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Five stray thoughts

(1) If Barry Bonds were a man -- and that's not a phrase I commonly use, but it's what is needed here -- he would hit home run #754 and retire, one short of Hank Aaron's record. It would be a brilliant and redemptive gesture, honoring his senior, his better, and quietly acknowledging the taint his inevitable record will otherwise have. He won't do it, of course.

(2) If Barack Obama wanted my vote for president he would oppose the present drive within the coal industry for state and federal subsidies of the liquid coal boondoggle. I understand that as a senator from a coal-producing state he is more or less obliged to co-sponsor this legislation. But if he wishes to prove himself more than simply a first-term Senator, if he wishes to prove himself a leader, not simply of these United States but, yes, of the free world, he will need actually to lead and to leave behind the blandishments of local and regional power.

(3) I listened to two local businesspeople chatting yesterday, both bright and able and successful entrepreneurs, both people for whom I have enormous personal and professional respect. One of them said, "If we were starting out today, we couldn't do it." Meaning that the present landscape is so modified to meet the needs and appetites of enormous businesses — of the big boxes — that there is no longer room in the marketplace for local, creative, and ethical businesses.

(4) Some months back I read a book surveying George Washington's views of slavery. Because I loaned it to a friend I am unable to cite it here, but no matter. Washington was the only one of the founders to free his slaves, albeit in his will, and then only his slaves and not those which were owned by his wealthy wife...including her half-sister. Washington was apparently a pragmatic man whose objection to slavery was not so much moral as practical: Slaves did slipshod work, were poorly motivated, and finding managers who could extract good work from them was difficult at best. A number of the agricultural improvements credited to Washington are his attempts to create systems that not even slaves could mess up. At roughly that same time I read the E-Myth, one of those business books which make the rounds regularly and then fade, for most of them contain one good idea extended to 60,000 unnecessary words. (Not unlike my blogs, though at least I'm shorter winded here.) The chief lesson of the E-Myth is that Ray Kroc's adaptation of the assembly line to the production of regularized fast food is a model every business should adopt. Which means that everything your business does can be done by employees who require minimal training and can be plugged into a system so fool-proof that no employee is irreplaceable (nor commands a high salary, in consequence). This is, I suppose, means as a tonic to the many entrepreneuers who hold their business so closely they cannot let go. But it says precious little for the dignity of work.

(5) My father sent me a clipping from the Seattle Times noting that King County, which includes Seattle and the suburbs in which I grew up, is the tenth wealthiest county in the United States and is now home to 68,000 millionaires (counting net worth, but not their homes). There are 9.3-million millionaires in the United States now, Jerry Large's column also notes. He also cites a University of California study of IRS data from 2005 which "found that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans earned the largest share of the nation's income since before the Depression." Mamaw, in her mid-80s and a life-long Republican looked up from lunch yesterday and said quietly, "There is no middle class."

A change is going to come.

It may not be for the better.

One of the wisest things my father ever said: "Them as has gets."

Posted by grant on June 18, 2007 9:20 AM | Permalink