The Inevitable, Ignominious End of the Three Alphas

Lost in all of the losses, the roster upheavals, the endless disinformation campaigns, and the instagram recriminations, there was a cold comfort to the Three Alphas era of Chicago Bulls basketball.  The front office, fresh off of proclamations that the team would become younger and more athletic, signed Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo, two decorated, headstrong veterans with big personalities and collectively two and a half functioning knees between them to a universal chorus of disapproval from the basketbloggerati, and the entire enterprise collapsed exactly along the lines that everyone predicted.  In a year that has seen the entire project of prediction and conventional wisdom fall by the wayside, it is at least reassuring to know that when Rajon Rondo is introduced to a volatile environment of executive sabotage, espionage, and bumbling coaching howdy-doodery, a rational person can still count on the inevitable dysfunction.

The Bulls ended the Three Alphas project by trading Jimmy Butler to their old nemesis Tom Thibodeau, who committed the cardinal sin of winning with enough vomiting Nate Robinsons that people gave him credit instead of John Paxson and Gar Forman.  There is no need to go over the details of the trade-- there is an entire internet of that for the universal condemnation of the hideous return the Bulls got for one of the best players in the league.  That was to be expected.  While there's a decent case to be made that the Bulls should cash in Butler, no Bulls fan wanted the flustered Adam West-era Batman Villain front office to get swindled for a package headlined by a Knee Guy.

Chicago fans once again go into the attic to get the 
crutches for their ironic knee-related art installations

The Bulls are left a smoldering crater of basketball horror, the remnants of poor drafts, lopsided trades, and a bizarre commitment to targeting players despised by fans.  The Three Alphas turned out to be a lone alpha operation.  Rondo, who honed his game into a Shermanesque repudiation of jumpshooting, played competently only in select national TV contests.  Wade disintegrated before our eyes like the guy who drank from the wrong grail in the Last Crusade on numerous dunk attempts.  He will pick up his option and gleefully pocket his $24 million while easing into semi-retirement-- it is possible that he will replace his seat on the bench with a hammock.  With the exception of the time he paid $25,000 to make throat slash gestures at the Boston Celtics, Wade's willingness to put up with the gruesome specter of hoiball in order to take more of Jerry Reinsdorf's money is the only thing he's done as a Bull that I respect.  The Bulls are now left with two vestigial alphas clogging the salary cap and sowing dissent as the team sinks to the bottom of the standings like a rotting ship floating aimlessly because the entire crew has already mutinied and eaten each other.

The Three Alphas devolved into increasingly bizarre social media feuding

The Jimmy Butler trade has ignited a firestorm of fan anger towards the Bulls' front office.  John Paxson, the floppy-haired hero of the 1993 Finals, has transformed into a bald, flinty-eyed executive who runs his front office like a crime boss in an action movie who spends all his time sitting angrily in an overstuffed office chair waiting for someone to be brought in to be either berated or fed to a carnivorous animal.  Paxson holds press conferences infrequently and only after an earth-shatteringly boneheaded move where he irritably fends off questions by people who he clearly thinks are too dumb to comprehend his plan even though he works in a field with the most literal definitions of success and failure possible.   Gar Formans' job is to burst out of ducts and gnash his teeth at people.

Bulls fans secretly hope for a Terminator incident to prevent Paxson 
from sinking that shot in the 1993 Finals in order to prevent him from 
trading Jimmy Butler for a guy who is going to be dunked into a Wile E.
Coyote accordion

There is little to look forward to.  A team with Butler and the largely incompetent roster from this season would battle again for a brief playoff cameo.  The Bulls acquired no additional draft picks and sold their second-round pick, a pick so old that it's riddled with those s that look like f letters for straight cash to the Golden State Warriors.  That money should, at the very least, go to upgrading the fleet of t-shirt blimps, hiring dozens of playwrights to come up with a new Stacy King catchphrase, or at least lowering the free big mac threshold to 99 points.  The Bulls are a sclerotic organization run by people who seem to have given over the entirety of their jobs to petty feuds and contracting exotic gouts. Thank goodness the city has an entire Big Ten team to fall back on.

FORD'S RAINFOREST

There are few things in the world more unnerving than a wealthy, powerful industrialist who decides that it is time to do something especially if that industrialist has enough money to buy a tract of land the size of two Delawares and has a vision of society includes strict and specific ideas about folk dancing.  By 1927, Henry Ford had developed a company powerful enough to try to industrialize the Amazon rainforest while indulging his belief that he could also build a community based on his own bizarre beliefs in a non-existent idealized America in the heart of the jungle.  Greg Grandin's Fordlandia follows Ford's disastrous Amazon rubber plantation between its founding and abandonment in 1945.  Grandin argues that, in Fordlandia, Ford saw the rainforest as not only a source of rubber but a blank slate upon which he could project his interpretation of American ideals that were, he believed, under increasing attack in the United States from forces like the government, unions, Jews, and as Grandin suggests, the very forces of consumerism unleashed by his own ubiquitous automobiles.  Grandin shows how this grand Amazonian Fordism fell apart in the face of remote and incompetent management, workers who chafed against Ford's strange and exacting behavioral expectations, and the jungle itself, which laid waste to millions of rubber trees and rendered the entire enterprise futile.

Ford's foray into Brazil came from a concern over the rubber supply.  Brazil had been the world's foremost rubber supplier.  That all changed when a bumbling, hard-luck British man named Henry Wickham managed to spirit a cache of rubber seeds back to Kew Gardens.  British cultivators brought them to Sri Lanka and Malaysia where the trees thrived with no natural predators.  Soon, Asian production outpaced the less efficient Brazilian supply and brought rubber under British control.  Wickham's story is chronicled in Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World, which ends with a brief section on Fordlandia, and which I reviewed although I focused mainly on a brief passage that involves one of Wickham's ancestors getting cheated in a horse race by the slovenly George IV.  As Grandin describes it, Ford and tire magnate Harvey Firestone resented that the British government had the ability to tax and restrict their access to such a precious resource and began to scheme to grow their own rubber, free from taxes and restrictions and the grubby fingers of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill.

Grandin describes how Fordlandia from the start had problems with managers who were hired to build cars and then found themselves shipped out to carve an America from the rainforest.  One early manager, an overmatched ship captain, turned to drink as disease claimed three of his children.  His successor, a Ford engineer from Detroit, left after the heat made him swell up.  He did two stints, and I like to imagine that he returned, fit, and glowing with health only to step off the gangplank, blow up like a parade float, and get rolled back into a cabin.  Willis Long Reeves Blakely, the first manager and an acolyte of Ford's enforcer Harry Bennett, established himself by repeatedly subjecting the port city of Belém to his naked ass:

Blakely quickly gained a reputation among the rogues and expatriates as a drunkard and exhibitionist.  He stayed in the best corner suite on the second floor of the Grande Hotel, Belém's finest, with a veranda an floor-to-ceiling windows, the shutters of which he left open as he walked around naked and made love to his wife.  The hotel, since demolished, was located on the city's central plaza, and Blakely's room faced the majestic Theatro da Paz, where the city's gentry promenaded every evening, coiffed and bedecked in formal wear.  "Everyone on the street could see," complained the hotel manager...

When Ford came to a region, whether it was a Michigan lumber town or millions of acres of rainforest, it brought the promise of investment, infrastructure, hospitals, and high wages. The price, as anyone clamoring for Ford involvement found, was a demand for conformity with Henry Ford's ideas about how to live. These ideas included enforced temperance, refraining from jazz age "sex dancing," and not unionizing; Ford unleashed Bennett's Service Department, a violent, cudgelous goon squad, to intimidate, infiltrate, and physically attack any group with a whiff of union about it.
 
Bennett (l) with Ford (c) sporting his signature bow tie 
look that he wore because of its strategic value in fistfights. 
 Bennett's most interesting role in the company was in a 
bizarre Ford family psychodrama where Ford set him up 
as a rival to his son Edsel.  Ford delighted in taunting and 
insulting Edsel, who he saw as weak and unable, unlike 
Bennett, to call in swarms of violent goons to render violence 
against his enemies and hammer them with his fists 
probably with weird nineteenth-century boxing stances

In Fordlandia, the Ford proscriptions extended to Main Street USA style houses wildly unsuited to the climate; Grandin's interviewees and archival sources described them as "hotter than the gates of hell," "galvanized iron bake ovens" and "midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night, and frequently between midnight and dawn undergoes a fierce siege of heat-provoking nightmares."  A switch to a sweltering mess hall and buffet system so incensed workers already pushed past exhaustion clearing brush through a maze of biting insects and poisonous snakes provoked an uprising in late 1930 that could only be quashed with help from the Brazilian army.

Ford's greatest folly was his belief that industrialization could be brought to bear on the Amazon. The grand economies of scale that had turned Ford into an automotive juggernaut could not produce rubber.  The company's attempt to mimic the enormous plantation production in Asia failed Brazil, where an entire ecosystem had developed around destroying tree clusters.  As Grandin describes it, the rubber tree canopies became highways for blight as waves of insects, fungi, and caterpillars leveled the trees year after year.  Ford's management figured out how to perform elaborate tree grafts, but production remained dwarfed by Asia and, by the late 1940s, petroleum-based synthetic rubber. In 1945, Ford's grandson Henry Ford II took over the company and sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government for the cost of back wages owed the workers.

Grandin trawled through archives and traveled to Brazil to chronicle a largely forgotten monumental enterprise.  Parts of Ford's settlements and factories still exist with roads and water towers and homes and possibly stacks of mildewed newspapers with strong a strong editorial voice in favor of the fox trot.  The strength of this book is its profile of Ford as a man with the resources and will to not only bring a Fordlandia into existent but to suffuse it with his various monomanias, to send armies of people to clear and plant and build and die, and to try to control how hundreds of thousands of people ate and dressed, learned, and thought about time itself. The whole enterprise invites an inevitable comparison to Fitzcarraldo on a massive scale, Werner Herzog's movie about a madman trying to move a boat against the unyielding rainforest while yelling and making Klaus Kinsky faces. If Ford yelled at the rainforest, though, he did so in Detroit.  He never visited Fordlandia.

Mundial

Global commerce has surely ground to a halt as people the world over are hunched in front of their computers, tantalized by the World Cup and paralyzed by indecision over which fist to shake in righteous slightly xenophobic sports anger (ergonomists would say to alternate except when you need double-barreled fist shaking action for particularly odious soccer-playing nations). The World Cup is by far the world's greatest sporting event, with the possible exception of September Northwestern games against uncomfortably plucky FCS teams under the watchful eyes of dozens of fans disguised cleverly as more than 17,000 by the Northwestern Ministry of Comical Soviet Statistics.

Comparison of Northwestern's reported home attendance for the
Towson game versus other important world phenomena. Note
that the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling Competition and Wake
was canceled last year due to overcrowding after local officials
literally begged people not to attend. An unauthorized cheese
rolling took place to a crowd of only 500 rebellious cheese rolling
enthusiasts.

The Cup has provided plenty of drama so far, with late goals and goal differentials deciding who advances past the knockout stages while the rest of us hold our breath for a breathtaking FIFA lot-drawing ritual. The most entertaining part of the World Cup so far has been the Shakespearean collapse of the French team featuring a brooding madman, insults that are much funnier when comically translated into clumsy English (although nothing can top "I prefer the whore that is your sister" for inelegantly transcribed soccer-related zingers), the always crowd-pleasing division of the team into opposing camps, and the occult mystery of astrology.

The FFF has been blamed in keeping the despised Domenech around
because he carried the burden of the glorious French mustache
throughout his playing days. His reign bears certain similarities
to the also gloriously-mustachioed French President Jean Casimir-Perier,
who lasted only six months as president in 1894 before resigning, claiming
that he had been marginalized by the ministers who taunted him with
unnecessarily mean-spirited legislation such as "resolved: this legislature
moves to level the President's comically lopsided head"

Casimir-Perier only took the reigns of office because of the horrific assassination of Carnot, who I will venture to guess was the last modern head of state that was actually stabbed to death. Carnot found himself enmeshed in an endless whirlwind of anarchist vengeance. The whole episode stems from the guillotining of anarchist bomber Ravochol, which prompted a retaliatory bombing from another anarchist named Auguste Vaillant, who was then executed and avenged by bomber Émile Henry whose death along with Vaillant prompted Sainte Geronimo Caserio to take a dagger to President Carnot in an act of brutal simplicity that would have immensely frustrated a nineteenth century French version of Frederick Forsyth.

BIOPIRACY

It is time to turn from the depressing notion of anachronistic assassination techniques and turn to the far more exciting world of botanical piracy. In 1876, Henry Wickham returned from the Amazon with an unheralded find that would eventually give Britain control of the world's rubber supply and destroy the Brazilian economy. That find was 70,000 seeds of the hevea brasiliensis plant, the world's most bountiful rubber tree.

Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World describes Wickham as a sort of bumbling over-eager botanical agent working for a sinister Kew Gardens hell-bent on gaining control over valuable plants the world over (of course, as far as I'm aware, Kew is no longer an international center of botanical intrigue; the only piracy there is the ridiculous demand of £13 just to get in the place). Jackson excellently evokes the Amazon as a vast cornucopia of horrible tropical illnesses and incessant attacks from tiny organisms that live only to attack or lay eggs in the last places that a human would ever want eggs planted by anything. Wickham's act of piracy itself involved a rather disappointing lack of swashbuckling, as he managed to successfully secret the seeds onto a fortuitously empty freighter-- unlike the gloriously apocryphal Robert Louis Stevenson pirates who menaced people with an eighteenth century Cockney argot or even submarine-using South American drug navies, Wickham's theft involved a lot more monitoring of moisture levels than the futuristic Johnny Mnemonic theatrics that the term "biopiracy" would suggest.

It would in fact be even more shocking if a
nineteenth century person who gained notoriety
for practicing devious botany did not have a
spectacular mustache

Wickham never gained much financially from transporting rubber trees and spent his life moving increasingly to the fringes of the British Empire in a perpetual state of financial ruin. The seeds he brought back eventually became forests in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), while any attempts to tame the rubber tree in the Amazon fell into ruin. The most amazing attempt came from Henry Ford, who purchased 2.5 million acres of rainforest in order to create a massive rubber plantation that he humbly named Fordlandia. In typical Ford fashion, he sought not only to turn the chaos of the Amazon into an efficient natural factory, but also make it a vast city where he could mold workers into his idea of moral and model employees. Inspired by its vast success in the United States, Ford instituted prohibition in his borders; workers and locals cleverly circumvented this by erecting a series of taverns, brothels, and other houses of vice just outside Ford's jurisdiction and hilariously named it the Island of Innocence.

However, the best part of the book is a barely mentioned aside discussing Wickham's family. His great-grandfather, a minor aristocrat, lost his estate due to royal treachery. The comically villainous George IV, who spent most of his adult life as the Prince of Wales fending off his father's bouts of insanity and iron will to live, dealt with his position by becoming a bloated, gout-ridden pox on British society. In this case, the Wickham ancestor foolishly made a wager with the Prince on a horse, in a time when horse racing was so spectacularly crooked that skill in picking the ponies more often than not corresponded directly to skill in hiring unsavory underlings that could most successfully cheat. The Prince's men put weights in the jockey's pockets; even though the cheating was discovered before the race, the hapless punter was done in by either misfortune or, as I would wager, some other sort of undiscovered skulduggery such oat manipulation or using horse psychiatry to rob the horse of its equine self-confidence. The details of the race were published in Gentleman's Magazine, a publication that no doubt prided itself on showing different ways to cheat at horseracing until two people were forced to shoot each other in the most dignified and civilized way possible.

Both George Cruikshank (left) and James Gillroy portrayed George IV as
a corpulent, scheming Jabba the Hutt-like figure, with the title of
Gillroy's painting effective eulogizing the hefty monarch as "A
voluptuary in the horrors of digestion"