Out of My Mind (38 page)

We ought to start being nicer to rich people.

One of history's great injustices is how often the great artists of any age—painters, musicians and writers—fail to make a comfortable living from their work. Long after Gauguin, Beethoven and Shakespeare were gone, their work still produces billions of dollars. In their lifetime they got small change.

Listening to the radio last weekend I was fascinated by a report involving literary rights and the Walt Disney Company. It's always fun when you know some things about the story that the reporter telling it does not.

Amy Wallace, a very good writer for
Los Angeles
magazine, was giving details of the problem Disney is having with a lawsuit brought by
Shirley Slesinger Lasswell. Her husband, Steve Slesinger, who died in 1953, owned the rights to A. A. Milne's characters, including Winnie-the-Pooh.

Apparently, Pooh is making more money, billions a year, for Disney than Mickey Mouse and, while Disney has been paying about $I2 million a year to Steve's widow, she claims that's peanuts compared with what they ought to be paying her. She is known in Hollywood now as “The Pooh Lady.”

I knew Steve Slesinger well. At the end of World War II, I had written a book about my experiences with the Army newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes
, with my friend Bud Hutton. Steve was operating as a sort of literary entrepreneur and we took the book to him to see if he thought there was any chance of selling it for a movie.

Over our first lunch together, Steve told us how he got started. When he finished college, his parents gave him $2,000 as a graduation gift. He decided to go to London. While he was there, he sought out A. A. Milne. He had always loved Winnie-the-Pooh. This was about 1930, the beginning of the Depression, and prices on everything were down. Steve offered to buy Winnie-the-Pooh rights in the United States for $I,500. A. A. Milne was not rolling in money at the time and he accepted the offer. It was Steve's $I,500 that has, since about 1960, been producing $I2 million a year for his dissatisfied widow.

Steve was easily likeable and disarming. In his back offices, an artist, Fred Harman, worked on a cartoon strip called
Red Ryder
, which appeared in 400 newspapers. Amy Wallace said the strip was Steve's idea, but I believe Fred Harman took it to Steve, who then bought the rights from him. That's the way Steve worked. Fred always said Steve paid him “about $60 a week.”

Steve was a merchandizing genius. He went to the Daisy Air Rifle Company and sold them a deal to make a Red Ryder BB gun. In Hollywood, Republic Pictures agreed to pay Steve for the rights to make ten B movies based on
Red Ryder
. Fred Harman, meanwhile, was cranking out the strip in Steve's back room for $60 a week.

Steve called one day to say that MGM was buying our book for $55,000 and we were going to work at MGM as screen writers for $I,500 a week. We were two young men just out of the Army where we'd been making $I35 a month as staff sergeants and MGM was going to pay us what seemed like half the money in the world.

We were so naive as business people that Bud and I hardly noticed that Steve was taking 50 percent of the $55,000 and half of our salary. It never occurred to us to resent him.

It's hard to side with a greedy corporation like Disney in this lawsuit. But when the creator of all this, A. A. Milne, was paid a mere $I,500 for his genius and sixty years later the widow of a smart operator who had nothing whatsoever to do with the literary invention of Winnie-the-Pooh is unhappy with $I2 million a year, something seems wrong.

There is nothing more stimulating to the brain than getting mad. I am easily angered (grade school English teachers correct me when I use “mad” for “angry”) and there are so many things in the world to get mad about that my brain is seldom at ease.

Nothing so regularly angers me as much as stories about lottery winners. There were big headlines recently about the man in West Virginia, Andrew Whittaker, who won $3I5 million.

There ought to be a law forbidding newspapers, radio or television stations from reporting the name of a lottery winner unless, at the same time, they listed the name of every single loser. The names of everyone who bought a losing ticket for the same lottery won by Mr. Whittaker would not fit in all the pages of any newspaper. Governments are empowered to do for people what people are not able to do for themselves. They should protect idiots from their natural inclination to take chances with astronomically high odds.

If you wonder who buys lottery tickets, look at the people who line up to buy them. They are invariably the poorest, least-educated, most unemployed among us. Some people on welfare wait for their checks, not to buy groceries but to buy lottery tickets. I feel sorry for them but I also think we should help them by making it impossible for them to waste their money—and ours—on lottery tickets.

This all came to me this morning, driving to work, when I heard a radio commercial imploring people to buy tickets for the New York State lottery. When I got to the office, I set out to find how much the state spends on commercials like the one I heard. Last year, the state spent $24 million on lottery advertising. Am I the only one outraged to find that the state is spending that kind of money inducing its citizens to participate in so stupid a thing as buying lottery tickets? Originally, proponents of a state-operated lottery said that people were going to gamble whether it was legal or not. The mob bosses were already making a fortune on the illegal numbers racket. They argued that as long as people were going to gamble anyway, the state, not the mob bosses, should profit from it.

If people were going to gamble anyway, how come the state has to spend $24 million a year talking them into it with advertising? State officials promised to do all sorts of good things for education with lottery money. Have you noticed a big improvement in our schools because of all the lottery money pouring in?

Gambling is a national sickness that has become epidemic in the last twenty-five years. Thirty-seven states now have lotteries and twenty-nine allow gambling casinos. It wasn't long ago that gambling was restricted to a few places like Las Vegas. Atlantic City, a once prosperous seashore resort, somehow lost its luster, went broke and talked New Jersey into letting it open an East Coast gambling operation to compete with Las Vegas. Then some smart operators, preying on the guilt feeling we have as a nation about the desperate condition of Indians in our country, opened “Indian” casinos, most of which are about as Indian as I am.

Lotteries are immoral and stupid. They produce nothing. It is the transfer of money from the dumb poor to the smart rich. It undermines
the American work ethic of which we're so proud. It suggests that anyone can be successful and live handsomely without working for it. All he or she has to do is guess the right number and retire for life.

Predicting whether the economy is going to get better or worse is about as much a science as picking the winner of a horse race. The race may actually be an easier call because at least you know the horses are honest.

Just when things look as if they're getting better, they get worse, and just when things look as though they're getting worse, they get better. The decline in employment is more under President Bush than it's been in twenty years. This is the first time since the 1930s in which the actual number of people working is less than in the previous administration.

The last time there were actual job losses for four years in a row, Herbert Hoover was President. The total reached 7.7 percent. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the number of jobs increased by 18 percent. The job loss statistics today are amazing—and don't think you're not going to hear about them at election time. The number of jobs increased by 22 percent under Bill Clinton's presidency, the biggest jump in history. Under George W. Bush, overall employment is down 2.37 percent. It may not be his fault and Bill Clinton may have been lucky, but Democratic candidates won't be telling you that.

A headline this week read: “Jobless rate at 9-year high.”

Of all the things about the economy I don't understand, I understand unemployment the least. There isn't any work that needs to be done? Is that what unemployment means? I look at the business I'm in and see nothing but work that needs to be done. I look at my own personal and home life and see nothing but jobs that need doing that I can't get anyone to do.

Too many of those things that need to be done at home are things I either don't know how to do or they're things that would take me longer
than is worth my time. We all draw the line somewhere. My hourly wage is more than I'd be willing to pay myself to do the work. I'm looking for someone down the wage scale to do it for me. It's a cold, cruel world.

The reason the unemployment rate is so high is that a lot of people looking for work have a higher opinion of their value than the people who have work that needs to be done have of it. It's also true that many people draw a line between blue- and white-collar jobs, and those who think of themselves as white-collar, college-educated, never consider doing physical work, no matter how badly they need a job.

It's clear that we need more people who know how to do things with their hands. We should forget this collar color division. We have enough administrators, computer technicians, sales engineers and board-of-directors directors. What we're short of are people who actually know how to make something, do something, or fix something. We long ago passed the point where the hourly wage for a skilled craftsman exceeds that of the average office worker.

I took my 1966 Sunbeam Tiger to a mechanic last week because the brakes weren't working. He told me it would be a while before he could get at it because he lost the two men who'd been helping him. He was working alone. He'd hire a capable mechanic in a minute, he said, but he can't find one because almost everyone goes to college now and they don't teach what he needs done in college.

I don't know how we ever got thinking that physical labor was demeaning. I wish more colleges would set out to convince students that reading good literature, knowing something about history and philosophy and having a good education is not inimical to working with your hands.

The politicians running for President don't really give us much to go on. They make it hard to decide who we want to vote for. Most of us
feel more strongly about who we're against than who we're for. It's easier to get someone to say they hate one politician than that they like another.

Polls show that Americans are more worried about the economy now than about Iraq, but most of us are economic ignoramuses. We know, in a general sort of way, whether things are going well or badly because we see the headlines about stock prices being up or down. Economic theory eludes us, so we don't really know what we're worried about.

When I was quite young—before I went to college—I had a temporary love affair with the ideas of an American journalist writing from Moscow named John Reed. He was Harvard-educated, a brilliant writer—and a communist. He was the only American apologist for the kind of government that ruled Russia after the revolution. I wasn't smart enough to be a communist—or a capitalist.

I got over my infatuation with John Reed, but I've never given up my suspicion that there's something wrong with the capitalist, free enterprise system. Selfishness is the God of Capitalism. It doesn't seem right and it's a disappointment to me that it works. Success is the only thing in capitalism's favor. There is no intellectual defense for it.

In the real world, businesses cheat to get ahead and the quality of the product always gets worse when a big company takes over a smaller one. Unfortunately, however, we can't devise a system that works any better.

As early as the late I800s, a handful of businessmen like the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, DuPonts and Morgans had accumulated so much money, while millions had none, that it became apparent to lawmakers something was wrong with pure, unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism. The business tycoons were known affectionately as “The Robber Barons.” To curb their excesses, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

The Antitrust Act provided government regulation designed to prevent a big, rich company that could afford to do it, from selling its product below cost until the smaller companies selling the same product were forced out of business. At that point, with no competition, the corporate giant could charge anything it wanted.

Most people in business are personally honest, but it's sad and true that most of our laws pertaining to business assume that business would cheat the consumer if it were not inhibited by law. What's sad is the assumption is true. The ethical standards of too many businesses fall short of the personal standards of the people running them. I don't know why that is. Kenneth Lay, the chairman of Enron, stole millions but wouldn't pick your pocket or cheat in a poker game.

The biggest problem anyone like me has in supporting government regulation of anything is not economic theory or Republican inclinations. What's wrong is the assumption that elected officials are smart enough to run business any better than businessmen. (I call women in business “businessmen.”)

The fact is neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism works. So we lean one way or the other and draw the line between being conservative and liberal on business issues. If the administration is dominated by Democrats, we draw the line one place. If it's dominated by Republicans, we draw the line another place. President Bush has tried, successfully, to draw the line closer to where the business community likes it. As an elected Republican President, he gets to do that.