A Bum's Wages

Show me a man with very little money and I will show you a bum.

— Joe E. Lewis

You can't get good help these days.

I know. 

I've been trying for almost a month to find someone to turn on my sprinkler system (it's controlled by a bunch of servo-motors and above my pay-grade). 

Two different companies have already broken two appointments each; a third is now on deck to come to my home and do the 20-minute job three weeks from now—for five times the price asked by the other two oufits.

I won't hold my breath anyone shows up.

The proprietors are quick to point out to me the source of the trouble: bums.

While business owners are working 17-hour days, bums are sitting on their couches, collecting juicy federal payments. 

Never mind their companies collected juicy federal payments, too, last summer—in fact, three rounds of them.

The unspoken message: socialism breeds bums.

Or not so unspoken.

Today's Delaware Business Times features an editorial by the publisher headlined, "Delaware’s leaders need to rethink federal benefits." 

He calls for the state's governor (a Democrat) to follow the lead of the nation's Republican governors and withhold all federal unemployment payments.

The payments, he says, represent a "body blow for small businesses."

The metaphor makes clear the publisher believes business owners and elected officials are engaged in a boxing match.

"Ladies and gentlemen, in the red corner, 'Punching' Pete Proprietor... and in the blue corner, Patrick 'The Pickpocket' Politico. Let's get ready to rumble!"

Business owners make a simple argument. 

It goes like this:

There are tons of jobs available. But bums just want to sit at home and spend the $300 federal unemployment checks they get every week to finance their Commie lifestyles. They're not grateful for the bum's wages we so graciously offer—because they're bums. And the bums are being abetted in their ambitionless bumhood by the bleeding-hearts who want their votes. They should all be kicked off the gravy train and go to work—for us. Pronto. Profits are at stake. 

I, for one, don't care to admit our normal economy functions because of the millions of working poor who are paid a bum's wages.

I just want my sprinklers turned on. Now. Cheaply.

But you can't get good help these days.

UPDATE: As it happened, I had to call a fourth company to turn on my sprinklers.

Food Fight

Seventy-nine years ago today, a gang of female protestors entered a small grocery store in Nazi-occupied Paris and began yelling and snatching the canned sardines on display. Arms loaded, they ran back outside and tossed the cans to the crowd in the street.

It was a sardine riot.

The Nazis had been starving the Parisians during the Occupation, just to show them who was boss. They denied civilians everything from beans to broccolini, potatoes to pasta, sausages to sardines. 

The sardine riot—an organized street protest against the shortages—resulted in the killings of two policemen and, in time, a wave of reprisals by the Nazi puppets who ran the Vichy government.

The obscure event is recounted by French studies professor Paula Schwartz in Today Sardines Are Not for Sale, new from Oxford University Press.

Schwartz describes the food riot as "banal," a "human interest story consigned to oblivion. 

"Even the human toll of the incident was sadly banal," she writes in the introduction. 

An eyewitness called the riot, "a brief scuffle of no importance."

But the story's banality makes it enchanting. 

There's no Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, FDR or de Gaulle moving history's levers; no great armies storming the beaches or fighting in the forests; just a group of hungry French housewives tossing canned fish.  

"Microhistories" like Schwartz's are among my favorite kind of books. 

Launched in 1983 by Natalie Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, the microhistory craze goes on unabated. 

The best microhistories I've read have covered a crazy pageant of subjects: rock bands, businesses, hobbies, professions, books, paintings, voyages, meetings, battles, crimes, trials, disasters, animals, cities, and paleontological digs. 

One of my all-time favs, Small Town Talk, examines the history of Woodstock—the town, not the festival; another, Thunderstruck, recounts the invention of the radio. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life describes the Smithsonian's plunder of a Canadian treasure. 

Microhistories, in William Blake’s words, try to "see the world in a grain of sand." They bring you so close to a subject you feel its breath on your face. Then, they pull back the lens. You get to look at the big questions scientists, psychologists, philosophers and theologians pose. 

Why, for example, do cultural moments always originate in villages? Why do we always credit thieves with history's greatest inventions? Why do we think only the strong survive?

Forty years in the writing, Today Sardines Are Not for Sale examines a 20-minute incident that, in a grain of sand, lets us see how Western Europeans—women, in particular—came to terms with Hitler's invading armies.

Through a 200-page close-up on “the women’s dem­onstration,” you learn what it was like not only to be a Parisian housewife, but a resistance fighter, a collaborator, a grocer, a cop, a spy, a snitch, a jurist, a Commie, a corrupt politician, and a Nazi occupier.

"As a protest action emblematic of its time and of its type, the affair presents an extraordinary opportunity to understand some signal features of everyday life in Paris under German occupation," Schwartz writes in the introduction.

But Schwartz's book, like all microhistories, does more than that.  

Today Sardines Are Not for Sale also asks several big questions. 

Why are most women's contributions throughout history forgotten?

Why is history itself a moving target?

And will Americans have to starve before they stand up to fascism once more?

The book is terrific. 

Try it out.

Brain Dead

 

Shot between the eyes at Chickamauga, Indiana Private Jacob Miller’s chances of surviving the Civil War were infinitesimal.

As his company fled a Confederate battalion of sharpshooters the morning of September 19, 1863, it abandoned Miller on the battlefield.

"I was left for dead," he later told a newspaper. "When I came to, I found I was in the rear of the Confederate line. So as not to become a prisoner, I made up my mind to make an effort to get around their line and back on my own side."

Miller sat up and probed his wound with a dirty finger. "I found my left eye out of its place and tried to place it back, but I had to move the crushed bone back first. I got the eye in its proper place and then bandaged it the best I could.”

Miller was so blood-soaked, the Confederates he encountered didn't recognize his blue uniform. He managed, half blind, to escape them and hobble back to the Federal lines, where he was carried by stretcher-bearers to a field hospital. A nurse helped him climb onto the operating table. "The surgeons examined my wound and decided it was best not to operate and give me more pain, as they said I couldn’t live very long," he said.

Miller decided to take his life into his own hands. He snuck from the hospital and followed a road heading "away from the boom of cannon and the rattle of musketry." But he soon collapsed from exhaustion.

"Monday the 21st I came to and found I was in a long building in Chattanooga, lying on the floor with hundreds of other wounded. I raised myself to a sitting position, got my canteen, and wet my head. While doing it, I heard a couple of soldiers who were from my company. They could not believe it was me as they said I was left for dead on the field."

Because he was able to walk, Miller was told to leave Chattanooga and find his way to Nashville, 130 miles away. He left with the men from his company. They crossed the Tennessee River that night.

"Tuesday morning the 22nd we awoke to the crackling of the camp fire that a comrade had built to get us a cup of coffee and a bite to eat," he said. "While eating, an orderly rode up and asked if we were wounded. If so, we were to go back along the road to get our wounds dressed. We had to wait till near noon before we were attended to. That was the first time I had my wound washed and dressed by a surgeon."

Miller was told to walk to Bridgeport, Alabama, only half as far as Nashville. From there, he could catch a train.

"We arrived at Bridgeport the fourth day out from Chattanooga at noon, just as a train of box cars was ready to pull out," he said. "The next thing I remember, I was stripped and in a bathtub of warm water in a hospital at Nashville."

The surgeons in Nashville also refused to operate and shipped Miller to a hospital in his home state of Indiana. "I suffered for nine months, then got a furlough home and got doctors to operate on my wound" he said. "They took out the musket ball."

Miller recovered in three months and was discharged from the army with a $40 monthly pension ($680 today). But his wound didn't close. Family and friends, shocked to learn he was alive (he'd been listed as dead), could see his pulsating brain through the hole in his head. "Seventeen years after I was wounded, a buck shot dropped out of my wound and thirty-one years after, two more pieces of lead came out," he told the newspaper.

Although he suffered constant pain and never again held a job, Miller married and had a son. Occasionally, in the years following his mishap, he would suffer spells of "stupor." Miller would tramp around town for two weeks, shouldering a stick and insisting he was on picket duty. He lived to the age of 88.

This Memorial Day weekend, please consider a fact: although a tad loony, Jacob Miller survived his war. His service should be honored, yes, but on Veterans Day. 

On Memorial Day we honor soldiers who didn't survive. It should be clear from the former holiday's name: you can't become a veteran if you die before your discharge. 

But Americans—without benefit of a musket ball in the head—are so brain-dead, they conflate the two. I blame poor teachers, sloppy journalists, and cheesy advertisers for their confusion.

If you're unsure of the difference, learn Memorial Day's origin story. It's touching.

From Béarnaise Sauce to Socialism

In France this day, celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Commune de Paris are wrapping up.

The Commune, a brief but world-historical uprising of Paris's working class, still rankles conservatives today.

That's because—from start to finish—it was a socialist uprising: a time of class warfare and revenge; of workers' rights, women's rights, and immigrants' rights; of living wages, debt forgiveness, rent control, cheap mass transit, and plentiful food.

Karl Marx loved (and inspired) it.

The two-month Commune didn't rise from nowhere.

It was triggered by the trauma of the four-month Siege of Paris, Bismarck's campaign to cripple the city, throughout which the working class had been corralled into a single arrondissement to starve to death. 

As Parisians' food dwindled, "siege cuisine" became popular.

Working-class people ate rats, cats, and dogs to survive, while the wealthy ate horses and mules and animals they took from the zoo—including camels, zebras, antelopes, and ostriches.

To make the wealthy's meat palatable, Parisian chefs experimented with fancy dishes like pâté de rat; stuffed donkey’s head with sardines; broth of elephant; and kangaroo stew. 

Sauces—first popularized by Chef Carême—came into particular use. 

Paris's chefs served meat cooked in burgundy, tomato puree, pepper sauce, truffle sauce, béarnaise sauce, and sauce chasseur (hunter’s sauce).

Without money for bistros, the working class had to settle for boiled, fried or baked rat, cat, and dog. No wonder they rebelled, once Bismarck's siege ended.

Like all of Paris's poodles, the Commune came to a terrible end. 

After a two-month reign over Paris, the Commune was crushed by soldiers rushed from Versaillais. 

They killed over 70,000 workers in the streets, executed another 30,000, and burned down a third of the city.

So much for socialism. 

But at least we have béarnaise sauce.

POSTSCRIPT: Learn how artists depicted the Paris Commune here. 

HAT TIP: Thanks to historian and gourmand Ann Ramsey for inspiring this post.

Comparing

Look for the similarities, not the differences.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

AA members believe "comparing" is the sure path back to the bottle. 

Comparing leads the drunk to minimize his problem-drinking ("I was never as bad as he was") and exaggerate his ability to control his drinking ("He drank every day; I'll only drink on weekends").

Instead, the drunk is supposed to "identify" with fellow members—accept that he's also an alcoholic and admit he can't control his drinking (it controls him).

My experience working with hundreds of different businesses has taught me that comparing—in AA's sense—is one of executives' worst habits—and an equally certain path to self-defeat.

I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every time an executive told me "we're different" (a statement often followed by "we're the industry leader").

Business strategists would call that attitude "optimism."

I call it drunk-think. 

Executives who believe "we're different" are drunk, drunk on a special flavor of Kool-Aid known as "Cheery Red." 

Drinking too much of it causes comparing.

For a decisionmaker, that's a terrible self-handicap.

Drinking too much Cherry Red, like drinking too much alcohol, blurs vision, slows cognition, and impairs judgement. 

And, like drinking too much alcohol, drinking too much Cherry Red can bring on denial—even deliria.

You hear examples of drunk-think in businesses every day. 

"That's unnecessary."

"That's untested."

"That can't be done." 

"We tried that, it doesn't work."

"That's too expensive." 

"That's too risky." 

"That's fine for other companies."

"That's for start-ups."

"That's for losers."

"That's irrelevant."

"I've never heard of that."  

"That's not how we do things here."

Drunk-think distorts reality because it's always way-too overconfident. 

Like the abusive drinker who believes he's different—that he can control his drinking—the executive afflicted by drunk-think believes that, compared to others, he is awesome—he can pull it off. He's peerless, after all, exempt from the ordinary constraints all his competitors suffer; exempt from the laws of economics, too. He has no need to rock the boat; challenge the company status quo; look outside for new ideas; or adopt others' proven strategies. He only needs to stay calm and carry on.

Eventually, drunk-think will take its toll on the executive. 

He may not destroy the company car, but he's sure to destroy the company's value.