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Monday, April 22 2002Gretchen's father was in town today to attend a big meeting hosted by the Rockefe11er Foundation on methods for dealing with the scourge of international tobacco, particularly in the Third World (also known as "the developing nations" or "the land of the ignorant savages"). Since he was in town, we went into Manhattan to have coffee with him after his meeting.
The Rockefe11er Foundation was located on the 22nd floor of the 420 Fifth Avenue Condominium. As you might expect, it was a lavishly-appointed building, with excessive layers of imported Italian marble veneer. There were also plenty of heavy oak, stainless steel, and even stone-slab doors, some of which slid sideways in the manner of high-tech doors on an intergalactic spaceship. None of this was any more lavish than the stuff you'd see in your average dotcom (circa 1999) but the difference was that these guys got to keep their loot and their good reputations.
The meeting was going on a little longer than expected, so the concierge gave us permission to go up to the 22nd Floor to wait. The receptionist at the front desk of the Rockefe11er Foundation, however, wasn't particularly polite, eventually telling us we should go back down to the first floor. But not before we got a stunning view of the Empire State Building from only about a block away. What with the patchy wetness from occasional recent showers, the roofs of varying heights below had an intensified hardscrabble organic look to them that seemed to place them somewhere lower on the continuum stretching from Tijuana shantytowns to the Platonic ideal of the international city. I really wished I'd brought my camera. Though I've lived in New York nine months, I've yet to take visual advantage of its considerable (though slightly diminished) vertical component.
We ended up having something more akin to lunch with Gretchen's father at one of those delis with the lavish multi-ethnic food bar. There was all sorts of meat, fish, pasta, you name it, and I mostly went for the expensive stuff since I knew they would overcharge for it by the pound. (Though it didn't much matter since Gretchen's father was paying for it.)
We mostly talked about how the American tobacco industry, having almost given up on the American consumer, has redirected its marketing efforts overseas. According to Gretchen's father, tobacco is already the number one killer of people in the world today. Indeed, we probably have tobacco (along with AIDS) to thank for the fact that there aren't quite as many famines in the world as there used to be. Interestingly, the notion that tobacco deaths are actually a good thing for a country was presented recently in a cost/benefit analysis prepared for the Czech government by Philip Morris.
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