Everyone looks for something to talk to an American about. They are tired of bashing George Bush and soon tire of asking whether Obama will really be our next president. What can I say except: “Every president makes his predecessor look terrible”? The world doesn’t understand our political system and believes that nothing and no one good can come of it.
Then there is talk of the dollar. That usually starts with the statement “I remember when…” the Ozzie dollar was sixty cents or the Swiss Franc was fifty cents or the Euro was one dollar or etc. Does that mean the world is surpassing the U.S. somehow or that the U.S. is stumbling economically. It opens the whole subprime conversation and the criticism of the US savings ethic.
More recently I received sympathetic questions about our flooding. From the lakes of Switzerland to the Thames to the Sydney Harbor people want to know whether my friends and family are well in these devastating floods. I mention that St. Louis was built on a bluff so though the arch steps are wet, my house and office are all secure.
But recently, Sydney was the theatre (note my spelling) for a series of conversations around the Busch family in St. Louis. Here was a business masking as a “family business” – a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Not like the family businesses elsewhere said an Australian but “merely a platform for a family to pretend it owned a business and glorify itself and its pals with shareholders’ money.” An Australian in the liquor business told me that the Busch company was notorious in its lack of inspiration and direction. And experts on family business told me how the company was a model of what family businesses should not become.
I tried my best to defend the company. I pulled every phrase I could find in the Post-Dispatch, hurriedly read on-line every morning. I scoured the Herald Tribune for any patriotic defense of the independence of our mighty brewery. Nevertheless I could convince neither the experts on family businesses nor the Australian beer drinkers I met (who don’t like Bud at all). So I returned to Obama and conversations were a little less awkward.
Until one day the Australian business paper had a small article about how the Mayor of St. Louis and other public officials had taken a position opposing the merger of A-B. The article mentioned petitions and encouraging congress to take action. At my first meeting that morning, an Australian accountant cited the article with humor. “You have floods, you have pestilence, and your mayor wants to keep a brewery from foreign ownership.” “Why wouldn’t he welcome the Belgians, they’ll run the company much better than that tired old family” said the expert on family business.
That was several weeks ago. I have heard similar conversation in London and Geneva. St. Louis “back on the map.” I have always preferred single malt (remember when Macallan was purchased by the Japanese) and now describe myself as from “near Chicago” until the brew-ha-ha is past and we can return to talk about floods and pestilence and how much further the U.S. dollar goes in St. Louis than in Sydney.
- The St. Louis Traveler. | 
July 27, 2008
