As Reliable as a _____________________.

Excuse the continuity issues.

There's a great line from the great Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe," written by Robert Riskin, and uttered by a good actor, but a bad human being, Walter Brennan. It's one of those lines I'm not sure shows up in movies nowadays. It's about 82-percent more cynical than people today can bear--that is, 82-percent truer--and it doesn't contain a cuss, a sex act or blood. Therefore, it ain't modern enough for today's audiences.

You'll find it in the first twenty seconds of the clip above and you owe it to yourself to, once a decade or so, acquaint yourself with a world view that involves more than fukking the other guy or avoiding taxes.

Pursuant to shaving and drunken barbers, I realized just now the entire problem with the world. Maybe it was prompted by going to the local supermarket and finding them out of bananas. I'm 67-years-old, I've never before NOT been able to buy bananas.

And then it hit me, in what used to be the "last best hope on earth," what used to be "a government of the people, by the people and for the people," has been taken over by an unreliable narrator.

Someone who spins BS as easily as he breathes. It's convenient, malevolent, evil, and will surely separate you from your freedom, your money, your future and your set of principles, that is, if you have any left.

Our industry too, all industries, are being led by unreliable narrators.

Narrators who tell you they have to downsize. Then take $49,000,000 golden parachutes. Narrators who tell you how they'll save $750,000,000/year and try to hide the fact that it will lead to the end of at least 7,500 jobs (at $100K/job.)

This is your trade-press.
Calling mass firings "cost savings [sic] and structure updates.

A gallery of unreliable narrators.

Narrators who claim to believe in DEI, until they don't.

Narrators who believe in diversity, that doesn't include Jews and people over 50.

Narrators who fire people and hire dumbness-producing AI bot machines and call it "marketing."

The unreliable-narrator-ness is endless.

In fact, if you go to the front page of Ad Age--the nominal advertising journal that stole their name from this blog--look at every story and append to that story the words "unreliable narrator."

Do the same when you turn on the late-term abortion that is television news. Or the slightly earlier-term abortion that are The New Tork Yimes or the Stall Wheat Germinal. 

When you hear anything from our Liar in Chief, or his ruling Kakis, felon muskmelon, the blonde spokesthing: Unreliable Narrator.

Any agency award, any agency press-release, any blather about the effect of man-in-the-moon superbowl marketing: Unreliable Narrator.

I remember as a three or four year-old hearing this lyrics and asking my mother about their incongruity. She babbled something about silliness. Missing, as we all have for too long, the Unreliable Narrator of Life. 

The cosmic Drunken Barber.

It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot, I froze to death
Susannah, don't you cry.

Or maybe this is better, by Yip Harburg, Harold Arlen and Billy Rose.

Say, it's only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Yes, it's only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Without your love
It's a honky-tonk parade
Without your love
It's a melody played in a penny arcade

It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me

Or, Conrad.