Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Through the multiplicity of characters in Dead Souls, Gogol has shown that in order to depict a people, an author must first depict the uniqueness of its countless citizens, and, in doing so, assert the primacy of individuality over fungibility.
FUNGIBILITY, DEAD SOULS,AND OCWS

For some of Obama’s critics, it’s a breathtaking bit of fungible principles, as though Gandhi suddenly donned a Dolce & Gabbana, or Dolce & Mahatma, loincloth.

Money in Stupak's world is "fungible," or interchangeable, meaning whatever money the government gives you frees up private money for you to use on something else. So every dollar the government pays toward your health insurance premium allows you and the insurer to spend private funds in that plan that you might not otherwise have had on abortion. To Stupak, that subsidization is the equivalent of a direct payment.

But by that token, every government benefit a woman receives, whether monetary or in-kind, whether for healthcare or for something else, could be seen as subsidizing an abortion if she has one.

If everyone thought like Bart Stupak, a woman seeking an abortion:

(1) would not be able to take a public bus or commuter train to an abortion clinic, even if she paid her own fare;

(2) would not be able to drive on public roads to a clinic, even if she drove her own car and paid for her own gas;

(3) would not be able to walk on public sidewalks to the clinic, even though she paid property taxes;

(4) would not be able to put her child in childcare while she was at the clinic if she received a tax credit that offset the cost of childcare;

(5) would not be able to take medicine at the clinic that was researched or developed by the government, even if she paid for the medicine herself.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100315/arons

Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo once said that “metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.” Cardozo’s warning would seem to have been heeded by a group of A-list first amendment scholars who met on March 27 at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice to consider the Court’s recent campaign-funding decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Calling the give and take of points of view in the course of democratic deliberation a “marketplace of ideas” can mean one of two things: (1) political speech occurs in a marketplace like any other and its production and marketing is finally no different from the production and marketing, say, of Coca Cola; or (2) the arena in which political speech is produced and consumed can be thought of as a marketplace, as long as we take care to make the appropriate adjustments in the light of the difference between Coca Cola cans — which can be regarded as fungible units, every one like every other one — and ideas, which cannot and should not be so regarded.

Does Money Talk in the Marketplace of Ideas?