Out of My Mind (37 page)

There were several desserts, principal among them a dense, lemon pound cake called a “62nd Street Cake,” named after the great baker Maida Heatter, who first produced it in her shop on 62nd Street in New York. My sister, Nancy, has always made our 62nd Street Cake.

There were a lot of arguments. One ensued Christmas Eve when I insisted on grinding coffee beans instead of using the coffee in cans people had brought. Ellen's British husband, Les, was not interested in the argument. He quietly made himself “a nice cup of tea.”

For Christmas dinner, we cooked a huge roast beef. I made Yorkshire pudding, which cooked in the fat after the beef had been in the pan for several hours. (Yorkshire pudding is the same recipe as popovers.) Emily peeled, then braised several pounds of pearl onions until they were brown. For dessert, we had my specialty, peppermint stick ice cream. I crush and melt in milk and cream one pound of peppermint candy canes, which produces a lovely pink mixture. I put that in my sixquart ice cream freezer for about forty minutes and serve it in chilled dishes with slightly bitter homemade chocolate sauce.

Breakfast was hard because not everyone showed up at the same time. I made waffles one morning in a waffle iron we've had for fifty years. The kids always used to fill the holes with maple syrup.

There are still leftovers in the refrigerator, which Les refers to with a British term as “lurkies”—food that lurks in the 'fridge.

We should help the poor because we're rich and they aren't but then after we've helped them, it seems to me we have the right to ask a lot of people of the world, who resent the success of our civilization, why they haven't done more to help themselves.

Men and women from the poorest, most underdeveloped countries make their way to the United States and prosper in our society. Professional and business people from economically retarded countries come here and frequently distinguish themselves. Individuals are not responsible for national failures. So who is?

Almost all of Europe, South America, Russia, China and Japan have working economies, stable governments, police forces, a judicial system, roads and public services like water and electricity. At the same time, dozens of countries in other parts of the world do not have the amenities of civilization. The United Nations has estimated that half the people on earth live in poverty.

If it weren't for television, which occasionally shows it to us, we wouldn't understand poverty at all. Poverty to us means a handful of dysfunctional homeless people in our town. Few are in danger of starving or freezing to death. Real poverty means whole countries whose people not only don't have jobs they don't have an organized society, houses, food, clean water, places to go to the bathroom. Forget bedrooms, two-car garages, swimming pools, refrigerators, central heating and air conditioning. They don't have houses.

Poverty anywhere in the world is a concern to us because we're nice guys and we're pained to see hungry and unhappy humans anywhere. We are also concerned because it's only human of the world's poor to resent our prosperity, and we don't like being hated.

You look for reasons why so many countries are what we euphemistically call “backward.” Many of the most depressed countries are under the heel of some oppressive potentate who keeps himself rich and the
people poor. However, it isn't easy to determine whether a dictator in a poor country is a cause or a result of the nation's problems.

It's a mystery why the people living in the warmest parts of the earth are often the worst off. You'd think that not having to expend money, energy or resources staying warm would be an advantage but that doesn't seem to be so. Africa is the warmest continent but it has many of the least successful societies.

Warm weather should give the people of Africa and the Arab countries a head start on prosperity. Even in the United States, for no discernible reason, the South was for years the poorest and most backward part of the country. In the past 50 years, the South has developed into one of the most prosperous parts of our country. Maybe it's coincidence, but the change seems to have been concomitant with the development of air conditioning. Maybe we ought to raise the money to air condition the earth. It would be cheaper than war.

While I'm not comfortable using the term “Arab” because the definition of the word is vague, many Arab countries are not among the world's most successful. If it were not for oil, they'd probably be destitute because they haven't created any kind of economy for themselves independent of that natural resource.

There was a time in history when the Arab world led all others in the knowledge of geometry, astronomy, chemistry and medicine. Europeans in the Middle Ages learned a lot of what they knew of science from the Arabs. The world has not learned much from Arab countries in recent centuries.

I don't know how it can be done, but it's important that we find out why the people of some parts of the world prosper while others live lives desperately devoid of pleasure or the basic necessities of the good life. You wonder why the poor cling to life as tenaciously as do those of us who have a life so clearly worth clinging to.

The oddball poet and professional character, Gertrude Stein, said, “Money is always there but the pockets change. It is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.” I always remember but probably ought to forget this statement because there's a lot more than that to say about money.

On a dozen occasions, I've addressed the graduating class at a high school or college. All the kids want is their diplomas so they don't listen to what you have to say, but you're supposed to say something important anyway. One of the things I usually say, trying to sound important, is that I hope, when they finish school, they'll set out to make something other than money.

Enron, the seventh-largest company in the United States, just went bankrupt, basically because it didn't make anything but money. Enron stock fell from $90 to 26 cents per share. Top executives who knew what was about to happen sold their stock while the price was still high. The other 20,000 employees lost most of their savings because they were not allowed to sell their stock and abandon the sinking ship.

Despite the hundreds of news stories about Enron, if you asked most Americans today what the company made, they still wouldn't know. I can tell you. Enron made money for a small handful of dishonest executives. There was no product. The company was a collection of natural gas salesmen and a small collection of sleight-of-hand money managers who stole millions from the public, quite possibly without breaking the law.

Except for the superlatives involved in its demise—Biggest Bankruptcy in U.S. History—the story of Enron Corp. isn't very interesting. The details of what happened are vague, buried under layers of obfuscated deals, reports, accounting and mergers that no one but someone in the money business could understand.

What is interesting is the absolutely disgraceful connection, made with huge sums of money, between Enron and elected officials. You
begin with President George W. Bush and next drop all the way down to Vice President Dick Cheney. The details of the connection are unknown but certainly exist. In 2000, Enron gave half a million dollars to Bush's presidential campaign.

While three quarters of all the money the company gave went to Republicans, one quarter went to Democrats—and it wasn't peanuts. Because they got less, does this make Democrats more honest? The chairman at the first Senate hearing was Senator Joseph Lieberman, who must be relatively honest because he hasn't taken any money from Enron since the $2,000 he got in 1994.

After George W. Bush and Cheney, the next highest public official to have benefited from Enron's generosity is former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who received about $58,000 from the company for his failed Senate re-election bid in Missouri.

If we all weren't so dumb and happy and relatively prosperous, we'd start a revolution in this country.

Enron did as much to make capitalism look bad in the year 2002 as Joseph Stalin's Soviet dictatorship did in the 1930s to destroy any favorable opinion idealists in the world had about communism.

Socialism still has the communist stigma attached to it because of the disastrous Soviet experiment. It will be interesting to see if Enron and other corporate giants do any lasting damage to our confidence in free enterprise. It is unlikely Enron was the only major corporation that hid its devious financial dealings behind the capitalist curtain.

There are too many ways for a big company to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. However, any company that doesn't engage in what most of us would call cheating—even if it isn't strictly speaking illegal—is at a competitive disadvantage. By employing such practices, corporate giants
shift the tax burden to individuals who don't have offshore (off tax) bank accounts.

There must be thousands of corporations shaving their taxes with bookkeeping tricks of which the average citizen knows nothing. They give free enterprise a bad name and make ordinary Americans yearn for more, not less, government oversight of Big Business.

It's really strange that while the religions so many people profess to believe in are generous in their philosophies about the distribution of money, the majority of religious Americans approve of the dog-eat-dog economic premises of capitalism. We are all becoming more aware that too many people are not getting a fair share.

A relatively small number of people are smarter, more energetic and more capable than others, and they end up getting 90 percent of all the good stuff. Without discouraging this able minority, we have to find a way to keep the Enrons of our capitalist society from stealing so much that they turn all of us off the free enterprise system.

There are still lots of great corporations making big profits from producing good products, but in recent years, too many American companies have been making nothing but money. Their only product is on paper; they don't make anything but stock market statistics. They shuffle their books, buy out small competitors, borrow and loan money so fast that bookkeepers can't keep up.

It seems inevitable that more people will begin thinking we have to devise a better system than either communism or capitalism for distributing the good things on earth. The great power of big business is out of control.

We Americans wave the flag and admire our own greatness but fortunately we have a mitigating tendency to be critical of ourselves. We
agree with the articles we read about ourselves saying we're decadent. We know we have too many luxuries and spend most of our effort trying to acquire more of them.

We nod, agree with the criticism and keep working to get all we can. There's no question that we have an unlimited appetite for the limited supply of good things on earth. Neither should there be any argument that, with a lot of exceptions, the most capable people get most of the good things. These are the people we call “the rich.” We call anyone rich who makes a lot more than we do. We have a natural aversion to the rich. We hate them but we want to be one of them.

The rich are the bad guys. If anybody needs a PR agent, it's rich, successful Americans. We take great satisfaction in complaining about the kind of people we're working so hard to be like.

You never hear anyone say anything nice about the wealthy. When politicians talk about taxes, they want to raise them on the rich. Politicians never say they want to reduce taxes on the rich. Something like 6 percent of Americans pay more than 50 percent of all personal income taxes the government takes in. The top 1 percent of people pay 36 percent of all income tax. You'd think it would dampen their interest in being rich but it only whets their appetite for more.

The number of luxuries we enjoy can seem ridiculous in a world where so many people are starving to death. Expensive clothing, jewelry, pampered pets, five-bedroom homes for two people—do we need all this in a world where so many people don't have enough to eat? Should we feel guilty because 20 million American families own three cars while there are whole countries still using donkey carts?

There are good things to be said about the rich that no one ever says. So help me for saying so, but I don't think the poor work as hard as the rich. Is this blasphemous? Will I go to hell for thinking so? Is this just an arrogant American attitude? You don't see a lot of lazy rich people.

I cannot stop thinking that people seeking to acquire the luxuries of life work harder to get them than people working for the bare necessities. Many people work an eight-hour day, knock off and go home.
They sleep and watch television until they get up and go to work tomorrow again the next day. They have enough to buy what they need to eat and pay for a roof over their head.

The appetite successful people have for more has created more, and that's not all bad. There's no limit to what they want and try to get. They are never satisfied because as soon as they get one thing, they want something else. They want to go out on the lake, so they buy a rowboat. First thing we know they want one with an outboard motor. What they really want is a yacht.

Desire is a great motivating force. The fact that our desires are so often for things that provide physical pleasure doesn't diminish their importance as the principle driving force behind American business. We probably ought to have some motivating force superior to greed but we can't seem to find one. Schools haven't taught one. Religion hasn't come up with anything. The businessman who goes to church on Sunday is no less acquisitive at work Monday morning than one who never goes.