I pay fairly close attention to civic affairs in New Albany, and perhaps this owes to broad personal interests and a degree of community-mindedness, although as in most communities, a taste for low comedy doesn’t hurt.
Among the political tugs-of-wars witnessed on a daily basis throughout the year, those various mechanisms by which municipal governments of all ideological identities – both country and western – pretend to develop their economies have come to be especially entertaining to me.
Whether it’s my town or yours, they tend to work the same. A business purporting to be the second coming of Henry Ford, Ben & Jerry and Versace, all rolled into one unstoppable juggernaut, argues that it is poised to bring great joy to the inhabitants, not to mention a job or three, if only (ahem) the business climate might be adjusted just a tad. Consequently, it is gifted with a heady cocktail of incentives, including tax abatements, loans, grants, discount sewer coupons, lottery tickets and oral sex on demand.
It’s a little known fact that these businesses actually must make some semblance of a theoretical case to merit their share of governmental largesse, as in a certain number of positions to be created, machines purchased, and dual-purpose flanges shipped. And so they do — theoretically. City councils salivate with Pavlovian aplomb, stenographers (still quaintly referred to in some quarters as “journalists”) cut and paste from breathless press releases, mayors pad their resumes, and the incentive pies are duly sliced.
Ostensibly, that’s where the public/private partnership begins, but in the real world of attention spans the length of a fruit fly’s adolescence, it’s where the relationship usually ends. The barn door has been left ajar. Calendar pages turn, concrete is poured, accountants diligently wield their fiduciary looms … and then, every once in a while, something exceedingly strange happens to shatter the monotony.
At a meeting, a timid hand will be raised, and an inconvenient question proffered:
“Excuse me, resident economic development tsar, but all these claims of jobs and sales and market dominance justifying the incentive package you awarded this company … well, did they actually create those jobs? Did they really ship that many flanges, or was it only a projection? Was anything they were saying actually true?
Crickets chirp, and pins are heard dropping. The patriotism of the questioner is ridiculed.
Somewhere, a stenographer dozes.
—
Thinking back to the time when I was asked to explain how I’d managed to survive in business for more than two decades with a lowly Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and history, rather than appropriately seductive parchments in business, I recall spitting, harrumphing loudly, and barking back at my interlocutor: Because serendipity rules our planet, and thinking outside boxes trumps rote recitation … and I doubt any of it is taught amid the quasi-theological curriculum at “business” schools.
I went into business because I love beer, and an opportunity was presented for me to love beer (for inconsequential pay) while sharing my love of beer with others. It was nothing more at the time, it is nothing less now, and it remains absolutely nothing to build a business school curriculum around.
I’m very, very proud of that fact.
An autobiography is still possible; if so, it will be entitled “Beer, Bile & Bolsheviks: A Fermentable Life,” although if the tome ever comes to fruition, there’ll be precious little inside it about spreadsheets. Numbers are what you hire other people to understand, while carefully applying the greasepaint, rehearsing the shuck and jive, and performing “My Way” for the 3,657th time.
America’s weird indigenous cult of business achievement titillation repels me. My personal heroes have always been artists, baristas, musicians, chefs, writers, actors, dancers, sportsmen, brewers and other practitioners moving within the less easily quantifiable realm of creativity.
How and why they’re paid is far less interesting to me than how they create, and what they produce in an aesthetic sense. How do their physical skills capture the output of their brains?
If the business of America truly is business, then it causes me to openly shudder, and if so, my personal “business” encompasses looking elsewhere – anywhere will do – for a higher order of inspiration, as opposed to worshipping techniques to amass and maintain wealth. While it’s true that Bruce Springsteen is handsomely rewarded for creating music, give me the Boss over Donald Trump, any day. I can whistle along with music, but only wince at avarice.
As a matter of convenience, I accept the term “businessman,” but prefer to think of myself as a beertrepreneur.
The very rood word “entrepreneur” is suitably French. There’s an element of daring and risk contained within it, contrasting with “businessman”, which sounds far too numerically vocational and conservative for my blood. Entrepreneurs sweat to create, and can relate to Lear’s raging. Businessmen wear dull threads and merely manage the inspiration of others.
The prime reason for this violent, lifelong allergic reaction to the trappings of chambers of commerce and like-minded business idolatry societies is their vacuously obnoxious glorification of business for the sake of business, in the form of endless rounds of symbolic pom-pom waving, mysterious networking rites, totemic seminars and expense account driven re-education junkets, the sum total of which is the perpetuation of eager, grasping and typically greedy cadres of business “elites”, each dressed exactly alike, refusing to travel in steerage, wholly ignorant of the universe beyond their sales strategies, but perfectly capable of exchanging indecipherable business lingo and colloquialisms that surely would have inspired Sinclair Lewis to update the saga of “Babbitt” for an even more annoying age.
—
That’s why I generally refuse to wear a suit. I waited a long time to find a line of honest work that would permit me to dress like a normal human being. My uniform is different from yours, just as a football player’s is different from mine. Having found such a pursuit, permitted to be both comfortable and unhesitant to dribble hot wing sauce down my chin, I’m hesitant to surrender the autonomy.
I’m a craft beer kind of guy, and there’s a saying in the craft beer business: We brew beer, we drink beer, and we sell what’s left. At the end of the day, if there still are a few farthings lying around, then we made a profit, and while I readily acknowledge the imperative of making a few bucks, it’s worth repeating that love of beer is what drew me to my business.
History, geography, lore and storytelling about beer are my interests. Being truthful in relaying them is my goal. Anything less is Wal-Mart … or AB InBev.
It was inevitable that craft beer would grow up, but if growing up means embracing the tactical fictions and emulating the attitudes of our mass-market brethren, you can count me out. I’d rather raise that timid hand, rouse the steno from the clutches of the sandman — and repair to the nearest bar.
