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March
17, 2002
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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March
17, 2002
St. Patrick's Day
American Journal
Tipping in America
By Alexander Cockburn
Tip-skimming has surfaced in Boston, and there
can't be a tipper in America who, on hearing the news, doesn't
exclaim, "The greedy bastards!" In a lawsuit filed
March 7 in Suffolk Superior Court, five former servers from the
venerable eatery called Locke-Ober say the restaurant made them
kick back the bulk of their tips to management. Then, when they
made a fuss, they were fired. When they complained, the suit
alleges, they were fired. Suits are being filed against three
other restaurants by employees. The waiters allege that the restaurants
are breaking state labor laws by grabbing their tips
Sue Anne Foti, who has been a waitress
for 25 years, worked at Morton's, the Chicago steakhouse on Boylston
Street, for two years before she was fired in November. ''They
forced us to pay the management's salary,'' she told the Boston
Globe. ''I'm a single mother and I've got two kids. They were
taking food out of my kids' mouths.'' Skimming tips allows restaurant
owners to pay managers less out of their own pockets, because
the tips make up the difference.
Appearances to the contrary, greed isn't
unique to Boston. This must be happening across the country.
Soon we'll be asked to make it standard practice to tip a minimum
of 30 per cent: 15 per cent for the workers, and 15 per cent
for the management.
Hovering somewhere between charity and
a bribe, the tip is one of our most polymorphous social transactions.
At its most crude it can be a loutish expression of authority
and disdain. At its purest it can approach a statement of love.
At one end of the scale we had the foul decorum of those old
lunch places where the men thought it their right to pat the
waitresses on the backside. If a waitress objected to these caresses
the tip would be thrown into the dirty plate.
At the other end we have the elevated
snobbism of Marcel Proust, for whom the tip was a profound and
complex form of social expression. 'When he left,' writes Proust's
biographer George Painter of one meal in the Paris Ritz, 'his
pockets were empty, and all but one of the staff had been fantastically
tipped. "Would you be so kind as to lend me fifty francs,"
he asked the doorman, who produced a wallet of banknotes with
alacrity. "No, please keep it - it was for you"; and
Proust repaid the debt with interest the next evening.' Of course
he also used tipping for the coarser purpose of inducing certain
waiters to partake in those sessions of mutual masturbation which
was apparently as far as Proust proceeded in his erotic encounters.
Hanns Sachs who grew up in Vienna at
the same time as his 'master and friend' Sigmund Freud wrote
a memoir of life in that city in the late nineteenth century
in which he devoted some testy pages to the growing complexities
of trinkgeld, complexities which he took to be evidence of the
decadence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everybody had their
hand out for prescribed portions of trinkgeld - the coachman,
the doorman, the hatcheck girl, the waiter, the wine waiter,
the headwaiter, the maitre d'hotel:
"Every door which you had to pass
was opened for you by someone who demanded a tip; you could not
get into the house you lived in after 10 p.m. nor seat yourself
in the car in which you wanted to ride without giving a tip.
Karl Kraus, Vienna's witty satirist, said the first thing a Viennese
would see on the day of Resurrection would be the outstretched
hand of the man who opened the door of his coffin."
Doctor Sachs' indignant portrait is clearly
reminiscent of today's taxi driver, doorman, hatcheck lady, waiter,
and so forth, all of whom, from Manhattan to San Francisco and
from Chicago to Corpus Christi expect and usually receive similar
trinkgeld. Is America therefore in decline? Visitors to the young
republic found to their surprise that coachmen and waiters refused
their tips. An organization called the Anti-tipping Society of
America, founded in 1905, attracted some hundred thousand members,
most of them traveling salesmen. But anti-tipping laws were declared
unconstitutional in the same year that Congress passed the Volstead
Act, and Americans entered the twenties buying bootleg liquor
and tipping big.
Tipping is even bigger money now, with
well over five billion dollars per annum being left on plates,
scrawled on credit cards, squirmed through taxi partitions, and
slapped into outstretched palms. This is not so much an art as
an item in the federal budget serious enough to provoke certain
government provisions designed to insure that the U.S. Treasury
gets its tip too.
That's the trouble. Tipping is a paradox: formal yet informal,
public yet private, commercial yet intimate, voluntary yet in
reality so close to compulsory that most people, across the years,
have little difficulty in remembering the times they felt compelled
to leave no tip at all. If tipping becomes an entirely mechanical
act, beneath government supervision, it loses its vitality.
A tip must, however fleetingly, be the
acknowledgement of a personal relationship, which is why the
process can instill such panic in people plunged into a ceremony
where much is uncertain and where only a special familiarity
will teach one the proper mode.
Due contemplation of the appropriate
tip, in size and allocation, discloses not only what sort of
place you are in but what sort of person you are: the sort who
self-righteously calculates fifteen percent of the pre-tax total
and gives fifty cents to the hatcheck girl, or the sort who bangs
down a big tip with the vulgar flourish that says, 'There! I've
bought you!', or again someone like Proust, who saw the tip as
a perverse gift.
At the conclusion of an excellently cooked
but badly served meal at Boeuf sur Ie Toit, Proust (in Painter's
words) ignored the person who served him so badly and 'Summoned
a distant waiter and rewarded him regally. "But he didn't
do anything for us," protested [Paul] Brach and Proust replied,
"Oh, but I saw such a sad look in his eyes when he thought
he wasn't going to get anything.'"
The tip can become a bond between tipper
and tippee, leagued in a transaction against absentee ownership.
We tip waiters, doormen, hat ladies, taxi drivers, and hairdressers.
We don't tip flight attendants. Last week there were reports
of a tip sign at one airport askin g for trav ellers to tip the
security people checking your bags. Bank clerks, no; croupiers,
yes. The modalities are complicated, ever-expanding. The service
economy, exploding decade by decade, will affect the tipping
process. Seen more darkly, this could mean two increasingly divergent
classes, one rich and one poor, with the latter increasingly
dependent on tips, gratuities, presents, and other pretty expressions
of the master-servant relationship to get by. Tipping in America
may therefore become an ever more complex and fraught affair,
approaching the status of necessary alms-giving as for the well-heeled
traveler in India.
It would be better, some argue, to give
up tipping altogether, as they tried in the old days in Eastern
Europe and China. Tipping is, after all, about the relationship
between served and servant and should play no part in a free
society of equals. It depends on what one thinks the origin of
tipping is. It can be traced to the primitive gift exchange,
the amiable and generous distribution of surplus goods and cash
which, in its most abandoned expression takes the form of the
potlatch, where the surplus was either disposed of by common
consumption or heaved over the side of a cliff.
Me? I'm a 20 per cent guy, as a rule,
unless the service has been lousy. Women tend to be tighter in
the tips. Smokers and drinkers tip better than the live-clean
crowd. Working people tip better than the rich folk, taxi drivers
tell me.
In a perfectly equal society everyone
would exchange equivalent gifts--portions of the surplus. Everyone
would tip and everyone be tipped in universal rhythms of generosity
and gratitude. But, of course, modern society is not equal and
the surplus wealth is unequally controlled and allocated, so
the distribution of surplus wealth must always be an expression
of power and of domination.
All this was understood perfectly by
P.G. Wodehouse who approached the intricacies of the served-servant
relationship more boisterously than Proust, but who expressed
it with equal realism as in the scenes at the end of so many
of the Wooster-Jeeves sagas, in this case The Inimitable Jeeves.
"Jeeves!" I said.
"Sir?" "How much money
is there on the dressing table?"
"In addition to the ten-pound note
which you instructed me to take, sir, there are two five pound
notes, three one-pounds, a ten shillings, two half crowns, a
florin, four shillings, a six pence and a half penny, sir."
"Collar it all," I said. "You've
earned it."
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