TriumphAnt

Strike update!

The vote results were finally announced the last week of January and ballots ran three to one in favour of accepting the government’s latest offer, despite the Union management’s unanimous recommendation that it be rejected. Everybody, it seems, has a theory about why that happened, and the Union’s talking heads have said in several media interviews that they want to “consult” with the members in the weeks and months ahead to determine why such a gaping disconnect seems to exist between the management and the rank-and-file.

I have a few thoughts on that, and they relate to delivering some actual service – not an unreasonable expectation, I would have thought. And in fact for me personally, it’s a matter of a very few simple little things like oh, perhaps replying to e-mail when you tell someone that’s the “best way to get in touch with me”, returning phone calls left on your voicemail when you don’t answer your e-mail, issuing strike pay within weeks of the event, instead of months later, little things like that – in exchange for the whacking great amount of money that is stripped from our paycheques every two weeks for “Association dues”. But I’ll wait until I’m asked.

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Every once in a while I get caught completely by surprise by something I read in the news. Recently, it was an article announcing that German boxer Max Schmeling has just died. He was 99.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize he was still alive.

Many, many years ago, when I was but a young teenager [long before there was an Internet, back when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics kept the George Bushes of the world from “sharing democracy with the freedom loving peoples of (insert name of unwilling host country here)”… um… but I digress], one of the continent’s sports services ran a multi-bout fantasy boxing series on radio.

The premise was quite elegant and the result made for some really exciting radio. Using computers, they cast various aspects of a fighter’s standard boxing abilities into quantifiable form and created a computer-based statistical comparison that pitted the world’s greatest boxers in modern history “virtually” against one another, regardless of when the boxer had been in his prime.

They then employed scriptwriters to develop a “called” play-by-play scenario for the radio audience. It was a totally fictitious fight based on what was probably nothing more than a dozen or so-character coded printout from a computer indicating a likely statistical outcome of, for example, “Johnson: KO-5th”.

Some sports figures become such giants they transcend their sports. For example, even non-golfers recognize the name Tiger Woods. Likewise, it’s probably safe to assume that even in North America, where “football” is called “soccer”, the vast majority of people asked would correctly be able to place David Beckham into that sport, even if that knowledge is due to the popularity of the movie, “Bend it like Beckham”.

For this fantasy world boxing match, there were several such names: Joe Louis, Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali), Jack Dempsey and, to the point of this ramble, Max Schmeling.

Schmeling’s fight career accomplishments by themselves were not the reason for his boxing fame. It was, rather, a combination of sports and politics. In 1936, white German Max Schmeling beat the previously unbeaten black US boxer Joe Louis. Schmeling was a ten-to-one underdog on the betting line and, plainly and simply, was given no chance whatsoever in practical terms. The shocking result of their 1936 fight is still considered by many in the boxing world, indeed many in the larger world of sports in general, to be one of the greatest sports upsets in history.

And the times being what they were, the Nazi propagandists of the day swiftly turned the fight’s outcome into a cause célèbre on which to trumpet the obvious superiority of the “Master race”. (They hadn’t quite been able to accomplish the same result when black US sprinter Jesse Owens waxed several other members of that same “Master race” in competitions held during that year’s Olympic Games in Berlin. And not surprisingly, when Schmeling was soundly beaten by the “Brown Bomber” Louis in a 1938 rematch, the event did not get the same play in Germany.)

Probably nobody was quite so appalled at the propagandist use of his 1936 win as was Max Schmeling himself. He had a Jewish-American manager. The Nazis urged him to terminate that relationship. Schmeling refused. In fact, he hid a pair of Jewish boys in his apartment during the “Night of Broken Glass” (“Krystallnacht”) in 1938 when rampaging gangs of Nazi thugs smashed thousands of Jewish-owned homes and business storefronts to bits. Later, Schmeling was also rumoured to have used his fame and influence to discreetly help a number of his Jewish friends escape the regime.

He was drafted into the German armed forces as a paratrooper and one of the most famous period photographs of the boxer in military uniform shows him poised in the doorway of a Junkers JU-52 aircraft in the parachutist’s typical “Ready-Set-Go” position. His regiment took part in the Germans’ airborne invasion of Crete, shortly after which he himself was badly injured and underwent a long period of convalescence.

I honestly don’t recollect the outcome of that long-ago radio fantasy boxing series. For some reason, I think I recall Dempsey beating Clay (later, Mohammed Ali) in the final, but I concede memory uncertainty here. What I do remember is being introduced for the first time to Max Schmeling, a man who in his way was able to tell Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels to go to hell, and yet who lived to fight, literally, another day.

Post-war, he had the foresight to purchase the German distribution rights for Coca-Cola, which made him a rich man and, in one of those little ironies of life, eventually enabled him to quietly send support to the now-destitute Joe Louis, when post-fame life was nowhere nearly so kind to the American. Louis’ funeral in 1981 was paid for by his pre-war rival and lifelong friend, Max Schmeling.

In his later years, he apparently refused to capitalize on his fame, beyond enjoying the quiet and leisurely life it allowed him to live out. Schmeling in fact said in a 1975 interview that losing that 1938 rematch quite possibly saved his life. Had he won, the even more intense political use of the outcome might have seen him branded a contributor to the growth of the Nazi regime. Schmeling, no doubt fully aware of what happened to filmmaker Leni “Triumph of the Will” Reifenstahl after the war, said he might have wound up being tried as a war criminal had not his loss knocked him off the Nazis’ “A” list of propaganda tools.

The boxing world officially assigns the nickname “Gentleman” to “Gentleman Jim Corbett”, but it seems to me that Max Schmeling certainly was no less deserving of the title.

(Biographical facts courtesy of an official obituary in The Globe and Mail online, 4 February.)

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What if this catches on?

“Failing Sanyo orders employees to buy its products: Sanyo's business is failing, so they've ordered their employees to spend a minimum fraction of their salaries on Sanyo products. Executives have been asked to spend up to 2 million yen ($19,290), division chiefs 500,000 yen and other employees 200,000 yen on Sanyo products, which include televisions, refrigerators, mobile phones and insurance.”

Can you imagine the employee response were any “failing business” in North America to issue a directive to them to truss up the sagging corporate foundations by emptying their bank accounts in an effort to re-black the company’s bottom line? (Although one’s first instinct might be to think the response words would all be four letters long, I’m thinking more along the lines of “class action”. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of law, and all that.)

And why stop at a “failing” business? “If you enjoy working here at McDonald’s, you’d better consider making our fine products the core ingredients of your lunchbreaks.”

“Haven’t you noticed your paycheque has a Ford logo printed on it? Lose the Corolla – or at least stop driving one to work – if you know what’s good for you as you meander down your career path.”

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Give it about a month and (in Canada, anyway) we’re all going to be completely sick of hearing the word “dithering” or any of its present / past / future tense variations. For some reason, the ranters and railers in the Opposition parties appear to have decided that it is the one single word that best describes all the problems they have with the government of Paul Martin. The Liberals were “dithering” over dispatching our Disaster Assistance Relief Team to Sri Lanka; they’re “dithering” on missile defence; “dithering” on implementing our environmental commitments to the Kyoto Accord; “dithering” on what role the feds are going to play in the massive Toronto waterfront re-development plan.

If this keeps up, the public is going to demand that daily newspapers yank Blondie from their comics page simply because one more appearance of Mr Dithers is going to trip the “going postal” switch on several readers whose family members warn are already just teetering on the soundbite-induced edge of insanity.

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And finally…

This is why we have stereotypes:

In a recent Associated Press story (February 3, to be exact. Dateline Prattville, Alabama) about a wild melée that erupted at an Alabama high school girls’ basketball game, we are told the brawl got so intense, riot police were called out, Tasers employed, charges laid and arrests made. One parent grasped at what must surely be a standard Alabama metaphor to describe the speed at which the outbreak exploded in size:

"Initially, there were 30, then it started spreading like cockroaches," said… parent, Joanne Heningburg.”

And not to be outdone, when interviewed about her perceptions of the event, this sweet young thing (how else to describe someone named “Cherish Cartee”?) obviously reached to the very depths of the worst deprivations she could imagine in order to convey the true sense of disaster to readers / listeners everywhere:

“'People were screaming and running,' Prattville cheerleader Cherish Cartee said. 'Girls lost their cell phones. Keys got lost. It's something I will never forget.'”

The horror! The horror!