Ghostbusters: Eat your heart out, EPA
It has been awhile since I have posted here on Pomocon. That’s in part because I have been slammed with prep work for new classes I am teaching this fall. And in part because there have been other fun diversions, like the small Hurricane Nicholas that breazed past us here in Houston earlier this week.
One of the new classes I am teaching happens to be ENVIRONMENTAL LAW. I don’t know much about this topic, but I am picking it up from a standard textbook many law schools use. In the chapter on “Enforcement” I just taught, the authors say that the EPA considers parties in non-compliance with regulations in terms of 3 groups:
1. amoral calculators- those who “decide wheter or not to comply with the law based on what is in their economic interest.”
2. political citizens- those who “are willing to comply with laws that they consider to be just, but believe that a particular environmental law either is unprinicipled or is being enforced in a capricious and unfair fashion.”
and 3. organizational incompetents- those who “lack expertise, capacity, or ability; even though they want to comply with the law, they are unable to do so for reasons of technical or organizational incompetence.”
What a paternalistic and un-American way of viewing the American people! Shouldn’t a government “of, by, and for the people” treat us all as “political citizens”?
In order to illustrate to the students how demeaning and infantilizing this way of looking at things is, I showed them this classic scene with Bill Murray and Walter Peck in Ghostbusters (1984):
It’s clear that the EPA inpector played by Walter Peck sees the Ghostbusters as organizational incompetents; basically, idiots. Bill Murray can barely pay his secretary or the rent, much less turn in the kind of “self reporting” data the EPA demands. Big businesses and their lawyers can keep up with such things, but most small businesses in America today cannot. Most people working for small businesses are considered by government bureaucrats today to be organizational incompetents too.
The lesson of the movie is that it is just those “incompetents” who are the kind of people who make the city work at all. The only thing that stands in the way of all hell breaking loose in New York City is the Ghostbusters- in truth, an innovative and heroic bunch of guys. The hubris of the bureaucrat in not recognizing their importance or dignity almost causes the destruction of the city.
That is why I asked my students who had not seen the movie before to be sure to watch it- especially as we get ready to celebrate Halloween.
Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!
P.S.- Carl might know this already, but the awesome Ghostbusters theme song may or may not have been a rip off of the great Huey Lewis and the News song, “I want a new drug,” with some synth replacing some guitar parts. Apparently they even had a lawsuit about it!