” I’d argue it’s because there was no sense of moral responsibility in our business world.
So Hoover’s pronouncement was the opposite of fact. The “high sense of moral responsibility” in the U.S. resides consitutionally and pragmatically in our government — which is us.
Sure, there are politicians who have been corrupt, whose constituencies are not the main focus of their offices. Greed is an eternal human failing, trying to get more money than your job entitles you to by selling out your “high sense of moral responsibility.”
As a prominent civil rights lawyer I once knew said in an interview, when asked about his pro bono representation of people who couldn’t afford a fee, “Hey, if I wanted to be rich, I’d be a corporate attorney.”
It’s a choice between the simplicity of money and the complexity of humanity — a choice the GOP never seems to make. Maybe they’re not smart enough.
