The Chief Flips the Bird

Well, the island collectively dropped its jaw when the news came out. Se fue muy molesto read the headline in The New Day, our local newspaper; “He Left Hot and Bothered,” would be the equivalent in English.

And the “he” is a pretty important he, since Héctor Pesquera is the head of the police department, which in turn is the second largest force in the United States (New York City is number 1).

Well, the question on everybody’s lips is, “why?” Granted, the job couldn’t have been much fun, since morale is low, public confidence in the police is virtually nil, the politicians are busy fighting each other—sometimes to the point of fisticuffs—and, to top it all off, the United States Department of Justice is suing the police department for violations of civil rights.

And was that the problem? Because yesterday, federal judge Gustavo Gelpí appointed Juan Mattos to be the federal monitor to assure that an 18-year reform of the Police Department was going according to plan.  

Pesquera denied that the appointment of Mattos has anything to do with his decision. However, Pesquera also refused to say why he was retiring and returning to his home in Florida.

And Mattos was presented to the public two days ago at the governor’s mansion, at which everybody and his brother showed up, except….right, you know who….

"Pesquera se cansó de las determinaciones apresuradas y el ridículo ayer, donde el Gobierno anunció un alegado monitor sin estar el Jefe de la Policía y sin dar detalles sobre la contratación, es el mejor ejemplo", dijo González.

Roughly, “Perquera got tired of political pressure, and the best example was the ridiculousness yesterday, when the government announced an alleged monitor without the chief being there and without giving details about how he was contracted,” said González.

“He works very hard—Saturday and Sunday, included—and he has the respect of the force,” said my friend Tony, who is the kind of guy who knows the inside story. What he didn’t do, apparently, was play the political game terribly well. And that’s crucial, because the reform won’t come cheap—it’s guesstimated that it will cost 300 million bucks over the course of a decade. Which means that any police chief is going to have to go to the capitol and press the flesh.

Pesquera made over a quarter of a million bucks annually, but guess what?

…wasn’t worth it.

Missing the Miracle

On the face of it, it looks like the classic “oh, fuck” moment. Or maybe like those dreams I still have, at age 57, of taking an exam for a class that I have somehow completely forgotten that I was taking.

So there the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires is, sitting at the piano expecting one concerto, and guess what? Yup, the conductor starts off on another concerto completely.

In fact, I came across this last night as I was lurching out of a sleep to feed a body screaming for carbohydrates—in short, I was half asleep. So I wasn’t entirely sure—had I dreamed this? Was it my own nightmare? Had I somehow switched sexes and instruments?

I can now tell you—yes, it’s real. And this video below, shot in 1998, has now gone as viral as it gets in the classical music world; if not a million hits, it’s got a respectable 724,000. And people are saying, “wow, that’s amazing—she plays a concerto she wasn’t expecting, and she plays it perfectly! That’s incredible!”

Only Stephen Hough gets it right: it is and it isn’t.

Maria João Pires didn’t start playing piano a couple weeks ago—she gave her first recital at age 4 or 5. And she’s been practicing and playing ever since; she’s had half a century of grind at the piano. And she’s played this concerto every season in her life. More to the point, Mozart doesn’t pose the technical challenges that Chopin or—God forbid—Liszt do. So the real deal here is that she remembered a piano concerto, to which I say…

…big deal.

I say this because every musician is walking around with a lot of music stuffed between the ears. I sat down to play Bach suites a few weeks ago after an absence of five years, and did I drag out the music? Confession—I’m not even sure I have the music, since the termites have gotten into a lot of it. I had to throw a lot of music away….

Which meant comparatively little, since most of the repertoire is in my head. And yes, my memory is unusually good, but not that good. And not, of course, as good as it was: I could learn a piece without effort in a day or two. As Hough points out, the real miracle is that Pires is a marvelous pianist, and, as it turns out, an interesting person as well. How interesting? Well, check out this portion of an interview with David Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

DPS: But certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.

MJP: I never did it because I had no time. I was always very busy with other things…I had children very early and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I was always an amateur somehow. I did the career … it was not on purpose. It was not wanted and it was not very natural.

DPS: But you have such a natural facility for piano.

MJP: I don’t think so. I have small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.

An amateur? Well, as a Buddhist, Pires is saying it, but the rest of the world is. Here, ripped off from her biography on Deautsche Grammophon is a quote from The Times of London:

“I can’t think of a pianist with a more ideal command of Chopin’s style. Pires trips through the roulades with filigree dexterity, but her tone is so thoughtful, serious and weighty that they arrive with immense emotional profundity.”

OK—so an amateur with “filigree dexterity….”

Also an amateur who won the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in 1970, and who has performed around the world ever since. Although not, incidentally, much in the United States: she was reluctant to play or travel to America during the Bush years.

And an amateur who really prefers to share the stage—her peeve with Chopin is not the pianistic difficulties he presents, but that he started the piano recital; it has bedeviled her all her life.

And in a field dominated by, well, dominating personalities, Maria João Pires is self-effacing. Or rather, her focus is outward—here’s what she says later in her interview with Stearns:

People care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music. And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that. Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business. And in competition you feel like you have to kill someone to have his place. This is horrible. This is not art. So I would like to give young people the possibility of taking the mission of the society in the world. Not fighting against that but finding new ways. I’m not saying to change the world. This is very pretentious. What better than to have artists in projects in many places in the world where problems are big. It’s not decent that we’re eating a lot and having a lot of luxury and people are dying because they have no food or no water. Our mission should be to try to change things. And art is something that can give people their dignity back.

She started a school in Belgais, Portugal, and the experience wasn’t…well, wait. She says she learned a lot, and she might be, as a Buddhist, the last person to describe the experience as bad. At any rate, she applied for Brazilian nationality, and her relationship with her native country may be strained.

There are pianists who somehow win your heart, who manage to take on the prodigious technical demands on the piano, and throw them off completely. Martha Argerich is one, Radu Lupu another. They’re people who know: it’s not about them, still less about the piano. It’s all about the music.

Wow—Those Great Saudi Guys!

OK—it’s only been seen 5,595,531 times on YouTube in the three days that it’s been there, so it’s clear. Iguanas has to step in and lend a hand; check in on the video below, and help this video get this video out there!

So it’s hard to defend the Saudi Arabian treatment of women, but guess what? Here’s a Saudi woman with a defense:

In Saudi culture, women have their integrity and a special life that is separate from men. As a Saudi woman, I demand to have a guardian. My work requires me to go to different regions of Saudi Arabia, and during my business trips I always bring my husband or my brother. They ask nothing in return—they only want to be with me.

The image in the West is that we are dominated by men, but they always forget the aspect of love. People who aren’t familiar with Shariah often have the wrong idea. If you want stability and safety in your life, if you want a husband who takes care of you, you won’t find it except in Islam.

Wow—what a great deal! And what princes these guys are, who only want to be there for their women! The wonder is that—given that they must be exhausted, from all the care that they lavish on their women—they have the energy and desire to have two, three, or four wives. How do they do it?

And what, by the way, is wrong with our Western women, who can fail to see the obvious benefits of this good Sharia system? Consider—every woman has a guardian, who drives her, gives her “permission” to work, study, go places and even visit the doctor. Are our womenfolk so blind? Why aren’t they jumping at the chance?

And the best thing? Women get all this protection as early as nine, which most courts say is the youngest age for a girl to get married. Oh, and don’t think about marrying outside the tribe, because guess what? That’ll get you disinherited.

Even better, if you get a divorce? You won’t get stuck with the kids—who are the property of the father. Oh, and you’ll have to ask your son if you want to remarry. Oh wait—that may not even happen, since the groom will automatically be dealing with your guardian, not you.

Naturally, it takes some work to maintain this system; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

In 2009, the Saudi Gazette reported that a 23-year-old unmarried woman was sentenced to one year in prison and 100 lashes for adultery. She had been gang-raped, become pregnant, and tried unsuccessfully to abort the fetus. The flogging was postponed until after the delivery.

Wow—postponing the flogging until after the delivery? Is there no kindness these guardians won’t shower on their women? Amazing!

Still people carp. For example, according to Wikipedia, “the World Economic Forum 2009 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 130th out of 134 countries for gender parity.” And even in Saudi Arabia, there are critics: here’s Wajeha Al-Huwaider:

The ownership of a woman is passed from one man to another. Ownership of the woman is passed from the father or the brother to another man, the husband. The woman is merely a piece of merchandise, which is passed over to someone else—her guardian ... Ultimately, I think women are greatly feared. When I compare the Saudi man with other Arab men, I can say that the Saudi is the only man who could not compete with the woman. He could not compete, so what did he do with her? ... The woman has capabilities. When women study, they compete with the men for jobs. All jobs are open to men. 90% of them are open to men. You do not feel any competition ... If you do not face competition from the Saudi woman ... you have the entire scene for yourself. All positions and jobs are reserved for you. Therefore, you are a spoiled and self-indulged man.

I’ve a friend, Harry, who once worked for an organization for Latinos. In his time there, the organization was asked to come out in support of a Mexican guy who had started a brawl in a bar. “Fighting in public,” said the lawyer defending the man, “played an integral part in the cultural life of the Mexican male,” or some such thing. Everybody thought about that for a bit…

…until Harry began to sing, “oh give me a home, where the bottles are thrown…”

Which is the way I’m starting to feel about Islam, at least Saudi Arabian-style. Come on, guys, I do my best to be respectful but…

..couldn’t you guys make it a little easier?

Blown Off, if Not Away....

OK—I have a simple policy about hurricanes: I take them all seriously.

Yes, all of them, barring the ones that are clearly too far north of us to have any effect whatsoever. But any storm coming low across the Atlantic? I’m on it.

Maybe I get it from Rose, who in the pre-Internet days would give me big paper maps of the Atlantic and Caribbean, on which we would put coordinates as NOAA announced them every six hours. Then, for five days or so, we would watch the storm coming, and slowly go into storm mode.

Which meant that you bought two gallons of water every day before the storm. This you did because you were on foot, not car, and anyway, if you waited until the government announced the storm? There would be pandemonium in the street, small riots in the stores, huge lines at gas stations, and reports of muggings for bags of ice.

A category three or above? In the early days, we took every picture from the walls, and lifted every rug from the floor. And I should tell you, I live on the second floor, probably 100 feet above sea level, and the walls of the building are three feet thick full of brick and stone.

And so, two years ago, I called to John and Jeanne—my middle brother and his wife—with the news that Hurricane Irene was not making me happy.

“Not a problem,” he said. “It’s just a tropical storm.”

“John, it’s been a hurricane category 2 for three days now….”

This exchange will tell you everything. I’m am in the tropics, worrying and monitoring the storm. John?

On the golf course!

Look, everybody deserves a vacation. And so they were reluctant to move from the house they had rented—a wooden house five streets away from the beach.

“FIVE STREETS!” I am almost shouting at John. “HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT STORM SURGE?

“Well, we’ll go up to the second floor,,,,”

Is it because I’m the youngest? Because I swear—the more adamant I became that John had to leave, the more casual—no, admit it, here’s the word I want to say—cavalier John became. It ended with the promise that John would evacuate if the storm got too bad.

Well, it was a fight—but it ended with no serious hurt feelings. They both swore—they weren’t blowing me off, and the Fire Department had told them the morning of the storm to stay put.

I could have countered: of course the Fire Department is going to say that. But there were several reasons to have evacuated days before. First, you never really know where these storms are going to hit. Second, if you wait until the water is knee high in the streets, and those three mini Austins ahead of you can’t make it through….well? Oh, and the firemen prefer to do their rescues without too many vehicles on the road.

Of course you know what happened--Irene barely touched them, and they were able to call several days later and report that it barely rained. Irene, however, did major damage north of them.

I had been, it seemed, silly, alarmist, absurdly fatalistic. Was I OK—they asked? Was I having anxiety in other areas of my life? Perhaps I should call my therapist….

I learned—my brother blows me off. He had “been” through a hurricane up on Cape Cod—and that was a Category 2. So a Category 1 should have been no problem, right? And what was Marc worrying about, down in Puerto Rico?

A bit more than a year later, Hurricane Sandy blew through the Caribbean and it was obvious—this was going to be a bad storm. But I had learned—John is a big boy. He gets the Times delivered to his door. And if he’s not going to listen, why talk?

So I stayed silent, and then watched—as the rest of the nation did—as New Jersey and Staten island got smashed. When I flew in to the city in early November, they had just had a major snow storm on top of the super storm; I watched the local news of parka-covered rescue workers walking through the dark halls of city housing projects, trying to figure out who was who and what to do with them.

Up on the upper West Side, where John and Jeanne live, nothing again had happened. Sure, some tree branches had been lost. Was was hard to get—but that was the cab driver's problem—not mine or John and Jeanne’s.

“Who would have thought,” I heard Jeanne say to John in the kitchen, “that a storm could cause so much damage?”

Sitting in the living room, I silently raised my hand.

It’s now a year later—I watched the documentary below yesterday about Sandy, and thought about the devastation, and the many miracles among the tragedies there were. How could it be that in the fire that destroyed over 100 homes, not one life was lost?

Have we learned out lessons, the media are asking?

In one important way—no.

I generally like the National Hurricane Center—I can hear them breathing a sigh of relief up there in Miami—but there is one thing that they’ve got to do. We have got to give the public a better perception of how dangerous a storm is. Which means we have to kiss the Saffir-Simpson Scale goodbye.

Sandy, in fact, was not a hurricane when it hit the East coast; here’s what one writer said about it:

The National Hurricane Center was being infamously stubborn during the storm, refusing to issue hurricane warnings for New Jersey and New York City based on the technicality that Sandy would become extratropical (lose its tropical characteristics) before landfall. Sandy had all the effects of a hurricane, but because its structure wasn’t expected to fit the textbook definition of a tropical system by the time of landfall, no tropical storm or hurricane warnings were issued north of the North Carolina coast.

Whether a storm is extratropical or not makes pretty little difference when the water is rising to the second floor. And if all you have done is consider the Saffir-Simpson scale, and chosen to stay home and ride it out because it’s “just” a Category 1, you’ll have missed some other very important factors.

Such as?

How big is the storm? How much water is associated with it? If it hits, will it be at high tide, as it was for Sandy? How fast is it moving? A category 1 hurricane stalled over the house for 36 hours is not fun….

I left New York and took the now-running subway, in which I saw what I had never seen: a fight broke out between a well-dressed Wall Street type and a young black dude. I was quickly broken up, and people went about their day.

I got back and thought about the storms that come, the storms that fizzle. My brother blows me off—but you know what? He’s otherwise a very good brother—a guy who is fiercely protective and loyal to the ones he loves. Oh, and very guarded in a very public way. If you want to hide, the best place is out in the open.

“Not a problem,” he says to me at any ridiculous request I manage to cook up. So he plays golf when he should be evacuating? No big deal.

He gets away with it!

Art...Or Not....

Well, it’s either art or it’s vandalism, and you’re either lucky if it happens to you or it’s a pain in the neck. And what am I talking about?

This!

Or what about this?

Those in the know—which excludes me—will know that it’s Banksy, a guy whom few people have seen but everyone seems to know about. And he’s been at it since he was in his teens in Bristol, when he was part of the “great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980’s,” according to Wikipedia. No, I have no idea what this is.

And the guy gets around—he popped up in New Orleans after Katrina, he’s been to the Middle East, and he’s now in New York City, where each day for the month of October, he’s putting up a display. Here’s today’s work, which he says was done in the middle of the night in a state “of advanced inebriation.”

For doing stuff like this, Banksy has become famous and, in the process, rich. How rich? Well, he’s estimated at about 20 million dollars. And his work, if authenticated, goes for up to a million. But there’s a problem; authentication is done by a group called The Pest Control Office, and he warns you—the process is “long and challenging.”

And quite often, he chooses not to authenticate a work. Once, in fact, well—let Forbes tell the story….

Take the water tank on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway outside of LA. Thinking the old tank was abandoned, Banksy painted a caption on the side of it “This Looks A Bit Like An Elephant”, and instantly turned it into a tourist attraction and a potential money-maker for two owners of a media design firm that bought the tank from the city of LA with plans to remove and sell it. There was just one complication – the homeless man, Tachowa Covington, who had been living inside of it for seven years and suddenly had his home destroyed.

Banksy heard about the situation, and within hours had reached out to Covington, giving him enough money to get an apartment and support himself for an entire year. This was not enough for the artist. He went on to remove the water tank from his website, and refused to authenticate it for the new owners. The result? Instead of a profitable sale at auction, the tank ended up in a scrap metal yard.

Right—there’s something to like about a guy like that….

And so all of New York is busy trying to find the most recent Banksy attack before it is shown on his website. Where, by the way, you can download high definition Banksy works, so that you can spare the half million or so that you need to bleed out for an original.

Oh, and if it's your building that is chosen as the visitation site? Be prepared to hire security guards.

Now then, the question of the hour--is it art? Well, one guy has the answer, and he's the mayor of New York. Do I have to tell you what he said?

But take a look at the final photo—you decide...

The Next Island Over

Right—the point could be made: who am I to talk? After all, as a citizen of the United States, do I have the right to talk about anybody else’s mess of an immigration policy? Do we really do better?

In this case, yes. Because the supreme court of the Dominican Republic has just directed the authorities to examine birth certificates all the way back to 1929—and I seriously want to know how they chose that year—in order to find out who is of Haitian descent. Why? Because children born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents will no longer be considered citizens.

Both Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island—Hispaniola—but it sort of stops there. There’s the language difference—the Haitians speak Creole, Dominicans speak Spanish. There’s the cultural difference—the Haitians had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and are proud of their black heritage. The Dominicans?

Time to confess—I had thought they roughly followed our own history: Spanish up until the time of the Spanish-American War, and then independent. But no—they have a history that very much defines the animosity between them. Because seven years after the slave revolt of 1801, a group of people from Dominican Republic attempted to take over Haiti for the Spanish. In fact, the tables turned, and it was Haiti who, in 1822, took over the entire island. And when the Dominican Republic finally achieved independence in 1844, it was from Haiti, not Spain.

Then came the massacre. Haitians had been crossing the border for years, and worked in the sugar cane fields—which is a job you don’t want to have: it’s blazingly hot, and cane has spines that can cause serious injury. So the Dominicans had been happy to have someone else do the work. So what was the problem? For mostly political reasons, a scapegoat had to be found. And the Haitians, it was said, were taking jobs.

Sound familiar?

Right—so Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of Dominican Republic, decided in 1937 to send the boys over to the border and ask every dark skinned guy to say the word perejil (parsley). Easy for Spanish speakers—not so easy for Creole tongues. And the price for a badly spoken r? Well, the boys had machetes. Was it 10,000 or 25,000? We’ll never know.

The whole question of race is super charged in the Dominican Republic, so much so that Trujillo used to wear white makeup. And as a student once told me, to be rich and white in Santo Domingo is to live with absolute freedom to do as you like. Yes, you can get away with murder.

Or get away with denying about 200,000 people citizenship, which is what the supreme court decided to do. And that’s no mean thing—well, mean in the sense of small—because without citizenship, kids can’t go to school, people can’t work. So what’s the alternative? Go to Haiti, where they don’t speak the language, and where there’s no work?

I once argued that I believed in cities but not nations. Why? Well, consider this comment from an article in The Guardian:

“I am Anglo-American and my wife is Haitian. We have a daughter of five whose biological father was Haitian (died in earthquake in 2010), but whose registered father is a Dominican of Haitian descent. She has a Dominican passport, though whether she will now lose it, I don't know. I don't think the DR government is efficient enough to investigate everyone of Haitian descent to revoke their citizenship, carry out DNA testing, etc.

Our younger daughter was born in the DR and thus became a stateless person at birth. I was able to get a UK birth certificate for her and perhaps one day she will come to the UK. Thus I have a family in which four different nationalities are represented: Myself British and US, my wife Haitian, my daughter British, and my stepdaughter Dominican.”

Well, I hope that daughter manages to stay in the Dominican Republic, because if she gets sent to Haiti? According to one source, she has a 10% chance of becoming a slave.

The Caribbean is a strange region—an archipelago of islands very close and yet very far from each other. We typically know little of each other and care less. But here’s what P J Patterson, former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:

No one can be hoodwinked as to the reason and the purpose for this kind of discriminatory legislation. Within the region we have an obligation to speak and we cannot allow such inequities to go without our strongest condemnations.”

Sadly, our “strongest condemnations” may not be enough….

When Sugar Bought Art

There’s something melancholic about it—the news that the Two Trees Management Company wants to develop the shuttered American Sugar Refining Company. And why, you ask? Well, for one thing, the name American Sugar Refining Company may mean nothing to you, but its finished product? Domino Sugar.

Well, if you’re like me, you can still see the bag in your mother’s kitchen—or kitchens, since I could locate the sugar immediately in my childhood home, were the sugar still there. Sugar tends to figure pretty strongly in the culinary life of kids.

Then there’s the fact that the sugar came from a site across the East River from Manhattan. In fact, the factory had operated from the site since the mid-nineteenth century at least—the ships had come in laden with a sugar cane slurry from the Caribbean or the Philippines or wherever, and the sugar was refined right there in Brooklyn.

Nor was it, as the Times article describes it, “refined” in anything but name. Temperatures could get up to 140 degrees. Here’s what the Times had to say about the process:

In the earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones.

Then it was “whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,'” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”

“Not infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”  

Henry Osborne Havemeyer inherited some sugar interests, and then went on to found his company in 1868, when he was just 22. The current building, built after a fire destroyed the original building, was built in 1882, and is the only factory site named as a New York City Landmark. Havemeyer went on to become an extremely rich man, know as the Sugar King, and the company was one of the original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What happened? Well, the company stumbled on, and sources for sugar shifted from cane to beet sugar to the nefarious high fructose corn syrup. And why the shift? In part, according to Wikipedia, because of tinkering with the marketplace:

A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price[29] and the price of corn is kept low through government subsidies paid to growers.[30][31] High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.

Hey wait—the cost of sugar in the US is twice as much as in the rest of the world? So the government is protecting the corn farmers by paying them to grow this stuff—or at least the raw material for it—and also imposing tariffs and quotas on sugar, which may be far healthier?

In fact, a recent study at the University of Guelph in Canada has this to say:

Canadian researchers have found that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats 'similar to those produced by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine'.

Professor Francesco Leri of the University of Guelph, who carried out the research, said it suggested there was an addictive quality to foods that contain high levels of high-fructose corn syrup which could explain, at least partly, the current global obesity epidemic.

Oh, and the same article says this:

Research from Princeton University in 2010 found that rats fed on a sugary diet became nervous and anxious when the sugar was removed. They were thrown into a state of anxiety similar to the kind of stress that people feel during withdrawal from drugs like nicotine and even morphine.

So at some point the Havemeyer family sold out, and in 2003, the refining part of the operation closed down, after a bitter, twenty-month strike, one of the longest in New York history. And then, in 2004, the whole operation closed down.

I tell you it’s bittersweet; here’s why. First, we used to produce stuff, rather than import it. Second, it’s an outrage that we are subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to something called metabolic syndrome: high blood sugar, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.

Lastly, anyone who has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will know the Havemeyer name; both Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife collected art like crazy, and their three children carried on as well. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Although each of the children collected in their own right, Electra Havemeyer Webb collected on the grand scale of her parents and went on to found a museum to showcase her deep and diverse collections. Louisine identified some 142 works as a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and empowered her children to give the Met's curators free rein. By the time they had finished an inventory of the Havemeyer's three-story Fifth Avenue manse 1,967 works would be assimilated into the Met's holdings.

And here’s the Met itself on the collection:

A legendary assemblage, the Havemeyer collection is famous for its unparalleled groupings of works by Corot, Courbet, and Manet, its great Monets and Cézannes, and its many paintings, pastels, drawings, and bronzes by Degas. But the real depth and the encyclopedic range of this legacy are not well known, because part of it is dispersed throughout the Metropolitan and part dispersed throughout the world. Few know, for example, that the collection encompassed Rembrandts and El Grecos as well as works by other old masters. The Havemeyers were not only the premier American patrons of late nineteenth-century French painting—Mrs. Havemeyer was perhaps the first American to buy a Monet—but also pathbreaking collectors in such uncharted fields as Spanish painting, for which they created a demand and established a taste among their contemporaries.

Will our current crop of magnates do as well?

Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609)  El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)