An Old Song.

Since the Jewish holidays are upon us once again, as they have been every years for the last 6,000 or so, and since Jew Hate is resurgent around the world--I thought today I'd write a little bit about being Jewish in the ad industry and the Jew Hate that afflicts us all.

By the way, I call it Jew Hate not anti-semitism. The former is visceral and true. The later is anti-septic and almost academic.

I'll start with the words below from a book review on Friday in The Wall Street Journal by Dominic Green on a book Mark Mazower titled "On Antisemitism: A Word in History." 

Here's the opening of Green's review:

The word “antisemitism” is the most successful and destructive of all the political terms that, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, seek to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The sound and the appearance suffice: define political language, and you define the terms of political reality. The reality is that antisemitism is the most popular ideology of the age of mass politics. 

An inerrant harbinger of disaster, first for Jews and then for everyone else, antisemitism is institutionally entrenched on the American left and increasingly noisome on the podcast right. In a divided America, hating Jews is the sour spot that unites Islamists and Christian nationalists, white supremacists and black nationalists, college professors and the criminally insane. America the exceptional, the only Western society where Jews have lived as normal people, is now exceptional only in the diversity of groups with Jews on the brain.

Admittedly, Green's review is more than a little right-wing for my taste, but nonetheless.

As for advertising, or amerika, while just two people out of every thousand claim some Jewish heritage, Jews are not considered a minority. Jews do not figure in any calculus of diversity. Even when this benighted nation was pretending to care about that concept.

When Jews were murdered and raped in Israel--not one agency changed it's logo on social media--which seems to be the empathetic apotheosis of performative recognition. BTW, Israel was a recognized nation over 3,300 years ago as seen in the Egyptian Merneptah Stele below. 

I can't tell you how many meetings I was forced to attend on the Jewish holidays. Or how many meeting I had the strength to not attend. No provision being made for people of my faith. And you're some sort of zealot if you want to take New Year's off.

Just as it seems collectively we've forgotten the slaughter of October 7, 2023. Not to mention the slaughters of Europe and the Crusades that have gone on for over 2,000 years. While there are nine member nations of the Arab league that recognize Israel's right to exist, 28 nations in all don't accept that right. Half a dozen, representing almost 200,000,000 people, dwarfing Israel's 10,000,000 population are currently "in a state of war against Israel." That's a declared state of war, which Israel is expected to accept as situation normal.

Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen do not accept Israeli passports. No one knows facts like these. And thanks to multi-million dollar PR and ad campaigns, we're supposed to think of places like Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination and a business partner. In Saudi Arabia, they teach the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I'm kind of tired of all this.

I'm not religious. 

But I'm Jewish.

I understand the smallness and relative success of my tribe leads to hatred and abnegation. Even the early 20th Century Tsarist concoction, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," is still today in wide circulation. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Education ministry of Saudi Arabia have endorsed them as authentic.

Judaism, by the way, is/was one of the few religions, perhaps the only religion ever, to demand that its congregants read aloud in public. This began at a time when just about all the world was illiterate. If you ever attribute the prominence of Jews in various fields to some sort of cabal or conspiracy, maybe it's because for 3000 years Jews read. They self-selected their way to advancement.

It's Jewish New Year, so forgive these facts.

​In 64 C.E., sage Joshua ben Gamla issued an ordinance mandating universal schooling for all males starting at about age six.​ Within about a century​ the Jews​ had effectively established universal male literacy and numeracy.​ 

This rise in literacy occurred at about the same time as the destruction of the Second Temple—64 C.E.  ​I​t marks the moment when Judaism began actively to transform itself from a religion centered on rites and sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem to a religion centered on prayer and the study of the Torah at decentralized synagogues and study houses. Worship of God involved not only prayer but study, all Jewish males had to read if they were to practice their faith—and not only read in private but be able to read aloud in the presence of others.

The Torah and the Hebrew prayer book are not simple texts; even to be able to read them mechanically requires fairly advanced literacy. To study the Talmud and its commentaries with any understanding requires considerable intellectual capacity. 

La distruzione del tempio di Gerusalemme. The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70CE. -Francesco Hayez - gallerie Accademia Venice

  

In short, during the centuries after Rome’s destruction of the Temple, Judaism evolved in such a way that to be a good Jew meant that a man had to be smart.

You can attribute Jewish strength and prominence and success to conspiracy, space lasers, the Rothschilds, George Soros, and the Christian blood we use to bake our bread.

Or you can try to understand history.

One path offers an easy explanation. The other takes a bit of work.

Like I said, I'm tired of all this.

Maybe even mad.

Playing the Numbers.

There's an old Borscht Belt joke (and if that isn't redundant, nothing is) about a guy freshly arrived in a giant prison like Sing-Sing. It's his first night and it's lights out and the new prisoner is laying in his bunk in his cell without any real lay of the land.

After a few moments of silence in the cell-block he hears someone cry out "Twenty-seven!" Immediately, everyone is practically doubled-over in laughter. 

Just as the yuks die down from another direction someone else yells, "One-hundred and nine!" Again, everyone is convulsed. 

This hilarity goes on for a while--someone screams out a number and the convicts laugh hysterically. 

The new prisoner is baffled and he asks his cellmate to explain. "Well," says the grizzled con, "we've all been here so long, we all know the same jokes. To save time, we've numbered them all. That's how we tell them"

Wanting to be "one of the boys," the new convict decides to give this process a go. He calls out "Fifty-one!" 

Crickets.

He tries again, "Thirty-three!" 

Again crickets.

He says to his cellmate, "How come when someone yells out a number everyone laughs, yet when I do there's silence."

His cellmate says, "You’re telling them wrong."

As I am fast coming to the end of my forty-second year in advertising, I wonder how much time and effort could have been saved if we in the industry had adopted a similar sort of short-cut for advertising trends.

What if we had numbered everything that was going to, irrevocably, change everything. Rather than talk about them, attend conferences on them, wear lanyards showing we're speaking about them, we simply called out a number.

In my decades, we might have had

"1! The :15 is going to change everything!"
"2! Cable is going to change everything!"
"3! Interactivity is going to change everything!"
"4! Social is going to change everything!"
"5! Google+ is going to change everything!"
"6! Four Square is going to change everything!"
"7! Digital shooting and editing are going to change everything!"
"8! Always on is going to change everything!"
"9! Digital typesetting is going to change everything!"
"10! Separating media and creative is going to change everything!"
"11! Bringing media and creative together is going to change everything!"
"12! Story-telling is going to change everything!"

I could easily get my list up to the hundreds--and before long, have as many statements as my convicts above had jokes.

The one thing that we've all forgotten is the wisdom of Trott, as in Dave Trott. Who explains, as much as everything changes every second of every day, what hasn't fundamentally changed is you and me, humans, and therefore, how communication works.

It goes like this. In that direction, and only that direction.

You have to start with impact or no one will notice or hear what you're saying.

You have to follow up and communicate something that's clear, intelligible and reasonable, or it will fly past people.

You have to persuade people to do it or think it, therefore buy or consider what you're sellin, otherwise, what's the point.         

When I started in the business it might take you a week to create a print ad. In a good year, you might produce fifteen ads, six radio spots and nine TV commercials. 

Today, we seem to produce that much in an afternoon. Literally hundreds of ads of all different sizes and descriptions that are supposed to influence your cerebellum when they arrive on whatever platform holds you in its thrall.

To be stupidly reductive about it (what I do best) we have replaced Impact with Inundation. 

We don't try to get a viewer's attention through humor, intelligence, beauty, reasoning, music, a celebrity. We get try to get it through an endless onslaught of inconsequential pinpricks.

 

As a consequence our industry has become Lilliputian. Tiny. We create gnat-like messages that pester viewers (or those who give up avoiding us) into submission.

CEOs don't care about us. 

CMOs regard us as an expense. 

And we are procured, like fifty-pound sacks of beans, by procurement.

If you don't like Trott's upside-down pyramid, you can try this chart which I copied from Communication Arts some time in the 1990s and have been using ever since. I don't know its original source.

It's not as good and simple as Trott's paradigm, but it's worth considering. And if you're not in box 2, or you don't want to be, you're missing, entirely, the point of all this.

                            

Hooked.

If you live and work and shower and cavort and fight and eat and travel and kibbitz with enough people for a long enough period of time under a good amount of the stresses and strains that come from trying to earn enough to rub two pesos together, or maybe more, sooner or later someone is going to crack. 

I saw it in high school, losing friends to the ravages of drugs. I saw it in college, losing friends to drink and drugs and depression. And I certainly saw it in any number of the big and small agencies I've worked at over the last 42 years. 

At one agency, in fact, a copywriter's husband sat in his Chevy Malibu, closed the garage door and asphyxiated himself the slow way. She got the call in her office and I can still, all these decades later hear her screams reverberating off the dirty carpet tiles and the dropped ceiling that never dropped enough.

Back when I played ball, almost exactly half-a-century ago for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA), we had a utility man, Jorge Ibarra. One day during a stretch of games against the Diablos Rojos del Mexico, Ibarra cracked through like a hot wine glass shoved into cold water. 

Brittle. With shards.

Though I lived near Ibarra for hundreds of days and nights and countless hours of bus rides up and down the crags of Mexico, he was one of those guys I hardly ever spoke to. There was no animus between us, it was nothing like that. We'd nod and say "hey" when we saw each other, but neither of us had a set of well-lubricated gab muscles and we never had the occasion to do any jawboning.

One scorching hot week we were scheduled to play the team that was perennially the best in the Mexican Baseball League, the Diablos Rojos del Mexico. This was never easy for the Seraperos. Playing Pandilla Escarlata (the Scarlet Gang) was easy for no one, and during this stretch of away games, because of rain earlier in the season, I think we were slated to play something like six games in four nights, including two double-headers.

Our souls were tired. Our bones were tired. We were tired of being tired. My teeth overslept.

We were staying a high-rise hotel of the modest sort. It was called, without irony, El Conquistador, which indicated that it catered primarily to those from el Norte. I'd say the hotel didn't much cotton to a horde of two or three-dozen un-shaven obreros hunkering down in their rarefied surroundings and we could feel the scowls every time we congregated within an axe-length of an Americano.

Maybe it's because it was scorching hot and therefore the low season. Maybe someone from the Diablos lost a bet to someone in management at the Seraperos. Regardless, we had de-camped in the classiest digs we had, by far, ever stayed in. 

Ice machines and everything.

I don't recall the exact days and scores of the half-a-dozen games we played against the Scarlet Gang. I do recall that as the stretch of games unfolded, we got more and more bedraggled by the pressure and the loses and the strangeness of our surroundings. 

It was then Jorge Ibarra cracked.

He missed the bus to the ball park. A cardinal sin. Then he went missing altogether. After two days of being missing, not even his roomie, Refugio Cervantes had heard a peep from Ibarra.

One evening I was in Hector's room with Batista and Sisto talking about the things dumb men talk about. It was about twenty or thirty minutes before we would head downstairs to bus to the ballpark for the last of our six games. There was a knock on Hector's thick wooden door.

Two cops were standing in the hall. Hector waved them in. Decorously in their immaculate uniforms with white leather belts like military police. They took off their peaked caps and spoke to Hector.

"You have a player," the shorter cop asked, "called Ibabba."

"Ibarra," Hector corrected.

"We had him in down at the station. We have had to arrest him, but we will release him to you with no charges as long as you keep him under your care."

Hector had heard this song before. 

The taller cop left the room and in a moment he brought in Ibarra and un-handcuffed his mitts which had been chained in front of him.

"What did you do, Jorge?" Hector asked.

Jorge sat in his dusty pants on Hector's bedspread. He left an imprint of ass like the chalk outline at rear-end's murder scene.

"There were so many people. There were just so many people. And I am so alone. I decided to catch one," Jorge explained.

The shorter cop broke in. "He was people-ing," he said. "He had lowered a fishing line from his window with a fifty peso bill on it. He lowered the bill on his hook to about eye-level to the people on the street."

"By and by," Jorge said, "I caught someone's eye. They would reach for the dinero. They wanted the money. Then I would try to hook him and reel him in. There were so many people. So many people. And I am so alone."

Hector walked the cops to the door of the room. "I will take care of the boy," he assured them. He laughed, "Maybe his sliding pads have been on too tight."

The cops laughed at that and they each shook Hector's calloused right hand. Hector shut firmly the door and bolted it.

He sat in his bedspread next to Ibarra. He held the young man's hand.

"People-ing," was all Hector said.

"I caught no one," Ibarra admitted. "I used the right bait, of that I am sure. The people-ing is not good here in the city."

"Maybe it will be better in Puebla or Veracruz.

"You are not mad at me with the policia?"

"Next time, I will people with you," Hector said. "Together our luck will maybe better."

Ibarra got up to leave. The rest of us grabbed our things to go to the stadium. 

Where there were so many people.

And we were so all alone.

Hurley Burly.

If you have any sense of history at all, any sense that giant institutions have always tried to impose their world-view on the population they seek to control and, therefore, profit from, you should be very sensitive to the current dogma being propagated by nearly every giant company and thousands more smaller companies who are those giant company's willing executioners.

AI is almighty, god-like and great. Any mistake is your fault and acceptable. And any deviation from today's current technology orthodoxy subjects the deviator to excommunication modern-style. 

This morning, I came across an ad from Oracle--a malign company if ever there was one. By the way, like the drug dealer/child-killer driving a giant SUV and flaunting his wealth and power, Oracle of late is doing the same. Consider this.

This sort of growth doesn't happen to a half-a-trillion dollar company if some sort of manipulation and prestidigitation isn't happening. Something is going on that is about as kosher as a church basement potluck dinner in Pork Belly, Iowa.

Growth this precipitous is simply not tenable. It's the human contact equivalent of Elizabeth Hurley deciding I am Mr. Wonderful. If that somehow happens, something is amiss. 

Back to the 19-page ad I saw for Oracle this morning. Here are just some of the dogma masquerading as truth statements I pulled from their downloadable brochure.

What I find striking in all this is how Oracle's claims are so distant from any reality I've ever encountered. Much like church dogma in the age of Galileo or RFK-anti-science dogma coming from much of amerika today. Much like the arrogant dogma of statements like these from WPP, my ex-employer.

HINT: When your market cap has dropped from $32B to $6B in ten years, and you've shed 70% of your employees, calling yourself a creative transformation company ain't cool. It's like a rapidly metastasizing cancer hiring a PR-firm and calling itself a "rapid cell-growth organism."

As it pertains to Oracle and their long ad, I found this footnote. All of the data in their slides above comes with this as their source.

2019! 

Really, they're citing "scientific" data from a study that's almost seven years old? That's a bit like taking a photograph of an acorn and calling it a future 300-foot-tall giant sequoia. 

The best thing that came from being born during the era of LBJ and Richard Nixon, of Vietnam and Watergate, of long-hair and middle-fingering norms is that we learned to question. Everything.

Something is rotten in the world when trillions are spent telling you how great AI is and you've yet to see any evidence of it other than you can make a video of your dog talking from a still photograph. 

Despite trying to force it down my throat, I'm not sure AI is winning anymore hearts and minds in the workplace than amerika did in Vietnam fifty years ago. Compliance is not acceptance.

Something stinks here.

In a time of universal dogma, questioning is a revolutionary act.

Up Above in My Basement.

Sometimes the finest thing that can happen is the thing that happens least often, or has happened never before. One of those happenings happened to me late last week.

A passel of books had arrived at the doorstep of my small Connecticut crib. Before too long, or more accurately, before my bookish clutter annoyed too much my wife, I lugged them down the steep steps to my basement office.

It took me until I was about 65 to have a room of my own, and it's almost exactly as I wanted it. Would I like a view of the sea? Sure. Would I like a small sofa to recline on in-between meetings? Who wouldn't. But even without those accommodations my office is fairly perfect. I get good natural light. I have two comfortable upholstered chairs. I have an elegant Herman Miller stand-up desk. I have a 15-pound dumbbell to lift to keep my biceps from looking like Walter Brennan's neck.

Most of all, of course, I have my books. 

Books and books and books and books and books and books and books. And more books.

It's those books, the ones that already line my shelves and the new arrivals that made this post happen. 

The new books meant I had to rearrange my old books. I had to do what I seldom do. Straighten things up. And under some of those books and under some papers and some old notes I had taken I found this leaflet, 16 pages or so from an event about 19 years ago during The New Yorker Festival down at the South Street Seaport.

A bunch of old New Yorker-ites and Joseph Mitchell's daughter, Nora Mitchell Sanborn, had gathered together to talk about the old man, my favorite writer of all time. For all these years, I have saved this catalog from that talk. The back is splattered like a pointillist canvas with the spray of some of my wife's viscous black coffee. It looks like the remains of a spit-take.

I hadn't really opened the brochure since my early 50s, if I opened it at all. But I opened it on Monday and was struck my how wonderful it is and how Mitchell's writing moves me like little else.

Here's what Nora Mitchell Sanborn, Joseph's daughter wrote. It's the wrap-up of her two page preface. I'm sorry about my inability to take proper iPhone photos from a printed page. Somehow I think their lopsidedness is a genuine case of form following function.

I've written a lot since I began this organ back in 2007 about Mitchell. But I'd guess very few people who read what I write have bothered to spend the time it takes to know someone like Mitchell. 

Why should they? He's old. He's dead. He's that most heinous of all contemporary sins. He's not contemporary. 

Today, we readily admit things I would be embarrassed to admit. My mother would have swatted me like ballplayers high-fiving each other's callouses during a home-run trot. We look at "Common Sense," by Thomas Paine, or "The Sound and the Fury," by Faulkner or even "The Seven Stages of Man," from "As You Like It," by Bill Shakespeare and we say,

we say TL/DR.

I find that sad. 

To my world-view, Phil Dusenberry of BBDO advanced his agency and his career by proposing that in order to be welcomed into people's living-rooms, TV spots should be better than the programming they interrupt. I've always tried to uphold that thesis with my copy. I've always tried to make it human, interesting, educational, funny. I've always tried to Joseph-Mitchell-the-shit-out-of-anything-I-was-working-on.

Of course I've failed at least 99.79-percent of the time. 

But I tried.

I hope this wasn't TL/DR.

BTW, I found one page from the brochure online. It's archived at Seton Hall University and Princeton University. I also found a photo of an historical marker commemorating Mitchell.