Part the Third, of Twelve.

The best thing, maybe the only good thing about growing up during the Vietnam era--when virtually every country in Asia and Africa--waged endless bloody wars against colonialism, aka amerikka and france and the united kingdom, is you learned to doubt. You learned to question everything. 

You didn't trust anyone over thirty. 

If you were smart, you didn't trust anyone under thirty, either. 

Like Alan Ladd in "Shane," you learned to challenge. You learned "Prove it."

Prove it is powerful.

Next time someone says, "____will save us _____,"  say "show me one instance where that happened. Prove it."

I've done it.

People left the room crying.

In fact, most of what fills corporate conference rooms, what's left of newspapers, politicians' rises and falls, and of course their endless global-warming hot air, would be deflated if people only learned to shout--or even sotto voce--prove it.

Imagine if a decade ago someone said 'prove it' to the current crypto fascists running the currently crypto fascist amerikkka. That sound you hear? Not bombs bursting in air...that's bubbles.

Seeing photographs like the three below, large, indelible, staring back at you, not with pop-ups and marthastewartdistractions, in Life magazine at the kitchen table when you were seven or eight or eleven, teaches you. Hearing nightly the names of the war dead on the radio, teaches you. 

It teaches you to question the oligarchy and political, military and flag-wrapping elite that's selling you hard on their god, their liberty, their right and wrong, their rules, their patriotism. You learn to question accepted wisdom. And you learn the more someone tries to foist something on you, the more toxic it likely is. 

It's most elite. From the holding company scions who have destroyed advertising to almost everything else.

I realized some years ago as more and more of the world is gripped by the promise that technology, like alchemy before it, could turn base metal into gold, that more and more of the world is in the thrall of predictions.

We even have something called "the prediction market." Which is really just a gussied-up guessing game backed by billions of dollars. The better to impoverish you with.

In today's modern schema, if you make a prediction--no matter if it's as false as an impossible burger or a Hollywood pouting lower-lip--you become, almost automatically, a "thought leader," or an SME--a subject-matter expert or a KOL--key opinion leader. Though you're really just, like the rest of us, a dweeb with an inflated sense of self.

It seems like half the "news" is predictions and opinion. There's never any follow-up, mockery when what you said was going to happen doesn't. There's no accountability. Just another scot-free prediction. As Yogi Berra is said to have said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

But that doesn't stop people from making them.

Through my years, working for people who talked more than did, which is the sine qua non of working for most people, I have heard more guesses posing as truths than there are stars in heaven, twinkling over our flat-earth.

Politicians and corporate leaders talk about change--which is usually about making things worse so they can pocket more money--in the form of a pep rally. From corporate town halls, which have nothing to do with towns or halls, to today's political rallies, no one says what we should all say.

Prove it.

Put your money where your mouth is.

The war is over.

They're eating cats and dogs.

We have to destroy the village to save it.

They want to rape white women.

$2000 checks, or $5000 checks, or gas prices plummeting.

No one says prove it.

(This was written before last night's tumping of the republican party--proof that everything he touches turns toxic.)

We are so accepting--not doubting--that before we can catch our breath another falsehood is posited and believed that unaccountably is once again unaccounted for.

Doubt has been transmogrified in my lifetime from wisdom to veritable an Orwellian thought-crime. Going against the status quo is to be a traitor, an outcast, a "witch" in Salem, Mass in 1692.

If past follows prologue, maybe in a Koestler "Darkness at Noon," way, independent thought and doubt will become real crimes. People will be beaten for it. Noses will be askewed. Eyes blackened. Scrotums electrocuted. And jail cells filled.

Remember, it's operation enduring freedom that we're after.

Our duty as humans is to doubt anyway.

Humanity, in fact, is doubt.

Doubt as in starting with, why does it have to be like this? Why can't it be better? Why can't I do something.

That is humanment number three.

But don't take my word for it.

Doubt.

 

Part the Second, of Twelve.

The most-human of all emotions, more than mating, more than shitting, more than eating, more than fukcing, is laughing.

You can fight me on this.

You can ignore me.

You can try to prove to me that that ain't so.

But I'll just laugh you off.

I'd say, every creature on our planet, and probably atom-sized neutrinos too, mate and shit and eat and so on, but only humans laugh.

Over my nearly half a century in advertising, especially in meeting rooms, client presentations and finished work, I've noticed that laughter--which used to be welcomed and expected, which used to be a personal differentiator--is now not only anomalous, it's actually scorned. You can get fired for being funny.

There's a simple parallel. You can also get fired for being different, for being human, for disagreeing, for standing up for things that today are oft-interred. That is principles, taste, decency and thought

The prevailing ethos in advertising and the world today is that we are in a serious business. Clients are paying serious money, and the industry itself is run by serious consultancies, so making a joke is like doing stand-up at an autopsy.

(To be blunt about it, the industry--and most of those in it--have serioused themselves to death.)

What's more, the billionaire-class, who increasingly are the C-suite of the Fortune-50 companies with global brands that agencies serve, have become through the years less-and-less human. They're too busy and too rich to actually laugh. In fact, they have so much money--and are so unlike the people they're ostensibly "messaging" to--that they are hardly anymore to be considered like you and I. They don't lower themselves to one-liners, pratfalls, word-plays or even merry mix-ups.

That's all beneath them.

As someone who's wrestled with the three-headed, or six-headed, or thirty-six-headed growling dog-god of depression, I've probably been sad for sixty-eight of my nearly sixty-nine years. I think my ratio might be a little worse than most others, maybe I have fewer serotonin uptake inhibitors than most, but still, if people were inherently merry, liquor and beer sales in the US would likely not tally almost $80,000,000,000 a year. In 2013, the last year I could find data for, cocaine sales tallied $34,000,000,000, and legal marijuana sales are close to $40,000,000,000. That's almost one-hundred-and-fifty billion dollars spent annually in intoxicants--that's a lot of money staving off dour.

No wonder Woody Allen said, and millions agreed, "being funny is a second choice."

Or as Henry David Thoreau never said (while his mom did his laundry) “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

A lot of unsung songs.

Those are eloquent ways of stating the obvious.

As are these:

'Life," as Hobbes said in the Leviathan, "is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Or as the Buddha might have said, "everyone carries a burden."

Or as, most profoundly, Shecky Weinstock said one night at the Nevele many decades ago, "Life sucks and then you die. Try the veal."

With all that, maybe the kindest, most-loving, most-uplifting. most-human thing one person can do for another might also be the simplest.

Handing someone a laugh.

BTW, re the remember part of "remember to laugh."

My sister was killed in 2007 as she was riding her new Ducati motorcycle up 12th Avenue in Manhattan. It was early on Mother's Day morning and a drunk ran across the wide avenue.

Nancy swerved to avoid him and in a moment the large bike crushed the small girl. 

I have a lot of memories of Nancy. 

But as I was writing this piece I remembered two jokes she liked that somehow capture who she is, maybe better than a complete Robert Caro biography would.

The first she made up when she moved to Chicago with our parents when she was 16 or 17. 

She said someone asked her:

"Have you lived in Chicago your whole life?"

She answered, "I don't know. I'm not dead yet."

The second laugh she made up was at a bus stop in Chicago as she was waiting for the 151 bus on Michigan Avenue. 

Someone asked her:

"Does the bus go to-the-loop."

Nancy answered, "No. It goes beep-beep."

The gods. Part the One, of Twelve.

Yoknapatwapha. A cosmos.

(Faulkner never called it a campus.)

As someone who has no god, I spend a good amount of time thinking about gods. 

I think a lot about the Greek gods. I like very much the idea that as opposed to the muslim, christian or jewish god, the Greek gods are many and they are far from perfect. They are as flawed and jealous and petty as humans--just immortal, tremendously powerful and sometimes wise. I never got or could understand the unique "genius" of monotheism. So what. I'd rather have one cleaner for glass, one for furniture, one for tile, than one that does everything. 

Back to the greek pantheon. While I have no burning desire to disguise myself as a swan or a bull so I can have my way, I think often of Athena's words to Odysseus. Third-born and grey-eyed, Athena kicks me in my ass. Her words motivate me. 

Even Owen, my therapist of 91 years cannot expunge this line from my cerebellum. "Few sons are the equals of their fathers. Most fall short, all too few surpass them.” It drives me even in my dotage--a quarter century after my father's demise.

In any event, I've been thinking about gods and people. 

And the biggest problem with gods is when people start believing that they are gods. 

1. That they are better than others.

2. That the rules don't apply to them--their reality is truth.

3. That they face no consequences and take no responsibility.

When people, companies, "leaders," religions, nations,  begin believing in that trinity is when the world--large and small, macro and micro--becomes fuckupterized.

That's where we are today. When the non-tax-paying trillionaire freeloaders and grifters posit that they are better than others. Not just better cheats, thieves and gonifs. 

Some years ago, I read that when Roman generals returned in triumph from a giant victorious battle with countless slaves, with loot and gold, and with people bowing down to them, they hired someone to stand alongside them and keep repeating, "You are not a god. You are not a god." 

Beware the throne. 

That seldom worked. 

Most people when they amass power, no matter how small and idiosyncratic, start believing the trinity above. When Roman emperor Vespasian was dying of dysentery, his last few words were reported as, "Oh dear, I think I'm becoming a god!" I think many of amerikkka's current trillionaire and political class believe they are gods.

All that prompted me to write, not too terribly long ago, for a TedX talk in Lisbon, Portugal, something I called The Ten Humanments. Ten behaviors that might help you be decent.

Over the next eleven or twelve or twenty posts, I've decided to go through each one of my Humanments and explain what I mean by the behaviors I've identified.

 

It's never been harder to be a human.

It's never been harder to feel free, safe, among friends, part of something bigger. Today, you are odd-man-out if you smile at a stranger or help someone. I think the felon-in-chief might call you a "sucker." God knows what peat hegseth would call you. Likely a weirdo and a beardo.

They are well-armed.

Human. Right.

Encroachments on our human-ness seem to be coming from more angles than there are angles.

At work, we're made to do things faster than ever.

We're made to do things even when we know they suck.

Our controllers, whether those controllers are machines or private-equity orthodoxy or profit-maximizing anti-human forces or algorithms designed to eat up free-will, force us into a machine-mandated mediocrity take without give. You must comply. If not you are monopoly-banned. They control the jobs and you must obey. Especially if you want that rarest of human privileges, the right to health-care. 

So, or even alas, we work harder and harder and longer and longer to make things we have less and less ownership of and no pride in.

All-the-while, the lead story in what seems like about 75-percent of all news stories is that we can be replaced at any time. We breathe employment peril like coal miners inhale coal-dust. It's in our lungs and destroys us from the inside-out.

Machines in other words have become the pillars of humanity--they'll last. 

While people are regarded as drains on profit, in the parlance of fascists gone by, 'useless eaters.' We're protoplasm that interferes with all that matters. Profit for about a dozen people on top, and the frictionless hegemony of machinery.

But as Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech from 1949--when humanity faced a different specter of annihilation, "I decline to accept the end of man." (Faulkner's 'man' was an inclusive man. Don't go damning him for being gendered. That sort of sectarian behavior only plays into the grasping hands of those on top. They've taught us and trained us and set us up to fight each other, so we don't fight them.)

The humanments are about declining to accept the end of humankind.

The humanments are about refusing to give into the gods of selfishness and empty profligacy.

The humanments are about refusing to quiet.

Refusing to fill out forms.

Refusing to have machines call us by name and to use the first-person pronoun for themselves.

The humanments are about refusing to become a machine and a line item.

The humanments are about refusing to accept false gods and their puniness.

The humanments are about refusing and declining to accept the end of man.

As Faulkner concluded his speech, "when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

That's what this is about.

Recognizing and rejuvenating our spirit.

Our spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

What will follow are rules I've learned--ways of living I've adopted.

So I don't become dumb and numb and no more.

Rules that let me give permission to myself to be angry, outraged, happy and in love.

Rules that let me be me.

A fucked-up, full-of-fault, fallible and sometimes frail human.
Who despite my sometimes frail has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance, so I do not fail.

One Humanment a day.

For much of the next couple weeks.

If I am semiotic about it, maybe ending on Thanksgiving.

If we last till then.

Advertising Advice from Gary Cooper.

If you're reading my blog, my guess is you're probably too young to know the great American actor, Gary Cooper. Today's recency bias somehow stops people knowing anything about anything that happened before last Tuesday. That explains a man with an eight-second attention span deciding on a whim to invade an eight-thousand year old civilization.

MATH INTERLUDE:

So far the pentafake estimates the non-war has cost us $48,000,000,000. It was begun to distract us from the 38,000 times tump was mentioned in a dossier essentially about child rape. So $48B divided by 38K mentions equals $1,263,157.895/distraction.

But back to the topic at hand.

To be fair, though I'm as old as basalt, Cooper was big before my time. I grew to love him because I love old movies. And Cooper starred in one of my top-ten movies of all-time, "High Noon." Maybe the greatest Western ever, or second, edged out by George Stevens' "Shane."

Cooper was famously "laconic." That is he didn't speak much. When people impersonated him as they did, usually the impersonations consisted of someone saying little more than "yup" or "nope."

This short scene between Cooper and Katy Jurado is a pretty good example of Cooper's style. As John Wayne said once as acting advice: "Talk low. Talk slow. Don't say too much." You'll see that wisdom in action, above.

So many people in our world today, in advertising and just about everything else, seem to be intent on being like everyone else. Months ago, I wrote in this space about Alex Murrell's excellent essay, "The Age of Average." 

Murrell writes,

What gets noticed in the world, and in advertising (which used to be part of the world) is standing out and being different. Not going with the flow and agreeing with the most senior person in the room. Not not questioning the dominant complacency. And never balking against following "best practices" when tautologically that means you're doing something that's already been done by someone else.

About two decades ago when Sheryl Sandberg's book, "Lean In," was on everyone's night-table (though I'd guess no one actually read it) about 98-percent of all planners used the phrase "lean in" in about 98-percent of all their sentences. 

I was in a meeting and one senior planner asserted that at night people go home, turn on the TV and "lean in" to watch. Everyone went along with that. It's like getting popcorn when you're at the movies. It's what you're supposed to do.

After a second, I could take it no longer.

I said, "I dunno, Andrea. I'm old. When I get home at night, I'm beat. The last thing I want to do is do. I don't want to lean in. All I want to do is watch the Knicks and lean the fuck out."

In any event, the other night I saw this clip on YouTube of Gary Cooper not following Gary Cooper-best-practices. It makes me laugh like very little makes me laugh.

It's funny what happens when you break character. 

It's funny what happens when you do something different.

It's funny when you call a dog a cat and a cat a duck and a duck a turtle.

It makes children laugh.

And even people.

Where I come from, laughing is good.

Though it's no longer best practices.

BONUS COOPER MENTION @ 1:06.

All You Can't Eat.

There was an article in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend about "all-you-can-eat" buffets. If you can get past the paywall, you can read it here.

Once many years ago, a young account person and I were sent out to Rochester, Minnesota to visit an Eero Saarinen-designed factory, where that once-vaunted and important company made servers. (It's since been sold.)

I was a bit of a celebrity in the IBM server cosmos in those days, and I had a long day the next day talking to engineers and filming the factory. (Agency relationship tip: Clients like when you visit them, understand and are interested in their business and offerings and make them feel valued.)

Yet another metaphor for advertising.

In any event, the only restaurant near the dry-wall hotel we were staying in was a place called a paean to plastic trays, acid reflux and gluttony.  

😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

[Borscht Belt interlude: Q. How can you tell when you're in the best restaurant in Rochester, Minnesota? A. You can leave your tray on the table when you're done eating.]

😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀😀

Until I went to an expensive resort in Costa Rica, all inclusive, and all inedible, I haven't gone to many all-you-can-eat places. Even the occasional hotel that has such an indulgent breakfast has very little appeal. I really don't need a plate with sixteen warmed-up scrambled eggs, three-quarters of a pound of bacon, yogurt, out-of-season fruit and four croissants. The problem is, you wind up taking too much because it's there for the taking. In fact, if you don't stuff your face, you'll probably feel like you cheated yourself out of something.

It's hard to eat like a human when you're offered in-human quantities. Even the most austere consumer is likely to indulge her Lucullan tendencies.

It occurred to me just now--and having glanced at the Wall Street Journal article above--that all-you-can-eat-ness is today nearly a perfect metaphor for the current course and speed advertising business.

Advertising is like all-you-can-eat buffets.

Nothing's very good, but there's so much of it.

So we pile more on.

While there's a bit of Yogi Berra in that, I think it's worth repeating: Advertising is like all-you-can-eat buffets. Nothing's very good, but there's so much of it.

Right now I'm struggling with a very big (for me) and very difficult client. 

I've worked with him for more than six years, and of late, have interviewed a dozen people affiliated with his company--from employees in a bunch of different disciplines, to private equity consultants, to clients, to affiliates.

It's painful.

Everyone sees the company in a different way.

And at the top of their voice.

Maybe it's that way with most businesses today. (I read somewhere that when Hilary Clinton ran for president in 2016, her marketing teams proposed to her 216 different taglines. That's not an indication of creative fecundity. That shows that you don't know what you stand for. Certainly, Clinton's winning tagline was as flat as a plate of piss. "I'm with her," means a whole lot of nothing and foists on the viewer a faux sensation that they're passionate about her, when most people--even those who liked Clinton, merely tolerated her.)

When I start with clients, I present something to them I call the Four Ds.

Before I do anything for the client, before I create any messaging, I have to answer the toughest, the most-important and least-commoditized part of my construct. I have to get the client to agree who they are, what makes them different and why they exist.

I believe about 99.879667-percent of all companies cannot do this or fail to do this or don't know they need to do this. (See Hilary Clinton above.)

For instance, I don't think anyone knows the difference between United and American and Delta. Or Hilton and Marriot and Intercontinental. Or Nissan and Toyota and Honda and Kia and Audi and VW and BMW. Or Publicis and WPP and Omnicom and Havas.

Adding insult to injury, since none of these companies and their agencies can do the most important of the jobs they need to do, they make up for their nothing-ness with quantity.

They don't produce the six messages a year that tell the world (and as importantly their own employees) who they are. Instead they spew out like Etna with diarrhea a lava eruption of un-differentiated molten crap and hope somehow something sticks, or somehow no one notices, or someone makes a ketchup filled running shoe and that gets their CMO some buzz.

When Charlotte Beers was CEO of Ogilvy, she propagated a line that I'm not ashamed to admit I often co-opt and rewrite. She said Ogilvy's aspiration was to be "Most-valued by those who most-value brands."

You don't see much today that's big, memorable, defining and enduring. You don't see much that fulfills D1.

If nothing else reveals itself, that's not a bad paradigm to steal.

For a copywriter: "To be most-valued by clients who most-value breakthrough work."

For a blogger: "To be most-valued by readers who most-value thoughtful discussion about things they're interested in."

For a comedian: "To be most-valued by people who most-value belly-laughs."

For someone on a dating site: "To be most-valued by people hoping to settle down with a mensch."

I'll find a way to do D1 Define for my client.

D1 Define will be strengthened by D2 Demonstrate.

I'll get well-paid and thanked for it.

I'll get incremental revenue, and maybe another six years of work.

I'll be damned if I'll serve an all-you-can-eat meal.

Burp.