Contract Law

If every exchange is negotiated with the presumption of bad faith,
the only possible way to come away with even a piece of what you
want is to propose basic terms which you have no intention of fulfilling,
while feeling around for what givens on the other side can be seized
and services extracted without further harm to you, though the tenets
of the system be destroyed. Thus one does real business with family,
from whom there is no extraction, and on whom survival often depends,
so is neo-sacralized, while any outside encounter provides opportunities
for real advancement on terms that can be as fresh as one's devising,
with no disturbance to the interior life. This is a failure of contract law,
a primary means of exclusion, and an aspect of state failure in general,
along with environmental depredation, disputes over birth rates,
and thousands of incalculable daily forms of threat and coercion,
culminating in violent deaths that achieve sporadic documentation.

Michael Scharf
The Hat 6
Spring 2005

Copyright © 2005 The Hat
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

REMEMBER TO SUPPORT POETRY DAILY'S GENEROUS SPONSORS... Sponsor PD!