Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Someone managed to sing without a guitar. They sang to deafen their ears to the approaching whirlwind. The access streets to the plaza were blocked. There were warning shots fired though the heads of the leaders. In the cavernous middle of the Great Depression, over 100,000 workers from 30 separate unions declared the Great Banana Strike. Involved were seven...

UNITED STATES—It was not the “constitution” per se that got Allied Fruit Co. back up again and going. It was the energy behind the policies. It was a new deal, and the new deal was an old deal, going back to the lean and small Chamelecón Co. format, the minnow that swallowed the whale of Allied; it was a...

UNITED STATES—After the Delaney’s second tenure, the company gradually but steadily slid in till the year Richard Nixon ran for president, the new Nixon (thank you Bernard Lukasey, the public relations wiz manipulator extraordinaire) who said there were indeed some people he would not work for, including Hitler, whose people had sought to contract him, but Nixon he didn’t...

UNITED STATES—The advertising wiz Bernard Lukasey deftly spurned overtures from Hitler’s people to do work for the Fuhrer. It became a calling card that he had some scruples. On the other hand, Bernie did advise Willy Long, and he later came to rue his undeniable role in the creation of the King of Louisiana. “You have to ditch the bib...

UNITED STATES—You to be over 50. By then you know tempus fugit; time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana. Sam Delaney, unlike so many of his corporate peers, always saw himself more in the worker role than in management, more in the striver than the Kingfish. The Kingfish was an entrepreneur and organizer, more outspoken...

UNITED STATES—“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” said the wholesome apple-cheeked man in whose meteoric ascent to power Sam the Man Delaney had been murmured to have had a hand. Once upon a time in Louisiana there was a man named Willy Long, and he was a man for the times. It was a Depression, harsh times, and people were...

UNITED STATES—Marcos had tried the city. A new world opened up to him with the fancy check from the Chamelecón Fruit Co. Bodies of wide-hipped women, whisky and playing cards. In the name of whisky, fleshpots and the ace of spades—they were the unholy trinity that brought Marcos down. The jackdaws cawing on the telegraph wire in the luminous...

UNITED STATES—There stood Sam in the snazzy, well-tailored clothes from New York, that were the outsize sartorial expression of a man who gets all the loot and has had enough of all the khaki and shirtsleeve decades. He made a concerted effort not to use the words kvetch, for complaint. But in the end was so crass, this little...

UNITED STATES—Sam Delaney must not have been a businessman at heart. As a class they are often encouraged to be psychopaths at the extreme, married to lucre alone, “success” serves to foster what our time would term psychopathic tendencies, to pillage, exploit, and plunder. After another pivotal encounter with the Bhagavad Gita conjured a soul who lives in a...

UNITED STATES—The landowners in Bananaland, who had sold out and then made a bonanza, they too would be on a train, not immune to the allure and magnet of the camps. The American scribbler and embezzler (alias) O. Henry slapped the name Banana Republic. No wonder he was an embezzler when you are in the United States of Dollars...