A HELLUVA WAY TO RUN A WORLD

“This is a helluva way to run a railroad.” –from a 1906 speech by Leonor F. Loree, railroad executive, to a committee of creditors who asked him to take charge of the Kansas City Southern Railroad, which was described as two streaks of rust; its engines lost steam; the men were disheartened; and the stations were shacks.

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Since first said in 1906, the above quote has famously become a catchphrase for the high-and-mighty mentality of any commercial, governmental, military, or other top-down entity operating in a fashion oblivious to SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up). I (and maybe you too) have had occasion to view SNAFU close-up and personal, having served as a draftee in the military and as a 30-year “soldier” in the corporate milieu before retiring to savor domestic life anew (and rue honey-do). But at least I’m the boss of my own blog (though still at the mercy of invisible forces somewhere out there in the blogosphere).

Anyway, being of a philosophical bent, this got me to thinking about helluva railroads and SNAFU, writ LARGE –as in, dude: how did this whole woebegone world come to be so SNAFUed? Do we have a clue? Perhaps a few of us do.

It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of out species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.” But is this flattering story rational? From sex and music to religion and war, irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history. –from a reference to IRRATIONALITY (subtitled A HISTORY OF THE DARK SIDE OF REASON), a book by Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of history and the philosophy of science.

Well, if that isn’t food for thought, I don’t know what is. The problem, of course, is what it has always been: those most in need of reflecting on and applying such appraisal to oneself wouldn’t be caught dead doing so. It’s Greek to them. The Trumps of the world live in their own little world where big money talks….and it speaks power.

Oh well. So much for funny money.

 

DAYS OF OUR WIVES

The third Sunday in September, which by all (ac)counts is today, is WIFE APPRECIATION DAY. First and foremost, it’s a day for all us husbands to give thanks….thanks that we don’t live in olden times of guys like King Solomon, who had hundreds of wives for whose favors he had to pay dearly to prove his appreciation, not only this day, but on wedding anniversaries, birthdays, and romantic holidays like the ancient equivalents of Sweetest Day, Valentine’s Day, and, of course, Groundhog Day. My wallet (which I affectionately call Wally) is having a nervous breakdown just thinking about that empty feeling….and praying he doesn’t wake up tomorrow morning reliving this day.

Fortunately, we live in more civilized times where monogamy is the rule and just one wife is the ruler. Wally can rest assured that I see all such days as over-commercialized evil plots furthered by vile capitalists interested only in separating Wally and me from our hard-earned jack* (surnamed Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant and Franklin) — and my would-be better half had better see it that way, because I control the Jack in my Wally, and I will not be moved by shape-up-or-ship-out demands….

*jack, n. Money. Orig. a sporting term, common 1920s. –Dictionary of American Slang

Whoa! Let us not be too hasty — you know I was only kidding, don’t you, Honey Buns? Lay that pistol down, babe….

As a matter of fact, Snooky Wooky Ookums, I do have something for you on WIFE APPRECIATION DAY: something to bring back memories of those halcyon days when lovers can’t get enough of each other (as The Donald continues to feel about The Donald):

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Sorry, Wally. Sorry, Jack.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.

 

 

 

DOLLARS TO DOUGH-NUTS

Like a full moon, the mere thought of lots of money seems to make some people crazy. No doubt you’ve noticed with lotteries, for example, that the higher the jackpot, the more people play the lottery. I mean (leaving aside the astronomical odds against winning), what could you do with $500+ million that you couldn’t do with $250+ million — except maybe buy a sports team, put your money where your political ideology is (think Koch Brothers),  or build a Trump Tower-like monument to your ego?

So I found it refreshing to read recently about a guy who not only didn’t let dough go to his head, but stood income inequality on its head: Dan Price, a successful Seattle business owner who decided to help the people who helped him grow his business, by lowering his almost $1 million annual salary to $70,000 and increasing the salary of his 120 employees to that same level. According to Bloomberg Business data, America’s CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000% (to a ratio of 300+ to 1) since 1950. Price believed he could make the ratio 1-to-1 without raising prices or decreasing services to customers, and Price was right. Employee morale grew even stronger and business thrived. As a result of this heresy, he was named 2014 Entrepreneur of the year by Entrepreneur Magazine. I suspect it’s not a magazine run by conservatives.

As entrepreneur of this blog, I will now attempt to improve your morale by turning the remainder of this post over to the musings of others on the matter of money and affiliated subjects:

Where I was brought up, we never talked about money because there was never enough to furnish a topic of conversation. –Mark Twain

Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to shop. –Bo Derek

The chief ingredient that makes expensive merchandise so expensive is profit. –Evan Esar

I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, if I die by four o’clock. –Henny Youngman

The only thing wealth does for some people is to make them worry about losing it. —Antoine Rivarol

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men. –Sydney J. Harris

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated. —H.L.  Mencken

The definition of a living wage depends upon whether you are getting it or giving it. –Evan Esar

I spent a lot of money on booze, broads and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. –George Best

The leaders of the French Revolution excited the poor against the rich; this made the rich poor, but it never made the poor rich. –Fisher Ames

There are two classes of people: the have-nots and the have-yachts. –Evan Esar

Greed is not a money issue. It’s a heart issue. –Andy Stanley

 

 

MONEY: THE LOOT OF ALL EVIL

I rob banks because that’s where the money is. –Willie Sutton (though he denied saying it in his autobiography WHERE THE MONEY WAS)

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It occured to me, as I was thinking about this, my 253rd post, that few (if any) of my previous 252 posts were about money….in fact, I can recall mentioning money in only one post, in the opening line of a 24-line poem titled A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TOO CHASTE:

Money may talk,
Though I can’t hear it —
It takes a walk
When I come near it.

So a mistermusing on the subject seems long overdue….not unlike many of the bills I owe. Just kidding. I don’t not owe nothing to no one — no one that I owe of, anyway.

Anyway, what I want to say, as is my wont to say when I can think of nothing more to say, is that I hope you enjoy the following quotes. I trust you will find them on the money:

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it. –Bob Hope

The lack of money is the root of all evil. –Mark Twain

Money was fun only until you ran out of things to buy. –Gloria Swanson, actress (silent films, Sunset Boulevard, other movies)

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did. –James Baldwin

Money and women are the most sought after and the least understood of any two things we have. –Will Rogers

Where I was brought up, we never talked about money because there was never enough to furnish a topic of conversation. –Mark Twain

What this country needs is not more money, but more people who have some of it. –Evan Esar

I am having an out of money experience. –Anonymous

We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules. –Buzzie Bavasi

If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. –Anonymous

Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money. –Robin Williams

 

SERIOUS MONEY

I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.  –Joe Louis

Perhaps the most uncynical of the quotations in my last post was the one above, attributed to the late Joe Louis, heavyweight boxing champion 1937-49. I can picture Louis saying those words, first of all because as a boy during the 1940s, I remember him well, and second, because he was born dirt-poor in rural Alabama, a grandson of former slaves, had a childhood speech impediment, and moved to Detroit as a 12 year old after a Ku Klux Klan experience. As an adult, he suffered from financial mismanagement (to put it charitably) by his boxing handlers, which led to years of heavy indebtedness and hounding by the IRS for back taxes. Given this background, one can understand where that quote was coming from.

What may be less easy to understand is the money-motive that economist John Maynard Keynes called “The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life” — which is elaborated upon by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in “Money Mad,” a chapter in his book GOING SANE. The money for-its-own-sake obsession has long struck me as shallow and superficial, but Phillips goes further (as befits a psychoanlyst), calling it an aberration “in which the bad is made to seem good; in which what was once considered to be most distasteful about people — the callous ruthlessness of their greed, say — begins to be described as morally impressive.”

He continues, ” What one is loving when one loves money begs all the questions: power, prestige, invulnerability, independence, glamour — all these ideals involve asking in turn what each of these represent a desire for. Rather than being a love akin to other loves, a love for money may be a new kind of love [appetite] altogether — a love that destroys the capacity for all the other kinds of love that preceded it.”

“We should not be tempted into believing that there is something natural and normal about the insatiability of our appetites. Human beings can even get pleasure from ruining their own and other people’s appetites. Since money always promises something other than itself — it is only, as we say, worth what it can buy — it seems to protect us from the fear of there being nothing we want. A world in which there is a scarcity of need, a world in which wanting is a futile passion, is more terrifying than a world in which there is a scarcity of resources.”

Since I don’t want this little seminar to come off sounding like a sermon, I will stop here and simply recommend GOING SANE as a thought-stimulating and readably profound book on sanity and madness, including money madness.

Nonetheless, money makes….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

ON (THE) MONEY, TO COIN A PHRASE

I rob banks because that’s where the money is.  –Willie Sutton

The history of money is a fascinating subject, if you can afford the time to check into it. According to my Ye Olde Encyclopedia, early people had no system of money, probably because they had to spend all their waking hours hunting, eating, painting caves and avoiding being stepped on by dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. These pre-historic people, known as the Earlyites, used either the barter system of trading, or the no-holds-bartered system of robbing and killing, to get what they wanted. Some things never change.

Speaking of change, the first coins were made in the 600’s B.C. in Lydia, the Tatooed Lady — I mean in Lydia, the extinct country, in what is now western Turkey. In America, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was the first to make coins; an English court allowed them to do so in 1652 before permission was withdrawn shortly thereafter. But Massachusetts continued to issue coins for 30 more years by dating all coins 1652 regardless of when made. Apparently England couldn’t make heads or tails out of why Massachusetts never ran short of 1652 coins, so they made the best of it by increasing the Colony’s taxes. Needless to say, this did not suit the Tea Party, so they threw the British into Boston Harbor, declared independence and took control of Congress before you can say New England, which on a clear day you can see from Alaska if the sun doesn’t get in your eyes.

But enough about what I have to say, money-wise. Let us see what others have had to say about money:

The only problems money can solve are money problems.  –Kin Hubbard

Lack of money is the root of all evil.  –Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw (you pays your money and you takes your choice)

If a fool and his money are soon parted, why are there so many rich fools?  –Evan Esar

Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.  –Robin Williams

If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.  –Maurice Baring

There is an easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune: go there with a large one.  –Jack Yelton

We live by the Golden Rule. Those who have the gold make the rules.  –Buzzie Bavasi

Someone stole all my credit cards, but I won’t be reporting it. The thief spends less than my wife did.  –Henny Youngman

Women prefer men who have something tender about them — especially the legal kind.  –Kay Ingram

I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.  –Joe Louis

I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.  –George Carlin

That money talks/I’ll not deny/I heard it once/It said, “Goodbye.”  –Richard Armour