Making a Sensible Bourbon Purchase

Trying to make a sensible purchase of bourbon, I did what I always do: I checked out the brands on Wikipedia. It should not shock anyone that most of the bourbon brands are owned by large companies. What did I end up buying? Well, you'll have to be patient. Here's a breakdown of all those big companies:

Diageo (rev. approx $20.12 billion) - You know this company, even if you don't recognize the name. They own Guinness, Bushmills, and Johnnie Walker (and many many others). Bourbon brands: Bulleit

Beam, Inc (rev unknown) - This company is the result of a reorganization by parent company Fortune Brands that finally separated all of the spirits from brands like Moen, Fypon, and Masterlock, which, uh, aren't spirits. The reorganization happened in October, which is why the revenue numbers aren't there. The combined group reported revenue of $6.7 billion in 2010, to give you a sense of the scale. Bourbon brands: Booker's, Baker's, Basil Hayden's, Knob Creek, Maker's Mark (purchased from a now defunct Anglo-French conglomerate called Allied-Domecq), Old Crow, Old Grand-Dad, and, wait for it, Jim Beam

Brown-Forman (rev $3.23 billion) - This a pretty big company, but it's also local, so that makes up for it a bit. The company and the families are also huge supporters of the arts and many other causes in Louisville and farther afield, so they have that going for them as well. Bourbon brands: Jack Daniel's, Woodford Reserve, Early Times, Old Forester

Heaven Hill (private): A private company means it doesn't have to report much to anyone other than its owners, but it is but it is the 7th largest alcohol supplier in the country and the 2nd largest bourbon supplier, so it's save to say, it's not small. Bourbon brands: Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, Heaven Hill, Old Fitzgerald

Kentucky Bourbon Distiller's (private): These guys are also private and they don't exactly distill their own stuff, despite the name (they are refurbing a distillery though, so they will soon. Bourbon brands: Rowan's Creek, Willet, Johnny Drum, Noah's Mill, Pure Kentucky XO, Kentucky Vintage.

I ended up with Rowan's Creek, for a couple of reasons. I was looking for something that was truly small batch (Maker's can call themselves small batch, but when every liquor store has a wall of Maker's, it's hard to take that seriously) and relatively obscure. I have high hopes for this bourbon, but the more I think about it, the more likely I am to buy Brown-Forman in the future.






Now, you may be wondering, why the hell would anyone spend this much time investigating something like bourbon?! I'll tell you, I am fascinated by global capitalism. I'm a huge fan of globalisation and what it has allowed us to achieve as consumers, including the ability to not choose something from a major global conglomerate. But I think people are also frequently ignorant of just how pervasive such sprawling global powerhouses are and the pivotal role they play in making trips to the grocery store more interesting and a lot easier on the wallet. You can rail against the 1% or just plain feel queasy about what your money does when it leaves the aforementioned wallet, but the most important duty of consumers is to make informed purchasing decisions, especially if you have a political point of view. There is no more powerful act as a political animal than where you decide to put your money, every day. You can hate Food, Inc all you want, but if you don't understand how Food, Inc works (including some of the ways they are using organic to capitalize on the fact that you hate them), you will never effectively fight what you hate. For me, that means really understanding where my bourbon comes from, along with a lot of other things, of course. But it's a habit that's got to start somewhere.

What the Totalitarianism are you Talking about?

“[A] tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

C.S. Lewis

With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, I believe that he is quite wrong about this since the Communist regimes of the late 20^th century demonstrated that they could provide all the power of these omnipotent moral busybodies without any of their sincerity. I would argue that all totalitarian regimes exercise power in ways that are extremely similar to his hypothetical omnipotent moral busybodies and they only approval they seek is the continued exercise of power. Still, if we look at the strategies these oppressive rulers engage in to subjugate their citizens, I think Lewis has made an intriguing point There is no more effective totalitarian state than the one where the dictates of the security apparatus has been internalized by its citizens. In short, all totalitarian regimes find a way to turn the consciences of their citizens against themselves, while studiously avoiding having a conscience of their own.

You might be wondering, why the hell is Erin thinking about totalitarian regimes and how they oppress their people? I blame it on this little shelf above me. A guy can only spend so much time surfing the Internet. There on the shelf was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of those books that you are supposed to read (can we call it one those Books? Or at least, one of those Novels?) and truthfully, one that I had been meaning to read for a long time. And when I finished it, I saw that Lewis quote and it produced an internal dialogue that was long and complicated enough to warrant the time and effort needed to turn it into a blog post (and a good long one at that).

Since Kundera's novel was the proximate cause for this line of thought, let's start with the Communist police state (for the record, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Tom Stoppard have all written eloquently on this subject and I'm drawing from all of them). The Communist police state in action strongly resembles the more busybodies that Lewis talked about. The primary tactic applied to the population as whole is to create a culture of the surveilled, which is to say that the security apparatus is dedicated to creating institutions that give the average person the impression that they are constantly being watched. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discusses how Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon works in society. In the Panopticon (first envisioned as an ideal form of prison design by Bentham), the prisoners can all be seen by a security area at the center, but the center is opaque, so they never know when they are being observed. Since most people act in their own best interest, simple game theory calculations show that the most reasonable choice is to act as though they were always being watched (a perversion of Pascal's wager perhaps). Foucault feared the way that Western society had manifested this idea, but the Communist states took this idea and made it quite literal in applying it to their societies as a whole.

In the smaller states, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia every high profile dissident and everyone suspected of possibly being a dissident was convinced that they were being bugged and surveilled and informed on (history has shown that they were mostly right). Just in case anyone thought they could escape from the surveillance net, the regimes made examples of certain people, often they weren't particularly vocal or particularly dissident, in order to silence everyone else. This obviously has an (intentional) effect on the “normal” citizen as well (two birds, one large expensive stone). Kundera's Tereza talks about this feeling in very personal terms, comparing her experiences in Prague to her girlhood under the baleful eye of a once beautiful mother who survived the loss of her beauty by becoming old and grotesque openly and without shame and by stripping her daughter of her own right to feel shame. Tereza internalized this as an intense need for privacy and was thus constantly terrorized living in the post Prague Spring era. Kundera says that, for Tereza at least, a concentration camp is the total absence of privacy, in which case the ultimate goal of the security apparatus is to turn all of society into a concentration camp.

The overall effect of the Communist methods of subjugation (perfected over time beginning as early as 1917 under Lenin as Solzhenitsyn points out, lest anyone be tempted to blame this solely on Stalin's influence) is the same as that of a state of moral busybodies. We will get to the Nazis in a moment, but a key distinction between the Communists and the Nazis is only how they turned their citizen's consciences against themselves; both regimes made it a point of policy to do so. The Nazis had a generally a stable sense of what it was correct to believe, while Communists (both good and bad) never had any idea of what it was acceptable to believe. Maybe the Nazis would have gone this way as well, but Communism was riven from its very beginnings by disagreements and factions and a steady series of purges. Being a good Communist in 1933 was not the same as being a good Communist in 1938. This may confuse those who believe that Communists were acting rationally as a result of their ideology. Marx certainly didn't write anything new between 1933 and 1938. But Solzhenitsyn points out that these great waves of purges had a particularly chilling effect on society because the terror of the police state is most effective when no one has any idea why they were arrested. Solzhenitsyn points out that the KGB was adept at simply inventing reasons for you to be arrested and then convincing you during the interrogation that you are in fact guilty, turning their own consciences against them, usually by assuring them that if they go along with what the authorities want, they or their families will be spared. The key to understanding the success of all totalitarian regimes is understanding the extent to which the state makes a bargain with their citizens to trade their silence for their safety. The Communist regime was brutally effective at creating an atmosphere of fear and stifling a sense of community because they had no compunction about lying to, arresting, and generally bullying everyone, from the lowest citizen to the highest officials. The offered trade for safety was always false, but most people are helplessly innocent in the face of state power and they just refuse to believe that a government official would lie to them so blatantly. Note that the Communist regime is not acting in accordance with any particular ideology when it acts this way. Communism has its own set of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies and so a Communist regime will resort to Communist discourse to justify its actions, but underneath the rhetoric, we find an iron fist and an iron will to power. Words did not mean anything and they could be played with at will in the pursuit of silencing dissent, destroying a citizenry's sense of privacy (and therefore community), and generally creating an atmosphere of fear that made it possible to rule effectively.

As I mentioned earlier, the Nazis chose a slightly different tack. Instead of creating a blanket of fear through uncertainty, they enabled their regime and its goals by highlighting certainty in the calculations of personal safety. Much has been made of the silence of ordinary citizens concerning the Holocaust in Germany, both by Germans themselves in their intense introspective debates about the meaning of the Holocaust (or Shoah or Auschwitz or whatever you want to call it) and by outside observers (hence, Hitler's Willing Executioners). “But I didn't know!” is the classic cry of those who seek to justify themselves and this cry has been completely worked over in the course of the intense and long lasting debate about German history, showing how little power that phrase had in clearing anyone of guilt. It also doesn't give the Nazis enough credit for their adept manipulation of the conscience's of the average person. The Nazis co-opted their citizenry from the outset by offering a clear cut boundary. Pastor Niemoeller's classic quote lays it out: “First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew . . .” This was the bargain between the Nazis and the majority of its citizens: if you were not a Jew, then you have nothing to fear from us. If you don't help Jews or have anything to do with them, we will leave you alone and for this you will be grateful. You didn't have to agree with the Nazis beating Jews up, and you didn't have to do it yourself. All you had to do was not to look at it. From that point on, the Nazis own you, even if you don't take part in the beatings or the killings or the expropriation of property (though they did take your children and tried to make sure they took part – that's a much more effective compromise of someone's conscience after all). The Nazis have you on their side because the act of turning your back was immoral and people knew it. After all, no government that goes around beating people for one reason has any compunction about changing that reason to include you. But if the price for not getting beaten at the moment was not condemning the beating of this other guy, that is a price that most people will pay. But it creates a complicated calculus of guilt, which is undoubtedly intentional. If you didn't beat a Jew, and you didn't kill one, and you never saw the smoke from a crematorium, what reason did you have to be considered guilty was the public cry of many, but deep down, they knew that reason and the regime knew it too. The regime had purchased what it wanted from them, had used your own conscience against them by preying on this natural insecurity. Niemoeller finishes the thought of course (then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything). In other words, the Nazis also created an atmosphere of fear, removed any sense of privacy and community, and used the conscience of their citizens against themselves.

The Nazis co-opted their citizens by guaranteeing their safety and so silencing their consciences. The Communists arrested random samples of people periodically so that everyone assumed they were being spied on and could be arrested for doing something that was counterrevolutionary and since no one knew exactly what that meant, everyone's conscience became a weapon in the hands of state security. Both methods of totalitarian rule divided the people, kept them apart from themselves and never gave them the safety. You could argue that the difference in methodologies was a result in the difference in their ideologies and the end goals of the regimes, but that ignores a great big variable, which is that Communist countries perfected their tactics over the course of seventy years and the Nazi regime only lasted twelve, which is to say, the Nazis might have ended up in the same place, given enough time in power. My point is that despite these slight differences, the same effects were aimed for and achieved. Obviously the surface rhetorical and discursive strategies diverged, but in the end both regimes, and I think all totalitarian regimes, do the same things to their citizens and for the same reason, regardless of the surface rhetoric and ideological appearances. The purpose of a totalitarian regime is to exercise power in a particular way and it is always necessary to oppress their citizens to do so. Their justifications for this oppression differ (within limits) but all act to instill fear in their citizens, remove a sense of privacy at a societal level, and offer a fake bargain between safety and acquiescence which compromises the conscience of their citizens. In other words, Lewis was wrong to think that a completely oppressive society required moral busybodies who were convinced they were acting for their citizen's own good. He was right however, in sensing that a state that used the people's own good as it's justification could reach the highest heights of oppressive tyranny. There were good Communists who were true believers, and they had their uses, but true believers lack the flexibility of those who wish to remain in power, which is why the Communists had to purge them on regular basis, silencing those who would remind them of Marx's purpose, as if that were the point! Communist China is doing a wonderful job of living out this contradiction: Communism is as much a method of maintaining power as it is an ideology. Since the 1980s China has not let Marx or Mao get in the way of accruing economic strength.

C.S. Lewis is hardly alone in making the mistake of believing in the sincerity of the rhetoric of oppressive regimes rather than recognizing them as a means to an end, but nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. All totalitarian regimes fundamentally act to the same ends: terrorizing and silencing their populace by finding a way to use the conscience of the populace against itself. While true believers exist and though they help to provide the ideological and rhetorical cloak that enables totalitarian regimes, totalitarianism is fundamentally devoid of ideology. The surface rhetoric changes from regime to regime because the realities of power differ from place to place, but you will always find with such regimes that ideology is a cloak applied to the iron fist of power. Some (clueless) leaders may even believe some of the stuff they are spouting, though I have my doubts about that. Is Qaddafi really so insane that he sincerely believes the claptrap he spouts? I don't think so. Whatever the cloak, the underlying imperative of a totalitarian regime is to get and retain a certain type of power. Ideology provides a discursive reservoir for the rhetoric intended for public consumption. It's also a handy weapon against any of their citizens who make the mistake of actually believing any of it.

What are they thinking?!

The New York Times reports that Wisconsin Republicans have found a way to get their way even without a quorum. I have no doubt this will continue to be controversial.

Even if I agreed with the Wisconsin Republicans (which I don't) this seems counterproductive. You vacate any moral high ground in an argument about who better represents the will of the people by acting as if those Senators (and the people they represent) weren't there. Not a smart move.

Nate Silver (the excellent election forecaster and ) has pointed out that this move will probably not help Republicans in a state he calls a swing state in more than one way. Did anyone attempt to use this as leverage? Does anyone think strategically out there?

Political Philosophy in a Paragraph or Less.

Once again the Economist sums it all up for me fairly well. This post from their Free Exchange blogger is a great look at free trade and its costs and benefits. My favorite line: "Society doesn't owe anyone a factory job, and it doesn't owe factory workers a cheque if an improvement in trade rules leaves them jobless. It owes them precisely what it owes all of its members: a level of protection against the unpredictable sufficient to afford them the opportunity to get back on their feet."

I don't think I can put it any better than that. If I could, I would run to the nearest political campaign and get a real job.

Politics Found Me

It all started with a blog post from the Economist. I try to avoid long political debates on Facebook. It's not why I use the site since the 'Book is so diligent about telling everyone I know exactly what I'm doing. Eventually, the constant posts on politics will drown out the rest of the personal stuff that people come for. I don't want to do that to all the apolitical folk who friended me because we did Summer Theatre together.

I do love politics, though. This is a blog; it was inevitable that politics would find it's way here. Posting a news item about a topic like the Wisconsin union situation was bound to draw a response and draw one it did. An old friend took issue with it almost immediately. I'll just reproduce his post (adding some of his own edits) and my response here to save some time:

• Peter: What this article pretty much ignores is the fact that government jobs = fat pensions that you don't get in the private sector. That's one of the primary perks of getting a government job.
  
  The author dismisses said pensions by arguing that they'll be underfunded, but in doing so destroys the rest of his argument. Clearly then, the government is out of money and cuts have to come somewhere, but he provides no solutions.
  
• Erin: Hey, Peter! It's been quite a long time, hasn't it? Funny, I remember arguing quite a lot about politics as a rabblerouser in high school. It's almost like fifteen years hasn't gone by.
  
  Anyway, the author's argument here doesn't really deal with strategies for fixing the deficit (though the Economist in general is consistently on the side of pension reform, though not union busting). It's about the new idea that public sector workers are a lot better off than private sector workers. I would argue that even with the pension benefits, it's impossible to believe that public workers (meaning teachers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, firemen, policemen, etc) are paid wildly out of line with the work that they do. I also think he is right to point out that given the current economic climate, it is quite likely that even that one supposedly gold-plated benefit will vanish before most of the workers get their shot at it. Ultimately, I don't think there is any reason for the blogger to try to provide a particular solution to the deficit problem, since that isn't his purpose (though the Economist's editors consistently stand behind the need for meaningful deficit reduction through pension and health care reform, as well as other sensible tax reform to increase tax revenue and diversify the tax base away from an over-reliance on the income tax).
  
  The only point that I wish the author had made was that public sector benefits haven't fallen to the same levels as private sector benefits because governments are just plain slower at reacting to economic changes and because it responds to political as well as economic pressure (unlike, say GE or IBM). Even the Wisconsin union acknowledges the need for pension and health funding reform, though, a point that doesn't get enough emphasis, I think.
  
• Peter: It has been a while since we set up the ol' chess board and discussed life, politics and whatever else we deemed important. That said, I don't disagree with you, I guess I just don't get the point of the article. While it may be true that the pensions end up not fully-funded, isn't the fact that public employees have such fat pensions and sweet health-care plans that make it difficult to hire/retain/give raises to current employees? Moreover, though a direct comparison is difficult, I think that many public sector employees do make more than their private sector counterparts.
  
  At the end of the day, I'm all for paying a good wage to teachers, but I'd kill the unions too as they've long been against any kind of merit-based pay and make it darn near impossible to fire teachers.

I hope Peter has dropped by so that we can continue this discussion (sorry about the roundabout way to do that, Peter!), though I will gladly debate these points if anyone is interested.

I disagree that public sector pensions are outrageously high or that their health care plans are significantly better than many private plans (my parents will certainly debate that point and my father has worked for the federal government for his entire career). I would love to take issue with the comparison and there is a wealth of empirical data out there, but I'm just not going to out and find it (though if someone wants to hire me to spend the time to do that, they are welcome to send that interest along). It's just overall strange to me that in the past couple of years it has become an article of faith that the private sector workers are getting screwed and people look longingly at public sector compensation and benefits, something that would have been laughable even five years ago.

I definitely agree that teacher's unions have not been amenable to some obvious solutions to the clear problem of teacher quality (though it could be because of the confrontational way that these ideas have been presented by people who would happily do away with the union - not a recipe for dialogue).

As I said, I'm all about the discussion. Chime in if the spirit moves you!

Let the Retailing Begin

The accidentally brilliant thing about waiting as long as I did between the training post and this post about first day is that it took over a week and a half (but less than two weeks) to get to that first day of work after those awful training days (longer for the blog, many apologies, etc). It was excruciating. When I was hired, the woman indicated that I would start work the very next week, but that was not to be. No, I had to wait much longer.

When the time finally did arrive and I was walking up 7th Ave toward the employee entrance at 9:30 AM, it slowly dawned on me how little I actually knew about working for Macy's. I was opening the store and at the Bon Ton, that would have meant a morning meeting where we would talk about meeting sales goals and single out high performers and things of that sort. At the Ton, this took place in the break room, which was also a meeting room. No one told me where the morning meeting took place at Macy's. So I went straight to my station on the third floor. I can't say I was all that interested in a morning meeting at this store and I was fortunate that I was never forced to experience one.

Once on the third floor, I was greeted by a packer, who was just as surprised to see me as I was to be there. This packer was my first introduction to a non-manager, non-HR person at Macy's and it proved to be a wonderful surprise. He was pleasant, good-natured, relatively knowledgeable, and friendly. He told me what he knew and directed me to where he thought I should go and went on his merry, as the saying goes.

The thing about being early and not knowing where you work day begins is that you will wait for a long time before anything actually happens and if you work in retail and you show  up before the store is open, you will be doing nothing for in the dark for awhile. The lights finally came on and other associates (what's wrong with just being a cashier anymore? Sales associate is such a farcical term. I'm not a salesperson, I don't make commission, and I can't be anyone's associate anything) began to trickle in. They knew their business and they went about it with about as much effort and diligence as you would expect from long term employees at a store run like Macy's Herald Square. 

The number of things I didn't know about this store were piling up quickly. When no one has bothered to introduce you to a manager, you have limited resources for getting your questions answered. The urgent one at the moment was, am I, a temporary employee, allowed to open the cash register? I had been trained to do it (oh so efficiently), but no one had bothered to tell me if I should (that might sound ridiculous, but don't forget that opening a register involves counting money and that temporary employees are not allowed under any circumstances to close a register). I was standing behind a counter full of registers, so the question was not only should I open this register, but how many of these registers should I open? It was my first day, so I hung back and let the real pros handle that delicate question (for future reference at Macy's during the holidays, you open every register you come across).

The store was now definitively open (with the wandering customers to prove it) and still no one had greeted me, told me if I was at the right register, what was expected me for the day, when I would have a break, how long that break would be, where the stockroom was . . . you know generally useful information that you should be, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, trained on. But hey, this was the pants section and like all pants sections in department stores, it was a mess. The piles of pants were spread all over, forget about neatly stacked, the racks were full of pants that had no business there (Kenneth Cole doesn't sell for 39.99, I'll tell you that). The tie displays were a frightening nightmare.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, I got to know the nearest sales associate. He was an incredible resource, always helpful and cheerful. He looked at me oddly when I told I had been assigned to men's pants, but he took it in stride and let me in on a few tips, including what the manager's looked like. When it came time for my lunch break (meaning half the day was over), he helpfully pointed the managers out and I sauntered over to them to introduce myself. They too looked at my strangely when I told them I had been assigned to men's pants. Fortunately, I caught the area number that I was supposed to be working (that required some deduction, since none of the trainers bothered to point the number out or explain its significance, that was left up to me). A light dawned on the managers. "You don't work in this department." What? "You work in the basement. Uh, follow me."

Off we went, down into the bowels of the Herald Square store. He showed me where I could go, told me the name of the manager and went on his merry. That might sound brusque, but once again, the actual employees on the floor of Macy's are always eager to help (often because they are not eager to do their job or help customers, who, unlike me, are rarely grateful for it). I finally landed in a lonesome section, tucked between the Tommy Hilfiger discount boxers, the Hugo Boss, not so discount underwear, and the socks, the section devoted to Dockers. The men's pants that I had been working with not so long ago were on the third floor, there were casual pants on the second floor and jeans on 1.5, but Dockers were in the basement. You're right, it is ridiculous.

I never got around to asking managers about why no one asked me what I was doing on the third floor and why no one bothered trying to find me when I clocked in at the wrong register. I later learned that attendance is a perfunctory affair at the store. At some point during the day, a manager will come around to each register, usually after the staggered shift change should have been accomplished and ask if someone has arrived. Then they will check that name off their printed list. In their defense, while associates are assigned to specific sections, they will quite often float over to the busiest of the nearby sections on their floor in search of their daily goal, so they won't be found when a manager goes looking. Now, the idiotic thing about this is that we have to clock in and we do so on the registers, all of which have unique ID numbers. Somewhere in that building there is a record of an employee signing in and where they signed in. You don't really need to go around looking for people, especially since the computer keeps track of their sales goal in real time. If they clocked in and they have recorded sales then why do you need to lay eyes on them? What kind of idiotic con would involve coming in to work and giving all the credit for that work to another person? Just one more inscrutable mystery about the procedure of Herald Square.

I spent the next hour folding corduroys on a satellite display (the main one was on - wait for it - the third floor) that would prove to be the bane of my existence. Then I finally had to help a customer. I wandered over to the nearest, or the most obvious cash register and rang them up. And since no one lines up at an empty cash register, as soon as I was there, I was trapped. Another employee eventually wandered along and immediately treated me like an idiot child, the kind of behavior I had been expecting, but was now disappointed to encounter. She rudely shooed me from her counter (after stealing my credit application, something she undoubtedly did not need for her quota) and waved dismissively toward "your" registers. At first I didn't even know what she was talking about. But then it became clear: just behind the massive sock display and directly in front of a wall of socks was the counter for the Dockers, not fifteen feet away (the placement of those registers neatly sums up what is wrong with the Herald Square store, something I'll elaborate on later).

And that just about wraps up my first day, the rest of which was so uneventful that it is lost in the horrific sameness of the retail experience, particularly when you work one 80 square foot section of store. Every day. Awesome, I know, right?