Made in .... at home

Winter in Washington is really dull, especially from mid-January till mid-March. This year, the new administration will try to generate some energy into Washington's dreary winter with its inauguration spectacle, but who can get really excited about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Or any of the million-dollar balls? Except for being more glitzy, these crowded "galas" are about as stimulating as rehearsed American weddings. However, at least some goings-on stand out from the ordinary as the winter sets in.

Ford Motor Company created some sizzle this week when it announced it is scrapping the plan to build a new plant in Mexico and is expanding business at home. Although the move is carefully calculated and Ford is doing nothing to hurt its profits (its Mexico production continues as usual in an older Mexico plant ) the management gave some credit to the President-elect Donald Trump, for pressuring companies to keep jobs in the United States. Trump has since targeted more carmakers, but other U.S. companies making their goods in China, Mexico and elsewhere, are weighing the pros and cons of following Ford's suit. Even Apple is said to be looking into how much it would cost to move the production of its cell phones from China to the United States.

Attempts to promote local businesses are not new. In the past decades, the United States has seen a nationwide boom of farmers' markets selling locally grown produce. I found my first decent American tomato in one of those. And then there was American Apparel, formed in 1989, that branded its clothes as made in the U.S.A. But small farmers produce little and don't make significant profits and American Apparel went bankrupt in 2015, in part due to its relatively high labor costs. In my opinion, the bigger reason is that its garments are so unappealing there is no incentive to buy them when you can get more attractive and cheaper stuff at H&M or Zara. Whatever the reason, that company is not a role model to follow. 

Slogan "Made in the USA" could not save American Apparel

Regardless, the latest reports say Amazon now wants to buy the failing U.S. clothier. The question is why. The online retailer already is expected to surpass Macy's as the top U.S. garment seller in 2017. One reason may be to gain Trump's support (Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos has locked horns with Trump in the past) and another could be to appeal to the currently fashionable patriotic sentiment. American Apparel employs about 4,000 people and boasts of producing sweatshop free garments.  Buying an American Apparel T-shirt is akin to choosing a steak that is labeled as coming from a humanely raised cow.

But perhaps more importantly, Amazon is expanding from e-commerce into brick-and-mortar stores, with food and other goods, even books. (Ironically, the company that forced bookstores around the country to close is now opening its own). Most people like to try clothes before buying them and American Apparel already has retail stores throughout the country. If Amazon can rebuild the brand's image, it may be worth taking on its losses.

The United States is not alone in seeking ways to produce things close to home, although the trend is far from widespread. I was surprised recently by an article about Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli whose garments I remembered for their luxurious fabrics, sleek design and unaffordable prices. And they were unaffordable even in now-defunct discount stores such as Loehmann's and Filene's Basement, where I became familiar with the brand. 

Cucinelli vest on sale for $1,500, 40% off the original price

The article describes Italy's "king of cashmere" as someone who strives for quality not just in his products, but in the working lives of his employees. His business empire is based in the medieval village of Solomeo in the idyllic hills of central Italy. Cucinelli imports cashmere from China and Mongolia, but all his manufacturing is done in Italy. His factories are no sweatshops either. They are fitted with floor-to-ceiling windows so workers can enjoy the view.

“I don’t think it’s time wasted watching a bird in the sky when you are in the middle of sewing a button. On the contrary, nothing could be more beautiful,” he said in an interview. His workers get a 90-minute lunch break, go home at 5:30 PM and are not expected to check their office mail once they get home.

“Today in the world, we work too much. We are too connected and I don’t think that’s fair. I find that if I make you work too much, it’s like I’m stealing part of your soul,” said Cucinelli. Hmmm... Is something like that possible in the United States?  I am not sure any of my bosses care for the health of my soul.

Cucinelli Factory, Solomeo, Italy

Like American Apparel's employees, Cucinelli's are paid more than the industry's norm. But his business is thriving.  He has spent much of his profits in his village, helping renovate a 13th century castle and build a theatre, a library and an art school. According to the report, his brand has quadrupled in size in the past decade and his investors are not complaining either.

Cucinelli said it is important to return dignity to workers in western countries who feel they have been forgotten. The rise of Donald Trump and Brexit testify to the widespread dissatisfaction among Western workforces. But just giving them a job is not enough. 

"We cannot have companies that earn incredible amounts and our workers earning tiny sums to work 12 hours a day staring at a wall under an electric lamp. We have to put dignity back at the heart of our economic activity."

One of the main reasons for promoting local businesses is to improve the quality of life of local populations. As Cucinelli demonstrates, if you live where you work, you have a vested interest in making improvements in your community.  The luxury clothes designer is able to secure better living for his staff and contribute to his hometown by selling his high quality garments at extremely high prices. Not everyone can do that, but much can be learned from Cucinelli.

Trump won his way to the White House in large part by promising to keep manufacturing jobs in the United States. Companies such as Ford in Michigan and Carrier in Indiana have made small moves in that direction to see how it goes. But small moves are better than none. Michael Gilligan, a Ford employee in Dearborn said, "at least we get 500 to 700 jobs extra and we need that in our state, terribly."

By acquiring American Apparel, Amazon could save about 4,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. But Amazon is a multinational company, and notoriously a harsh place to work.  Its employees have complained of being exploited - too often to be ignored.  If it does acquire American Apparel, Amazon would do well to invest in a fashion designer who can do better than H&M or Zara so its financial losses are not recuperated by exploiting the workforce.

On Faith, Brexit and Designer Babies

Last week was awful in terms of the news: conflict, conflict everywhere and not a drop of light at the end of the tunnel.  As if mass shootings, terror attacks and wars were not enough, politicians are clashing on every single issue and the general public picks up the cue. The Brits are still fighting over whether they should stay in the EU or not, the young now claiming their long life ahead was determined by geezers with one leg in the grave. Amid all the mayhem reports, a refreshing headline grabbed my attention the other day: "Baby-making could jump from the bedroom to the lab." Wow!

I've heard of genetic modification and tampering with embryos to create a baby with desired traits. But this is not about harvesting eggs and working on them, it is about creating a baby from any cell in the body; a skin cell for example. In the near future, according to the report, cells will be turned into eggs and sperm in a lab to produce hundreds of embryos. Those will be tested to see what genetic traits they carry, and parents will be able to choose which one they want hatched into a baby. People who otherwise could not have their own children will be able to have them made from non-reproductive cells. From the multitude of embryos they will also be able to pick the ones that do not carry a hereditary disease. And if they have a lot of money to spend they can have the embryo further engineered to produce a baby with the desired eye and hair color, the size of the nose, the height, etc.

These days, children who get stuck with silly names chosen by their parents, like North West or Apple and Pear, can change them when they grow up. Altering one's physical and character traits may be a little harder. Still, in the future, we may have more Caitlyn Jenners. Gone are the days when the family awaited the arrival of a baby with baited breath to see if it is a girl or a boy. There will be no surprises - pleasant or otherwise - any more.

Whoa!  I got carried away.  For a moment I forgot my own video packages on drought and famine in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 40 million people in the region face hunger and even a larger number in India. A family moving from the parched Somaliland into the scorched parts of Ethiopia in search of food and water will be happy if the child is delivered alive, forget the hair color.

Then there is faith. A person who believes that a reward for killing in the name of God secures a place in heaven, with charming maidens serving refreshments  (as allegedly the Orlando shooter believed), is hardly likely to believe in creative baby making. Such a person is killing and ready to be killed to return things to what he imagines they may have been in some other time and place.

I am reading a book about Dracula - the real one, not the Hollywood creation. A fascinating and repulsive character at the same time: overly fond of impaling even for his own era, he also seems to have engaged in cutting off noses, ears, heads, women's breasts and genitals. It was said that Vlad III, nicknamed the Impaler, sometimes had children boiled in hot oil and made parents eat them, and did other stuff too gruesome to mention. But as we know, similar things happened during the war in the Balkans just a couple of decades ago, and are still happening at the hands of Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

We live in a world in which technology and innovation are literally skyrocketing, but too many people still face  hunger.  There is poverty in the United States, "the richest country in the world." More than 45 million people worldwide live in "modern" slavery. Globalization was supposed to even out some of the differences and bring people closer together, but appears to have created an even wider abyss between fellow human beings - a chasm not different from the one separating the medieval Wallachian prince and his brother Radu the Handsome, a favorite of Sultan Mehmed II.  The brothers fought each other, one with atrocities, the other with Turkish support.

Those caught in the middle of the tensions are confused and angry.  Sometimes they feel helpless, like the young Brits who say that the elderly imposed an unwanted future on them. Other times they arm themselves with assaults weapons, like some Americans.  Readers' comments to media articles on any topic reek of racism, misogyny and hatred. Culture is no exception. Just check YouTube video clips from operas. If you happen to like a singer or performance someone else dislikes, you better keep your opinion to yourself unless you have high tolerance for insults.

So commentators, professional or amateurish, who hasten to praise the Brexit as a "momentous event" akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall, those who predict that other EU countries will follow suit, and those who hope that the U.S. under Donald Trump will close its borders, are missing the point. Britain was split almost in half on the remain-leave referendum and it seems that some members of the "winning" camp got cold feet the very morning after the victory.  More than a million are now demanding a second referendum. Whichever way the vote might have gone, it would not have reduced the tensions in Britain. Neither will the country fall to pieces because it stepped out of the bloc. "Nigdar ni bilo da ni nekak bilo"...as an old Croatian wisdom goes.

In the 1960s, the slogan "Make Love, Not War" began its tour around the world, and the Hippy era saw the Westerners enthralled with oriental culture and spirituality. The commercialization of yoga and meditation in the West is a lasting reminder of that time. The world "love" has disappeared from the intercultural discourse. Today, we are talking of "tolerance" and we are protesting "against hatred" at best. Some of the most religious of us believe that a faith can be "defended" by war and isolation, and that love has nothing to do with it. I am no proponent of a return to any "glorious" era of the past, but I do hope that a future generation of the "Brave New World," the one that will create babies in the lab, comes up with a new make-love movement, one less steeped in drugs and more in sharing.

Washington, Las Vegas and Our Presidential Candidates

During a recent visit to southern France, many locals asked where I and my friend were from. When she said she was from Las Vegas, people would invariably get excited and wanted to have long discussions about her city while no one cared about my hometown - the capital of the United States and the western world. This now reminds me of the situation with Donald Trump: everyone wants to discuss him, but there is little genuine interest in either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Perusing European newspapers online these days one finds the US news sections flooded with stories about Trump. His every utterance and every move is recorded and discussed in detail, and if Sanders or Clinton are mentioned, it is mostly in relation to Trump. Like: Sanders agreed to debate with Trump after Clinton refused. It's a good thing President Obama went to Hiroshima, to provide a little diversion although even he could not come out entirely Trump-free. He must have been asked a lot of questions about the Republican presidential contender to warrant the statement "world leaders are rattled by him."

But what about Americans? Trump has not changed much in the past few months. Neither has his rhetoric improved. Yet from a candidate that was initially considered nothing more than a clown in the presidential campaign circus, he has become a serious threat to Hillary Clinton, a Democrat and seasoned politician who seemed to have the presidency in her pocket.

Pundits offer explanations such as Congress fatigue, fear of terrorism, loss of manufacturing jobs, Trump's TV popularity, his (dubious) business achievements, straight talk etc. I don't buy any of that. I think Trump's formula for success is the same one that gave power to Yugoslavia's Tito, Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, Lenin, Stalin, Putin and, yes, even Hitler. They were the kind of leaders that could persuade masses, especially uneducated masses, that they had the strength to protect them from whatever. If there was no threat to the nation, one was invented.

As school kids in the communist Yugoslavia we were taught the locution: Yugoslavia is surrounded by troubles (BRIGAMA). The Croatian and Serbian word for "troubles" was an acronym made from the initials of the countries bordering Yugoslavia (Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Greece, Austria, Hungary, ie. Madjarska and Albania). So from the earliest age, we were made to believe that our country was on the verge of an attack. Tito ruled uncontested for more than 30 years but after he died, the country he had built fell apart. Hitler's Germany went up in smoke, the Soviet Union disintegrated and the kind of Serbia Milosevic had in mind died before it was born.

Even though history proved Stalin to be a mass murderer equal to Hitler or worse, he enjoyed rising popularity after the Soviet Union collapsed and before Putin stepped in to take the role of a new "strong" leader. Some people still mourn Tito's Yugoslavia, and Hitler continues to fascinate the world albeit in a negative way.

About a decade or so ago, while I was driving my son to school, a local station was re-broadcasting the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate on foreign policy. I pointed out to my son how sophisticated the discussion was in comparison with the contemporary presidential debates. I particularly considered Bush junior a poor speaker at the time. Now I could point out how sophisticated his debates were in comparison with the ones we've had this past year. Trump especially is a terrible speaker with hardly any complete sentence in his diatribes, and every word of phrase he deems "strong" repeated at least two or three times. 

Example from his Rolling Thunder speech Sunday: "Make America great again! Very simple. Make America great again! So, in riding over, there are hundreds of thousands of people all along the highways, and they can’t get in! In other words, you’re very good at real estate. You got in! Congratulations! Congratulations. " His vocabulary is very limited and the language he uses to describe his rivals - "crooked Hillary" and "lying Ted Cruz"- is beyond the pale. And yet it does not seem to matter at home or abroad.

The amount of attention, including negative attention, Trump gets in the news media gives him status and importance. In the eyes of many people that translates into power. Every nation wants a "powerful" leader, but the United States, to maintain its status as the world premier superpower must have one. Being cruel and obnoxious is more acceptable than being apologetic if it is serves to project the image of power.  

I am reminded of a classic Serbian tale by Radoje Domanović of a people looking for a leader to take them to the promised land. They think that a silent stranger walking with a staff must be the wisest so they pick him. They follow him through thorns and wasteland as he seems to avoid a strait road. When he falls into a chasm, they jump after him. Many die on the way. When months later three remaining families confront the leader, they learn that he is a blind man.

Although the story does not apply to the United States, it illustrates how important an image is for a leader.

With the statue of Abraham Lincoln looking down, Trump delivered his usual crude oration on Sunday, with Rolling Thunder bikers cheering him on. A Vietnam War veteran was quoted as saying “He’s an asshole, and that’s what we need.” Another one said “We need to retake America, because we’ve lost it.” Wow! I must have been asleep. I never noticed we've lost our country. But I noticed that we've lost class. It almost seems as if no classy person would want to run for president any more.  Certainly no one like George Washington who as a teenager copied by hand 110 rules of civility that he followed all his life.  The current crop of presidential candidates seems oblivious to them. Thus wrote Washington:

 -  Speak not injurious words in jest nor earnest; scoff at none although they give occasion.

 -  Undertake not what you cannot perform but be careful to keep your promise.

 -  Speak not evil of the absent for it is unjust.

But does anyone apply these rules in campaign speeches? In the past, leaders strived to sound educated, today they want to identify with the rude and the illiterate.  Maybe that's how they see the majority of voters. Europeans are commenting on Facebook: "America, you might call this an election, but the rest of the world is viewing it as your IQ test. And it's not looking good."

I have always believed (and been rebuked for saying it) that a nation has the leader it deserves. Especially in true democracies where the head of state is freely elected. This is not to say that every individual gets the leader he or she deserves. I tend to agree with de Tocqueville in that "a majority taken collectively is only an individual, whose opinions, and frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another individual." Come January, a new U.S. president will be sworn in, one that many Americans will not have wanted: a president elected by the majority and imposed on everyone.

The rest of the world will have to deal with our president too. And not everyone will be annoyed if it is Trump. Judging by the amount of attention he gets in the foreign media, he is more attractive to a lot of people overseas than either Clinton or Sanders, sort of like Las Vegas is more seductive than Washington.