Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of an American Icon.

I wrote a story about succession planning for a magazine called New Brewer earlier this month. Who takes over when the founder moves on (for whatever reason) is going to be a hot topic in the craft brewing world in this decade as the bright young men who created the earliest microbreweries and brewpubs will be hitting their fifties and later. I figured the story of how the brewers of Budweiser, the 150-year old enterprise run by the Busch family which was taken over in the summer of 2008 by InBev, an international corporation located in Belgium but controlled by Brazilians (in what was the largest all-cash acquisition in history) would provide me with some useful material.

What happened to Anheuser-Busch was more a tragic tale of hubris, strife and discord between a father and son and a provincial view of the world by people too long insulated from its realities, a tragicomedy in which poor succession planning was almost a footnote. The sins of the father, August Busch III, doomed the short reign of the son, August Busch IV, so thoroughly that what happened was inexorable. There was little in its pages to meet my particular needs (although I was able to get an appreciative guffaw from the owner of a St. Louis brewery who is currently in the process of working our a succession plan by assuring him that whatever he came up with could never be the worst such plan in the history of his home town  (where A-B is also headquartered) because that ship had definitely already sailed.

That said, Dethroning the King is a marvelous read and a fascinating look inside the dysfunctional world of a major corporate entity and author Julie MacIntosh is both a solid reporter (she covered the merger for the Financial Times and developed lots of contacts who were willing to talk) and a skilled storyteller. August III is clearly the villain, ousting his father in 1975 and then hanging on to overshadow and disrupt the short reign of his son when he took over in 2006. Under III (as he was nicknamed within the company) A-B ignored the international expansion that might have saved it for the family, including not purchasing, in 1989, the small Brazilian brewer which became the nucleus of InBev.

This is a great story, even if you care not a whit about the beer industry, and I recommend it highly. There is a movie in the works, I believe, or if not, there certainly should be.

Still alive after all these years.

Love this from Life, the Keith Richards autobiography which is getting rave reviews.

After Keith falls out of a tree in 2006 and incurs a life-threatening hematoma, he receives get-well wishes from world dignitaries, Tony Blair included: “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes.” Keith does a double take: “England’s in the hands of somebody who I’m a hero of?”

He was hardly a role model, but, man, I'm glad he made it through.

A sneaky post, followed by an immediate confession.

While I will be spending most of this weekend (I hope) polishing up and off the re-launching of Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet with a more attractive, functional and clean look, I plan to set aside two and a half hours in late afternoon and early evening to watch the film adaption of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo via Netflix on my computer screen. It's not the ideal way to see it--although movies on the 'puter screen are pretty crisp and clean (even for the subtitles, I hope), the seating arrangements are not optimum--but I missed it when it played ever-so-briefly in the area and it's either this or renting it, an option I'll choose if the first half hour or so isnt' satisfactory.

Now, a bit of a confession. I posted the above mostly to check out a new linkage from here to Amazon which will earn Mermaids a bit of the profits every time anyone clicks from here to the book and buys it. Let me say up front that, if you are an inveterate reader and have an independent bookstore from which you usually purchase, please continue to do just that. I owned a bookstore for five years and I know both what an invaluable service they are to the community and how hard it is to make a living offering that service. If you do not have a local store and at some point you are moved to want to look more seriously at and possibly purchase a book mentioned and linked here, it would be a nice thing to do to reward the management for its efforts.

I promise I will put any earnings to humanitarian purposes such as buying donuts for the boys in the mail room one morning or dogitarian purposes by buying a treat for Buddy.

And, what the heck, as long as I'm pimping here, let me further suggest two of my favorite books of the year so far, The Pint Man and Hardball. The first is a tale of two or three days in a drinking man's life and filled with all sorts of clever wordplay and commentary; the second is the newest novel in a long running and very good private detective series.

And now we return you to our regularly schedule blather, already in progress...

"Beyond the numbing grip of circumstance."

 The Pint Man 
by Steve Rushin, 

Doubleday, 259 pages, 
$24.95

The Pint Man is the story of a few crucial days in the life of Rodney Poole, a New York guy in his mid-thirties who is about to lose the companionship of his best friend (moving away to get married), is unemployed but about to be offered a job he's not sure he wants and is confused about his feelings for Mairead (rhymes with "parade"), the lovely woman he's just met.

Rodney's only enduring relationship is with Boyle's, a classic Irish bar where he spends most of his time. Late in the book he makes note of a concept that sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his book The Great Good Place, described as "the third place," informal public gathering places such as bars which are neither home nor job, and muses that, for him, Boyle's is the first place.

Aside from the bar, and perhaps Mairead, the one thing that Rodney loves is words, as, obviously, is also true of author Steve Rushin, and the book is sprinkled with wordplay and unforgettable descriptive passages. It begins with the first two paragraphs of the book in which we are introduced to the bar which, some say, is the love triangle which completes the Rodney/Mairead relationship:

To say that Rodney went there religiously is not just a figure of speech, for Boyle's resembled a church even at noon, when no one was yet kneeling in the Gents, asking God for His mercy.

At that hour, a shaft of sunlight shone through stained glass. Which is to say, windows whose glass was comprehensively stained-by a double-glazing of nicotine and automotive exhaust, and the second hand smoke of a half-century of bullshit.

Has there ever been more comprehensive short description of an old-time watering hole? And don't you want to go have a pint there immediately upon reading?

Not much farther on, Rodney contemplates the bottles on the shelves behind bartender Armen, who will play a vital part in the story's unfolding and resolution, with a distinctive, off-kilter assessment:

A bottle of Cockburn's was shelved next to a bottle of Dry Sack. Given their proximity, Rodney thought of them not as port and sherry but as twinned male medial afflictions, the former leading inevitably to the latter.

Later on, Rushin/Rodney use Boyle's and an old movie theater, where Rodney has gone one afternoon, as a metaphor for New York itself:

Rodney was not unhappy being single, especially not here, in the shared solitude of a movie theater, sucking on sixty-four ounces of soda. That's what Boyle's provided. That's what all of New York provided: not companionship so much as shared solitude.

These sorts of observations and smaller, passing ones, such as Rodney's sudden recognition that a green can of Kraft's Parmesan cheese and a green can of Comet cleanser are almost identical, right down to the three holes in the top, make The Pint Man a hilarious and almost obligatory reading, at least for the likes of me whose own tastes also run to bars, lovely unattainable women, too much rumination and, most certainly, words in all their beauty and variations. Friends of mine--Ross, John and the sadly departed Charlie--used to engage the same sort of banter as do Rodney and Mairead throughout the story, rapid back-and-forth patter playing off whatever the other has said. Like them, our brains were generally fueled by alcohol at the time. That was another time, another life, but I relived the memories throughout my reading of The Pint Man.

The title of the novel itself comes from a beautifully written passage in an old book by John D. Sheridan, called Irish Licensing World:

The man behind the bar knows the pintman when he sees one. It is not matter of dress, or age, or social status; it is sort of a spiritual look. The pintman takes up the tumbler with ritualistic care. Nothing can touch him then. The clock ticks for you and me, but the pintman is on an island in time. He is no long old or young, rich or poor, married or single. He is beyond the numbing grip of circumstance-a devotee at a solemn right, a poet with an unfrenzied eye, a man with a pint. There is a restful, mesmeric quality about the whole business.

I'd give a whole lot to have written that.

The actual story told in The Pint Man is somewhat slight and I see no need to reveal any of it here; the telling is what matters. I highly recommend this book to my readers who appreciate the ever-changing pleasures of good drink shared with good companions, the imaginative delights of a tale which echoes with thoughts oft unspoken or the magic of words themselves. I especially recommend it to those blessed few who revel in all three.

"Continuity easily turns into inertia."

I have spent a lot of time in recent weeks trying to figure out exactly what I think about Barack Obama and his presidency at this point. Garry Wills' review of David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review suggests that the manner of his rise to the Oval Office  hold the key to understanding why his first year in office, the time when a landslide victor with both charisma and party control of the Congress might have been expected to achieve a myriad of goals, was instead marked by turmoil and disappointment.

Yes, the mindless obstructionism and near-criminal demonization of the new president by his opponents played a crucial role and the ruined economic landscape left him by his inept and disinterested predecessor played an an even larger part. But it was not only exterior forces that thwarted Obama.

His long, foolish and obviously doomed effort for "bipartisanship," as if it were some sort of moral value rather than merely a political tactic, allowed much of the energy to escape from his historic election. Many of the people he surrounded himself with, especially on his economic team, had played significant roles in the disaster that may yet bring him down. The fire and passion of his arguments for new policies and directions, until very recently, was dimmed.

The central theme of Remnick's books, from all accounts, is that Obama's solution to his always being the outsider, the newcomer, has been to ingratiate himself by the oldest social rule of them all, to get along, go along. And especially in seeking the presidency and then assuming the Oval Office, that predilection was often paramount. He could never risk being the Angry Black Man on the campaign trail; he wanted above all to embed his presidency in the long history of the office even if it was undeniably a demarcation from all that had gone before.

Wills is one of my favorite intellectuals and the final two paragraphs of his review provide a summary of what he took from The Bridge and what that might portend:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

The last time this sad excuse of a nation and what it used to be awoke from its stupor and put someone in charge to pick up the pieces left in wake of a destructive Republican non-stewardship of the nation, we chose The Man from Hope. If it turns out that this time we've chosen The Man form Inertia, then the broken heart of hope could turn out to be the least of the pain we will reap.

The perfect novel for your church group book club...

This one's from the golden age of paperbacks from this site, which apparently does this sort of nostalgia daily (I've signed up, how 'bout you), which I learned about from The Rap Sheet.

You just know it was a great read, am I right?