Dearly Beloved:
The sermon today comes to us from the King James version of the Bible and has to do with two writers who appear in that version. The first is Matthew, Chapter 20, Verse 16. That verse says, “So the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”
The second writer is Luke, who writes in Chapter 13, Verse 30, “And behold there are last which shall be first and there are first which shall be last.” As your preacher, I can tell you that Matthew and Luke were so friendly that one could finish the other’s sentence after it was started. On the other hand, cynics and non-believers may conclude that Matthew and Luke were guilty of plagiarisms in the holiest of books used by the Protestant faith. Your aged preacher is going to stay out of this argument about plagiarism and leave it to the congregants to decide where the truth lies. In any case, I hope that your contributions to the collection plate will be generous, regardless of whether you support Matthew or Luke.
This essay is being dictated on a Monday afternoon. Everyone knows that sermons are delivered on Sunday, and are entirely inappropriate on Mondays. So we will now proceed to three or four examples of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
The first example involves the Bell System. At its peak, the Bell System had one million employees and untold wealth. It was represented in every corner of the United States by what were called associated companies. There was the New York Telephone Company, Illinois Bell, etc. In addition, the Bell System owned a manufacturing arm that was gargantuan in size and was called Western Electric. There was also the Bell Laboratories which was renowned throughout the world for its discoveries. Finally, you may wish to recall that the Bell System was named after Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The Bell System had an enormous influence in the various states of the union as well as in the Congress of the United States. Organizations at that time, prior to 1984, with one million employees were considered behemoths. But this behemoth was a gentle giant who sponsored first radio, and then television programs to uplift the masses. The “Bell Telephone Hour” was one full hour of excellent music with no hard sell being involved anywhere in the programming.
The Bell Laboratories was considered the sine qua non of all the laboratories in the world.
I worked for the Bell System for 43 years, and from what I could see the company operated well and provided Americans with superior communications services at reasonable costs. But there were opposition forces who considered the Bell System a monopoly in spite of the fact that it was tightly regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. For several years, there had been an effort to break up the Bell System. That end was eventually achieved by the Telecommunications Act of 1984, which in fact caused the Bell System to spin off its properties.
The net effect is that, for example, Western Electric eventually became a subsidiary of a French concern called Alcatel and is now clearly just a junior partner. The Bell Telephone Laboratories seem to be have been scattered to the winds and when we drive by the main building of the Labs, the parking lot is empty and the lawn is populated only by passing geese. The individual companies of the Bell System did not thrive and in the end tended to seek partnerships of their own. The point is that at one time there was an organization that provided excellent telephone service to the American people, but it ran afoul of jealous competitors who wanted a piece of the action. Perhaps this is the price of progress but such progress is unattractive to this long-time observer.
The whole Bell System was gathered under the name of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. From its lofty heights having more than a million employees with untold wealth, the Telecommunications Act of 1984 was its death knell. A few years back, the entire American Telephone and Telegraph Company was purchased by one of its former subsidiary companies for a grand total of $16 billion. If you read on, you will find a much smaller organization that was sold this past week for $52 billion. So you see, when it comes to the Bell System, the first shall be last and if your telephone needs repair you will find that it will take perhaps three or four days for your new telephone company to get around to that work. So as a Bell System pensioner, I can only say, “Matthew and Luke, where are you now?”
In telling the faithful about the Bell System, I almost forgot that for many years AT&T stock was considered highly desirable. It tended to grow in value and, more than anything else, it paid a handsome dividend. Mothers of prospective brides always considered a Bell System man a good catch. But at this moment, that is neither here nor there because the Bell System no longer exists. Again, the first shall be last.
The second citation I would like to make for the congregants here today has to do with the General Motors Corporation. For all the years since I came along, General Motors was the rock of American manufacturing. They manufactured the Chevrolet automobile for those getting started out in life. As they succeeded, customers could proceed upward from the Chevy to the Pontiac. If a promotion or two were involved, they could graduate to an Oldsmobile, one of the oldest American marques in the car business. When a man moved from the Oldsmobile to a Buick, it would be said that he had arrived. For many years, General Motors manufactured a small sportier Cadillac called the La Salle. A man who drove a La Salle would possibly be mentioned in the society pages of his local newspaper. And finally, at the top of the line there was the Cadillac, which told the world that you were at the top of your game.
Over the years of my driving career, I drove each one of those automobiles except for the La Salle. Unhappily and unfortunately, as I drove the more expensive cars in the General Motors line, they proved to be less dependable. In 1986, I bought a Cadillac coupe which supplied inferior service during my years of ownership.
But now General Motors has fallen on hard times. It kept on building the gas-guzzling SUVs and pick-up trucks. It would not take a Rhodes Scholar to point out that in the last few years hybrids were being developed by the Japanese automobile industry and that sooner or later economy would become the name of the game in the automobile business. But General Motors kept building its gas-guzzling models. It had plenty of company in that the Ford and the Chrysler organizations did the same thing. At the same time, they did not improve the quality of their regular automobiles either.
In the automobile industry in this country, there have been gigantic layoffs. Whereas General Motors stock used to sell for around $50 a share, its most recent price was slightly under $10 per share. General Motors needs a cash infusion because it is having trouble converting its SUV assembly lines to lines that will produce fuel efficient automobiles.
And so General Motors, which used to be the crème de la crème of the American automobile industry, now comes at the end of the line and Matthew and Luke are correct when they say the last shall be first or the first shall be last, whichever applies.
A final example involves Budweiser beer. Yesterday it was announced that the Anheuser-Busch Corporation, which manufactures Budweiser, had been sold to a Belgian organization called InBev. Because of the devaluation of the American dollar, the Belgians had all kinds of money to invest in the Anheuser-Busch Corporation and in the end they walked away with the prize brewery in America. To add insult to injury, they will now market Budweiser with the word InBev on the label as an additive to Budweiser. The loss of Budweiser to the Belgians is a terrible insult to St. Louisans such as myself. Matthew and Luke didn’t say the following piece of doggerel about St. Louis, “First in shoes, first in booze, and last in the American League.” I am not a writer of scripture but it seems to me that the poem about shoes and booze and last in the American League would lend zip to the Holy Scripture as sculpted by King James of England.
A few years back, Budweiser was so big that it could brush aside a law suit filed by the citizens of Budweiss City in the Czech Republic. For many years the citizens of that town had manufactured a local brew which was called Budweiser. If the citizens of my home town of Clayton manufactured a local brew, I suspect it might be called Claytoner. But the judges were unimpressed by the arguments of the Czech producers of that Budweiser beer and the Czechs were told to get lost and pay court costs.
And so it is, my fellow congregants, that I have offered you three examples which tend to prove that Matthew and Luke were on the mark when they wrote, perhaps several hundred years ago, about the first shall be last. There was the Bell System, the General Motors Corporation, and Anheuser-Busch. As your clergyman, I regret the demise of the Bell System and of the General Motors Corporation, and when it comes to Budweiser, I can only say that lips that touch Budweiser-InBev shall never touch mine. On the other hand, St. Louis is not last in the American League because years ago, the St. Louis Browns were sold to investors from the Chesapeake region and are now called the Baltimore Orioles. But that is small consolation and I still grieve when I think of the Bell System, General Motors, Anheuser-Busch and the
St. Louis “Brownies.”
It all goes to prove that Matthew and Luke were right when they said several hundred years ago that the “First shall be Last” and sometimes those displaced from the lofty positions at the top of the ladder are also forgotten and recalled only by those with feelings for nostalgia.
E. E. CARR
July 14, 2008
Essay 327
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Kevin’s commentary: Okay, but what about the second part? I’m seeing plenty of firsts head to last in this essay, but not a lot of lasts seem like they’re coming in first. I guess Japanese cars used to be considered as pretty awful, and they’re beating the heck out of GM these days, but that’s a stretch.
Also the $16b price tag mentioned in this essay was particularly eye-opening in light of Facebook’s recent acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp is a fairly simple peer-to-peer messaging service with a staff of about 55 people. It’s valuation is mind-boggling to me when put next to a lot of other “real” companies, especially other companies in the communication industry. Tech valuations are friggen out of control these days.
P.S. — “Matthew and Luke were on the mark” is either very clever or very unintentionally clever.