Winning.

When I was a boy, a radio station in New York, WQXR was "the radio station of The New York Times." On the rare occasion that my mother emerged from her underground laboratory and decided to un-freeze food for her three children, she'd have the radio on so she could hear it while she slopped her kids.

My mother, a non-recovering gambling addict, had switched from betting on the ponies to betting on various stock markets. Somehow, at the time, the former was looked upon as low-class and illegal, and the later was the stuff of country-club conversation.

Since the announcers of WQXR would recite the nightly stock quotes after market close, my mother tuned in, when she was sentient with the ardor of someone with a rabid monkey on her back. "Amalgamated Fontesque, 44 and an eighth, down a quarter. Poughkeepsie Woolens, 18 and three-quarters up a quarter." This would go on for what seemed like, to my eight or nine-year-old ears for hours.

But before or after that, there was another list that was recited. An announcer would tell us of the weekly, or daily, or hourly casualties from Vietnam. He would start by saying, "Eleven hundred North Vietnamese dead. 600 Viet Cong dead. 550 South Vietnamese dead. And 12 Americans."

Then he, and it was always a he, would read the name, the rank the age and where the American victim was from. "Robert Mundie, Corporal, 21, Norman, Oklahoma."

Looking back on it from almost sixty-years' distance, it was quite an education. Some years later, when I was an eleven-year-old in a baseball camp, my Dudley Do-Right muscled counselor, Nelson Chase, sat on his well-made cot crying. He had lost his best friend in one of those Vietnamese jungles.

These reports were a horrible thing to listen to. 

But they were truth.

Today, our country fights wars, disappears people, and locks others up for their entire lives and they receive no ink, physical or digital. 

We have no news in our news. 

Instead we hear about lycra-clad d-listers doing a sky-high stunt. Or we mourn a ninth-rate actor with paeans about their time on "The Love Boat."

I think of this when I think about the ad industry. 

Late last week, about 45-percent of the people of the various over-bought WPP media companies were fired. In antiseptic amerika, we don't say fired. We say laid off. As if they'll be hired back when the economy improves. 

They won't be.

There is no economy. There's only a land-grab. And only six people have a bucket to do the grabbing with.

By the way, WPP's buying of all those media companies is like a single man buying 14 pounds of bananas to get one ripe one. They were always planning on throwing out 97-percent of them

Meanwhile, I read something last night in a new, and very good history of World War II called "Scorched Earth," the title of which is a good summation of our current economic and political and greed-driven era.

In writing about the Nazi offensive "Barbarosa," a German tank commander observed that the Wehrmacht needed to stop its bloodletting at the hands of the Soviets “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Win ourselves to death.

If there were anything remotely resembling the Vietnam reporting I described from my childhood, people reading this would have an idea of the huge destruction (the scorched earth) brooked by the greed of the holding companies. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have been fired since 2000 (WPP had 200,000 employees as recently as 2012--today that have just around 100,000) and literally hundreds of once-mighty agencies have been picked clean like a chicken carcass at a Passover dinner.

In a couple of weeks, the self-congratulations will Kaytusha from various undustry organs. We'll hear about the yachts, the rosé, the side-boob, the quasi-celebrities. We'll hear a list of the "of-the-years," and tales of the bravery and the courage of people and clients and the base-metal golden calves called lions.

We'll hear terabytes of bullshit.

We'll hear everything but the names of those killed.