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The European Union currently spends close to $1.8 billion per year subsidizing the wine industry. Nearly $700 million of this amount is spent on distilling unwanted wine into industrial alcohol. From this side of the Atlantic it would appear that European winemakers are getting a pretty good deal. I'm certainly not holding my breath until the United States government starts buying extra beer from us in order to turn it into ethanol.
Some French winemakers, however, aren't satisfied. The Comité Régional d'Action Viticole (CRAV), a committee of viticultural activists based in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France, wants even more governmental assistance. In order to generate support for their cause, members of CRAV have engaged in various acts of violence, such as bombing public buildings.
When I read about CRAV's reign of terror in the terroir, I realized that beer aficionados had once again dropped the ball in not founding The Beer Drinkers Party. While we've spent a lot of time solving the problems of the world over pints of beer at the bar, viticulturists in France have been getting ready to storm the Bastille again because the subsidies they get for making wine that no one wants to drink aren't high enough. If wine people can get subsidies for wine that no one wants to drink, why can't we get subsidies for beer that people do in fact want to drink?
While I was ruminating about The Beer Drinkers Party, I got an e-mail from an alert reader (AR) in Fayetteville, Arkansas named Pati Chamberlin Mitchell. Mrs. Mitchell informed me that she was the granddaughter of John McLean Chamberlin, who had been elected mayor of East St. Louis after campaigning on a promise to make the city "a little more like home and a little less like hell." It then struck me that this would be a good slogan for The Beer Drinkers Party. Eschewing the winemakers' tactics of destroying infrastructure, we would promise to make America more like home and less like hell. We would accomplish this goal by using our billions of dollars of government subsidies to help people mellow out by buying them pints of beer.
I also learned from Mrs. Chamberlin that her grandfather knew my great grandfather. According to an archive that she found, August Schlafly, the president of Union Trust Bank in East St. Louis, personally lent the city $70,000 in 1914. Moreover, Mrs. Chamberlin did not find any record of this loan's having ever been repaid. Can you imagine? The City of East St. Louis probably owes August's descendants $70,000 plus 93 years of compound interest. Even if I have to share the money with my cousins, there would still be enough to provide The Beer Drinkers Party with a big political war chest for the 2008 elections.
One of the features of East St. Louis that made it hellish in the opinion of Mayor Chamberlin was widespread prostitution in "The Valley," a series of brothels on 3rd Street between Missouri and St. Clair Avenues. Despite the best efforts of reformers, The Valley thrived until the Second World War, when it was said to be responsible for giving Scott Field (now Scott Air Force Base) one of the highest rates of venereal disease in the United States armed forces. Under pressure from Lieutenant Colonel Dorrin Rudnick, a medical officer at Scott, The Valley was shut down prior to the end of the war and was never revived.
Unlike East St. Louis, contemporary Japan has a fairly permissive attitude towards prostitution. Until fairly recently thousands of Japanese bordellos were known as torukoburos, or Turkish baths, i.e. bathhouses that offered massages with lots of extras. This nomenclature, however, offended a number of Turkish visitors to Japan who resented having their nationality used as a code word for lascivious recreation.
Turkish Ambassador Nurver Nures issued a series of formal protests to the Japanese government, which in turn put pressure on The All-Japan Special Bathhouse Association to persuade its members to change their names. In the interest of good international relations, the torukoburos agreed to rebrand themselves as soopurando, or soapland.
I was fortunate to be able to visit Japan last summer. While I never made it to a soapland, I did in fact leave my wife behind on one occasion when I went out for a night of male bonding. Tomy Naruo, my Japanese host, was kind enough to take me to a baseball game between the Tokyo Giants and the Yokohama Bay Stars. It was a great evening despite the fact that the hometown Giants lost.
A few days later I met two men who worked for the Sendai Eagles, another Japanese baseball team. My wife and I were on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto when I realized I had left my cell phone in the taxi we had taken to the train station. It was our great good fortune to discover that the man directly across the aisle from me was the interpreter for the Eagles, who were playing the Kobe Buffaloes that evening. Having studied strength and conditioning at The University of Iowa – he was also the strength and conditioning coach for the Eagles – he spoke flawless English. Within a few minutes he telephoned the taxi company, confirmed that my phone had been found and turned in, and arranged to have it shipped to our hotel in Kyoto. I came away from the experience with an enhanced admiration for the honesty of Japanese society. I never thought I would see the phone again and fully expected to find hundreds of thousands of yen in charges on the bill. I also came away as a committed fan of the Sendai Eagles. My only regret is that I never learned the name of the interpreter who saved the day for me.
During my two weeks in Japan I got the distinct impression that baseball is even more popular there than it is in the United States. It dominates the sports pages, which devote extensive coverage not only to the Japanese leagues, but also to the Japanese players on Major League teams, including the Cardinals' So Taguchi. More significantly, wherever we went I saw kids playing baseball. Whenever we passed a playground or park we were almost certain to see a baseball game in progress. By contrast, most of the baseball diamonds I passed in St. Louis over the summer seemed to be unused.
Unlike baseball, which was brought to Japan by an American professor named Horace Wilson in the 1870s, shortly after Tokyo became the capital, sumo wrestling has been around at least since the eighth century, when the capital was still in Nara. With roots in Shintoism, sumo still involves a lot of religious ritual and prayers. Sumo also involves athletes who can each weigh upwards of 600 pounds, which is more than the collective weight of most major league outfields.
Becoming a yokozuna, or grand champion in sumo, requires years of rigorous training and a diet that includes lots of chanko-nabe (a special stew rich in protein), rice and beer. Considering the importance of beer in the diet of sumo champions, perhaps we should find a yokozuna to serve as a spokesman for The Beer Drinkers Party.
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