viewpoint
BY STEVE MCQUIDDY
Fighting for Crumbs
Time to take our place at the table
O
ne of my earliest jobs was as a busboy at a fancy restaurant along the
Susquehanna River in southeast Pennsylvania. The building was a
Revolution-era tavern, partly made out of giant river stones, and rumor
said that George Washington really had slept there — or at least he had stopped
somewhere nearby.
Wealthy people came to dine there; we served them lavish meals and cleaned
up what they left behind.
The dining room was intimate, with about twenty tables and a huge stone
fi replace at one end. Menu items were written in French on one side. On weekends
a trio played Baroque music, dressed in period costumes right down to the
powdered wigs.
We worked in teams. Two waiters in tuxedos and one busboy in a white dinner
jacket served fi ve or six tables set up in candlelight, linen tablecloths, hand-made
metal serving plates, half a dozen forks and spoons, and three or four goblets for
drinks.
We fi lled wine glasses without picking them up, we noiselessly set their dinner
courses down from the left and removed their fi nished meals from the right, we lit
their cigarettes with a silver lighter, we opened champagne bottles without spilling
a drop.
When someone ordered baked Alaska for dessert, the entire dining room
watched as the lead waiter rolled out the gas-powered hot plates and poured
fl aming liqueurs into the pan. The sizzle and fi re always brought better tips.
Even with the best tips, we could never afford to eat there. Back in the kitchen
after we’d cleared the tables, we were not averse to picking morsels from the
wealthy diners’ plates before scooping the bones and bits of rice and coagulated
sauces into the trash.
Sometimes at the end of the night the chefs would put out a plate of leftover
pheasant legs or a piece of trout that had too many bones to serve the diners. We
didn’t mind that it was cold.
Sometimes we shared our crumbs with others; sometimes we ate them
ourselves. No one begrudged the system because we all worked hard for our
crumbs. You might call it a kind of cooperative scavenging.
The system worked because each night we divided our tips, and each Friday we
cashed our modest paychecks. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. And for most
of us, there was the belief that with time, energy, and perhaps a little luck, there
might be something more.
We could easily have turned on each other, though, if the system were reversed
— if we served and cleaned up after the wealthy diners, then handed them our
paychecks and tips as they left. Then, we would have only the leftover scraps and
cold pheasant legs. And the fi ghts would begin.
This of course is absurd; no one would submit to such treatment. And surely
no one would attempt to force it on others. Yet this is exactly what has been
happening to the American worker for more than a generation.
Over the last three decades, we have been serving and cleaning tables
for “people” called corporations and the people who benefi t from them. As
their profi ts and bonuses have soared, our wages have stagnated. As their tax
percentage has dropped, ours has remained roughly the same. As the laws have
been changed to reduce their responsibility to workers, other laws have made it
harder for the workers to make it alone.
For 30 years we have been serving the wealthy diners ever-more fancy meals
and steadily handing them more and more of our paychecks and tips as they leave
the dining room.
When they recently took the economy to the brink of collapse, we served them
the largest feast of all, some $300 billion on a menu called the Troubled Asset
Relief Program, or TARP, signed into law in October 2008 by President George W.
Bush. Then we paid their bill.
Now the diners tell us some waiters and busboys are getting a few more cold
pheasant legs than others. They say this is not fair, that we should pass laws to
make sure no busboy gets more bony trout than any other.
They are telling us that we should fi ght each other for the crumbs.
We must stop fi ghting for crumbs. Instead, we should take a good, hard look at
that table we have been serving and clearing all these years. We should require
those who dine at our tables to pay for their meals. And we should then reclaim
our rightful seat at the table, a seat we have left unoccupied for far too long.
Steve McQuiddy has worked in the private sector, public sector and as his own boss. He teaches writing at Lane
Community College.
letters
TO THE EDITOR
DRINK THE RADIATION
I’ve admittedly been waiting to hear
some wise palliatives from our favorite
local nuclear expert, Art Robinson,
recently revealed as a “helicopter-dad,”
but Nolan Nelson beat him to it with
an amazing piece (R-G Letters, 3/18)
regarding Japan.
His initial statement: “As the nuclear
events unfold in Japan, they not only
fail to reveal a cascading crisis, but
represent a favorable confi rmation of the
viability of nuclear power. Japan has just
undergone once-in-a-millennium seismic
events beneath the plants, with minimal
consequences.” Causes one to wonder
what he uses for a news source (even a
week ago!?).
He concludes, after this amazing
piece of divination with advice for
future nuclear-plant construction: “…
nuclear power plants do not explode like
atomic weapons, but can only release
proportionately infi nitesimal amounts
of alpha particles through explosions of
hydrogen gas. The particles would be
lethal in groundwater contamination, if
containment and monitoring plans were
not in place already for such unusual
events.”
I trust he will be taking kids to Japan
to demonstrate his comfort with a little
radiation to publicly drink the tapwater
in Tokyo, and partake of some delicious
Japanese salads from local produce. In
the meantime I hereby award him the
“Art Robinson Nuclear Disaster Remote
Divination” award. Clearly rebuilding in
the Fukushima area and for miles inland
will be enhanced by the nuclear waste
available for foundations, etc.
Said Albert Einstein: “Two things are
infi nite: the universe and human stupidity;
and I’m not sure about the universe.”
R. L. Thompson
Eugene
CRAZY IN POWER
With the ongoing nuclear disaster in
Japan, we must begin questioning the
psychological state of those in power.
4 MARCH 31, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
No doubt, Japanese offi cials constantly
assured the public that the Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was perfectly
safe. Their counterparts in the U.S. and
elsewhere will continue to do the same.
Meanwhile, similarly ridiculous decisions
are being made elsewhere:
People in the natural gas drilling
industry feel that “hydraulic fracturing”
of gas wells is a reasonable practice
to achieve a short-lived increase in
production even though it permanently
poisons the ground water wherever it is
done.
People working for British Petroleum
felt that pouring millions of gallons of
toxic “Corexit” dispersant into the Gulf of
Mexico was a reasonable way to address
the oil spill there even though it didn’t
make the oil go away but instead merely
dispersed it, making it less visible.
Knowing that artillery projectiles
made of hard, heavy metal are extremely
effective at piercing armor, the U.S.
military makes such weapons out of
depleted uranium even though their use
has poisoned military personnel and
created countless radioactive waste sites
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If those making these crazy decisions
didn’t believe that their behavior was
acceptable, they wouldn’t make such
decisions and they would be fi red and
replaced with someone else. Therefore,
to progress in their careers, they must
develop a strong degree of denial, delusion
and/or sociopathy. Just as we would talk
about an abusive alcoholic, we must begin
talking about the psychological state of
those in power.
Robert Bolman
Eugene
WHERE WERE YOU? PART II
Betsy Ragland wrote a letter entitled
“Where were you?” (3/24). I have to ask
where was someone like her and the other
kind people who helped the fallen man
with the walker when, the very next day,
March 11, I was walking along the very
same Coburg Road near P. F. Chang’s.
I was enjoying a rare overhead blue
sky and fl uffy white clouds. Within
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