Plato Meets Behir the Twelve-Legged Dragon
Resnick, Rosalind
Plato Meets Behir the Twelve-Legged Dragon by Rosalind Resnick Deep inside a government office building in downtown Washington, seven high-ranking officials stare intently as a well-built woman...
...After a long discussion about the problems the embargo was creating for importers, Baden recalls that the Commerce official finally admitted, "Ken, I know you're right and we're wrong...
...Because the rules that govern imports—the Tariff Schedules of the United States of America (TSUSA)—were voted into law back in 1962, the task of accommodating them to latter-day reality can get tricky...
...We can take comfort in the fact that while we may not be producing intelligent trade policy, at least we are producing very philosophical Customs officials...
...Like all truly serious philosophical discourse, the debate over injection-molded figures like Behir and Evil Nightmare is comfortably removed from reality...
...What taboos...
...they call them action figures:' argues Michael O'Rourke of Rode & Qualey, counsel to LJN, the toy company that brings in Dungeons & Dragons figures...
...The battle began in earnest when Star Wars hit the movie theaters and, shortly thereafter, a flood of plastic figures from the Orient bombarded America's toy stores...
...This inspired lawyers for the importers to devise rococo theories about what constituted a foxing-like band...
...He has a passion for subtle distinctions...
...Joseph's Seminary in New York, and is a student of Plato, Aristotle, and St...
...To any parent who has gone Christmas shopping for his five-year-old, the answer is obvious...
...Sheridan spent three years as an undergraduate studying medieval philosophy at St...
...You win some and you lose some...
...Consider the question of what constitutes a "foxing" or "foxing-like band" on a shoe...
...Instead, they have turned the whole thing into a challenging philosophical exercise...
...In the end, the Customs Service decided to accept this position in large part, but, by that time, it was too late in the season for importers to begin marketing the controversial footwear...
...Both bureaucrats and lawyers agreed that Barbie and Raggedy Ann are dolls, but what about a G.I...
...When she reemerges in skimpy attire, the men's jaws drop, and their faces redden...
...But Sheridan preferred a more systematic approach, relying for his definition on what he terms "an accumulation of differences...
...As Ken Baden of the American Association of Exporters & Importers recalls, Customs decided that any men's shirt with a square back was a sports shirt and that only an old-fashioned shirt with tails could be classified in the dress category...
...Thomas Aquinas...
...All this is very important...
...Instead, you probably learned about the role of tariffs in the broad panorama of our nation's past: the antagonisms between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain and between the northern and southern states...
...How did we end up with a system better designed for breeding philosophers than with establishing sensible tariff policy...
...shirts with square backs should be considered dress shirts or sports shirts...
...This has meant replacing chancy litigation with steady hourly fees for checking clients' merchandise for potential customs problems...
...Customs naturally sought to classify the plastic humanoids as dolls at the higher duty rate...
...Where imported goods were previously classified and assessed a duty based on relatively vague definitions, the TSUSA inaugurated a seven-digit system of nomenclature that could define the merchandise to an exactitude of six subheadings...
...But when the matter was brought before Harvey Fox, Customs director of classification and value, in a case involving plastic G.I...
...Sheridan is one of Customs' national import specialists for athletic footwear, and his office has dozens of sample sneakers arrayed on racks on the walls...
...and whether antiquated language used in defining sneakers can be used to classify other shoes made in a similar way...
...The attorneys, accustomed to making their living on the occasional windfall gained by trying cases on contingency, began to reorient their practices toward "preventive law...
...Joe and Barbie are on the same footing...
...The importers, naturally, claimed the characters were actually the contemporary equivalent of lead soldiers and, therefore, should be classifiable as toy figures of animate objects— hence, duty-free...
...Joe "action figures" are dolls or toys...
...Where were you in '62...
...After consulting four encyclopedias, a dictionary, and H.G...
...whether Rosalind Resnick is imports and government affairs editor for Footwear News, a Fairchild publication...
...Both can come in duty-free under GSP from certain Far East countries...
...Cogito Ergo Shoe The contemplative nature of the Customs culture isn't immediately apparent to outsiders...
...Another matter for contemplation at the Customs Service is the question of what constitutes a doll...
...Customs Service such exercises assume ludicrous proportions...
...This is a world where every day brings a Solomon-like decision on whether G.I...
...A similar controversy bubbled up over imports of dress shirts and sports shirts from South Korea...
...But talk to Sheridan and a different image emerges...
...On a "sliding scale" with "desk" and "not a desk" at opposite ends, does the object in question have more characteristics of a desk than of a non-desk...
...But sneaker styles and technology have changed quite a bit over the last quarter-century, and recently Customs was faced with the hair-splitting task of deciding whether vinyl casual shoes with a two-piece upper that overlapped the inner lining possessed a "foxinglike band ." Did Congress intend for the lower part of the upper to constitute such a band, or was it part of the upper and, therefore, inherently incapable of overlapping itself...
...For example, at first glance around the office of Jim Sheridan at Six World Trade Center in New York, you might think you'd wandered into a discount shoe store...
...Joseph Kaplan, an unusually resourceful Customs lawyer with the firm of Baskin & Steingut, has arranged the fiveminute fashion show to convince Customs to give his client, an apparel importer, the benefit of the lower duty rate applied to clothing classified as "underwear," as opposed to "outerwear...
...In the midst of the controversy, Baden says he conferred with a senior official of the Commerce Department...
...Evil Nightmare is exempt because dolls have to be people...
...Not incidentally, Fox struck a blow for sexual equality at the same time...
...However, there is little, if anything, in the various dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other secondary authorities . . . supporting an interpretation of the TSUSA which would attribute to the Congress an intention that parents of little girls pay more for their toys than parents of little boys for similar toys merely because the toy for one depicts a baby, dancer, or fashion model while the other depicts a soldier or cowboy...
...More recently you've no doubt read about the tariff issue in the context of our trade tensions with countries such as Japan...
...This is what led to the "foxing-like band" controversy...
...Nobody wants to make these little suckers here anymore...
...When Congress drafted the tariff schedules in 1962, lawmakers tried to protect the domestic footwear industry from an onslaught of cheap sneakers from the Orient by providing that any canvas or vinyl shoe with a tape band attached at the sole and overlapping the "upper" be assessed at a higher rate of duty...
...But within the Customs bureaucracy, where it all comes home to roost, the clerks have had to weigh and measure, ponder and deduce, with ever-increasing subtlety, in response to far more mundane matters...
...And should a piece of furniture that barely "squeaks by" in six "desk" categories be considered more of a desk than another piece of furniture that steadfastly holds its own in five categories but barely misses out in the sixth...
...In other words, using the analogy of a desk, does a particular piece of furniture fall more logically into the desk category than any other...
...their part in deepening the Great Depression and in defining, in large measure, the differences between the Republican and Democratic parties through much of the 19th century...
...But this is the U.S...
...So the quota for the "other" category quickly filled up, and a number of shipments of sports shirts were embargoed until the quota reopened...
...Customs Service headquarters, and, as Nathaniel Hawthorne observed more than 100 years ago in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, "Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom House opens on the road to Paradise...
...Passions begin to stir when the duty rate for "dolls" is 14.1 percent and the tariff for "toy figures of animate objects" is zero if the toys are produced in a country whose exports of that commodity are eligible for duty-free treatment under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP...
...And Evil Nightmare, a black, charging horse with white, skeletal hands for a harness, has been dubbed a "toy figure of an animate object...
...When they were introduced back in 1962, they were intended to streamline the old hodgepodge of antiquated laws and court decisions into a unified system of classification...
...But we're consistently wrong ." The battles over Barbie dolls, foxing bands, and square-backed shirts are not, of course, the kind of Customs controversies you read about in your American history texts...
...Joe "action figure" or a Dungeons & Dragons figure of Elkhorn the Dwarf Fighter...
...This is because, as O'Rourke likes to point out, "there is no domestic industry being protected...
...The tendency to turn the vividness of human experience into an exercise in categorization is common in any bureaucracy, but at the U.S...
...The underlying premise," Fox wrote, "is that toy soldiers are not dolls because boys play with them rather than girls...
...So strict was Customs in embargoing the sports shirts that even square-back shirts destined for prisoners on New York City's Rikers Island were detained...
...From now on, G.I...
...One suggested that if a shoe could not be held together without the lower band, then that piece could not be termed a foxing band...
...We can trace our most recent problems to the tariff schedules...
...Congress, of course, never even considered the issue: two-piece-upper vinyl shoes did not exist in 1962...
...Several years ago, when quotas were instituted to curb imports of Korean men's shirts, the Far Eastern imports were tallied in two categories`dress" and "other...
...Within the trade, nobody calls these dolls...
...Sheridan, in trying to stretch the tariff language to fit the current styles, drew on his theoretical training...
...Wells's autobiography (which created some definitional difficulties with its reference to a "toy soldier with rotating arms"), Fox rejected the notion of an "action figure" as distinct from a "doll:' calling the trade term "merely a euphemism catering to lingering taboos in our society against deviations from traditional roleplaying in children's games...
...Indeed, if one were to search for a historical antecedent to the culture of the Customs bureaucracy, it would have to be Athens in the fourth century, B.C.—the age when Plato and Aristotle grappled with the question of whether Reality embodies, or merely partakes of, the Ideal...
...The "other" category was expected to be filled primarily by sports shirts...
...Not so for Customs officials...
...Unfortunately, the battle for clarity has largely ended in defeat at the hands of lawyers, who've found in the tariff schedules a chance to create a legal history for each new word and provision...
...Happily, such distinctions come up quite frequently in his day-to-day decisionmaking...
...If this were, say, the Capitol or the State Department, one might think a sex scandal was in the making...
...Employing this logic, Sheridan concluded that the vinyl shoes did not have a "foxing-like band ." But not everyone accepts the logic of the footwear expert whom detractors have referred to derisively as "the philosopher-king ." One who didn't was Sheridan's boss...
...The difficulties were made worse by the fact that Congress would never be able to keep up with changes in styles...
...O'Rourke, whose client imports some non-humanoid figures as well, may console himself with the classification of Behir, a bicolored plastic dragon with 12 legs and a triangular horn flaring out from behind its head, as a "toy figure of an inanimate object ." Behir is exempt from Fox's ruling because he is an imaginary animal...
...Joes shipped in from Hong Kong, Fox concluded that such figures are dolls...
...But the bureaucrats at the Customs Service do not despair of bringing the innovations and changes in fashion of the last 22 years into line with categories that were dreamed up when John F. Kennedy was president...
...Plato Meets Behir the Twelve-Legged Dragon by Rosalind Resnick Deep inside a government office building in downtown Washington, seven high-ranking officials stare intently as a well-built woman in a tight-fitting brown jumpsuit slips behind a dressing screen...
...Plato would think of some essence out there," he recalls thinking...
Vol. 16 • May 1984 • No. 4
