It's always tough when an American icon dies. Hostess Brands declared bankruptcy and the closure of their business. Hostess, if you are not familiar, is the company that made all the sugary baked goods of my childhood, and possibly many of yours. Granted, there were other companies that mass-produced such things, but Hostess was easily the best for a few reasons.
First of all, Hostess is a great name for a company that makes desserts. I like the idea that any time I visit someone, a good hostess will give me lots of sugary baked goods. I always appreciate this from my friends, and while I appreciate it no less from my male friends, I can understand why "Host" would be a bad name for a baked goods company, because people might associate it with communion wafers, which taste terrible.
Hostess brought the phrase "snack cake" into common usage in America. A snack naturally refers to a little bit of food that you eat between meals. And originally this might be something like peanuts or popcorn. But with "snack cake," we began to accept the idea that cake was a standard snack.
Children all over the country rejoiced. Cake between meals, often with frosting on the inside as well as the outside? Sign me up! Hostess products also had the dirtiest names for snack cakes that you could buy at grocery stores across America: Ho Hos. Sno Balls. Ding Dongs. And of course, Twinkies. Now when it comes to Twinkies, the name is far from the
What I do want to mention about Twinkies, however, is that they secured a place in American history forever linked with insanity and murder, thanks to an inspired bit of argument that became known as the Twinkie Defense. In 1979, an attorney for accused murderer Dan White argued that a first-degree murder conviction for his client was unfair due to depression and diminished mental capacity, linked with excessive consumption of Twinkies. White ended up charged with voluntary manslaughter for killing George Moscone and Harvey Milk.
In addition to successfully reducing the charge, two other things were accomplished by this defense. First of all, we learned that Twinkies always go with Milk. And secondly, the phrase "Twinkie Defense" came into the common parlance as a way to describe an insanely improbable defense.
And while it would be easy to apply this term to, for example, the Philadelphia Eagles, it might also apply to the reasons given by management as to who is responsible for the demise of Hostess. According to the Hostess website, the baker's union "chose not to negotiate a new labor contract and instead, when presented with a final offer, launched a campaign to cripple the Company's operations and force it to liquidate." This doesn't mention, however, that workers had already taken large paycuts of roughly 20 percent a few years prior, and yet management chose not to reinvest that money into the company, but rather the CEO in 2011 took a 300 percent pay raise to well over $2 million per year. And the current CEOstess handed out some 100 percent raises to executives and wants to hand out another few million in bonuses.
So while management and the equity companies may blame the workers who don't want to take another 8 percent pay cut and 30 percent benefit cut, when Hostess collapsed, it wasn't the bakers who walked away with all the dough.
Seth Brown is a humor writer, the author of "It Happened In Rhode Island," and enjoys writing and eating Zingers. His work appears weekly in the Transcript, and weakly on RisingPun.com.
Font Resize
