Starvation.

With the Jewish Holidays, Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur (Jewish rush week) fast approaching once again, as they have every year for most of the last 6,000 years--including the darkest days of the Hitlerite state--preparations in our little Connecticut sea-side shambles are beginning to form up. 

The preparations remind me a little bit of a ragtag baseball team getting ready for a series of games somewhere. Slowly duffles get packed with uniforms, spikes, bats and balls. Rolls of tape and batting gloves and tubs of atomic balm for sore wings find their place amid the canvas. 

Before long, a few dozen boys have packed their change of clothes, their chewing gum, an old paperback or two and an ancient plastic transistor radio, maybe from Korvette's, to break the monotony of the transoceanic peregrinations.

Accordingly, for the Jewish Holidays, my wife is writing little shopping lists on small sheets of paper, menus are being planned, daughters and others are being consulted. The long unfurl of preparation is easing into the wind.

Not too many hours ago, my wife sent me a receipt via email of some holiday-adjacent-Eastern-European-Jewish-adjacent food she's dispatched to our younger daughter out in San Diego. There's not an eatery in all of that urban agglomeration not decorated somehow with a surfboard. It is as distinctly un-Eastern European as the world gets.

When I got the receipt I thought, lovingly, of my wife. She is, and has been since her late 20s--more than forty years now--the matriarch of our small, slightly-larger-than-nuclear family. As I have been for forty years now, the patriarch.

It's not that we're the oldest, it's that both my wife, L, and I were "born old." We grew up with parents who were missing, drunk or otherwise irresponsible. In turn, our responsibility muscles got an early and frequent work out. At early ages we were making sure the work of running a family, meals, getting to school, picking people up at airports, etc, got done. We suffered from a lack of parenting, and in accommodation for that lack, compensated.

As I do, however, I started thinking about matriarchs and patriarchs. The mat and pat part is easy to get. It's "ma" and "pa," without being all disgustingly Latinate about it. The -arch part is a little less clear to those not in the habit of looking words up.

The -arch part brings us to the advertising point of today's post.

It occurred to me as I was on this etymological gallop that the agencies I grew up in had -archs roaming the halls. Older people--even people with their names on the door--who set the tone and tenor of the joint. 

They were the resident "fathers and mothers" of the agency. They could mete out reward and punishment. They established standards. They could glare at you. You were, from an evolutionary point of view, somewhat bred to please them and to meet their demands. You certainly knew your ass was in a sling if you disappointed.

Last week I was asked to write an endorsement in support of an ad luminary's nomination to the One Club Hall of Fame. My friend Rob Schwartz was asked to do so for a different luminary. He sent me what he wrote. His nominating letter quickly leapt to this passage.

That passage illuminates one of the important aspects of the
--arch job. A toughness. A sticking to values. A standard that is unambiguous and not subject to discussion.

As defined above, --arch: "to rule, lead the way, govern, rule over, be leader of."

I wonder if today, in agencies, and in the larger world in general, we are suffering from a lack of --arch-ness. The muckety-mucks in corporate, at the holding company, the matriarchs and patriarchs now make 200 to 300 times what those who work for them make. They usually sit apart from them. They don't walk to halls and kibbitz with their children. 

They have rarefied, ivoried, in and from a distant planet where different rules, even a different sense of humanity apply.

Culture, often, is a masthead or an email or some inauthentic representation from the long-ago days of --archs. To be blunt, quoting a dead founder is not the same as someone who has taken over for that founder and assumed their --arch-ness. Someone who will feel personally disappointed if the work and the performance and the comportment of the place is slovenly.

Maybe decay due to lack of --archness is inevitable. Rust never sleeps, after all. Everything that rises must recede. 

But I can't help but think this decay has been sped along by the cheapness-impelled firing of people who would be matri-and-patri-archs had they not be shit-canned because they harkened back, and more broadly, the general dismantling of another --arch, hier--archy.

Years ago, you had to live up to the people in big-windowed offices, who made big salaries, and who got the big assignments. Today, everyone sits in the same crappy tables and you can't tell who's got a forty-year track-record of building brands and who's just graduated from ad school.

The holding companies saw fit to destroy all that --archiness. Matriarchs. Patriarchs. Hierarchs.

With that destruction, they destroyed so much more.