Even if, like me, you scarcely know the first thing about electric guitars, you’ll definitely be familiar with the Gibson. It’s the legendary American brand you can hear Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton playing on Cream’s ‘White Room’, and Mark Knopfler on Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, and Dave Grohl on ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
Paul McCartney uses a left-handed Les Paul Standard as his main stage guitar; John Lennon wrote most of his songs on The White Album on a Gibson he borrowed in India from Donovan; Bob Marley’s Les Paul Special is buried with him; U2’s The Edge is a fan, as is Bob Dylan, as were Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. Yep, and it almost goes without saying, Jimmy Page played ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on one too.
You don’t even need to like that kind of music to appreciate what a contribution it has made to western culture. Babies have been conceived to it; lives soundtracked by it; multi-million dollar careers and multi-billion dollar industries built on it; movies and commercials enhanced by it; memories made of it.
True, civilisation might not have worked out so very differently if Orville Gibson had never established his mandolin and guitar company in 1902; or if Gibson had never branched out into solid body electric guitars with the Les Paul in 1952 (Fender was already making its rival Telecaster by then). But our lives would have been ever so slightly the poorer for it, in much the same way they would be if there’d been no Ferrari, or no Gone with the Wind, or no disco, or no skateboarding. It’s these non-essentials that make us unique as a species: where the other ones merely exist, what we strive to do is to enhance and advance. Without Gibson, and the myriad wondrous unnecessaries like Gibson, we would be no better than the beasts.
I wish someone could explain this to Barack Obama. He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism — we knew that. But nor, it seems, does he believe in human exceptionalism, as he demonstrated once again last month when agents from his Department of Justice raided four of Gibson’s factories, confiscating thousands of dollars worth of wood and guitars, forcing the company to shut down operations for a day.
Ostensibly, the raid was to investigate a potential breach of a conservation law called the Lacey Act, in this case involving the import of protected East Indian rosewood. But why Gibson and not, say, its competitor CF Martin, whose guitars also use the same wood? Could it be, perhaps, that while Martin’s CEO is a long-time Democratic supporter, Gibson’s CEO Henry E. Juszkiewicz is guilty of being both a Republican donor and an employer of non-unionised labour?
Even if the raids weren’t a case of ‘You can take the gangster out of Chicago but you can’t take Chicago out of the gangster’ mob tactics, they do invite a bigger question about Obama’s ability to steer the US out of its economic crisis. Surely if he means what he said recently about wanting to cut regulation and promote jobs and growth, his administration has chosen the very worst time to persecute an iconic and successful US business like Gibson on an obscure regulatory technicality.
The technicality in question concerns a crazy amendment to the Lacey Act introduced by Congress in 2008. Like so much environmental legislation, it seemed like a good idea at the time: in order to prevent deforestation in countries like Madagascar, it imposed swingeing penalties (five years in prison; fines of up to half a million dollars) on anyone found guilty of importing unlicensed exotic woods such as ebony and rosewood.
‘And a jolly good thing too,’ you might say. ‘Someone has to do something to preserve our fragile planet!’ Except there’s at least one enormous fly in the ointment: China. Of all Madagascar’s ebony and rosewood exports, for example, 95 per cent go to the Chinese, mostly to the super-rich who prize it for their furniture. As blogger Lee Stranahan reports, this year’s must-have item in Shanghai is an $800,000 rosewood four-poster bed. China, of course, has nothing remotely equivalent to the Lacey Act or its amendments.
It gets worse. The wood for which Gibson is being persecuted (for the second time in two years; the Feds still haven’t handed back the $500,000 worth of stock they took last time) was not even illegally harvested. It’s just that India’s protectionist laws stipulate that rosewood for export should be finished by workers in India, whereas Gibson prefers to have its own skilled workers finish it in the US. And why should Indian laws concern an American company? Because, bizarrely, under the Lacey Act amendment, US citizens are obliged to obey environmental laws passed by foreign nations too.
You think this kind of madness couldn’t happen in Britain? It can. It already does, cheer-led by caring, sensitive, well-meaning types like the new president of the World Wildlife Fund (UK), who said this in a speech last week: ‘There is an urgent need for all of us to concentrate our efforts on sustaining, nurturing and protecting the Earth’s natural capital and, moreover, reshaping our economic system so that Nature sits at the very heart of our thinking.’
But is there an urgent need? Who says so: real scientists or environmental activists producing scare stories for Greenpeace and WWF press releases? And where does that leave people in developing countries, Madagascans say, who might wish to benefit from their country’s natural resources? And what about all the businesses which are being crushed by environmentalist red tape, overzealously enforced by a growing army of officials paid for by the taxpayer? The author of that rather sinister speech was the Prince of Wales. Sounds like the New Great Depression is his most fervent dream come true.
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