(FORTUNE Magazine) – Even the vast and merciless poverty of Calcutta cannot do what the New York City building code can do: make Mother Teresa cry "uncle." ÊThe Missionaries of Charity, whose leader that estimable lady is, wanted to take over an abandoned building in New York in 1988 and convert it to a homeless shelter. Hold on, said the city. The rules demand that renovators of all multistory structures install elevators, even where there were none before. The nuns couldn't afford the $100,000 elevator for their four-story building, and their ascetic customs would have prevented them from using it anyhow. For a year and a half the good sisters shuffled from hearing room to hearing room to get a waiver. No relief. They gave up and directed their generosity elsewhere.

So it goes in big cities and small towns across the U.S. We live in the Age of Unreason. Government doesn't serve; it entangles. "Government acts like some extraterrestrial power," observes Philip K. Howard, author of an important new book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America (Random House, $18). "It almost never deals with real-life problems in a way that reflects an understanding of the situation." Two examples:

The Environmental Protection Agency required Amoco Oil to install a $31 million filtering system on smokestacks at its Yorktown, North Carolina, refinery to screen out benzene, a dangerous pollutant. But there was very little benzene leaking from the smokestacks. The real damage was being done down at the loading docks, where the fumes were billowing into the air--and where it would have been cheap to choke them off. That wasn't an option because EPA regs didn't apply to docks.

Drew P., a child in rural Georgia, was pitiably handicapped. The state provided him special instruction, but Drew's parents had heard of a better program out of town. The courts ruled that under federal law the state was required to pick up the bill for that superior program, which was way out of town. It was in Tokyo.

Collecting displays of government stupidity is not a novel calling. It's the stuff that radio talk shows are made of. What distinguishes Howard, a Manhattan attorney, from Beltway bashers like Rush Limbaugh is that Howard is passionate but not mean-spirited, and scholarly without being stuffy.

Most important: Among the many with an eye for the absurd, only Howard has identified common sense's killer. It is not bureaucrats. Howard, no knee-jerk conservative, has high praise for bureaucrats, at least for the breed as they once were--giants of the New Deal like Adolph Berle, Harold Ickes, and Rexford Tugwell, who weren't afraid to make decisions.

The murderer is the law, or more accurately, our misguided faith that we can resolve all of society's conflicts and guarantee everyone's rights if we write the law in such precise and voluminous detail that human error and corruption will be eliminated. "But it doesn't work," says Howard. "Human activity can't be regulated without judgment by humans."

THE RESULT of our attempt to make law self-executing, applicable everywhere under all circumstances, safe from human bending, tampering, and trimming has been madness: manuals for police in big cities that run on for more than 1,000 pages; some 4,000 regulations promulgated by OSHA dictating such minutiae as how much a plank can stick out from a temporary scaffold (no more than 12 inches).

Even worse, what gets lost in such forests of detail is the law's intended effect. The safety manager at a brick factory points out that trying to make the workplace idiot-proof is actually dangerous. "Workers don't have to think," he observes, "and bosses get tied down with nitpicking regulations."

Tiny minorities become tyrants. The Americans with Disabilities Act has been so strictly interpreted that New York City cannot install pay toilets on its sidewalks. Such toilets must accommodate wheelchairs, and toilets wide enough to do so would block the walks. The losers in this reading of the law are not only the able-bodied but also the blind, deaf, retarded, and others the ADA was designed to protect. (Fewer than 2% of the nation's 43 million disabled are in wheelchairs, according to Howard's calculations.)

Howard's elixir for bringing common sense back to life is straightforward. Write laws and regulations more broadly, let bureaucrats and elected officials use their judgment to apply those rules, and then hold them accountable when they're mistaken or corrupted. Law is supposed to create an arena in which reasonable people can argue toward sensible solutions. To force it to do more, Howard persuasively insists, is to kill civil society.

GRISHAM'S LAW

By Patricia Sellers

"A financial thriller? Isn't that oxymoronic?" a colleague asked me as I rode the elevator to my office, where now I write to tell you that it is not. If John Grisham, whose workmanlike page-turners have made him one of the most commercially successful authors in history, were female and British and attuned to the high-tech tintinnabulation of currencies changing hands around the world, he might write a twisty thriller such as Nest of Vipers (Doubleday, $23).

Nest comes instead from an impressive first-time novelist, Linda Davies, a 1985 Oxford University grad who got wise to money's seduction while working for seven years on Wall Street and in London as a merchant banker. Davies creates a bewitching protagonist in 27-year-old Sarah Jensen, a beautiful, brilliant foreign-exchange trader who lives on the edge--with money, men, and drink. One of the City's top traders, Jensen is recruited by the governor of the Bank of England to work undercover at the notoriously cutthroat and prestigious Inter-Continental Bank (which just happens to be a U.S. firm). No surprise, Jensen turns up an insider trading scam that's reaping millions of dollars in illegal profits for a few ICB traders. The plot quickly turns to murder, the Mafia, sexual intrigue, and corruption at the core of the G7 industrial powers.

It's all great fun, and Jensen turns out to be a character you can't not like. Just don't expect realism. Financial bosses, traders, and government officials are either corrupt or impotent stooges. Known criminals are too honest and clever to believe. But in this way, too, Nest of Vipers is Grisham-like, starting out with terrific detail, then throwing its crime-busting protagonist into ever dizzier implausibilities. Davies knows a winning formula, I guess. Give her time. She may yet do for finance what old John did for law: give it enough sex and sizzle for hours of engrossing, mindless reading on the beach.

SUCKERS, BEWARE?

By Gary Belis

Say this for Randall Rothenberg's Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (Alfred A. Knopf, $25): Not since Joe McGuiness took us behind the scenes of the 1968 Nixon campaign in The Selling of the President have we been treated to such a detailed soup-to-nuts tale of the making of an image.

The image in this case is that of Subaru of America and its Legacy compact car. The author, a former advertising columnist for the New York Times, knows his territory and won unprecedented access over nearly two years to the private deliberations of the players. The drawback: His story is, if anything, overreported. (One minor character is described as wearing "a conservative blue suit, a blue button-down shirt, and a red tie with green polka dots," and what reader needs this information?) Rothenberg's narrative also too often veers off on tangents worthy of a Newt Gingrich speech. Still, what emerges is a compelling and cautionary tale.

In the ad world, a car account is considered the Big Enchilada, and the six agencies that made the final cut for this particular $75 million piece of business wanted it bad. The firm of W.B. Doner concluded its presentation by shepherding Subaru executives to the Doner employee parking lot, where in all the stalls stood Subaru Legacys with license plates reading wbd1 to wbd36 in succession. But in the end the winner was Wieden & Kennedy, the Portland, Oregon, agency that had put itself on the map with its ultra-cool work for Nike. "There wasn't a rock-video director in America, not a shaky cameraman on either coast, not ahypercolor-quick-cutting-swish-panning-grainy-filming filmmaker anywhere in LaLaLand, London, or the Big Apple who wouldn't have killed for the chance to direct for Wieden & Kennedy," writes Rothenberg.

The problem: None of those people seemed particularly interested in selling cars. In fact, Wieden's creative director on the account admitted to hating cars. "Automotive advertising is the biggest lie of all time," he confided to Rothenberg. "You want to live better, look better --buy a grill, go to the gym!" The result of this kind of attitude was commercials with attitude. The great-looking, postmodern campaign told America "A car is just a car" and "Its sole existence is to get you from point A to point B." But despite the tag line ("Subaru. What to drive."), America bought its cars elsewhere, and Wieden & Kennedy became Subaru's ex-agency in under two years.

The critical question for marketers here is this: Was this a bad marriage, or is there something irretrievably flawed about the client/agency relationship as it's usually conducted? Rothenberg doesn't give an answer, though he does observe early on that Revlon and Calvin Klein successfully do their own advertising without an agency. Granted, that's too revolutionary for most companies. But as this tangled yarn makes clear, if you feel the need to forge a relationship with an agency, be forthright about who you are--and choose your partners carefully.

Gary Belis is a New York City public relations executive and freelance writer.