Take an extra dose….

I wrote some time ago about Jack, and his quirky habit of writing to the presidents of companies whose products he had bought. They—or their secretaries—always responded, and a whimsical, perhaps gently satirical correspondence evolved. Seems like a different time—quieter, gentler. And I remembered Westinghouse, and its funny little trademark. Where’d Westinghouse go off to, I mused.

Well, today I wondered about Parker Pen. What’s up with those guys?

Oh, but first—you have taken your anti-depressants today, haven’t you?

Parker Pen was founded in Paul Ryan’s hometown—Janesville, Wisconsin. I knew that, of course, because Jack would on occasion refer to “old man Parker.” He started the whole company in 1888. Knew everybody in town, everybody knew him.

And Janesville, thought Jack, was a nice little town. Good people. Nice place to live. Not like Rockford—a hardscrabble city.

And old man Parker did OK for himself. Got a patent in 1894 for something called the “Lucky Curve” pen, and then, in 1931, developed the “quink.” That would be “quick drying ink”—and it eliminated the need for blotting.

Turned out to be a hit. The Parker pen was number one or two in the world for forty years between 1920 and the sixties. They got around—the company had manufacturing units in Canada, France, Germany, Denmark, Mexico and the UK.

Oh, and the armistice that ended World War II?

Signed with a Parker pen!

Things got a little screwy in the seventies, when the company bought, and then sold, Manpower, the temp agency. Also, strangely, an automotive sensor company. (Don’t know what that’s about).

But not as screwy as in 1987, when there was a management buyout, and the company moved to Newhaven, England. Then, in 1991, Gillette bought the company. They manufacture, you may recall, PaperMate.

And then, in the summer of 2009, the company announced two things. Production in Newhaven was moving to France. 180 jobs lost. 

And operations ceased in Janesville, Wisconsin. Here’s what the company said:

This decision is a response to structural issues accelerated by market trends and is in no way a reflection on the highly valued work performed by our Janesville employees over the years.

Gee—why does this sound familiar?

“Not one job will be lost,” they announced at Wal-Mart, in a special meeting called to boost morale and quell rumors.

Well, it was true. The day I was terminated, I was told that the position I held had been eliminated. But there were other positions available! I was given a list!

Cake decorator in the Ponce store?

Night shift receiving in Carolina?

I stopped reading after that.

You know, old man Parker probably made a bundle. He also had to walk down the streets of Janesville, Wisconsin. People looked him in the eye, greeted him. His kids went to the same school as the kids of the guys working in the factory.

Was he a good guy, a nice guy?

Jack never said.

They both operated under one principle:

You don’t do that to good people.

Sorry, that’s the “highly valued workers of our Janesville operation over the years.”

And Thus Spoke Susan

Readers of this blog—which, I’m happy to report, include folk from Spain (17), Russia (11), UK (6), Trinidad and Tobago (3) and one each from France and Ireland—know that I’m busying myself by listening to Haydn’s The Creation. Well, why not? For seven years I sat in a room and threw pencils at the students. Don’t I get a break?

And speaking of breaks, why do I have to write every day? Can’t somebody else shoulder the burden? And since this blog is now international, shouldn’t it start getting serious?

Well, it was puzzling me, yesterday, as I sat in the Internet café absorbing the air conditioning. What to say about my paisano, my countryman, my almost neighbor?

Paul Ryan. Resident—or so I thought—of Janesville, Wisconsin. The very city my father, Jack, was born in! And a man who has cheese flowing in his veins (as he disturbingly said yesterday). 

But what to say?

Well, those years of being a teacher paid off. A student asks a question you can’t answer? Send him to the library to do some research! Get somebody else to do the work.

Susan!

I dashed off an email, asking if she might say a few words about the man, and then began to feel a little bad. Was it an imposition? Was it fair?

Would Jack approve?

Would Susan feel a bit used? She’s a busy lady, after all.

Answer came back in 45 minutes!

And here she is:

The New York Times (part of the liberal media) this morning (August 13) published a story on Paul Ryan (“Conservative Star’s Small Town Roots”). It leads with “the death of his father when Mr. Ryan was only 16 punctured his life of math tests and bike riding . . . ‘Paul went to work at McDonald’s and began to pull his own weight . . . ‘ says his brother. ‘It is remarkable that he chose a path of individual responsibility and maturity rather than letting grief take a different course.’”

The article continues: “His self-reliance followed him to summer camp, where as a counselor he canoed and hiked, and into young adulthood, where he took up deer hunting, a fact noted in his engagement notice in 2000 in The Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel. “Ryan is an avid hunter and fisherman,” the paper reported, “who does his own skinning and butchering and makes his own Polish sausage and bratwurst.”

What you won’t read in this lengthy hagiography is that Ryan’s mother inherited a bundle from her family’s fortune*, his father was a successful lawyer, the camp Ryan went to was Camp Manito-wish (a pricey camp in Northern Wisconsin -- the price today runs from $2000 for two weeks of basic camp to $12,300 for three weeks on an expedition), the Ryans lived on Courthouse Hill in Janesville (and still do --at least for voting purposes, although he’s rarely left Washington since graduating from college). But the NYT article makes him sound like a typical small town kid, bike and paper route, and appealing to Palin fans’ love of hunting and butchering.

As a student (Miami University in Ohio), Ryan was described as “a freshman with a Ph.D. attitude” but Ryan only completed a bachelor’s degree in -- well, they don’t tell us what his major was. He was in too big a hurry to get to Washington. In summers he was an intern there for GOP politicians. Upon graduation did he get a job and some real-world work experience? He did work briefly in the family construction business founded by his great-grandfather. (In the mail room, no doubt.) But not for long. He ran for Congress and scurried back to Washington.

Besides being entitled, Ryan is a hard-core Catholic -- he is adamantly opposed to not only abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), but also birth control. He hates gays and loves guns. Not only for hunting, evidently, as he supports concealed carry of handguns and the kind of weapons used to kill people in the Colorado theater and the Wisconsin Sikh temple.

The article winds up with “Ask one of the 87 Republican freshmen who came rolling into Washington in 2010 — many of them with no political experience — whom they most idolize in Congress, and chances are Paul Ryan’s name will come up.”

Interesting, as the Tea Party loathes Washington insiders, and Ryan is as insider as it gets.

So the GOP has given us two men from privileged backgrounds and money, neither of whom appears to have done a day of sweaty work in his life, both of whom are deeply embedded in authoritarian, patriarchal, anti-woman religions. 

 *See Esquire Magazine: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-family-wealth-11644997

Wow! Guess I got the answer there!

Well, I did ask. And I pondered it all today, on the daily trot. The Creation, I had decided, was what was called for, after such a gloomy report from home. And I had decided that The Creation would be done in German, since the English version, apparently, resembles a bad computer-translation. Here’s WikiPedia on the subject:

Van Swieten was evidently not a fully fluent speaker of English, and the metrically-matched English version of the libretto has given rise to criticism and various attempts at improvement. Indeed, the English version is sufficiently awkward that the work is sometimes performed in German even in English-speaking countries. One passage describing the freshly minted Adam’s forehead ended up, “The large and arched front sublime/of wisdom deep declares the seat”. The discussion below quotes the German text as representing van Swieten's best efforts, with fairly literal renderings of the German into English; for the full versions of both texts see the links at the end of this article.

Right—German it is! So all I understand are three words: Und Godd sprach. And God spoke. Until I came to this, the slyest and most respectful homage to Handel possible.