Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Only in the USA! (I hope)
The Hormel meat packing company, famous for its tinned "luncheon meat" (you should pardon the expression) Spam, is planning a new Spam Museum and Visitor Centre. No, really. Lots of people would like to visit a Spam museum, I'm sure. Hormel apparently expect crowds: the new museum, in a renovated former Kmart store in Austin, Minnesota, will be over 16,000 square feet in size. It will replace a much smaller existing museum in a shopping mall at Oak Park. According to a release, the greatly expanded museum will include "a history walk with exhibits and displays which follow the company's progression from its founding in 1891". These are unlikely to show the Hormel company's bitter battles with meat workers. There'll also be a dining area serving Spamburgers (probably more profitable than serving food). There's even a museum shop selling merchandise — hats, golf balls, glassware, etc — emblazoned with Spam and Hormel logos.* * * The rich get richer Eric Brakken drew attention in AgitProp News (a news bulletin distributed over the Internet from the Labour Education Centre at Rutgers University in the USA) to the fact that Phil Knight, chairman and CEO of global sweatshop "sportshoe" manufacturer Nike, saw his assets go up in one day (November 19, 1999) by a cool US$215.3 million. His company's stock jumped 2 1/4 points on positive comments from analysts. Brakken points out that Knight's one-day gain was about ten times the amount earned by all 55,000 workers making Nike shoes in Indonesia this year.* * * Culture in New York When cultural workers such as orchestra players, ballet dancers or opera singers are driven to take industrial action, the usual management tactic is to cancel the performance and heap all the opprobrium of the disappointed patrons onto the striking workers. The New York City Ballet, one of the world's leading cultural institutions, couldn't do that, because its workers — specifically, the members of the orchestra — were not on strike. Certainly they were in dispute with the Ballet's management, but they were prepared to play while they negotiated. Instead, the Ballet's management locked the orchestra out! Faced with the prospect of cancelling the company's annual performance of the Nutcracker and blaming themselves, the Ballet management elected to present Tchaikovsky's enduring work with TAPED MUSIC! What are artistic standards when you've got workers to beat into submission?* * * Monkey wisdom "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." — Professor Robert Silensky of California University* * * Beggars belief At the end of November, the British press and parliament got their collective knickers in a knot over the visit to the country of the Emir of Bahrain, Sheik Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Prince Andrew had just visited the oil-rich sheikdom and the visit should have been a doddle for the experienced hands at the Foreign Office: bit of mutual smooging with the Queen and Phillip, photo session with the ever- smiling Tony Blair, official dinner with heads of British industry (especially armaments) and trade would have got a right royal shot in the arm. Unfortunately, the Sunday Herald inconveniently ran a story featuring testimony from some of the Emir's less than loyal subjects living in Britain showing that the Scottish head of Bahrain's Security Intelligence Service colonel Ian Henderson not only ran a service that routinely and frequently used torture, but that Henderson himself took part in the torture. Henderson, who is now in his '70s, took over as head of the SIS in Bahrain in 1966 after he was hurriedly bundled out of Kenya, when the violent reprisals he co-ordinated as a Special Branch chief against suspected Mau- Mau "rebels" could no longer be covered up. He wasn't sacked, you notice, just kicked sideways into a similar job away from the glare of publicity. While British MPs call for his extradition to Britain to face trial over the torture allegations, the British media has been expressing shock and horror over the same juicy allegations — as though British military tradition somehow did not include torture. Significantly, however, none of them seem to have paid much attention to the fact that Henderson was merely a dutiful — if enthusiastic — servant of imperialism, who could not have achieved his high security positions in Kenya and then Bahrain without the full knowledge and approval of the British intelligence authorities. That they were unaware of his methods beggars belief. After all, they used them themselves in India, Borneo, Malaya, Aden, Northern Ireland and even in Britain itself against "Irish terrorists". The Foreign Office reacted to the furore with its usual sang froid. It calmly announced that the Government did have concerns about Bahrain's human rights record, and it "was in dialogue with the ruling family" about it. The "ruling family" of Bahrain, however, wants to remain just that; if they do fire Henderson they will simply hire someone just like him.