Look what they've done to my song, Ma.

Look what they've done to my brain, ma
Look what they've done to my brain
Well they picked it like a chicken bone
And I think I'm half insane, ma
Look what they've done to my song.

I wish I could find a good book to live in
Wish I could find a good book
Well if I could find a real good book
I'd never have to come out and look
Look what they've done to my song.

Ok, this is going to discursive at its best, with connections and leaps aplenty, so fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight.

I am not a sports fan. Perhaps the only male in America who isn't. This time of year, when baseball starts its month-long crescendo, I wonder why. Today, I believe, I figured it out. The brand that sports used to maintain (its immaterial whether or not this brand was based on mythology or not) lied to me. Maybe they started lying when baseball went on strike and because of circumstances, the team with the best record in the majors that year didn't even make the playoffs. Maybe I'd been lied to too often when I discovered that the greatest player of my generation bet on his team to lose. Maybe I finally had too much when what had been sold to me as a contest of athleticism and level-playing fields became one of amphetamines, steroids, god-knows what else and rapacious owners who flouted their wealth in order to acquire "winning," as if winning is something that can be bought, like virtue and integrity and courage.

Whatever, call me deluded, I feel today that the sports brands have lied to me. And as I don't wish to associate with liars, I no longer associate with sports--especially big-time college athletics which is the biggest sporting lie we have.

But there is a larger point to leap into, and leap I must. What about Brand America? Has it broken so many promises to the world that a change in administration cannot heal it? Admittedly, despite the greatest income disparity in our history, I will concede that there is an economic pull that draws people to this country. But what about the mythic side to the American brand? Has that been destroyed completely? I am not anti-American, I am attempting to look at this with dispassion, but hearing Robert Mugabe undress Bush and America in front of the UN, and agreeing with him is quite disturbing.

In today's NYTimes (have you heard of it?) Thomas Friedman re-writes a bit of Emma Lazurus: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”

We've undone Habeas Corpus and the sanctity of human rights. We've destroyed the ozone layer. We've invaded countries and used uranium depleted weapons to kill them and their earth. We've tortured and ignored international law. Is this America? Are these behaviors on brand?

The deeper point here is that I am not trying to be political. I am trying to discuss America the brand and what is on-brand and what is off-brand behavior. Naturally, no brand is always on brand. As we've noted in the blog, even Apple stumbles. America is no different, I suppose. What remains to be seen is if any of those midgets running for president can say, "we've erred. And my job over the next four years is to fix our brand." Just before he was killed Lincoln called America "the last, best hope for Earth." Maybe I believed in that like I used to believe in the beauty and truth of Sports and Mickey Mantle's muscles. Maybe my belief in the verity of Lincoln's line is nothing more than the delusion of an infatuate. I hope not. I'd like this brand to come back.

Day 1068.

Since Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, I have gone one-thousand sixty-eight days without using that term.

$190,000,000,000.

That figure above is the one-hundred-and-ninety billion dollars that defense secretary Gates has said we need to continue fighting in Iraq. I suppose, though no one says, this is over and above the $600 billion we already spend on offense, er, defense. (By the way, the plan to give health insurance to America's children, which would cost $7 billion and be paid for by higher tobacco taxes, has been rejected by the Bush Wehrmacht as being "too expensive.")

I have a mathematical mind and a good head for numbers. Iraq has a population of 20 million. So spending $190 billion there could translate into giving each man, woman and child in Iraq $9500. $38,000 for a family of four. Free and clear. No taxes.

Here's what I think we ought to do. Allot half that money to consumer goods and give each Iraqi a 96" flat screen, an iPod, and half a dozen Prada accoutrements. Then with the other half of the money, rebuild their infrastructure and beam in the mindless televised crap (complete with pharma commercials) that is the opiate of our populace and keeps our outrage confined to issues as seminal as Britney's body fat, Janet Jackson's nipple, and John Edwards' haircut. Also, we could invite drug cartels in to further anesthetize the people. After all, the Mexican drug cartels alone do a combined $23 billion in sales here, which must keep more than a few potential trouble-makers nodding off rather than rabble-rousing.

I'm serious.

This makes sense to me.

Another new word.

This one I didn't make up. It was revealed to me by the ex-boss I referred to in my previous post. Apparently someone showed him storyboards he didn't like. His response to the work was "It's not fun and it's not funny. It's unny."

That's funny.

I've just created a new word.

When something is stupid or utterly foolish, you can call it asinine. But what about when something is beyond stupid and beyond utterly foolish? Like agencies that refuse to adapt (sometimes you can't keep the dinosaurs from the tar-pits, my favorite ex-boss once said to me about a client.) Or what about agencies that refuse to grow-up and thus never make the transition from pleasing clients to leading clients?

Or what about our daily dosage of dumbness dispensed by companies that seem to do all they can to drive you away dissatisfied? (See General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, the airlines, the telcos, movie theatres, supermarkets, mass-transit systems, mattress manufacturers and retailers, television networks, computer manufacturers, big-box retailers, avaricious employers, for example.)

What do you call them when the word asinine isn't strong enough?

Asiten.

I hate them both.

The president of Iran, who got his PhD. in traffic management, spoke on Monday at my almer mata, Columbia University. And yesterday the president of the US, who has a PhD. in lies and deceit spoke at the United Nations. I hate to say this but I think I dislike Bush more than Ahmadinejad.

First off, Bush runs a country that spends more than the rest of the world combined on military armaments, while nearly 1/6 of its citizens have no health care. Second, he has eviscerated civil liberties in the name of preserving our liberty. Third, he is a global warming denier. Fourth, I could go on and on and on.

Ahmadinejad is despicable. And a holocaust denier. An alleged exporter of "terror." But compared to our ConnecticutTexan and great Satan, he is small potatoes.

After all, our government exported terror by invading at least two sovereign states on a pretext. Now it comes to light that Blackwater sets traps for Iraqis and then shoots them when they're snagged. We also execute more people, mostly dark and poor, than Iraq. More on a per capita basis too.

Ad Aged for sale.

Microsoft bought an agency recently. Google and Yahoo! are rumored to be buying whole networks, so I guess it should come as no surprise that I recently ran a classified ad in the Agency Pennysaver hawking Ad Aged. With Digitas having been sold for $1.3 billion, I figured I'm worth triple that. After all, I have ideas, integrity and I speak English, not a bullshit jargon bizspeak buzzword platitude patois argot crapola.

Now, a sentence or four on being bought.

It doesn't make a thimble's-full of difference who you're owned by if you don't have ideas. Holding companies don't influence consumer behavior, ideas do. Yes, holding companies can be sources of financing, can help with contacts and backroom deals. But without ideas, it's all a crock.

Mission statements and dumbness.

The New York Times had a good article in it's business section yesterday on the ubiquity of mission statements and how they are infected with "bizspeak and bromides."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/jobs/23mgmt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In creating this synthesized blather, companies engage in much of what is wrong with companies today. Mission statements, after all, become "an important team-building experience"...they're created by a "broad cross-section of people [who] would jointly write a statement both specific and lofty and then seek feedback from other employees."

Ack ack ack ack ack.

That's all for me right now. I have to start activating Ad Aged's mission statement which is: We are committed to continually restore principle-centered content to proactively disabuse the prevailing paradigms of corporate manifestations."

Halavai.

The Siberian Dilemma.

< I just read Kurt Campbell's blog in the NY Times and in it he talks about something called the Siberian Dilemma. Here's how Campbell describes that dilemma:
"The fishermen of northernmost Russia go out onto the frozen lakes of Siberia in temperatures at times approaching 60 degrees below zero centigrade to fill their catch. They know from experience that the biggest fish congregate at the center of lakes where the ice is the thinnest. They slowly make their way out across the ice listening carefully for the telltale signs of cracking. If a fisherman is unlucky enough to fall through the ice into the freezing water, he is confronted immediately with what is known as the Siberian dilemma. If he pulls himself out of the water onto the ice, his body will freeze immediately in the atmosphere and the fisherman will die of shock. If, however, he chooses to take his chances in the water, the fisherman will inevitably perish of hypothermia. Such is the stark choice presented by the Siberian dilemma."

Somehow, and I'm not exactly sure how, the Siberian Dilemma reminds me of the plight so many agencies face today. Do they stay in the hypothermic water of the status quo, or do they pull themselves out and perhaps die of shock. This is not to say that agencies today face only a Hobson's choice--but most agencies today seem not to make any choices at all, that is they are letting the future happen to them rather than inventing it. And that is a sure way of either dieing of shock or freezing to death.

Is "blogging" new?

Yes and no. Posting things online for the world to read is new, ie. the delivery system is new, but as a form, blogs are really "feuilletons."

This confirms Ad Aged's thesis that the principles of good communication haven't changed since we became Erectus, only delivery technology has.

I was introduced to the word feuilleton when I read Joseph Roth's great book, "What I Saw," about his life in Weimar Germany. He described it this way:

A feuilleton is best described by what it isn't. It isn't news. It isn't the metro report. The opposite of an editorial, a feuilleton is descriptive, philosophical, meandering and poetically inclined. Though the word is French, the form reached its apogee in fin-de-siècle Vienna. An early master, Alfred Polgar, said, ''Life is too short for literature, too transitory for lingering description . . . too psychopathic for psychology, too fictitious for novels.''