04/30/1998

Eat the Rich

I live in Vermont and I’m an outsider, an immigrant – a flatlander in local parlance. I’m not from around here. The local standard has it that to be considered a Vermonter, not only do you have to have been born here, but your parents have to have been born here, too.

That’s setting the bar pretty high, but I understand. The native Vermonter, with just a hint of the Western New England accent catching in his or her voice, has to take great pains to defend the home territory, so overrun is it with immigrants.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/23/1998

Don’t Get Caught

I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes about – relationships. Wait! Wait! Please, don’t go switching over to Pacifica just yet. This isn’t going to be what you think it is, I swear.

I recently read in a magazine that the Reverend John Papworth, of the Church of England, last year told an interviewer for the BBC that shoplifting is not a sin. While he was careful to point out he is not encouraging people to shoplift, Reverend Papworth gave two reasons to support his position. One, since supermarkets and other mercantile outlets fill airwaves and billboards with enticements to buy products people often can’t afford, Reverend Papworth doesn’t think it’s fair to blame the individual for giving in to temptation. Second, and more important, Reverend Papworth believes stealing involves the betrayal of a moral relationship. Moral relationships are only possible between people, the reverend says, one cannot have a moral relationship with the corporation which owns the supermarket, because the corporation is a thing, a non-living entity, with which it is impossible to enter a moral relationship.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/16/1998

Functional Extinction

I’ve been thinking about cloning lately. I know the big debate on cloning was last year when Scottish scientists successfully cloned Dolly the sheep. All the pundits came out in the newspapers and tee vee and said this or that and it all went away and we forgot about it for a few months until Richard Seed, the Doctor Strangelove of Chicago, announced his intention to clone humans. Then it started in all over again with the pundits and the tee vee and even the president poked his head out and said he was opposed to research that might lead to the cloning of humans. I think we all know by now that when it comes to reproduction, the president continues to favor the old-fashioned methods, but regardless of what he or anyone else says, now that this cloning box is opened, it will be very hard to close up again.

This is true of every technology. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian physicist who was the first to imagine the terrible power that could be released by splitting the atom, helped to design the nuclear bomb and then tried to stop the government from using it. He could not.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/09/1998

Leave Them Kids Alone

You know, I really thought it was a spoof on April Fool’s Day when I looked at the New York Times and there, shyly staring back at me from a posed photograph, was 11-year-old Emily Rosa of Loveland, Colorado.

According to the Times, Emily is the youngest person ever to publish a paper in a major scientific journal, in this case the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her paper, which is said to debunk the practice of “therapeutic touch,” is based on a science fair project of two years ago, when Emily was a nine-year-old prodigy.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
04/02/1998

Democracy in Action

Spring is here. The snow is gone, the crocus is up and the robins have returned. In Washington, the cherry trees blossom as Congress drones on fruitlessly over campaign finance reform – which reminds me we are approaching the season of the annual general meeting. In one of the last vestiges of control the federal government exerts over American corporations, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires each corporation to make the board of directors available to shareholders once a year. If you’ve never been to one, you should go while you still can. It’s quite a sight: a dozen millionaires on a dais, each one stoked to the gills with Valium and Xanax to get him through his annual brush with hoi polloi.

In the past 15 years or so, investors of conscience, usually church groups or a pension fund, will use the annual general meeting to petition the board of directors to take a particular action. The petitioners may wish the corporation to behave in a more environmentally responsible manner or they may ask for more safeguards for workers. Often corporations are asked to cease doing business in countries with repressive regimes. In the 1980s it was South Africa, today it’s likely to be the People’s Republic of China or Burma.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
03/26/1998

Vegging Out

We’re right in the middle of Lent, and for six weeks, Catholics are abstaining from eating meat on Fridays. When I was a child, Catholics abstained from eating meat every Friday and my dad would pick up fish frys on his way home from work. Batter-dipped fish with wedges of lemon and french fries and paper cups full of cole slaw and tartar sauce and the whole thing carried between two paper plates stapled together. You could smell it coming through the door.

In those days, it was a sacrifice to give up meat. It was important to eat as much meat as you could. My parents remembered the Depression, when meat was hard to come by. Even in my childhood, having meat on the table every night was not just about nutrition, it meant your family had achieved a certain socio-economic threshold. When I was older, I started meeting vegetarians; many of them came from families wealthier than my own. By eschewing meat, they seemed to be saying they were beyond such concerns. They had access to plenty of protein without resorting to a blue-collar plate of meat and potatoes.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)
03/19/1998

Dangerous Days in the Economic Empire

Hello there, pleased to meet you. I’m the builder of the new American empire – the economic empire. Perhaps you’ve heard of me. There was a story about me a few weeks ago in the Sunday New York Times. They can’t seem to stop writing about me, the New York Times – Wall Street Journal either, for that matter.

The particular story I’m talking about has to do with all the trouble my friends and I have been having in Mexico City. It’s a classic dilemma: on one hand, there’s a ton of money to be made down there, always has been, but since NAFTA – forget about it. Place is crawling with Americans – Dupont, Xerox, Citibank, Goodyear, IBM. It’s like the whole Fortune 500 has gone south of the border. All the guys down there are on the same track, spend a couple of years in ol’ Mejico, come back a vice president. Best favor you ever did for your career.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Comments (0)