As I said yesterday, I'm writing this to try and work out some thoughts I have for my second novel (whose Synopsis now has a first chapter). I'm not trying to make any earth shattering conclusions or points. I am just trying to dig as deep as I can and see if there is oil underneath - to see if I can grasp some underlying truth.
Yesterday, I wrote about slavery. I was trying to grasp the concept of what it would be like to own a slave as a sort of contrast to modern life. In my mind, I see slavery as the opposite of freedom. In the Navy, I always used to say, "It's Not Just A Job, It's An Indenture." Taken away from the horrible context most of us associate with slavery, from a purely intellectual standpoint, slavery can be viewed in a pretty wide context.
It is with that same wide open, purely intellectual, standpoint that I now approach the topic of Property. To set the stage properly, I am addressing a single question, "Who owns your house?"
The prompt for this question came from, of all things, a grafitti tag. As many of you know, gangs use tags to define their territory. In traditional thought, a territory might be described as the land that you "own". Since I did not know all the boundaries of this gang territory that I was entering (or was it leaving?) I can not tell you if the property I own is considered gangland or not. But then, it probably doesn't matter, because I'm sure my property is part of some gangs territory anyway. The question is, then, do these gang members "own" my property?
In the past, land has been owned by the ruling party and controlled by the use of force. The land of Canaan, for instance, has been claimed by thousands of societies throughout history - but the party in power, the one with the most fighting men and the best killing record, has usually been the one to "own" Canaan. Ownership of property, in this case, implies that the person with the power to enforce control is the person to whom ownership belongs.
In the Feudal system, since it was implied that the king ruled by God's favor, the king had the power to grant any of the nation's land to any person - usually lords who sweared allegiance to the king. The lord's then owned land given to them by the king and passed on that ownership to peasants in exchange for their allegiance to the lord. Everyone owed everything to someone else, with the king owning everything because God had made it that way.
When a nation was conquered, the king would grant new lands to his lords. A lord might never set foot in land that he owned - but he would own it just the same. There is a scene in the Shogun mini-series when the gaigin, Pilot, explains to Lord Torinaga that Japan is owned by Portugal. Torinaga looks at the Pilot as if he is insane - and then he gets angry. I imagine the same would be true if some gangbanger walked up to your front door one day and explained to you that your house was actually owned by the Crips.
When a dispute arose as to who owned a particular parcel of land, the lords would send out their armies to fight it out - with the winner getting and keeping the land. If a lord fell out of favor, the king could revoke the lord's rights to the land by having the lord beheaded - now we have courts to do the same thing ;) I think R.Sherman mentioned over on his blog the fact that a great deal of his court cases dealt with disputes over the land and that people were willing to spend thousands of dollars in court fees to protect their interest in a $500 piece of land.
Yet, our system hasn't come so far. If you think about all the various laws in this country, who really owns your home? If you have a mortgage on the house, the bank does. If you die without an heir, the state does. If you forfeit your rights through law suits or other debts, or if you marry the wrong woman and she divorces you, the state can force you to sell your home to pay off your debt. Even if you own your home outright without a single lien on the property, you still owe the government every year property taxes - and failure to pay can mean that the government takes your home.
Going back to my original thought, if the gangs don't own your property, do the cops? Do the people who protect your land own your property? Can those who give, also take away?
The same can be said of just about any piece of property we own - from houses to the very last dime we own. Who really owns it? Or is everything owned by nobody except for whomever claims the item at the time?
They say you can't take it with you... but maybe they should say, you never had it in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment