Sunteți pe pagina 1din 10

Why Luxury Goods' Entrepreneurs Are So Ludicrously Stupid!

We would have to sift forever to find an enterpriser more dopey than one who today produces exemplars of opulenceThe Trinkets of Vulgaritysuch as bags, luxurious vehicles, private jets, haute couture clothing, accessories, yachts, designer clothes, luggage, shoes, watches, jewelry, and then some more. There is a glut of conspicuous consumption in view, but targeted to only a few: those who can render it! Let us concentrate on the one more parasitic on Look than any other: Italy. Perhaps no other country in the world is so cramful with works of art as Italia is. The people of Italia refer to their Past to live in their Present. The nation boasts beauty in design, fashion, and architecture. Its culinary prowess is renown; its machinery goes to all parts of the world; and, its manipulation of matter gives joy to millions who sightsee through Italy, drink from its glassworks, or touch its wood and marble creations. When one ties the knot of his silk cravat made in Como, wraps around her wool scarf manufactured in Prato, fastens the laces of his stylish leather shoes made in Varese or Firenze, or strokes her fine linen from Lucca, the MADE IN ITALY label is certain to bring a sense of glee and contentment to both the sexes. Italia is a hands-on economy. Its modus operandi is meat and potatoes capitalism. Until very recently, invoices were handwritten. Yet, candles are used nowadays to make wax seals for the post office's official documents. Remember those rubber stamps? They are now being used. OLIVETTIs computer division went out of business. Italia is electronic only when it has to be. The Past is utmost. Italians want to create beautiful articles that fetch beautiful prices. Luxurious items. Not $50 electronic watches, but $50,000 ones that can be sold in ones lifetime for $100,000. Italian publishers do not print literary criticism essays or business management journals; they translate into Italian proven, foreign best-sellersusually from the United States. Italians are conservative and cautious in business. They are out to serve the rich. Italian businessmen do not want a low price for the masses; rather, they want a high price for the elite. Italians are penurious. Even with their language. Italian has remained almost the same for

centuries. English has as much as five times the amount of lexicographical entries in dictionaries than those Italian offers. Is it possible that Italians gesture so much because their language lacks the words needed for the expression of it? Italia is, therefore, anti-scientific; that is to say not with it. Italia is low-flamed on a backburner in the very hot kitchen of Progress. It is an ingredient in the zuppa internazionale that provides flavor far more than it replenishes the hungry with vitamins and proteins. Italia is anti-scientific by its very nature. It is a place where works of artistic and historic valuefrom the Pastare exhibited and sold to the Present. The Future enters little. Italia is where what one has should be preserved as long as possible. Italia is a huge museum which blusters about how it was. It maintains itself showing the Past to the Present, and this effort has until now reaped tremendous economic advantage. Italia is anti-scientific for another reason: its production, 90 percent stemming from small family businesses, is for the most part quasiartcraftsmanship. It is not the mass production producers breeding ground. Science and technology do not enter persistently into the minds of little Italian family businesses many of which are quick to see their children leave school as soon as possible to come to work alongside mamma e babbo. University attendance in Italia is the lowest in the European Union. An incredibly low 57 percent of Italians possess a high school diploma. Italians are gifted with an infinitely primitive sensitiveness regards design, coordination, and beauty in things they construct and manufacture. They are uncommonly dexterous in fabricating objects by hand, and their consummate skill is recognized for its wonderful transformations. But, the Italians are no longer artists and have not been for a very long time; they are astute artistic businessmen and businesswomen. Italias capolavoro is no longer creation; it is changing form. (It is the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans who are making real the dreams of Leonardo da Vinci!) Work by artisans, skilled laborers who connect the Past with the Present, is good business. BULGARI, FERRAGAMO, FERRARI, GUCCI, PRADA, PUCCI know this very well. Italians have mastered The Craftsmanship of Beauty = The Trinkets of Vulgarity. The refined technique of linking the before to the now relies little on Science. The Pavarottis and Ecos must record their CDs and publish their books not in Milano, but in New York or London where the Present looks to the Future and the technological means to deal with the

Future exist. Italias anti-Science stance, indolent in spirit, is carrying Italia further and further away from Progress. Italians are short-sighted when it comes to Science. They are traditionalists immersed in the what was. They are not complicated innovators or masterly creators. They are convinced that their Past cannot be surpassed or even equalled by any other nation. One senior Florentine citizen was heard to say, flat out: We Florentines invented everything! Everything since has just been a copy of what we created. Let us change the word anti-scientific to non-conformist and look at Italia from another angle not thought of in terms of annual reports, political expediency, scientific discoveries, or accountants printouts. Let us observe, candidly, Italia a bit as a brake on what some gauge an outlandish behavior to make everyone correspond to current customs, rules, and stylesat worst, to uphold by authoritarian means the designs of a polity characterized by a monolithic unity. (Italia has put itself up against the giants yet it is doing everything to be squashed!) The best and deftest members of Multinat Statesmanship are clear about their obsessive drive to bring the world into correspondence for the good, for the bad. Most of us who are alienated observers on the World Scene, not activists of homogeneity (giant businesses, worldly-thinking political entities, think tanks, Cyclopean financial establishments, et cetera)more inclined to authentic, outside the box, immediate considerations than to chimerical ponderingsare running scared. We are distraught over starvation, overpopulation, destruction of the Earth, social injustice, crime, inflation, deflation, pollution, AIDS, broken marriages, and so on. The majority of us are at the receiving end. We simply want peace, quiet, and security in our political, social, and ordinary lives. And we know very well we do not have what we want. We understand that together we are doing something terribly wrong, yet we want to believe that the fault is not with us but with those establishings we are persuaded to opine have failed us. This fault-finding is a great mistake. It is the hatching grounds of the very heavy-handed appropriateness and supposititious democracyboth false impressionsthat at once we admire for their compatibility, then despise for their unfairness. Non-conforming Italia serves, in part, as a symbol of that reaction against the tendency to bring, anomalously, into compliance. Delightful are the Italians. They stuff themselves with pasta and

they sing with joy. They bow with reverence to the Popes God and the United States ambassador, yet never go to church or know the name of Washingtons plenipotentiary. Italians are warm (and today very, very irritable!) unconstrained free agents. Against the Machine, the computer, electronics, rationality, scheduling, punctualityagainst the dirty conformity word. They change reluctantly and very, very, very slowly. They are always getting in the way of Progress. They are extant with an enthralling appearanceone they can count on to cover up much for them. Yet how enormous can be the influence of a mere 60,000,000 individuals20 percent of whom are over 65 years of agein impacting a world of 7,000,000,000? Italians foolishly believe that they have solved this rebus by fanatically concentrating on that which they are best at actualising: Look. And, it is Look that will eventually do the Italians in simply because Look, The Craftsmanship of Beauty = The Trinkets of Vulgarity, can be patterned after! * * *

Italian captains of the Luxury Goods' IndustryLook, par excellenceare particularly puerile and feeble-minded for two reasons that now will be elaborated upon: These pseudo moguls are sorrowfully doltish when marketing and merchandising their products; and, they are undemocraticat cross purposes with so many peoples many of whom are their own customers! When I was a boy, the post-World War II reconstruction of the devastated Japanese nation was beginning to bear fruit. Japanese products, referred to as junk, were starting to seep into the United States' economy, and the Japanese, keen on expanding their economic ties, invented a city, USA, and stamped their products with MADE IN USA to jump the Stars & Stripes' customs' lines! Slowly but surely, Japan's thriftiness and economic muscles began to swell at an astonishing momentumas if the Japanese were reinventing themselves all over again, were redefining themselves so that they could regain that vigour that had once brought their commonwealth to ruin. The Japanese had to recoup their losses and they would do it at the expense of those who had conquered them (The Art of War). Shipping containers, thought up to shuttle war materiel for the United States' armed forces stationed in Vietnam, also afterwards carried American commodities to Japan.

It did not take long for the Japanese to refill these huge metal, corrugated boxes, once unloaded, and send them back States' side with televisions, cameras, watches, Walkmans, alarm clocks, stereos, radios and other electronic merchandise and MADE IN JAPAN wares now not junk, but objects of prestige respected for a quality unbeknownst to most Americans. I remember buying my first SONY Trinitron. As a journalist, I employed a SONY cassette-recorder when I conducted interviews. I am word-processing this article on a SONY computer. I have a SONY alarm clock, a SONY TV, a SONY digital voice-recorder that I utilize to make notes. I bought a CASIO G-SHOCK, Tough Solar watchwhich gives me the exact time via radio beamingbecause a similar one before it lasted ten years without a battery replacement. I do not ever remember having to return a SONY product, and I see no reason not to be a constant customer for SONY for the simple reason that I feel surefooted when dealing with the company. Over the years, it has given me justification to trust it, again and again. (Once, as a joke, I wrote to SONY and asked them if they manufactured SONY wives!) There is a great deal of drivel, in commercial circles, about brand reliance, brand identification and customer satisfaction. Beauty is skin deep. Most products today have an aesthetic, well-formed lineament to them, but not necessarily a substantial one. The Japanese have well amalgamated Beauty with dependability and quality, and the prices of most of their products are affordable to all the economic strata in any given society. Just as in Manhattan, you can find a restaurant that charges from $15 a head to one that costs $1500 per person. The Japanese want to include everyone. From the kid who buys a CANON calculator (CANON's respect for the environment is more than admirable) to the businessman who desires to own a LEXUS. Japanese employers of workers in manufacturing endeavor to make people experience a unique connection to their company that makes individuals feel proud not only of the products they own but also of themselves. (It is obvious that the Chinese will follow in the footsteps of the Japanese. We are not far from the day when Chinese conceptions will be recognized as superior ones. Italians, in Prato and Florence (Firenze), for instance, taught the Chinese workers, these Marco Polo's in reverse coming from Zhejiang Province, who then carried carry back their new-found knowledge of textile and footwear production to China, so that today Italians produce many of their products in China, and after, stamp MADE IN ITALY labels on them!)

Italian tycoons think exactly in the opposite direction of the Japanese and Chinese. They cater to a fixed economic sector: either the very rich or those so interested in wanting to be wealthy, they are willing to put themselves in debt to give the impression, by donning running into money Italian fashion, that they are. Italian producers of luxuriousness think exclusively in terms of opulent effectuation. They are snobs but abominable at being so because their phantasmagorical mindsets are so deeply conjoined to tradition. (If you saunter into an outlet of a famous brand on Via Tornabuoni, Florence's (Firenze's) pseudo-Fifth Avenue, the snotnosed salespersons there will look you over, from head to toe, to ascertain whether or not you are a financially well-equipped prospect.) Italian fashion lords want all to wear their staples because they are convinced, that in doing so, Italians will be privileged with the adulations their Look confers on themselves and then others. These execs are not humble! Most Italian high-priced, fashionable vendibles are to be worn on special occasions, and if not, in the company of others who are prone to brag of their costly tastes at clubs, expensive restaurants or in the salons of exclusivity. You never see, in Italy, a woman shopping at the supermarket with a $5000 GUCCI bag and wearing $3000 FERRAGAMO shoes! (Who might be inclined to sport a pythonskinned bag, with a chartreuse-dyed crocodile handle, in public!) Italian luxury goods' titans of the fashion biz are anal-hoarders. Stingy SOBs! They are completely humorless, keen to take offence, insecure, self-righteous and are always criticizing their performance and that of their subordinates. Nothing satisfies them because they are forever wanting more and more and more. The analhoarding character is stubborn, orderly, cheap, punctual, obsessively clean, rigid and deficient in ideas and originality. Because they see the world as hostile and dirty, they preserve their mental balance by keeping things at a distance from them and by controlling external events as forcefully as they can. Anal-hoarders are fanatical preservers of time and space, seeking order and security in their lives which they feel are victimized and beleaguered by forces which are against them. These characters have no sense that their psyches flow through a series of ups and downs in between which they may collect their strength to prepare to meet more of life's onslaughts. Anal-hoarders are always safeguarding themselves because they believe their lives might be destroyed at any moment. They persevere to prevent things from going out, and in the process defeat their own purposes, for

things rejected physically (excrement and other waste products) and mentally (fears and doubts) no longer serve life in the human body and spirit and, eventually, find their departure routes from that which impedes. This personality often crosses into the domain of the perverse impulses of sadism. Worse, these Prussian-like magnates often hold Masters' Degrees in Mechanical Craftsmanship Design and Doctor of Philosophy Degrees in Corruption. (Various concepts attributed to R D Laing, Erick Fromm and Simone de Beauvoir). Should we assume that these anal-hoarders, these Milton Friedman freaks, would be so alert as to insist that individuals, capturing for them the animals to be used to make their handiwork, would be paid a just wage for their efforts? Should we take for granted that these fashion swayers struggle to obey the anti-poaching legislature governing the number of ponies, calves, ostriches, elephants, rhinoceroses, goats, cobras, pythons, rattlesnakes, crocodiles, alligators, fish, et alia, legally available for capture? Should we postulate that these geniuses of business acumen are being honorable Italian citizens when they outsource the production of their stock in trade to other countries negating the disconsolate fact that Italians themselves are desperate for work, and unemployment in Italy is so staggering it is endangering the stability of the nation? Should we be surprised that these experts of Greed have stashed away fortunes in off-shore tax-free banks and other financial havens located all over the world? * * * When I lived in Venezuela (1976-1983), I enjoyed the company of a Peruvian woman whose father had been a general in the Peruvian army and whose ex-husband had been a minister in the Peruvian government. Rosa, a kind, loving and charming lady, and her family, had had to escape Peru for political reasons, and before coming to Caracas dwelt for a while in Costa Rica. Rosa, when she was the wife of the Peruvian minister, enjoyed a privileged lifestyle many others in her poor Peru could not. While serving her country on diplomatic missions, she dined with the Shah of Iran and frequented important European leaders and their representatives. Rosa was elegant when called upon to be so, and Peru was proud of her and the efforts she and her husband strove to accomplish attempting to speak up, around the world, for the wretched Peruvian nation.

In the 1980s, Caracas was a violent city but not as knockdowndragout as it is at this writing. I was robbed then, there, three timeson two occasions gunmen put pistols to my head at both of my temples. I eventually knew very well the nooks and crannies of the streets of the City of Eternal Spring, and with this street sense, became a wiser explorer of the ciudad. If I had not served in the military (U S Army) and had not been born in a big city (New York), I may not have had the smarts to survive in Caracas. One night in Caracas makes a hard man humble! One day I suggested to Rosa that it would be cleverer if our nocturnal outings throughout the city of Caracas were had in informal clothing. No Italian and French dresses and shoes, no Rolex, no jewelry.... Rosa looked at me as if to think I were mad, but she finally did agree with me because she was a faithful reader of the Venezuelan newspapers El Nacional and El Universal that regularly elaborated on the abominably high Caraqueo crime rate. It was a novelty for Rosa to go slumming with me about the city at night in jeans and a franela. She even came to enjoy herself understanding better that, dressed as she was, she had to be accepted for what she was and not for what she represented. Further, we were able to visit some really pleasant, inexpensive restaurants that were not the haunts of Caracas's nouveau riche, cliquish set. If a thief has half a brain in his or her head, he or she is going to mug a victim garbed as if he or she is well off. Expensive-looking apparel are a badge that announces social class distinction. Clothes are on the looter's shopping list. As the void between the very rich and the very poor expands even more, one must fit oneself out to protect oneself by blending into one's immediate environment. A word to the wise should be sufficient. * * *

Our undereducated Italian luxury goods' fabricators have not the minimum amount of grey material to understand that their craftsmanship serves as a social catalysis. Instead of setting about to satisfy both of the protagonists (the haves and the have-nots), just as we all wish the Chinese will still do, the Italian fashion

tyrants, arrogantly and rudely, seek to control and rule for themselves that which should be for the benefit of all. What should we expect from these dullards who cynically respond with their smirks: Everybody's doing it! These preservatives hold too much of a share of pessimism and negativism to offer. They have grouped together to form palsywalsy cultural, social, economic and political ties which serve the inclusive general concept that a government should dole out political and civil honors according to wealth. The preservatives are not interested in offering a fair shake to their fellow men, and exclude them from their power circles with the justification that life demands a political philosophy that exalts the nation and a select group of individuals above all others, and that severe economic and social regimentation, and the forcible suppression of the opposition are necessary measures to exercise stringent control over the masses who are considered inferior to the nobler and more privileged preservatives. (Definition of Fascism, that might be today called Neo-fascism, taken from Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition.) I deny this philosophy and its aspects of myopic gloom. I look for programs which exhibit liveliness and interest in good things. Which look with hope to the future. Which signal danger but communicate love and understanding. I wish that all peoples enjoy their lives in a spirit of generosity, lucidity and freedom, and I beg luxury goods' entrepreneurs to come to their human senses and yield to the ideal that all men belong to the same community where equality and justice for all is the common goal.

Authored by Anthony St. John 15 July MMXIII Calenzano, Italia www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior

S-ar putea să vă placă și