Next, Baghdad’s National Library went up in smoke, and half a million books were reduced to ashes. Many of the earliest publications in Arabic and Persian, died there.
Traditions
He was his family’s headache, the worst student in his class. The disgrace had no solution, until the father of that wretched student put on a banquet for his teacher. At the end of a long evening of food and flattery to delight his pride and palate, the teacher went home weighed down with gifts. By morning, the worst student had become the best.
A word more, a word less, this story from over four thousand years ago has never gone out of style, proving that bribery is one of Civilization’s oldest customs.
It was found on the banks of the Euphrates. The Sumerians told it, through symbols that look like bird tracks drawn with pointed canes on one of the thousands of clay tablets that disappeared from the Baghdad Museum.
The Pioneer
Humanity’s Great Inventions: No one knows who invented the wheel that moves carts and machines, but we know who invented the wheel that drives the economy. It was Marco Licinio Craso, born 115 years before Christ.
He discovered that the market depends on the push and pull of supply and demand for goods and services.
To put this economic law into practice, he founded a company in Rome.
Thus was born the first private firefighting firm.
It was a great success.
Don Marco set fires, then charged to put them out.
Another Pioneer
Pepe Arias founded the first virtual company. Half a century before online commerce and NASDAQ, he put four thousand square feet of land up for sale in Buenos Aires.
Pepe greeted prospective buyers, contract in hand, ready for the signing. He received them on his feet, because the place wouldn’t even hold a chair.
“Where is the land?” they asked.
“Here.”
“Here?”
“Yes, sir,” Pepe explained, raising his arms to the heavens. “Four thousand square feet, straight up.”
Role Models
When the end of the millennium was drawing near, our local press touted a huge success story. It was about a Uruguayan who shone with his own light in Internet heaven. As it turned out, the glow from our star of cyberspace was rather fleeting, but while it lasted the president of the country exhorted us all to follow his example.
This exemplary entrepreneur had been a child prodigy. At the age of six, he rented out toys to his friends in the neighborhood, at daily or hourly rates. By the time he was ten, he had founded an insurance company and a bank: he insured school supplies against theft or accident and lent his schoolmates pocket change at a reasonable rate of interest.
State of the Art
Levi Freisztav came to Patagonia nearly half a century ago.
He came out of curiosity or maybe by happenstance. Strolling through the land, breathing in the air, he realized his parents had chosen the wrong map. And he stayed for good.
When he first came south, he found work on a hydroponics project. A local doctor had read about the novel idea and decided to give it a try.
Levi dug, hammered, and sweated day after day, knocking together a complicated structure of glass, metal struts, and split pipes for growing lettuce in water. If they do it in the United States, the doctor liked to say, it’s a sure thing; those people are the vanguard of civilization, technology is the key to wealth, we’re centuries behind, and we’d better run if we’re going to catch up.
Back then, Levi was still a man from an asphalt world, the type who believes tomatoes grow on dinner plates and who goes bugeyed when he sees a chicken uncooked and walking. But one day, contemplating the immensities of Patagonia, it occurred to him to ask, “Listen, doc. Is it worth it? Is it worth it, with so much land to be had?”
That was the end of his job.
On Sale
He looked like Carlos Gardel, after the plane crash. He coughed, adjusted the knot in the scarf protecting his throat. That rag had once been white.
“I’m not selling anything!” he growled.
He was standing on a bench across from the Pensioners Credit Union in Montevideo. In his hands he held a cardboard box, tied with bits of string as frayed as he was.
A few onlookers gathered, all of them elderly or very elderly. Pepe Barrientos, who was always wandering about the city, stuck his nose in too. Gradually, the onlookers became a crowd.
“I’m not selling anything!” the man repeated.
When the moment arrived, he raised the box with a theatrical gesture and offered it to the heavens. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not selling anything! Because this. . this is priceless!”
The old folks pressed in anxiously, while those bony fingers, moving as parsimoniously as a lover prolonging his pleasure, slowly untied the twine that held the mystery fast.
The box opened.
Inside were pieces of colored cellophane tied in the shape of butterflies.
Each cellophane was a new life. They were green, blue, purple, red, yellow. .
“Your choice!” the crier growled. “Pay what you can and get a new life! It’s a gift, ladies and gentlemen! You’ll pay more for a bottle of wine that contains poison, prison, insanity!”
Marketing
Salim Harari always kept a little bag of pepper, that unfailing weapon of the East, close at hand to throw in the eyes of thieves. But not even thieves bothered to come in. The store, La Lindalinda, was as empty as the stomachs of his nine children.
Salim had come from far-off Damascus to sell fabric in the town of Rafaela. He wasn’t about to give up. The lemon tree wouldn’t bear fruit, so he tied lemons to the branches. Not a single customer came in, so from the balcony he tossed yards and yards of cloth into the street. “We’re giving it all away!”
News arrived that a ship had sunk in the Parana River, so he sprayed water on his satins, calicos, and taffeta and shouted, “Cloth rescued from the shipwreck!”
Even that failed. It was useless. People walked by and looked the other way.
His misfortune lasted a long time. Every day was worse than the last and better than the next, until one night Salim rubbed a burned-out lamp and a genie from the old country appeared. The genie divulged the magic secret: charge to get in.
That’s when Salim’s luck turned. The entire town lined up.
The Exemplary Banker
John Pierpont Morgan Jr. owned the most powerful bank in the world, as well as eighty-eight other companies. Since he was a very busy man, he forgot to pay his taxes.
When the story broke, he’d been remiss for three years running, ever since the crash of ‘29. The many who had been ruined by the catastrophe on Wall Street were furious, and it became a national scandal.
To alter his rapacious image, the banker turned to the head of public relations for Ringling Brothers Circus.
The PR man suggested he hire a phenomenon of nature, Lya Graf, a thirty-year-old woman who stood twenty-seven inches tall but had neither the face nor the body of a dwarf.
A huge publicity campaign was launched, built around a photograph of the banker on his throne, gazing like a kind father at the miniature woman on his knee. The symbol of financial power sheltering the common people who had been diminished by the Depression. That was the idea.