ON THE AVENUES: Can't you smell that smell?A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Back during those heady postwar days, America’s empire of the cash register was the last one standing in a world bankrupted by conflict.
We imagined our nation as the personification of a handsome, Nebraskan, corn–fed farm hunk, with wavy hair and muscles rippling, atom-powered rockets in his pockets, but moreover, raised the “right” way by God-fearing, plow-lugging folks, all pious and well-meaning and virginal.
The CCCP was a concern, to be sure, but fortunately the United States intended only the best Christian Capitalist Consumer Protection for those countries soon to be colonized, though not for reasons of territorial aggrandizement in the physically acquisitional sense.
(Except for Hawaii, of course; after all, we needed somewhere dependable to go on tropical holidays, and those pineapple salespeople could draw up the statehood contract, take their cut, and git ‘er done. Alaska was a non-tropical afterthought, albeit one with plenty of pretty petroleum.)
Nowadays, we’d just outsource the whole kit and caboodle to China, but back then, what we needed were markets. Not only that, it was either Moses, Ben Franklin or Henry Ford who’d once asserted that the Burmese, Kenyans, Uzbeks and residents of inner Winnipeg merely wanted to be just like us, so long as they remained exactly where they were over yonder, and continued to purchase their Bible-toting suburban start-up kits from genuine American distributors on a time payment plan.
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At about this same time, it was widely held outside the narrow confines of the Bronx that rooting for the New York Yankees was like rooting for U. S. Steel. Youthful and otherwise inexperienced ears may not grasp the analogy, but make no mistake: It was intended as derogatory to both named parties.
In short, how is it that an ordinary person in hock to the higher-ups might be duped into feeling an allegiance to the ball clubs and companies with all the money?
How could any dues-paying, card-carrying member of organized labor’s various unions ever cheer for the Yankees, if by doing so meant implicitly siding with the length, breadth and power of the Man? (This was before George Steinbrenner, by the way).
Granted, while rooting for either of these behemoths legitimately might be considered indicative of human neuroses capable of being understood (and spelled) only by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Sidney Freedman, it’s at least possible to argue that sports enthusiasm generally is harmless, and perhaps even mentally healthy, in carefully regulated, smaller doses.
They’re only children’s games, and so long as the viewer displaces his or her extensive list of personal grievances and hostilities by leaving them to the combatants on the field, rather than bludgeoning targets in real life, perhaps it helps to grease the wheels of pervasive apathy.
But rooting for a corporation? How is it possible?
Cheering for U.S. Steel, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, or Archer Daniels Midland?
Really?
It’s inexplicable, unfathomable and more than a bit degrading, and yet it’s exactly the path Americans chose to follow as the Greatest Generation receded into decay and the circuses grew ever more elaborate. Even those professing to hate the Yankees came to pull for the corporate giants, primarily because we were deluded into thinking that every man can be a king by investing in the rich man’s game.
Unfortunately, as the famous writer F. Scott Smith once observed, “The rich are different than you and me -- they have the Republican Party to ensure they hold on to their money.”
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One such bloated monstrosity, which somehow still inspires affection in non-shareholders spite of itself, is the multinational amalgamation known as Anheuser Busch Inbev (ABInbev).
It was reported the other day that in Texas, a Houston-area wholesale distributor of Budweiser was paying cash to bar managers to take a certain local brewer’s beer off tap, and replace it with one of the distributor’s own brands.
While these allegations remain unproven, they do not come close to constituting a shocking revelation. Payola is illegal most places, and no one cares, because in subterfuges both great and small, payola is the way that each and every one of the ABInbevs and U.S Steels of the country came to be where they are today.
Naïveté simply has no place in determining the value of your stock.
Interestingly, a quick glance at the wholesaler’s web site shows that while ABInbev’s brands obviously are its malt and butter, a few craft brewers are on the roster, too. It’s entirely possible that the wholesaler paid to remove one craft brewer’s brand, and replace it with another, and how bizarre is that?
Moreover, in the wake of Internet outrage over the Budweiser wholesaler’s act of imperialistic hubris, there also were hints that some craft brewers – gasp! – have themselves practiced pay-for-play when it comes to draft placement.
Ah, but them’s fightin’ words.
Not us! We’re the honest, localized, creative and exuberant segment, not the old-time, immoral, ginormous ass hats. Craft brewers don’t play by the rules, we subvert them … conjure new paradigms … inject honesty and ethics into the equation ... and so on. The Greatest Generation of beer wholesalers was the one playing dirty pool, not the chosen, the redeemers, the innovators.
On the other hand, perhaps it points to the direction we’re all heading as our segment of the beer market matures, because however much we may like to think of ourselves as different, we still must play according to the rules of a system that is flawed at best, and at worst, inextricably broken.
There’s no glib moral to this story. Will the economic system we’ve chosen to abide in America permit the craft beer business (as well as others like it) to grow according to its own merits, with a semblance of ethical propriety, and without having to use the odious, time-tested “tools” of the trade?
Or, does the money stay where it is?
