Skippy (minor spoiler if you've never read GR)

[Gary Thompson]

I saw this on a mailing from "Focus on the Corporation" [address for 
FC at end of post]and thought it might make a good post in anticipation 
of the many accounts of multinational corporations in GR, e.g., the 
Rathenau seance (163-67). Sorry to be early but I'm leaving town again
soon. 

"Skippy peanut butter. Made by the New Jersey corporate giant,
Bestfoods.
The same people who bring you Hellman's mayonnaise, Entenmann's baked
goods, Mueller's pasta, Mazola corn oil, and Thomas' english muffins. 

"Now, if you are older, there is a chance you will remember a comic
strip
character named Skippy. Skippy was the creation of Percy Crosby. 

"Through Skippy and his other characters, Crosby lampooned politicians
and
crusaded against corporate crime, Al Capone, the Ku Klux Klan, and for
civil rights, child labor laws and freedom of the press. 

"In the early 1920s, Life magazine began running the Skippy strip, and
Skippy was syndicated in newspapers worldwide from 1926 to 1945. Crosby
became a wealthy man. In 1925, he obtained a federal trademark
registration for Skippy. 

"Enter Rosefield Packing Co,. which in 1933 began selling Skippy peanut
butter, without getting permission from Crosby. On the peanut butter
label, Rosefield used the same Skippy lettering, picket fence, and paint
bucket made famous by Crosby in his comic strip. Rosefield was later
bought out by the Corn Products Corporation (CPC, Inc.) which changed
its
name in 1997 to Bestfoods. 

"Percy Crosby's daughter Joan Crosby Tibbetts believes that her father
was
wronged by Bestfoods and her predecessors and she is determined to tell
her father's story to the world. Earlier this year, she put up a web
site
(www.skippy.com, also at www.rjriley.com/skippy) detailing her father's
fight with the powers that be."

There's a lot more at that site (the first one includes a visual image; 
the second seems to be just text), but I'll leave the FC post at this
point.

The most relevant P passage is of course the bit in the Byron the Bulb
sequence
(640-55), including . . . 

	"A ‘37 Ford, exempt from the K.H. [Karmic Hammer]? C'mon quit fooling.
They'll all end up in junkyards same as th' rest!
	"Oh, _will they_, Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then?
	"W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th' War, I mean there's no new
cars being built right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable in
tiptop shape cause there's not too many mechanics left here on the home
front, a-and we shouldn't hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker
prominently displayed in the lower right--
	"Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and
retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the
paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His
shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it
because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the
pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes
the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or ‘Der
Leid-Stadt,' that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem about
the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read
it, because _we_ are going to Happyville." (644)

More here on the War as the set of points, which takes us back to
GRGR(6). 
And of course there's material here on our friend Pointsman from
GRGR(7), who has
just now sent Slothrop to Happyville . . . 

I think that this passage's account of the movement from individuals
selling 
stuff to impersonal and (in theory) immortal corporations which plunder 
every little corner in search of profit [pages of illustrations] is 
_GR_'s equivalent to _V._'s drift toward the inanimate / entropy. The 
reason it's more convincing (to me, at least), is that it removes the 
threat from the domain of the abstract and inexplicable to the domain 
of institutions, thus giving us a more familiar set of agencies to
explain 
how it's happening. (This is work that's probably been done
already--refs
anyone?--so I won't work at it now.) 

Previously I commented on _GR_'s indeterminacy, but this anticorporate 
theme is very consistent, it seems to me. 

Gary Thompson, off for a bit to cool, refreshing Dallas . . .


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