The Past is a Present.

If you read, as I do, an endless succession of large, long books on history, you realize the timing we append onto historical events is about as deceptive as a well-groomed congressional child molester or presidential rapist.

Humans like, as a species, hard and fast beginnings and ends. So we can say things like "World War II ended when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945."

Very little could be further from the truth.

If the shooting stopped in 1945, the legacy continued. A dozen wars started when that war purportedly stopped. From the Reds versus the Kuomintang in China, to the wars on the Korean peninsula, to Vietnam, from anti-colonial movements all over Asia.

Things don't stop because we deem them stopped.

Even the religious wars like the Thirty Years' war or the Hundred Years' war lasted longer than their convenient date-derived names suggest. The legacies continue long after we mark things done.

America's Civil War might be the most-expressive example of the ongoingness of ongoing. I'd argue that 160 years after Lee's "surrender" at Appomattox Court House in 1865, that war is still being waged today.

As the January 6th confederate raid on the capital showed, it never really ended. And I'd say that with the resurgence of socially-acceptable hate during trumpism, that in terms of race-hate, amerika today is much like amerika in 1880s, that is we are redefining the permissability of evil treatment, odious terms and racist assessments.

The myth of the Lost Cause emerged in the 1880s. It is re-emerging today. 

In advertising, we are prisoners of the same sort of date-based dopiness. Such thinking leads us to data-ize the work we do that clients run, giving us a calculus so we can create yottabytes of numbers that allow us to post-mortem things that can't really be post-mortem-ed. We also subscribe to the notion of causality in advertising. If we do x, y will happen. Ignoring that the human brain has something like six-trillion neural connections. We don't know what happens with them when we run an ad. We never will

In brief, most everything, including ripples, have ripple effects. Such as an earthquake in Krakatoa that might have caused societal collapse in Nineveh, almost 7,000 miles away. 

As they say, shit harpoons. And keeps on harpooning.

A dumb ad made by AI might start to unravel dozens of years of great advertising done by humans. We like to bubble-boy our efforts--walling it off from the past. We delineate and attribute results to current moments when common-sense says they're not really delineatable or attributable. 

Bernstein had this just about right in Mankewicz's and Welles' "Citizen Kane" from 1940, before even I was born. 

I still covet BMWs based on ads from BMW did back in the 1980s and 1990s. The ads they do today do very little for because they don't seem to understand driving, the car itself or the mind-set of their potential customers. 

I'd bet a good portion of BMW's sales, or Coke's, or IBM's or almost any brand's are based on decades of imagery and messaging that hasn't run for half a century. My guess is the top two ads for Coke above sell a helluva lot more diabetes-water than the bottom two ads--if those bottom two ads ever actually ran. (Oh. And Coke lies about their recycling. They're the world's largest plastic polluter.)

I suppose all of this would have been un-needed if we all just read Faulkner's 1919 novel "Requiem for a Nun."

That's where you can find these words.

Imagine them on a 165-page powerpoint.

164 pages of padding.

Or, if you prefer.