The Ethicist

Over the years, I have read the NYT advice column titled "The Ethicist."

It comes out every Sunday and the Ethicist is Randy Cohen who with a quirky admixture of intelligence, practicality and integrity, answers his readers' moral queries.

This week's moral query comes from a gentleman from Massachusetts. The man writes:

I know a woman, an undocumented immigrant, who wishes to get married in order to be able to return to Brazil to see her children (after an absence of nearly seven years). She works at a chain store and seems to be there 60 to 80 hours a week. She sends most of her money home to her children. She is always kind, decent and helpful to others. I’ve known her for three years and believe she would be an exemplary American citizen. She has saved money in order to pay someone to marry her; I believe this would be wrong. If I were to marry her, I’d expect nothing. I live alone, have no girlfriend and think this marriage thing would be the morally correct thing to do. What do you think? 

Here is The Ethicists' response, and it's a layered one to say the least:

Let me open by stating that you seem like a great person. Let me follow that compliment with this irrefutable fact: This is illegal. Don’t do it. You could receive an enormous fine and some jail time, and so could she (the maximum sentence for marriage fraud is five years in prison, a $250,000 penalty and her eventual deportation). I can’t justifiably instruct you to do this, regardless of its moral underpinnings. But let’s say you did do this, against my advice. Would it be ethical?
I don’t know you, and I don’t know this woman; you might be a horrible judge of character, and she might be a con artist. All I can do is take your letter at face value and assume what you’re claiming is accurate. And if it is, my conclusion would be this: If you married this woman, it would be positive for society. It would be transformative for her children, it would eliminate the possibility of her being taken advantage of by someone marrying her for financial gain and it would add a hardworking person to the American populace. I suppose some will argue it would unjustly place her in a position to take a job from a “more deserving” U.S. citizen, but I don’t believe mere citizenship entitles anyone to a job.
The ethical quandary is your entrenched motive. By writing this letter, you are openly defining this marriage as a loveless transaction that falls under the rubric of illegal activity. But something else strikes me about your letter: You seem to respect this woman. You see her as kind, and you see her as good. Have you considered asking her to dinner? Does she seem remotely interested in you as a person? Many long-term relationships begin with a physical attraction that evolves into a state of mutual appreciation; it’s not impossible to imagine that process happening in reverse. If you were to fall authentically in love, any subsequent marriage would not be a sham.
Now, is this suggestion realistic? Perhaps not. In fact, probably not. It’s almost as if I’m trying to persuade you not to steal a loaf of bread by advising you to open a bakery. But what have you got to lose? The worst that could happen is that you have one awkward date while coming to the realization that you’ve tried harder to help this person than perhaps anyone she has ever met.

The Times: Roll Back From Global to Local

A Professor I studied under, once told me that he really liked reading the New York Times, and he especially cherished its "World" section.

She knew I was from India, and assured me that she knew of Indian affairs through the Times.

Over the years, I had grown to develop a certain perspective on the value of the Times as a window on the "world."

My initial experience of the illustrious newspaper's coverage of world and Indian "affairs" bordered on the ecstatic.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, imagine the world's best known daily reserving space for stories on the Indian scene. This was the rough opposite of what the Indian dailies--particularly the non-vernacular one's--I grew up reading preferred: They would rather focus on the world outside--the goings on in the Western world--and disdainfully scratch something in about the local.

But my view of the Times' world coverage has undergone evolution since then.

I have discovered that the world that emerges in the pages of the Times' International section is a world that is seen through a Western/American lens. Of course, today, we would call the lens "global," but my personal feeling is that the "global" lens is still fogged up by the mist of a residual Western.

The stories on India are of an India that is either rigidly one thing or the other. In the 90s, the Times would write of India as though it were in a morass of doom and poverty that is a national fait accompli.

Things changed and India bloomed into a nation of galloping economic growth, and now the India that is seen through a global lens in the Times is an equally monolithic nation. Now the stories are about the rising middle class, their increasing buying power, and the break down of the caste system in a way that's allowing the previously downtrodden-by-birth to come up.

What I mean to suggest is that the stories of India and by default of the world that appear in the Times, are stories of a formulaic kind.

These days, I skip the "World" section altogether and focus on the "New York Region/Metropolitan" segment.

Magically, the lens seems to disappear in the stories of local reality in the Times. In other words, it seems like the stories of local people and places and events we read are results of an unmediated eye-witnessing.

So fascinating they are and so faithful they are in investing the "life" of the city with a dynamic that inheres in the life itself.

Take for instance the stories from the Metropolitan section of today's (March 4, 2012) Times:

The story of Chinese take out deliverers who risk so much for so little remuneratively speaking. Or, the report on Park Slope's Food-Coop's agonizing, internal debate on whether/not to boycott food products from Israel. Then again I came to know of the existence of Keens Steak House (Chelsea) and how exclusive a membership to it's special "Pipe Club" is (it's passed down from generation to generation of the club's members, i.e. from grandfather to grandson).

I was enthralled by the life of an African-American who has an ancient Egyptian, Pharaonic shrine smack in the middle of China town. He is a 70 something man who believes that the Nubian Egyptians were actually black/North Africans. With this belief firmly in his mind he set about being a cop on the mean streets of East New York in the 1960s. While policing the streets he found that he had become a pawn of the "white" powers that be in that he was wielding weapons at his own people. He was also into his Egyptian thoughts, so he decided to carry with him not only guns and handcuffs, but also the "ankh" or the Egyptian symbol of power and peace. His mission was to uplift the morale of the demoralized blacks through an act of symbolism that reminded them of their real origins.

The stories of New York City are very many and each has an individualistic flavor about it. I get a sense of the city with an energetic pulse. The stories surprise.

The stories of the "world," on the other hand, are predictable and grist to the mill of a standardization that is boring.

My take: the Times should retract into a national and mostly a regional newspaper, at least from the point of view of somebody who cherishes language and related virtues of the cultural sphere.