Untitled Document

04 August 2005

Grapevine

The President made his announcement on Prince Spaghetti Day down in a place called Grapevine, Texas . I assume that is near Crawford, where the ranch is. He is starting his five-week vacation, and I am pleased he has found a little time to get away from the stress here in town.

August is a hot month here, sticky and uncomfortable, and I want the chief executive fresh to make important decisions. Before he left town he mentioned that the concept of Intelligent Design should be included in any rational discussion of concepts like evolution in the schools.

Intelligent Design, as I understand it, is the notion that the world is a very complicated place, beyond human understanding, and therefore something much smarter than us must have created it.

I'm OK with that, even if the scientific basis for the alternative to evolution comes out of a book that is more than two thousand years old. It is a perfectly fine book. I think there is a place for philosophy in the schoolhouse. I am just a little worried about who is doing the philosophizing.

The President didn't talk about that in his Prince Spaghetti Day remarks. Instead, he made an electrifying call to put us back at war again.

I'll confess I had relaxed a little since the war was declared to be over last week. Secretary Rumsfeld said we were actually engaged in a “struggle against violent extremism," and you will have to forgive me if I get a little confused about what extremism he is talking about.

The President clarified things. "We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001."

I'm not sure we really know who that is. The people that are blowing themselves up appear to be largely college-educated young men with too much time on their hands. They follow a mystic branch of a faith that is derived from a strain of Salifism that has not appeared before in the world. The young men and their leaders resemble the Marxists or the Fascists of the 1930's more than anything else. I had been under the impression that we were fighting the mujahadeen from Afghanistan or something. Apparently, that is not true.

We are actually fighting a stateless, highly educated, technically savvy bunch of alienated young men, who have continued the old Arab tradition of adopting virtually every bad idea that has come out of Europe .

So I'm glad things are clarified, and I am glad the President said it while taking a long vacation on Spaghetti Day.

I plan my week by it, getting the boiling pot out of the cupboard before I go to work, and maybe you do, too. One fall afternoon in 1969, 12-year-old Anthony Martignetti was standing on a Boston street corner near his family's North End home.

The neighborhood was mostly Italian then, and the big elevated expressway still divided the old city. Immigrants could still afford to live in the city. He was approached by two men, and times being what they were, it was not considered aberrant behavior.

They were filming a commercial for a local pasta company. Spaghetti was considered an ethnic food then, if you can believe it. They had a camera, and they followed Anthony as he ran through the narrow alleyways, answering his mother's voice calling him to come for dinner.

By the end of the day, an advertising legend was born, and Prince Spaghetti owned Wednesday outright.

If the spaghetti folks have Wednesday, and the Church has Friday, Thursday should be up for grabs. I was thinking about a name for Thor's Day, since I need to tie it to the threat level in the war, since we are back in it. It is important to stay organized.

One of the reasons is simple. The two attacks on the London transit system came on Thursday. The anxiety there was highest as I came to consciousness here in the Washington darkness. By the time I had even a partial claim to real awareness the rush hour, and presumably the danger, had subsided in London.

The crisis level cannot be maintained indefinitely. Some of the police have not had a day off since the first attacks. I remember the feeling that started almost four years ago here.

I worry more about the time of day, than the day itself. I assume the bombs will come at rush hour, and I have consciously altered the timing of my transit patterns. I do not know if my employers understand the strategy, or the connection of my tardy arrivals to Global Terrorism.

Which brings me to the ownership of Thursday.

There was a tradition that the day was already taken, but that dates back to Junior High, just after the age when the hormones kick in and the concept of “cootie avoidance” was abandoned in favor of their relentless pursuit. There were dark mutters on the student grapevine that Thursday belonged to the homosexual community, and that strange and disgusting rites were conducted on that day.

Which turned out to be true, but it was not the Gay Community that was behind it.

Or maybe it was, but let us be charitable here. There are real enemies in the world, and they are more complex than we permit ourselves to understand.

I know a company- a big company that you would have heard about- that has been through the wringer. It has a glorious corporate history, a real pioneer that quite literally changed the nation and then the world. It had more trucks and operating locations than the Department of Defense, and it was part of everyday life.

If that sounds like General Motors or Ford, both of which have stock that is now valued in the “junk” category, that is fine. They are certainly not the only ones with the same sort of problem.

But this particular company, under severe pressure to meet a world that it changed, determined on a corporate strategy of strategic layoffs. To meet revenue expectations from Wall Street, lay-offs were orchestrated to lighten the payroll to meet quarterly revenue goals.

It could be a useful strategy, if used sparingly, and as a surgical tool to prune unprofitable activities while encouraging new areas of growth. But it became a regular occurrence; an accounting crutch to continue routine operations. That was an enabling activity to preserve a corporate culture that simply had to change. But it wouldn't, or it couldn't.

My Dad worked for American Motors, one of the proud little post-war companies that had a good idea- fuel efficiency and style- and startled the Big Three with its success. It lost its way, over time, a victim of artificially cheap overseas oil and planned obsolescence.

What doomed things was the hiring of executives from the bigger car companies who were mired in old-think, that could not think save the original Good Idea. They tried to compete in the style-sizzle of flashy cars with big engines. In the end they were old men directing the creation of cars they thought the young would like.

They didn't, of course, and some of the designs are the ones that make you shudder and laugh today at the excesses of the late 1970s. Remember the Marlin with the lime-green interior that resembled the Jungle Room at Graceland ?

I watched the death of that company over fifteen years from the vantage point of the family dinner table. We heard about the stock sinking below the employee stock-option price, and to our young ears the sad irony about “buy high, sell low” had an ominous note that seemed to undermine the foundations of our little suburban world.

It not much different than what is happening at the company my friend works for. I was having a Kettle One Martini with him, up, a little dirty, with olives, at the Flattop Grill near the Ballston Metro stop. He still takes the subway, and can get off and have a couple drinks before getting back on and riding out to the suburbs. He is a bit of a fatalist. He was looking at the pert bartender who seemed to have every reason for optimism. But his current mood was dark.

The Flattop recently banned smoking at the bar, and the place next door with the dark wood went out of business. I wanted a cigarette, but it was too hot to step outside. My friend shook his head. “I heard it on the grapevine. Thursday is when they are going to do it. Three weeks from now. That is the special day, the latest one they can get the people off the payroll before the close of the company fiscal year.”

“That is pretty generous,” I said. “That is almost six weeks pay as severance.” He looked at me grimly.

“Yeah. If you knew you were going to have a new job at the distant end.” He pursed his lips. “How many months of mortgage payments do you have in reserve? I just bought the house last year. And what kind of bargaining position does that put you in if you have to rustle up a job real fast?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You want it bad, you get it bad.” Despite the heat, I thought the idea of stepping out for a cigarette sounded good. “Maybe they ought to name Thursday for your company.”

He finished his martini and loosened his tie. “It's like a sports stadium. But I think they bought the naming rights a long time ago.”