Thinking Small.

Hans Fallada, a writer born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, in Germany in 1893, somehow survived life (if you can call it that) in Berlin during World War II.

His most famous novel, "Every Man Dies Alone," was not published in English until a few years ago. I believe I read it in one-sitting or two. "Every Man" tells a small story based on real events of Otto and Elise Hampel, elderly residents of Berlin during the war who decide they must resist the German state and nazism.

The Hampel's are named the Quangels  in "Every." They are old and creaky. They cannot blow up buildings, shoot state functionaries, or kill the police. They do not possess any power or strength at all. They are old, poor and living on the fringes of society. How can they battle the hegemony of almost-all-powerful state control and oppression-repression? How can weak fight strong?

Postcards.

--

In Adam Hochschild's book, "Bury the Chains," he recounts the story of the abolition movement that started in late-18th Century England. 

In England at this time thousands if not millions of people were addicted to a new drug. The drug was everywhere and almost everyone used it (they were addicted, after all) almost every day.

That drug was sugar. 

And it was grown in the most savage factories our planet has ever seen. The vast sugar plantations in the British-owned West Indies. Sugar plantations owned by British Lords that were worked by slaves. These slaves had a life-expectancy, due to the harshness of plantation conditions and the inhumanity of those who owned those plantations, of about seven years. They stole healthy young people from Africa and worked and whipped them to death in mere months.

In 18th Century England, these plantation owners were the Buffets, the Bezos, the Musks, the Gates, the Ellisons of their day. 

How do you fight their power? 

When etchings (the news footage of the day) started coming back to England from Barbados, from Jamaica, and from other sugar islands. "The Guardian" in an article on current tourism in Barbados wrote:

In the past...sugar in Barbados has been responsible for great human misery. The island was settled by the British in 1627 and rapidly turned into a landscape of sweeping sugar-cane plantations, planted, cultivated and harvested by forced labour. By the 1660s it had become the jewel of English colonies; one commentator referred to it 'as the richest spote of grounde in the world' because of the fortunes that could be amassed. 

How do you fight this power? 

Wealthy women in England knew they had no way to "frontal attack." But a small group of them did something small and profound.

They stopped scooping sugar into their tea.

They were society women. The kind who set trends and who are emulated. First by other society people and then by many others. They were the taste-makers.

The small move of abjuring sugar started the British anti-slavery movement.

Just as stamping pennies in England like this, pressed the "patriarchy" to give women what should have been theirs all along: the right to vote.

Pennies circulate. Or at least they did. What better way to spread a simple message?

As amerikaka plummets into a white christian nationalist state, a state where those who wield power pay no taxes, a state that doesn't respect the sovereignty of other states, I wonder what we can do. 

What you and I can do.

Of course, vote.
Of course, speak out.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course.

But what small acts can we do that will have big impact? What small, daily behaviors can we begin that will have big impact?

We can't not pay tax like Thoreau did to protest Polk's Mexican war. Tax is taken from us automatically.

How do you fight their power? 

What small thing can we do for outsized impact?

That's our human brief.

Where Do Ideas Come From?

I think a lot of people in the advertising business, especially so-called creative people, aren't taken seriously in our business and by clients, because they think a lot about creativity but not enough about business.

To be clear, creativity in advertising must be in service of a business objective. We are charged with selling stuff, or improving a brand's reputation, or imparting some brand-relevant information. Commercials, despite the power and weight of what's award-winning these days, are not "art films." Or if they are, then at least they must be "art films in service of a business objective."

Many people in our business, in a way that I truly fail to understand, don't read The Wall Street Journal. The Journal, for all its cheery neo-fascism, gives readers the information to know more than their clients know about whatever field their clients are in. Oh, and more than planners, account people, and fellow creatives too. If that's not an "unfair advantage," when you're working on a information-based brand, I don't know what is. 

(BTW, I don't believe in making brands part of culture. During the upcoming Super Bowel, we will see about 75 spots that attempt to do so. They don't seem to realize that celebrity juxtaposition and cultural appropriation cannot really be owned by one brand. By doing advertising that's extraneous to the composition or components of your brands, you're really, in essence, making work for the category rather than your client.)

In any event, I started reading The Wall Street Journal around 45 years ago. They ran ads at the time for the Journal that featured famous advertising creatives. You can see about 50 or so here on Dave Dye's treasure of a blog, "Stuff From the Loft."
Here are just a few of the people profiled in these ads. Below that a picture of people profiled I was lucky enough to work for, with or near. (I know they're all white men I've featured. That's the way it was. And we didn't know any better. We do now.)

All these ads featured a bit of copy on why the ad notable featured read the Journal. I said to myself nearly half-a-century ago, if they read the Journal, if they admire the product, I should do the same. Here are a few of those reasons why:

I'm gushing about the Journal, however, because of this article and book review on how we get ideas. The gist of it can be summed up in these sentences, especially the single sentence I've underscored: "George Newman, a cognitive scientist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management...draws on scientific studies, historical examples and behavioral research to argue that what we call inspiration is better understood as a set of habits and mental practices available to anyone willing to cultivate them. Creativity, in his telling, is more method than miracle."

Newman analyzes how ideas happen--the circumstances and the conditions that are "idea-phrenogenic." That is, the circumstances and the conditions conducive to having ideas and working to make them better.

In the spirit of ideas coming more from method than miracle, Newman is a fan not of isolation--but of sharing thoughts with friends and colleagues. He's a fan of submitting ideas to the scrutiny of others because their feedback often sharpens what solitary effort cannot." 

Newman also notes that new ideas are rarely "entirely new." In fact, most often innovations and "breakthroughs" grow out of previous ideas. He cites a study by systems researcher Brian Uzzi. He analyzed 18 million scientific papers and found breakthroughs happen in only 5% to 10% of them. Most "new" ideas are "a strategic mix of old with a touch of new."

He likens creativity to an archaeological dig. It's the final, most tedious stretch--the sifting and refining--that makes something of what's been dug up. The point of tedium (re-working) when most people give up is when most ideas come to life.

Maybe most interesting to me is how Newman talks about how we can use AI. He sees value at the "digging" stage. Sometimes sheer "volume matters more than initial quality." But Newman believes (and this is where the cost-cutters using AI--including the holding companies--will fail) humans are essential to the process. "They bring the judgment to recognize a fertile idea, the unique experiences to make it their own and the ability to execute it in ways machines cannot replicate."

The point in all this is simple.

Ideas come from many places.

Friends. Sparks from previous ideas. Discussions. Feedback. And mostly working, re-working, re-re-working and so on.

No matter how you analyze the genesis of the alchemy of new thoughts--there is a miraculousness to the miracle of saying something in a way no one else has ever said it before.

I once wrote a line for an IBM software ad that made Chris Wall love me, or at least tolerate me, unconditionally. I wrote "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes."

No one knows where the ability to find those miracles comes from. Somehow I think I get a lot of them from reading. Especially things no one else reads. Like The Wall Street Journal.

Dogs. And Doggedness.

Rufus II, Winston and Cuban cigar.

As someone who's spent a lifetime wrestling with the "Black Dog" of depression, I've come to admire, not despise, the malady. Through a lifetime of therapy, I've attained an understanding of how the ailment works on my brain--and my moods. Along with that understanding, I've learned how to not conquer the problem, but turn it to my advantage.

Brown had the 4th-lowest season-ERA ever, in 1906. 
Just a year before I turned 50.

Brown's Hall-of-Fame Bronze.
His performance-enhancing tonic was having his fingers cut off.

There was a Hall of Fame pitcher from over a century ago, he pitched from 1903 to 1916 primarily for the Northside Chicagoans, aka the Cubs. Brown lost a finger-and-half to a farm-machinery accident, and a subsequent fall and bad resetting left his twirling paw--his right--more than a bit mangled.

Brown learned how to turn his ailment into an advantage. His missing digits forced him to change his grip, giving his pitches a groundball-inducing topspin. His a-kilter middle finger gave his pitches a wacky unpredictability--and sent his pitches a-flutter to the confusion of opposing batsmen. His 2.06 lifetime ERA is a testament to Brown's skill and how hard it was to hit his horsehide offerings. Accordingly, Brown became one of the great attendance attractions from the earliest days of the sport.

Some years ago, when I was a younger copywriter, I would labor at coming up with the three or six headlines or TV scripts that would fulfill the requisites of most assignments. Often, having come up with those few "deliverables" I felt stymied and unable to come up with more.

I began, in my own mind, likening my stuckness with what I had labelled the "meniscus of misery," that is the downward spiral of my bouts of depression. Where gloom would lead to deeper and deeper gloom and eventually to a spell of near-paralysis.

There was a time when my brain would spin down to point F. What I've learned through the years and with the help of therapy, introspection, training and wise-friends, is how to stop my depression and turn it around when it hits point A. I never even get to B, C and no longer do I find myself F'd.

This week, I got a big assignment from a Fortune 150 brand. They're paying me the money I've asked for. In return, they're getting about ten-people's work in a week. That means I've probably did a half-year of holding company output for them in just five working days.

Here's where I can again call on my drawing above. There was a time, I'd have gotten tapped out of headlines and ideas at point A. If you train your brain, you can prolific-ize your output. You can find a new approach to bring more ideas so your hustle past points B and C finally arriving (just ahead of your deadline) at point F. F as in Fantastically Fecund.

So much of being in the idea business or even the human business is about unlocking your brain. Stimulating it to either break a deleterious pattern or behavior or to think in ways you haven't thought before. 

It's about interrupting the barriers that interfere with progress. It's finding new jokes, new angles, new words, new approaches when it feels like you're tapped out or maxed out.

I think that's what Mordecai Brown must have done. I bet when he mangled his hand he went through days or even weeks and months saying "I'm done." Somehow he learned to turn that into "I'm blessed." Or "I have something no one else has." In the elevated parlance of our era, he turned his frown upside-down.

When I was a boy I remember sitting next to my father in his 1949 Studebaker Commander that he had bought second-hand for $350. I remember driving all over our grungy Yonkers neighborhood looking for, against all odds, a parking space in a busy shopping district. Maybe it was just before Christmas and spaces were scarcer than ethics.

I don't remember all that much about my father. We were never all-that-friendly with each other, but I do remember him saying like an old Jew repeating the Sh'ma, "We're going to find a space or make one."

Back when I was four, I couldn't understand what he meant by "making a space." It seemed to violate the physical law that matter cannot be created or destroyed. How could he make a space?

Sixty-five years later, I've discovered what he meant.

Confession.

They say confession is good for the soul.

It's probably even better for the blog.

I've been off-the-rails-busy since the start of the new year and this week and last were the worst (or best) of all.

In fact, I usually have two or three blog posts written by Sunday night for the week to come. Since I tend to 'front load' my weeks, this makes posting every day a bit more doable. However this week, going into Sunday night, I'd been too busy working to do any blog-writing.

It's been that way every day this week.

Sunday night I wrote Monday's post. Monday, I wrote Tuesday's. Tuesday, I wrote Wednesday's. It's late Thursday afternoon as I write this post, for Friday.

All that means is that my usual 'writerly gestation' is all off. I've no real time to do my walk-writing. To dope things out in my head. I've got nothing but my keyboard, my writing imperative and about an hour.

Today, with nothing to write about, I thought I'd throw out something I read a few years ago from two-time Pulitzer-winner Barbara Tuchman. As you might have guessed, it's called "Tuchman's Law."

I think it's something we should think about now and again. Whether you're dealing with creeping government repression, murder and nascent fascism, an upsetting of the world order, a wife who is invariably late, or teenagers who are sneaking cigarettes, making out and missing curfew.

Tuchman says. I've added my annotations in red:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. (Unusual events, like wars or terror attacks appear more frequent when you reflect on them. You remember them so they stand out. Like that time your zipper broke.)

Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. (The persistence of normal is the key here. Even when 9/11 happened, you still had to cook dinner, get the kids to bed, walk the dog. There are giant disturbances, but life goes on.) 

The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. (Most days come and go without incident or upset. Thank goodness.) 

This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply.) (The incessant chatter and 'breaking newsness' of an event magnifies its presence in your frontal lobe--and can make it seem overwhelming.)

If you don't quite understand "Tuchman's Law," listen to one-minute and eleven seconds of Harry Shearer from his radio show "Le Show." 

You'll see in just a few seconds how everyone and everything are trying to scare the crap out of us.

 

 

Bad Language.

There are probably thousands of books that have been written about Germany's descent into the embrace of Nazism from just as many different angles. I've probably read at least one-hundred of them.

These various volumes look at:
The failures of the Weimar.
The fear of communism.
Germany's millennia-long history of anti-semitism.
The psychic evisceration and humiliation of Versailles.
The eugenic belief in Aryan superiority.

Viktor in 1961.

The best book I've read about the descent into Nazism was written by Viktor Klemperer. Klemperer was a university philologist. He studied language itself, the use of language to sway people. And, of course, the manipulation of language for political ends.

His book "LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen," "The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologists Notebook," is as dense as a soufflé made by a masochist. Each page is work. This ain't no beach read.

But what Klemperer does in these pages is what we today in amerrykaka should be doing. He examines, closely, semantics to see how power was being imposed upon people. How hitler's will was triumphing.

As you can see from the Wikipedia examples I posted here, such language was everywhere in Germany during the thousand-years of Hitler, which lasted just twelve.

All social organizations, your family, your business, your clients, your department, and yes, the tump misministration use language both semantically and semiotically. There's dictionary meaning and there is usually deeper symbolic meaning. 

Here's an example of what I mean: For five years I worked for a big bank in New York. I saw the client pretty much twice a week for five years. The marketing department was on the 18th Floor. The executives (who had to approve TV spots) were on the 3rd Floor. Even so, my client always said, "We have to go up to see the executives." I'd say, "You mean down. They're on 3, we're on 18. They're below us." My line of thinking was dismissed quickly.

Our job now as amerrycants is to notice and call out LARF (the Language of Amerikan Racist Fascism.) 

The superlatives--greatest economy.
The accusations--a domestic terrorist.
The calumnies--reaching for his gun.
The interjections--'real' (as in not a real american.)
The diction and word choice--homeland (most tautologically can't fit in. This isn't their home.)

Here's one annotation I made of an article in Wednesday's Times. 

We need to learn how to do this for ourselves. Every day.
To understand what's happening.
And how we're being manipulated by LARF into nazis.
You and me: werewolfed into nazi 2.0.

--

By the way, if you can no longer read, Stan Neumann's one-hour and 42 minute documentary on Klemperer is linked here.

Bleeding.

I suppose you can tell something about a ballplayer by looking at the statistics he compiles over the course of a season or a career. The numbers can tell you whether or not  he makes good contact. Whether or not he has power. Whether or not he knows the strike zone.

The numbers can tell you if he has speed on the base-paths. If he has hands of stone, as I did. If he has range in the field and can grab one in the gap that 92 out of 100 guys would have missed. 

As computers have taken over more and more of human judgment, there are more an more numbers used in an effort to evaluate how someone performs between the chalk lines. There are numbers and data to the point of absolute nonsense. Numbers and data are so prevalent that sometimes they seem to overwhelm what you see with your own cataracted eyes.

Back when I played ball, my one long summer sojourn into the tumbleweed wilds of the Mexican Baseball League (AA), Daniel Garibay, our left fielder was very obviously our team's, Los Seraperos de Saltillo's, best hitter.

He had the most RBIs, and was second in both average and home runs. He was also an automatic pencil in. Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, whom I had el Norte-tongue anglicized into Hector Quesadilla, could scribble Garibay into the lineup every day. He knew left field was well-manned, as was the third slot in our Swiss cheese batting order.

One afternoon, under the darkening skies just before a late summer thunder and downpour, I leaned on the batting cage, Hector at my side, watching Garibay take his whacks.

His stroke was furious and fast, he rotated at the hips each time he took a cut. And his swing was as level as a championship pool table.

"He has a beautiful swing," I said to Hector.

Hector agreed. "It is nearly perfect. If I could get him to be a bit more patient and a bit more selfish, he would be even better."

We watched him take some more cuts, splaying the horsehide to all fields in sharp needles that would sting a fielder's gloved paw.

"With more selfish," Hector continued, "Daniel could hit more home runs. He could drop his elbow and get more loft on the ball."

"Those line-drives would be fly balls."

"Yes," Hector agreed. "But he would strike out more. And Daniel hates the strike out. He prefers contact. He is too selfish, too prideful to strike out."

Garibay rested for a moment, spit on his hands, rubbed them in the batting-cage dust and continued chopping down forests.

"I knew he could hit before he could hit," Hector said. "I knew Daniel when he was a barefoot boy from a nothing mountain town. He was only 17 and weighed less than his duffle bag."

"I'm only 17."

"Yes, but you have long muscles like a man. Garibay had nothing."

"Drinking straw arms."

Hector laughed through his nose.

"His first batting practice I saw it. His ribcage from his arms was bleeding. His arms had rubbed his ribcage to blood from his too many swings."

"He batted so much he bled. Like Teodoro Williams, the Splendid Splinter."

"He batted so much he bled."

"I didn't need numbers. I didn't need the words of half-soused scouts. I knew then he would hit.

"He bled hitting. That is how you know."

Sunday Morning. Coming Down.

Sunday morning at around 1AM,
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with a mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone. 
Sunday morning at around 1AM, just a couple of hours before Sparkle my two-year-old golden retriever decided to nuzzle me awake for good, a Greek-tragedy of a snowstorm decided to visit upon New York and much of what's left of the fast-fading untied states of americacocphony. 

By the time Sparkle and I had bundled up against the howl and the single-digits, the snow was already being cursed at by doormen and porters who have to handle its heft, and cabdrivers who still have to work and laughed and giggled at by children with caring parents who tote sleds and cocoa to whatever in Manhattan resembles a hill.

We walked out onto the street closer to six than to seven and started to make our way to Central Park. Dogs are allowed off-leash there until 9AM, and there's usually a pretty decent coterie of well-dressed people in expensive winter coats watching their dogs with one eye and their phones with their other. 

But this morning the slip was too much with us. The salt on the sidewalks--not from salt bagels--but to melt the ice, was already, in half a block, bothering Sparkle's paws. Quickly, we did a one-eighty and headed instead to Carl Schurz Park. The park is just 400 yards from my carpeting and though it's only 14.9 acres, compared to Central Park's 843, there's a fenced in dog-run there that serves my purposes and Sparkle's.

Roald rolled with the Arctic punches.

Getting there, of course, would have been a test for an Amundsen or a Peary. The sidewalks were like a carnival slip-n-slide, and each street corner was piled high with snow that had been shoveled from somewhere else and be-ribboned with slushy slurry of indeterminate depth. Slogging through it all, the ankle-high snow, the shin-high drifts, the Lake Baikal-deep puddles left me covered in sweat and fairly gasping for breath. 

However, this is New York, the city the never sweeps.

Growing up when I did, the ConEd guys would put up signs at their job sites. "Dig We Must," they read. And there's hardly ever been and never will be a better slogan for the city I love.

24 hours later, 92-percent of the sidewalks are cleared. At least three-lanes of five-lane avenues are clean and one-lane of each cross-street. Even a fair portion of the corners, where the disposed of snow is dumped have been canalled out, so there's a passage way through hip-depth accumulation.

Cabs are cabbing. Buses are elbowing. And Toyotas from Jersey are running lights and stopping in crosswalks. 

In an "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" sort of manner I started thinking about how the cities we live in reflect the people we become, or maybe vice-versa.

Nothing stops New York from moving. Even more than a $19 Timex watch, the city takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. 

I've lived, really, in just three places in my life.

One year in San Francisco.
Two years in Boston.
Sixty-five years in New York.

Each city, I suppose, like each person you meet, has their own ways of dealing with the vicissitudes of life. That's a fancy way of saying, we all have to play the hand we were dealt. Fairly or unfairly. Or a combination of those circumstances.

When I think of my long life--and 45 years in the ad business--through agency life, and now my seventh year of running my own agency, I think about muscling through the bad times. Working no matter what. Doubling down on what I do well and showing up every day, come hell or hot water, with ideas, what-ifs, ways-in and maybe something no one else has yet thought of. When I think about this blog, somehow I find something to write about even when I have nothing to write about.

That's the New York in me.

Switching gears, but only just a bit, it's been a tough time for the few remaining Jews of the world. There are fewer of us today than there were one-hundred years ago. What's more, Jew Hate seems to be having yet another moment. As they say, Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.

In fact, according to the FBI, anti-Jewish hate crime is higher than its ever been and though Jews make up just two-percent of the US population, 70-percent of all recorded religion-based hate-crimes have been perpetrated against Jews.

Just now I was once again in the snow-filled Carl Schurz park with Sparkle. She wandered off and visited this snow person. I noticed that instead of coal, this snow person had Hannukah gelt, gold-foil coins, for eyes.

Somehow that seemed a symbol of New York, a symbol of being Jewish, a symbol of strength, endurance, survival and humor. A symbol of taking a licking and ticking ticking ticking.

Scared.

When I was a boy--just about 22 or 23--the world was a scary place. Like today, we had a madman in the white house, ronald reagan, who had surrounded himself with people who believed the united states could win a nuclear war with the soviet union.

Thomas K. Jones was reagan's deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. In 1982 he said in an interview with Robert Scheer of the LA Times (before it became a kids' newspaper) “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. …  It’s the dirt that does it. … If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”

No one was really going to make it.

In a nuclear "exchange" as John Hersey wrote about Hiroshima, "The living will envy the dead." Easily 50,000,000 people would die. Probably more.

Yet, the saber-rattling and brinksmanship continued.

When people joke about tens of millions being annihilated, whether they're "good guys" or "bad guys," we're all bad guys.

One morning, back probably in 1982, I went down to the subway at 110th and Broadway at about 6AM in order to get to my office around 6:30AM. That was my start time when I was young and trying to write something more consequential than an ad or a blog.

When I walked down to the platform, it was covered with grey chalk outlines of bodies. I thought they were the night-before's murder victims (New York was rougher in those days.) No, they were painted by an anti-nuclear group as a warning about the vaporized bodies we would see everywhere if reagan's thinking prevailed.

The soviets had 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the united states. The united states had 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the soviet union. 

1,000,000 New Yorkers protested all this in Central Park on a summer day in 1982. It was said to be the largest protest in amerikan history.

I was scared then.

I'm more scared today.

Scared that amerika kills its own citizens. Scared that amerika lies about it. Scared that amerika attacks sovereign nations. Scared that amerika attacks the press, the poor, the people.

Scared of cops wearing face masks.
And killing innocents.
With impunity.

Scared of systematized, not random, terror. 
Scared of state terror.
Sanctioned terror.
Terror employed expressly to scare us.

I'm scared.

Angry.

Scared that my taxes--which I can't not pay--are supporting all this.

I'm more scared than I have ever been.

No one, no matter how 'law abiding' is safe.

We're supposed to be afraid.

Afraid so we don't think straight.

So we jettison our morality, 
our humanity,
our decency,
our equipoise.

That's the point.