“You Have Wristwatches – We Have Time”

There I was, reading a fascinating article by Patricia Marx in the May 25 issue of The New Yorker about the watch business. When she started to rhapsodize about the variety of watches – sorry, we are supposed to call them “wrist instruments” – from $1.00 to $4 million, I thought it might be good background for an article about class warfare. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to find out who paid $4 million for a sophisticated Timex lookalike?

I usually read and watch TV at the same time. It’s a habit I picked up when I had to correct hundreds of essays written by my English students. It takes a good read to capture all of my interest, and being a news junkie, I ordinarily have C-Span or CNN on. I was also listening to a Senate hearing chaired by Senator John “Dead Man Walking” Kerry on whether and how we could succeed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He had invited an unboring military five-some to testify about their multiple tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He and other senators were questioning a Marine corporal, two Army staff sergeants (one a woman), an Army captain, and a retired Army colonel on how we could “win” the wars.

The troops were polite, but all of them voiced objections to adding thousands of troops to our forces in Afghanistan. Most of them thought Iraq was going to blow up in our faces as soon as we left anyway. Most of them felt that an Iraq civil war was just “on hold.” The Army colonel said, “Over 85 percent of the world’s Muslims are Sunni. What makes us think they are going to allow the Shiites or Kurds to take over Iraq? They have been fighting each other for 1,400 years!”

A story out of Baghdad this morning supports the colonel’s contention. An influential Sunni tribal leader hinted to Ned Parker of the LA Times that Baghdad will burn “If we hear from the Americans they are not capable of supporting us… within six hours we are going to establish our groups to fight against the corrupt (Shiite) government. There will be war in Baghdad.”

The Taliban – The Cargill of The World Heroin Market

During the hearing an Army staff sergeant repeated a line from a conversation he had with a suspected Taliban leader in an Afghanistan village. It blew my mind because of its symbolism and significance. The Afghan said, “Whenever we are invaded we will fight to throw the invaders out, no matter who it is. We chased the Russians out and we will chase the Americans out.” And then came the blockbuster statement that summed up our two adventures in the Middle East and Asia: “You have wristwatches – we have time.”

That put the Afghan war in particular on several different levels: 1) A rich, pampered society against an impoverished one. 2) A rich society that buys the major portion of heroin grown by poor farmers who then sell it to the Cargill of Afghanistan, the Taliban. Then they buy weapons and explosives from our arms merchants to blow up our troops. 3) A technologically advanced society that uses Predator and Reaper drones staffed by fighter pilots 8,000 miles away – who can blow up a hut on the Pakistan border and kill everybody in it. After hours the remote pilots can go to the Las Vegas Strip for R&R.

Against us we have insurgents armed with AK-47s sneaking out at night to plant Improvised Explosive Devices made up of old artillery shells and cellphones. Teenage boys and girls blow up our troop carriers for $50, paid for with our oil and drug money. Even with all our watches, time may be running out on us.

Anyway, I thought it amusing, not karma, that wristwatches had become a symbol of success in our Western world and at the same time a symbol of our failure in the Eastern world. I hope our policymakers will spend some “time” analyzing the Taliban statement without a wristwatch.

A staff sergeant pointed out another serious problem. Our military used to deliver leaflets in the language of the area to warn villagers of attacks, programs, and rewards for turning in Taliban members. They stopped the paper attack when they discovered the literacy rate was so low in the rural areas people couldn’t read the leaflets! Don’t we ever do our homework?

The State Department just revealed that we have the grand total of 18 employees who can speak the regional language where the Taliban resides. How can you use diplomacy to get the people on your side if you can’t communicate with them? At the same time this startling fact was revealed, the Pentagon said it was prepared to have fighting forces in Iraq for ten years despite our current agreement that all troops would be out by 2012. I didn’t realize we were running an unemployment program for the military.

Are Watch Companies Feeding Class Warfare?

Wristwatches just were not part of my life early on. I must have worn one in order to get to school and work on time. I just don’t remember. I do remember buying a standard military watch in a Marine PX at the beginning of Officers Candidate School so I wouldn’t screw up an assignment. When the battalion commander calls a meeting, a lowly second lieutenant better not be late. I think I paid 12 bucks for it, a fortune for me in those days.

Now I wear wristwatches I have been given for renewing subscriptions to magazines or buying cheap pants and shoes by mail. I currently have three in working order and I change only when style or color demand it. And a couple of them are really cruddy. The cheap metal is worn and the “crystals” are scratched. But they keep good time and I never have to fear dropping them in the lake while fishing. If I need another one I’ll just renew a subscription early – or buy another $10 pair of pants.

Watches and clocks are a big business in Switzerland. The Swiss export more “watch value” than any other country, although the Chinese export more independent units. Patricia Marx, the researcher and writer of the article I previously mentioned, points out that the average Swiss watch export costs $410. The Chinese watch, although the export price is only $1.00, looks just like the Swiss watch. Ah, the ability of the Chinese to copy anything is legendary!

Actually most watches produced around the world have the same private parts, so to speak. A Swiss company called ETA makes movement “blanks” that go into other watches. It has 90 percent of the Swiss market and almost 75 percent of the world market for blanks. There are many classic names associated with the watch business – Patek Philippe, Zenith, Breitling, and many others – but practically all of them have the same guts.

The Perfect Pair – The Breitling And The Bentley

A Breitling ad in the latest Time magazine shows a watch with more little circles, hands, figures, and buttons than I would care to know about. And here’s the glowing, vibrant text for The Bentley Motors Model watch (I think the cheapest Bentley car runs about $400,000. I assume one would need a watch to match.):

“The greatest luxury in life is time. Savour every second. Power. Luxury. Exclusivity. Breitling and Bentley share the same concern for perfection. The same exacting standards of reliability and precision. The same fusion of prestige and performance. In the Breitling workshops, just as in the Bentley factories in Crewe, cutting-edge technology works hand in hand with the noblest of traditions. Born from a passion for fine mechanisms, the Breitling for Bentley collection offers connoisseurs a rich range of exceptional chronographs. While conveying the quintessence of aesthetic refinement, these wrist instruments are all equipped with high performance ‘motors,’ patiently assembled by watchmakers at the peak of their art. Time is the ultimate luxury.” Now, if these words don’t make your check-writing fingers itchy, I don’t know what can.

The largest watch trade show in the world is held in Basel, Switzerland for eight days each year. Almost 2,000 exhibiters from 45 countries staffed by 30,000 workers, work with 93,900 buyers, sellers and nosy visitors. No Taliban have ever registered although over 200,000 watches are available at the show.

Some unusual watches are available for those who thought they have everything. I just recalled that I bought a Timex for about $7.95 many years ago. The hands glowed in the dark. Timex is currently pushing the Timex Expedition WS4 for a $199 on special. Besides telling time, it gives you the temperature, the barometric pressure, the altitude, and serves as a compass. One extra delight: the face is in the shape of a Land Rover rear window. The engineer and the ad guy who thought of that should be given a big bonus.

Rolex makes the Oyster Perpetual Sea-Dweller Deep Sea watch which will still tick at 13,000 feet below the seas. I guess we will not know if it works until someone sticks his arm out of a deep-sea diving bell at that depth. It sells for $9,250. Not bad. That’s less than a dollar a foot. Rolex is the big boy in the luxury watch business, selling over 600,000 a year.

The most expensive, and perhaps the most complicated, watch put together so far is the Patek Philippe Calibre 89 pocket watch. It has 1,728 parts, 24 hands which serve 33 various functions. Pick out a year about 200 years from now and the watch can tell you on which day Easter falls. It can display a chart of the night sky which contains 2,800 stars. One sold for $4 million in 2004. It would be interesting to see what it would sell for during this recession.

Want To Wake Up And Smell The Bacon?

Another expensive watch is Dior’s Christal Tourbillion Rubies (Doesn’t that sound “Rich?”), a piece of jewelry loaded with rubies and diamonds. It’s a Limited Edition available for $1.3 million. They didn’t say whether it told the time or not.

Novelty watches and clocks are pretty big on the market for executives who want to give something different. You can buy talking watches, watches that can blow several different fragrances in your face, watches powered by air, watches which can act as TV remotes and detect Wi-Fi signals, watches that can predict the weather, watches that can unlock and lock your Bentley or Mercedes, watches that can play Tchaikovsky on a built-in drum set and keyboard, and a pig-shaped alarm clock which wakes you up with the smell of just-fried bacon.

What I think is really funny in the watch business is the fact that cheap watches keep much better time than expensive, luxury watches. An $8 quartz watch will keep much better time than a watch with pendulums, balance wheels, tuning forks, or other mechanical designs. A quartz movement oscillates 32,768 times a second. Comparing a quartz movement with a balance-wheel watch costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Marx (no relation to Karl) points out in the article, is like comparing a sundial to a watch awarded as a prize with a pair of pants.

A quartz watch movement may gain or lose about ten seconds a month. A Rolex costing several thousand dollars will probably “drift” several minutes a month. Of course, if you are busy, a manservant could change the time for you. If you really need accurate time you can go to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology and watch an atomic clock. It could possibly be off one second every hundred million years because its oscillating element is cesium.

I don’t think that makes a great deal of difference to an illiterate insurgent with no watch at all battling for his extended family, his homeland, and his religion. We have to take that into account.