POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning and Other Adventures in American Enterprise. David Owen. Villard Books, $16.95. When I was a business reporter in the Midwest, I once...
...Edmund White, Adam MarsJones...
...Then I had some bourbon and Doug had another beer and Tim had some more scotch . . .Then we watched some sort of helicopter show...
...Playing the role of a stranger in a strange land, Owen examines these enterprises and also provides first-person accounts of a Beatles memorabilia tour, a conference for Amway-like pyramid selling networks, and a meeting in St...
...Although the malignant acronym appears only once in this entire collection, it is the menacing reality behind every page...
...But the business did not make her a drug addict...
...Trade and professional magazines make some of the most esoteric reading in the world," Owen writes...
...Owen makes no pretense to being a business reporter...
...I was reminded of my musings when reading David Owen's collection of humorous essays, which originally appeared in Harper's and The Atlantic...
...If you answer "yes" to some or all of these questions, I heartily recommend Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto's The Third Century...
...Crown, $19.95...
...Am I arguing that anyone's happy the anchor woman died in that freakish car wreck...
...Maybe it's time for Owen to take on larger subjects, to work with a bigger canvas...
...politics has become the continuation of war by other means...
...The era of clumsy giants is past...
...A lot of this book's humor sounds like "Late Night With David Letterman"—which is not surprising, since many of Letterman's gag writers are, like Owen, former staffers of The Harvard Lampoon...
...Like Letterman, Owen dishes out plenty of mock-serious commentary: "Clarence Birdseye's estimable achievements notwithstanding, the early history of frozen food was not an unbroken chain of triumphs . . . centuries flew by and human civilization advanced in ways far too numerous to describe in a single sentence, 'frozen foods technology improved ' " All that is missing is a musical riff from Paul Shaffer and the "Late Night" band...
...Tired of Allan Bloom's efforts to get you to read the classics and take a morning pledge of allegiance to Europe...
...unemployment ran 50 percent above that of Europe...
...As Europe moves to confront 1992, when all common market countries will drop their trade barriers with one another, I have been deeply discouraged to watch its merger frenzy, which is a tragically flawed attempt to achieve the "critical mass" needed to compete throughout the soon-to-beopened, 320 million-person market...
...The rich in Latin America speak English and play golf and drink Bloody Marys...
...Yes, Gwenda Blair is picking on a. decidedly minor cultural figure who can't respond...
...But the truth is that Blair could not have written this if Savitch were still alive...
...Kotkin has previously authored numerous analyses of midsize and smaller American manufacturing firms...
...When I was a business reporter in the Midwest, I once came across a food company whose earnings were being depressed by its struggling new soft drink...
...Entrepreneurial behavior means the creativity, flexibility, and daring that are the essence of the American character at its best...
...In Owen's hands, their foibles become highly amusing for the upscale readers of magazines like Harper's and The Atlantic...
...But Kotkin, Inc.'s West Coast editor, and Kishimoto, a management consultant, have written an original and sweeping treatise on American economic and social alternatives...
...I agree with the thrust of their argument...
...In brief, the authors argue that Japan is not fully embracing the next stage of required development...
...Flipping through them is like eavesdropping on private conversations" The better essays also contain more about the subject matter and less about Owen, who is not as interesting as the businesses he writes about...
...His original research demonstrates that manufacturing is on the mend in this country, thanks mainly to vast new outpourings by the smaller firms—high-tech and low...
...White has alternated between celebrating gay culture and examining the problems of gay identity...
...To Kotkin and Kishimoto it means as well the humanity that is also a part of that character but is too often ignored by conservatives like George Gilder...
...We'll never know for sure...
...Savitch liked it so cold that set technicians wore their overcoats...
...Compaq, which took on IBM at the zenith of that firm's dominance of the PC market and then proceeded to race to $1 billion in sales faster than had any company in U.S...
...Blair's larger point—that the TV industry (and NBC in particular) set Savitch up for a fall—doesn't quite work...
...And despite massive 'targeting' by governmental agencies, the worldwide share of high technology-based industries of three top European economies—Great Britain, France, and West Germany—dropped nearly 13 percent between 1980 and 1984" The problem, they conclude, is an approach that scorns entrepreneurship...
...Aid is good, says conventional liberal wisdom...
...As White and Mars-Jones shape it, the greatest challenge posed by the AIDS crisis is the spiritual one: What sustains the soul that is bereft of family, enduring slow death...
...There is an echo in his work of another clever midwestern boy who made it big among the New YorkWashington intelligentsia—Michael Kinsley, Owen's former editor at Harper's, who is thanked in the book's acknowledgements...
...Tina Rosenberg The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis...
...The gay male AIDS sufferer speaks through these seven stories with the voice of the outcast, full of pain and yearning but also with courage and generosity...
...The authors begin with a statistical review...
...Rather than competing on innovation and creativity, Japanese firms usually prefer to buy the latest technology from abroad, an approach that worked when Japan's currency and labor rates were relatively cheap in comparison with those of Europe or the Unii:ed States...
...All in all, Rich Products Corporation struck me as a fun place to work,' ' Owen says of a frozen-foods company, but his claim is unconvincing...
...the role of midsize and smaller firms in revitalizing even our oldest industries (e.g., steel, other metals, and forest products...
...The problem is that while such trickle-down policies might work in a country where the wealthy feel a sense of social obligation and a responsibility to build and invest, this is not a description of Central America...
...Yes, they're hyping the hell out: of it with movie deals and splashy spreads...
...Louis attended by people who plan meetings...
...According to the authors, Europe is stuck with its stodgy system of special subsidies and slack unions while Japan is awash in xenophobia and short on risk takers...
...They are the forum where American business talks to itself...
...military aid to Central America makes headlines, there is little controversy about U.S...
...Confused by the macroeconomists' indecision about whether Reaganomics was something new (that either worked or didn't), or just Keynesian deficit spending in disguise...
...Owen's humor here is gentler, warmer, and more entertaining—possibly because Owen himself was once an intern with Milling & Banking News...
...Nowhere," they say, "has the dampening effect on planning for entrepreneurial growth been more evident than in the high-technology field ." Overall, "Europe's government-guided shift to 'high value-added production' has contributed to turning the continent even more into a technological backwater...
...Joel Kotkin, Yoriko Kishimoto...
...He falls in love, pledges fidelity, and mounts a siege against fears that he is a fraud...
...Combine freedom from libel suits and the public's lurid appetites and you have a hardy literary tradition: cannibalizing the dead...
...While the laboratory researches a cure for the body's illness, art seeks a salve for the mind's...
...Chamber members attacked it as "the road to socialism" The United States has always been taken in by anyone with the wit to say, as Anastasio Somoza did in 1979, "My ideals are basically the ideals the average North American has, and Nicaragua has similar interests to the United States" That he said it in English polished at West Point was even better...
...We feel close to them and think they are like us, even when they are the people who ensure that Latin America is nothing like the United States...
...Kotkin and Kishimoto's answer is surprising: "America's open system" —Tom Peters...
...misery of others, particularly (and aptly in this case) when bad things happen to the bitch in the office...
...Gwenda Blair...
...Not only does Europe have few gazelles, it seems haughtily uninterested in birthing any...
...I always wondered if someone's career was stunted, or if a cloud of ignominy settled over some hapless young product manager, who was forever stigmatized as the guy who went down with Yabba Dabba Dew...
...But they save their heavy artillery for an attack on Europe's failure to innovate: "The 1980s ushered in a period of decline on the continent, with Europe's economic growth rates falling well below those of both Asia and the United States...
...Grove Press, $18.95...
...For example, Owen goes on at length about his travels in a van that monitors satellite TV signals: "Well, Doug and I had a beer and Tim some scotch...
...In "Palace Days," youth is slipping away from the president of a gay travel agency for whom the limitless carnality of the seventies had once been a way of making a living...
...But now Japanese costs approach or even exceed those of its advanced competitors ." Where is Japan (and the other Asian nations, for that matter) locking for new role models...
...Simon and Schuster, $1&95...
...A volunteer AIDS "buddy," sent to cook and hug and, now, to clean up, is left to choose how to dispose of it...
...If you go in a quarter jerk, you may come out a full jerk...
...The company's beverage showed a picture of Fred Flintstone and was called Yabba Dabba Dew...
...Take Low Intensity Conflict, the Reagan administration's policy to deal with left-wing guerrillas, which combines military action with massive development programs to win the proverbial hearts and minds...
...the haircuts of Jessica Savitch's boyfriends that we could do without...
...Now his friends are dying and he wants to atone for a past that feels more and more like an accusation...
...But so far, this has not been in the cards...
...in Central America it seems awfully high intensity...
...Tom Barry, Deb Preusch...
...pleasure that is derived from the...
...Instead of writing about oddly named products and eccentric Beatles devotees, it would be great to read an account from Owen at ringside describing a titanic corporate takeover battle, a frenzy at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, or the greed of a plutocratic investment banker...
...Here Owen writes with compassion, even admiration...
...and the central role played by the newer concerns in the struggle for global high-tech prominence...
...Less than 3 percent of the citizens of El Salvador pay taxes...
...nor do they have the reknown of Iacocca...
...aid not help the poor, it strengthens the very sectors of society that block development...
...Kotkin and Kishimoto do not carry the academic credentials of Kennedy or Bloom...
...When he exercises a little restraint and detachment, Owen can be both funny and much more interesting...
...Occasionally his personal interventions into the stories are funny, but more frequently they are annoying distractions...
...Working in television can indeed bring out the worst in people...
...Nor, for that matter, could Nicholas von Hoffman have written about Roy Cohn or Gerald Clarke about Truman Capote...
...The small and mid-size firms now represent the most dynamic force in the United States economy," the authors assert in a well-argued section of the book appropriately titled "The End of the Era of Galbraith" Kotkin and Kishimoto lambast Europe for targeting industries for financial assistance and for its singular failure to generate extensive entrepreneurship, especially in the increasingly significant high-tech sector...
...Development is just one more part of the military campaign...
...Savitch also insisted on all the perks granted network "talent"—chartered planes, personal staff, and getting her way on details like the temperature on the set...
...The most unsettling is that Savitch's second husband hung himself with the leash of her beloved dog Chewy...
...more recently, ours has been about 65 percent less...
...Where AID used to at least talk about helping peasants get land to grow their own food, it now encourages the opposite: large, privately owned plantations for efficiency in growing strawberries or snow peas for export...
...Basin, which is now the manufacturing center of the U.S...
...They show us how the epidemic is also damaging the healthy and how the daily horror of AIDS is scarring the witnesses...
...economic aid...
...David Graulich The Soft War: The Uses and Abuses of U.S...
...Their thesis is startlingly optimistic: the American economy cannot only catch up with its competitors, it can overtake them...
...A society facing a major industrial transition should be rife with the messy capitalist carnage caused by large-scale takeovers, mergers, and spin-outs...
...It is in this heroic struggle, not just against despair but for loving and being loved, that White finds the greatest dignity of his characters, and it is where The Darker Proof achieves its most moving conclusions...
...Joe Arena Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News...
...Had enough of Paul Kennedy's theories of inexorable historic decline...
...Owen's stories make you laugh, but the aftertaste is often one of condescension...
...Working stiffs are devoting their futile little lives to futile little jobs, like running a Fresh 'n Frosty machine...
...The message from these essays is that Owen is exceedingly grateful to have escaped his hometown of Kansas City, to have graduated from Harvard, and to be a credentialed member of the East Coast witty writers guild...
...Not so fast, say Barry and Preusch: not only does U.S...
...Kotkin and Kishimoto's meticulous, firsthand analysis of today's Japan is peppered with words and phrases such as "tragic," "profound weakness," and "desperate vice ." Could this really be invincible Japan...
...Jonathan Alter The Third Century: America's Renaissance in the Asian Era...
...One of the greatest obstacles to development in Latin America is that the rich, the people who can help their countries grow, take their money to Miami at the first sign that growth might help the poor...
...Plume, $7.95...
...The book's title essay concerns a morning cartoon show...
...The life of the poor will not change while the United States—the only actor to whom the rich might listen— continues to reward such blackmail...
...A new American age could be dawning if we create firms that combine the best entreprenuerial behavior (and not Fortune 500 behavior) with Asian approaches to cooperation in the workplace...
...The authors present the casualties like doctors pleading for an end to war...
...here's hoping Owen finds other large, deserving targets for his stylish writing and potent sarcasm...
...The Third Century carefully documents the surge of smaller-scale manufacturing in the L.A...
...For instance, from 1959 to 1976, U.S...
...But instead the structure of Japan's economy, characterized by giant conglomerates, has remained largely intact" The old strategy has run afoul of the changing times...
...Hence the Agency for International Development (AID) builds roads eight kilometers from the Nicaraguan border in contra-controlled northern Costa Rica, rebuilds bridges almost as fast as the Salvadoran guerrillas can blow them up, and sets up model villages in the Guatemalan highlands where that country's guerrillas find their support...
...They write: "The much admired 'adjustment' policies and corporate stability of Japan are in reality signs of a profound structural weakness...
...The two best essays in the book contain his descriptions of entrepreneurs-Chester Cariso, who invented Xerography, and Charles Lazarus, who founded Toys-R-Us...
...In Costa Rica and Honduras, economic aid buys government toleration of the contras...
...But this book is still worth reading, mostly for the devilish...
...Gay culture prizes youthfulness...
...As the nation enters the 1990s," we are informed, "Japanese industry finds itself caught in a desperate vice, too expensive to compete with the lowcost NICs [newly industrialized countries, like Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, et al.] in mass manufacturing while lacking the dynamic new growth companies . . . capable of producing the necessary new innovations and technological breakthroughs" The authors and many of their Japanese informants say that Japan needs to find a new way: seedling firms...
...There's also an excellent chapter on trade magazines like Hardware Age and Turkey World...
...We are entering the "Era of the Gazelle," as a colleague puts it—from steel to computers, biotechnology, semiconductors, and superconductivity...
...It is harder to bury the dead when life seems mocked by so much injustice...
...I went to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in San Salvador where the government presented a plan to win support in war zones by providing electricity and hospitals...
...while trying to explain the economics of the pyramid schemes he says, "At this point it begins to get a little confusing and, in truth, I don't understand how it works ." He has a great eye for absurd detail and a deft touch with funny names and quotes...
...He has already written a book attacking standardized educational testing...
...Fed up with Robert Reich's and George Gilder's attacks on big business— albeit from diametrically opposite perspectives...
...The Japanese, the authors note, call Europe the "tribes of the setting sun ." The book's unmistakable message is that we should too...
...One of the most painful aspects of AIDS is the atonement it often begs...
...They argue that Central America would be better off without it...
...business history, is a typical Kotkin and Kishimoto favorite...
...While U.S...
...AIDS destroys youth in a particularly malicious way, leaving the living with booby traps of bitterness and rage...
...Yes, there are details about...
...Economic Aid in Central America...
...In Mars-Jones's "An Executor," the passing of someone young leaves an afterimage—a wardrobe of sexually implicit leather—that is both a rebuke of the owner's past and an emblem of his beautifully human contradictions...
...The book succeeds more as simply another good yarn about how sad and lonely life can be for the rich and famous, thereby making it more bearable for the rest of us...
...This book makes so much of the policy debate on AIDS sound like shameful squabbling...
...Bored by Lee Iacocca's latest round of Japan-bashing...
...She could have had the same news training as a male correspondent, not been sexploited by local TV news, not been promoted by the network before she was ready—and ended up exactly the same...
...Owen writes about curious backwaters of American business, such as a company in Buffalo, New York that makes high-tech frozen foods ("The Soul of a New Dessert") or a museum of failed products that exhibits Gimme Cucumber hair conditioner, Mister Meatloaf, and AfroKola, The Soul Drink (alas, no mention of Yabba Dabba Dew...
...It may be low intensity from the Pentagon's point of view...
...The mercantilist success of Japan has been based largely on a last-follower' strategy," Kotkin and Kishimoto contend...
...It has the feel of a theme concocted to lend gravity to what is essentially luscious gossip...
Vol. 20 • July 1988 • No. 6
