By Tom Davey
Driving through the United States of America is always a view of extremes. This is a new Roman Empire where the world plays American music, watches its movies and television shows while eating its burgers, hot dogs and fried chicken -- all while wearing US trainers, fashions and other palpable symbols of American culture. The US, is unquestionably the only remaining super power, having wrestled the Soviet giant to exhaustion in global economic conflict.
Where other historical conquistadors used force of arms to subjugate vassal states, billions of people around the world are peacefully and willingly, co-opted into adopting US culture -- happily paying to wear the badges and logos of Coca Cola, McDonalds, KFC, Nike, Disney, Microsoft, IBM and countless others. Traditionally, it was manufacturers who paid to advertise their wares to consumers. Now, by media spin and economic alchemy, today's consumers fork out their own money to proudly advertise multinationals' logos.
While US leadership in astro-physics and computer technology is a given, few are aware that world leadership in water treatment and research began 130 years before Walkerton when the American Water Works Association was formed in St. Louis. This was over three decades before Henry Ford revolutionized industrial production with his Model 'T'.
This negation of the engineering presence is also reflected in US politics. Engineers and scientists are especially scarce in the US cabinet and state legislatures, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter being two exceptions to the rule. Hoover was a brilliant businessman and politician who, unfortunately, inherited an economy poised for the Great Depression. One apocryphal story tells of a woman who, when told that Hoover was an engineer, remarked: "Oh I thought he was a gentleman." President Jimmy Carter had nuclear engineering experience in the US Navy. While he always behaved like a gentleman, he was, inevitably, better known as a peanut farmer.
While US engineering remains an invisible profession, there are legions of elected lawyers in American state and federal politics. The legal profession is dominant in popular movies and television shows. Cinematic courtrooms, in fact, have replaced Wild West saloons as the backdrop staple of contemporary movies, a matter of art imitating reality. For unquestionably, the US has far more lawyers in politics than any other profession, and Los Angeles County alone is said to have more lawyers than Japan.
Appropriately for Hollywood's home turf, the US legal profession provides an abundance of heroic figures in movies and television programs. Moreover, many more lawyers have become award-winning novelists than have journalists. John Grisham, William Bernhardt and Scott Turow are but three of the many lawyers who have written novels, many of which were turned into movies. Journalists, who also earn their living by the written and spoken words, rather surprisingly, have not matched the creative output of their legal counterparts. But perhaps our newshounds have already satiated their creative appetites in their reportage of environmental issues which, all too often, has displayed imaginative conclusions unsupported by scientific realities.
The foundation of North American jurisprudence is onus probandi -- the burden of proof -- where the accused do not have to prove their innocence. This is a fundamental difference with legal systems in some other countries where the accused must prove their innocence, rather than the state prove their guilt. As governments have far more money and resources than individuals, onus probandi has also been a bedrock in British, Canadian, and Australian legal systems, to name but three others. But eternal vigilance is the price which must be paid to maintain judicial freedom.
There are some disturbing thoughts about a new Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation which, claims the Washington Legal Foundation1, was rushed through in the waning days of the Clinton Administration. The Washington-based WLF states that OSHA2, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, has a new and sweeping regulation that will affect Mom and Pop grocery stores and Fortune 500 corporations alike. "OSHA's rule will govern the height of desks, the angle of computer monitors, even posture when employees lift a phone book," a WLF spokesman told me.
1www.wlf.org
2www.osha-slc.gov/ergonomics-standard/
This article has been abridged.
Editor's note: Since this editorial was printed, we received the following release: Congress Repeals Ergonomics Rule, Handing Victory to WLF (Washington Legal Foundation vs. OSHA). A brief update appears on page 73 of the May 2001 issue of ES&E.
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