Standing outside the castles
I had Exxon Mobil’s $39.5-billion profit on my mind the other day when I stopped to buy cherries at a stand overlooking the San Fernando Valley.
The obscenity of so much profit in a single year, the most ever for any American company, was filling me with an anger that wouldn’t abate. Even by the shaky ethical standards of today’s general merchandising, the amount was excessive.
There have been grumbles of protest since the news broke that the company had topped the world in profiteering during 2006, enhanced by the likelihood that it would probably exceed even that in 2007 when the numbers come in.
Slightly lower gasoline prices have muted a louder roar of indignation to Exxon Mobil’s disturbingly high profit, obscuring with a few pennies the amassing of billions at the expense of its customers, some of whom can barely afford to buy food. And one knows instinctively that sure as the sun rises over Wall Street, those prices will rise again right along with it.
Supplicants to the gods of wealth are confident that eventually all the protest will die down, just as it always has, and nobody’s going to do anything about oil company profiteering. Those who could, won’t, because they’d be risking their political futures and possibly their personal fortunes.
Jess Unruh, California’s one-time big daddy of the Legislature, called money the mother’s milk of politics and probably had oil money in mind. One can only wonder how many in D.C. are the suckling children of Exxon Mobil.
Meanwhile, armies of corporate spokesmen, like human robots in a George Orwell novel, intone in unison that the companies need the profits for research, for research, for research, and if they say it often enough we might even be lulled into believing it, or at least not doubting it.
The contrast between us out here and them in the castles of oil was never clearer than on the hilltop where the Cherry Man presides. His name is Arasa Nekousar, and just about every day of the week he’s selling cherries, strawberries and a lot of other good fruit at the top of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, looking down on Woodland Hills.
The only time he’s not out there, he tells me, is if the wind is threatening to blow his small stand off the hill or the rain is falling hard enough to drown a duck. He picks up the fruit he sells from what he calls a “secret source” in downtown L.A. at 4 a.m. and sets up just as dawn is filling the sky.
He makes about $300 a week during the summer months, when many are attracted by the signs he places along the road, calling attention to his wares with bright red depictions of cherries on one poster and strawberries on the other.
I hadn’t intended to interview him, but the dichotomy of Nekousar crawling out of bed before dawn to sell cherries on a hilltop for just enough money to exist and Exxon rolling in its ludicrous profit without anyone able or willing to do anything about it was more than I could ignore.
There are workers like Nekousar all over America, doing what they can to survive, usually at minimum pay or less. Many are the “food insecure” people we keep hearing about, a euphemism used to identify the hungry without placing too much of a verbal burden on our collective conscience. These include about 35 million Americans, 13 million of them children.
Hunger is a debilitating and, in many ways, a humiliating condition, forcing one into a state of desperation by the need to stay alive. I’ve been there. During what is grandly identified as the Great Depression, getting enough to eat found us digging through garbage cans for what scraps seemed edible, stealing whatever we could eat or peddle, selling our own clothes, working for pennies or turning “dog bones” into a watery soup. We were “food insecure” big time.
One reason I’m a steady customer of the fruit guy on the hilltop is my emotional attachment to cherries. We had a huge tree in the yard of an otherwise desolate East Oakland home whose basement we occupied through the generosity of a family friend. During the season, I always had cherries to eat and cherries to sell and a place in the gracious old tree to daydream of a better tomorrow.
Nekousar is one of those guys who, by selling fruit and managing college courses in accounting, sits in a cherry tree of his own dreams, pursuing a better future by starting at the bottom. I admire him for that, just as I sing of all who toil for bare subsistence against the background of a culture that rewards an evil cult of profit with billions sucked from the tables of the working poor.
This is the stuff of battle in what economic expert Harlan Cleveland once called “the revolution of rising expectations.” Social uprisings in a democratic society are achieved through legislation. Revolutions of exasperation are achieved on the streets. History records the existence of both.
One wonders which way the villains of excess profit will lead us. Not forever will the hungry tolerate the feasts of the fat cats while their children starve; not forever will profit threaten the very existence of those who dream in the cherry trees.
Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.
