Another voice
Kompassion in Kandy Kolor
Auberon Waugh
Ann Arbor, Michigan
rrbo years ago a seven-year-old local oy called Gregory Blevins Jr was play- ing with his younger brother behind the Glenwood Shopping Plaza when they notic- ed an electric power transformer in a sort of cupboard. They had not been playing with it for long when Gregory received a severe electric shock which resulted in serious burns. Glenwood Plaza admitted liability, since the transformer had been left unlock- ed and there were no warning notices out- side. Last week, local newspapers carried details of the settlement which had been agreed out of court, without the need for litigation or a jury verdict.
Gregory will receive an initial payment of $1,052,000 and an annual income which starts at $48,000 and increases at the com- pound rate of 5 per cent a year. This means, according to his lawyers, that when he is 30 his income will be $132,000; between the ages of 35 and 50 it will average $265,000 a year. He also receives a lump sum of $100,000 on his 25th birthday, and another lump sum of £.750,000 on his 35th birthday. If he lives to 65 — and there is no reason to suppose he will not live much longer — the settlement will have been worth $22 million, all structured to be entirely tax-free. However, if his dangerous play habits lead him to further adventures, this time fatal, his parents will be guaranteed at least $6 million to compensate them for the un- doubted benefits they will receive under the settlement before Gregory reaches adulthood. ,
Gregory himself seems little the worse for his accident, apart from some remaining scars which are not visible on the photo- graph in the Detroit Free Press. This shows him posing proudly in front of the electric transformer, now decorated by signs saying 'Danger: High Voltage' and securely lock- ed, in case any of the other children of Oaklands County should get ideas.
In fact Gregory will not receive quite the sum advertised by his lawyer, because it is normal in Michigan • State for plaintiffs' lawyers to receive a third of any settlement they secure for their clients. Moreover, unlike Gregory, they demand cash on the nail or 'up-front' as they elegantly put it. No settlement is ever agreed until the defen- dant has arranged for the lawyer's attorneys to receive their full entitlement, so we may assume that the man who proudly claimed that this $22 million settlement was a record for Oak lands County — the lawyer was called Elbert Hatchett — had also walked off with a record $7.3 million fee, although he did not choose to pose for the cameras with his young client in front of the transformer.
Even so, if he lives long enough, young Gregory will eventually dispose a tax-free income which will be considerably greater than that of the Duke of Westminster. If one wonders what on earth a boy of nine can find to spend $48,090 a year on, especially one from a humble background with no commensurate obligations, one wonders even more why a man of 75 will need a tax-free income of $1,201,530. Presumably the idea is that he should live like some mid-Western version of King Farouk, eating 12-pound steaks for breakfast every day and driving around in a motor car the size of St Paul's. Is this a sen- sible compensation for his misfortune?
A more worrying aspect of this practice, whereby American citizens have only to slip on an icy road to sue the local highway authority, is that although insurance com- panies produce the cash somebody, some- where, has to earn the money to keep this latter-day Farouk in luxury. Although the profitability of American industry — what Marx would call the surplus value of American labour — has taken some hard knocks recently, court settlements do not feel obliged to take this into account. How many British steelworkers, car workers, even coal miners would be needed to keep Gregory Blevins Jr in the style to which he will soon be accustomed?
I discussed the case with a group of American lawyers, who capped this story with others from their own experience. One had been defending General Motors against a court process from someone who had bought a General Motors Do-It-Yourself Service Guide to his motor car (which was made by some other firm). After servicing his car, he found it would not start, so he put his wife in the car to operate the igni- tion while he poured petrol into the bonnet and a neighbour, also peering into the bon- net, lit a cigarette.
Finding himself alight, the plaintiff dived into a pond at the end of his garden, struck his head on a stone and suffered paraplegia as a result. He sued General Motors, and the case has gone to appeal.
All of which would have been quite jolly in the 1960s when General Motors still ruled America. One of the lawyers kindly produc- ed a bottle of Echezeaux 1970 — all the pleasures of the world are still available to the reasonably prosperous American citizen. It was only after several hours of conversation that this otherwise apparently sane man revealed that he wrote a weekly letter to President Reagan. He did not sup- pose that anyone above the rank of office cleaner actually read it, but he said that it was a way of purging the frustration he felt over Reagan's failure to reverse American domestic history since the New Deal, reasserting the ethos of self-sufficiency against the nanny state. His lovely Sinhalese wife was unhappy about this leisure activity of her husband's, being more concerned about the unemployed car workers of Detroit, many of whom, she said, were ac- tually starving. Her own leisure activities tended more towards the relief of this con- dition.
At this point the visiting Englishman adopted the supercilious demeanour of someone who thinks he knows best. Ever since reading Tom Wolfe's seminal treatise on contemporary American society, 'The Me Decade and the Third Great. Awaken- ing' (in The Purple Decades, Cape E8.95), I have been haunted by his revelation that a family of four on welfare in California receives more money than 'most British newspaper columnists'. I do not know why he should have chosen newspaper col- umnists as his yardstick, but it hurt. What does he mean by most British newspaper columnists? Obviously they cannot receive as much as John Pilger, but it seemed by no means impossible that they received as much as me. Of the two leisure activities, it seemed that the husband's was slightly the less silly. But inquiries revealed that the beautiful, intelligent, kind-hearted Sinhalese was ac- tually correct, as her letter-writing husband acknowledged. It was no part of the American intellectual's general gloom which Tom Wolfe brilliantly castigates. Last Christmas, people in Michigan were alarmed to discover that large numbers of the unemployed were actually starving. The reason for this is that unemployment paY stops after three months in the United States, and nothing takes its place. What happened was that everyone rallied round. Doctors and estate agents — yes, even lawyers — devoted their spare time to distributing food which was sent in free bY farmers and nobody, so far as was dis- covered, actually starved to death. One would have thought that a little bit of pilgerising would have turned up a few deceased oldies whose pneumonia or cancer of the pancreas might have been aggravated by malnutrition, but not, apparentlY, s°. The story has now disappeared from even the Detroit newspapers, but it is anybody.s guess whether this is because the situation is now under control, or because they have found more novel things to write about. But even the threat of starvation is alarm- ing enough when set against the $22 million pocket money which a healthy and active nine-year-old boy will receive as compensa- tion for some disfigurements to his ski11 which were at any rate partly his OW11 fault. The more I learn about Americans the more I admire them, but the more I learn about them the less I understand how their system works.
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