Coffee Shop Read
February 26, 2008
After work, off the subway and up the stairs, down the street, at the local coffee shop that Deborah calls the student union, I passed a young guy slouched in an "S" shape -- rounded shoulders and bended knees -- all dressed in black and smoking a cigarette. He swiveled from side to side on the balls of his feet, dancing the "Twist" in slow motion, holding the cigarette awkwardly, flipping it between his fingers, and staring at it as if deciding which way looked coolest. Just then, a corn-fed guy, tall with a square, dimpled chin and wearing a twisted fleece headband that tuned his blonde hair into a hair volcano, rode up on his bicycle -- a fixed gear bike with a flip-flop hub. He dismounted while still rolling, walked his bike to the coffee shop stairs, and leaned it against the railing. He said something to the smoker that the smoker didn't catch. "Huh?" said the smoker, rolling the cigarette nervously between his fingers. The blonde guy carefully adjusted the lean of the bike against the stairs so that it wouldn't fall. It was as if he were posing it. Its small halogen headlight illuminated multi-layered splatters and drips of graffiti on the coffee shop wall. Once satisfied with the bike's placement, the rider repeated himself: "You mind keeping an eye on my stallion while I run upstairs to grab a java?"
The smoker rubbed the downy hairs flowering on his chin and nodded, No problem.
In a predictable marketing move, Penguin scrambled to publish a new edition of Upton Sinclair's Oil! featuring a photograph of Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview, the lead character in Paul Thomas Anderson's movie, There Will Be Blood , loosely based on Sinclair's novel. I bought a copy, so I guess it worked, although it probably had less to do with the photograph and more to do with the $10 sale price. In any case, I bought the book a couple weeks ago and will probably finish it tonight.
I'm struck by how little has changed since the book was first published in 1926. For instance, a few years ago, in reaction to France's outspoken criticism of America's current war, the American government had the silly idea to replace the word "French" in various menu items. "French Fries" were to be called "Freedom Fries," and "French Toast" would become "Freedom Toast," and so on. A silly idea that never really caught on. I didn't realize until reading Oil! that the same thing was tried against the Germans during World War I. "Sauerkraut" became "Liberty Cabbage," and "Hamburgers" were called "Liberty Steaks."
It's not just the little details that sound familiar, though. In Oil!, Sinclair refers to World War I as "an oil war," which again sounds oddly familiar.
And the current standoff between Venezuela's socialist government and the world's largest oil company, Exxon, sounds like something straight out of the book.
I first heard about Venezuela versus Exxon on the radio. A talk show host was asking a reporter some follow-up questions about the situation, and the reporter said something mind-boggling. (To me, anyway, someone admittedly naive in the world of big business.) He said that although Venezuela's threat to "cut off" Exxon and take away its Venezuelan oil concessions might sound like a potentially crippling ultimatum, "you have to understand that Exxon's annual profits of 10 billion dollars are five times the GNP of Venezuela."
In fact, it's more than all but 38 of the world's economies.
As someone pointed out in my comments, the USA Today article that I linked to states that, "The oil industry has tried to soften criticism of its current boom by pointing out the cyclical nature of its business. Government data backs that up. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that although the 20 big oil companies it tracks earned a combined $22.55 billion last quarter, those same 20 companies, together, earned only $1.59 billion in the fourth quarter of 2001."
I don't really see how pointing out that oil industry profits have skyrocketed by a factor of ten since the start of the Bush administration "softens the criticism," but as I said, I don't understand much about big business.
