A Note & Good-bye to the Solo Soupcan Inferno

A Further Note:

We hear of the "ugly American" abroad. Perhaps we send them abroad because they are ugly. Perhaps they go abroad because they feel they can push aliens around more; perhaps they don't realize other people are more tolerant than they are. Some people tend to act worse when they are not "watched", and take advantage of being out of the country. So it may be that way with other people, in other countries also. We see the worst face of the people the worst people from there; hopefully not.

Many people here claim to dislike Mexicans and other Hispanic peoples. It may be that they have had a bad experience with someone from the "deep south" (it usually only takes one bad experience to turn someone against an entire nation). They are not necessarily seeing these people in their best light; like everyone, they grow best on their native soil.

I once lived in Mexico for 3½ months. That is long enough to learn a little about the people who live there, and I like them. Not everyone was equally pleasant; no one was hostile, and most were at least friendly. I ate in people's homes, travelled through the jungles with them, sleeping sometimes with thirty-five or forty people in a room, attended church with them (the services there often last for hours, with three sermons, and lots and lots of singing); I ate in their restaurants, at the roadside shops that are equivalent to our fast food places; not so fast, but, O, so much better!

It was at once of these places I heard a classic exchange that I will never forget. The woman who served us was a bright-faced, cheerful young woman, obviously possessed of wit and great intelligence. At the sink a much older woman was grumbling as she washed dishes: "¿Quien inventó el trabaho?" ("Who invented work?") The other answered without missing a beat: "¿Quien inventó la comida?" ("Who invented eating?") Perhaps our Keynesian, spend-yourself-rich, economists should bear in mind this astute observation about the relation between these two activities.

I like Hispanic people. I think it is our fault if we offer incentives that draw them here, and then don't like it when they come. The whole problem of legal and illegal aliens is bad for the harmony of the hemisphere. True, Proverbs 25.17 says: Withdraw your foot from they neighbor's house . . . But why should we give him incentive to come and stay?

Added 7Aug 2010.

Good-bye to the Solo Soupcan Inferno: A Final Note

Friday was my last evening at SSI. I may never eat soup again. I spent four days of my wonderful life here, and it was not wasted. I met some genuine people, and had begun to share the stories of my co-workers; not all of them like each other, but, even with the little I know of them, they are a fairly interesting lot, already. I think of the words of the story-teller Gobind, in an older India, as reported by Rudyard Kipling: "All of earth is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away the poor from his door. The poor are the best tale-tellers; for they must lay their ear to the ground every night." Perhaps we here in America do not hear the best tales, for we do not know true poverty here.

Our production line was down for two hours yesterday (that is Thursday), and I wrote a draft of ten pages while I was waiting; an essay (which I will perfect and send out soon) entitled (at least for now) "Who is in Control? Who Owns What?" The point of this memoranda being that it is not the ownership of resources and land that is the real issue nowadays, the real issue for our society is who controls the sources of wealth, whether though taxation, government regulation, or corporate "ownership" (that is, stockholders and their paid managers). All very interesting.

Friday I spent the entire ten hours I was there packing oddly shaped bottles into large boxes in a herring-bone pattern: eight rows of eleven, three layers deep, and a flat layer of 21 bottles on top, for a total of 285 — not as easy as you think. At first it appeared nearly impossible to keep the stack from falling to pieces, but I continued to observe what others were doing (the man behind me who spoke Maya was doing pretty well — I haven't heard Maya spoken in years!). Then I began to experiment a little. After the second box I was getting better, and a little faster. (I'm tall; it hurts my back to bend over like that for long; but who's complaining?) Before long I was better at it than most of the women; someone even asked me to show them how it was done (she soon gave up and went back to sorting bottles.)

Now, what can I do with this wonderful new skill I learnt in the sweatshop? I suggest that if I am ever captured, and sold as a slave to the captain of a fishing trawler, I will be excellent at packing fish — salted cod, mackrel, herring; perhaps also anchovies and sardines; that could be handy. It might save me a lot of beatings until I learn. Sometime I shall certainly be glad that I was paid to learn this skill, even at a modest $7.50 an hour; and I shall not forget how to do it either; ten hours was long enough to reinforce the lesson.

My time was not wasted. I heard quite a lot of stories over the work week; most of them the last two days. I gave advice to an expectant mother (at her request), on homeschooling and the best environment for children. I discussed dietary laws with a black Hebrew (as Ambrose Bierce would say, a Shebrew, "an altogether superior creation" to the Hebrew). One older woman asked me if I had curly hair! I had to pull up the hair net I was wearing to show her. (We all had to wear them, and part of the time plastic gloves — this, I suppose, was to make sure that, when the cans got filled, there was no hare in the rabbit stew. I can assure you that there may be no finger prints on the containers, but there are certainly sweat drops in a lot of them.) I mentioned to one of the leads that I had also worked at the plant across town where the containers were to be sent; he asked me about how they handled our carefully packed products, and just shook his head when I told him they just dumped them down a hopper.

The man who spoke Maya asked me where I was from, and he didn't believe me when I said, "Here!" Believe me, I may have been the only person in that plant who was from here. (Some of the family as early as 1780.) Since I couldn't make him belive I was from here, I asked him where he thought I was from; he declined to say. That was intelligent; after all, there are an awful lot of places people can be from other than here. All of the possiblities had not been exhausted, even at SSI. I thought of something my friend Roberto, from Argentina, had once told me, and suggested "¿España?" Spain? — He thought that might be a possibility. Roberto had once suggested that I looked "like a Noble Spanish Prince"; but that was years ago, when my mustaches were longer and blacker. Later the suggestion "Italiano" came up, and my Maya friend liked that idea even better — any place but Boone County! What can I say?

I think it is possible that most of the newcomers to Northern Kentucky have never met any of the natives, thanks to our local government policy of tax breaks for cheap-labour factories. It is fine to use tax money to draw interesting outsiders here, if that is really what you want; but it is a little expensive . . .

One story in particular drew my attention, as I am in a similar position myself. A young man told me he had a good job as a housekeeper at our wonderful local hospital, St. Luke; at least that was the name when he started. Then it had a gender change, and the gentle St. Elizabeth fired him on a trumped up charge, his supervisor wished to cut him out of his part of the profit sharing. She even refused to give him his accrued "comp time", and denied him his unemployment. (I know how that is done for pure spite!) For all this, he was still a cheerful and willing worker, and I judge his story to be true. Keep your ear to the ground, and you will hear lots of these stories. If the world were full of good people, heads would roll when good people were treated this way!

It was hot. I heard disputes. I heard lots of cussing, and other vile language. I saw flirtations, rivalry, and manuevering for a certain spot on the line, etc. I heard humorous remarks, and saw eyes rolled and heads shaken. I overheard one woman say: "I am not having a bad day." (What could anyone have remarked to make her say that!) I nearly had to bite my tongue off to keep from saying to the person nearest me — "She's right! For her this is a good day!" (Ain't I a good person for not telling anyone what I really thought?)

Best of all, we were informed (in English and Spanish) at the beginning of the shift on Friday, that we had produced a lot of containers this week, and had made "a lot of money for the company." That is a good thing, though not, I think, all that counts. It probably made the little man in the green shirt happy.

Written 8 Aug 2010. 2.55 a.m.