Eight-Thousand Vs. Eight.

I recommend this.  

If amerika had a president who could read, I recommend it to it.

I read a lot.

A lot of history.

And a lot of history involves wars.

A lot of history involves firsts.

I am sad for a world where no one, especially our so-called leaders and our military so-called leaders don't know history.

If you love history (and I could argue that loving history is about loving humankind--since history is an aid to understanding, people, situations, life, planets and their movements and actions) you eventually wind up reading about the civilizations that occupied the area the Greeks called Mesopotamia. In Greek, roughly that means "between the rivers." The rivers in question being the Tigris and Euphrates. Some people call Mesopotamia "the Fertile Crescent." I like it with a drizzle of tahini.

It was the original home of the Sumerians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. It's currently one of America's favorite places to bomb the shit out of.

The equivalent of each and every amerikan dropping about $20 worth of bombs.

When our current round of bombing the shit out of Mesopotamia started about two weeks ago, I found myself saying to myself something that might pass for profound. That is if anyone listened to me outside of people I have to pay to listen to me. (BTW, today, a "Yikes!" uttered by Bazooka Joe passes for profound.)

I said aloud to myself, "A culture led by a man with an eight-second attention span should never go to war with a culture with an 8000-year attention span."

Here's a brief niblet on what I mean by 8000-year attention span. "The cuneiform sources for [Mesopotamian] culture span from c. 3400 BC up until c. AD 80...This culture endured for more than three millennia, meaning that from the Middle East to the West more than half of human history is written in cuneiform."

English has lasted roughly 1000 years. I can't imagine it lasting so that it's legible to current practitioners 2500 years from now. I don't even remember what on fleek means anymore, or 23-skidoo. Half of the things I say to people render them as crazy-eyed as Marty Feldman navel gazing.

Further, Wisnom, the author of the book shown above writes, “Writing is not the only legacy of Mesopotamia. Many concepts indispensable to civilisation originated here, including the city, banking, and law. Our division of hours into sixty minutes is based on the Mesopotamian mathematical system, and the constellations we look for in the sky were first grouped and named by the Babylonians. The Assyrians had aqueducts before the Romans, and the Babylonians had a version of Pythagoras’ theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras.”

Yes, but no trump meme-coins.

By the way, Hammurabi's Code, composed around 1750 BC (and stolen by the French for a display in the Louvre about 200 years ago) pre-dates the Magna Carte by about 2800 years. It predates the us constitution by about 3600 years. Its precepts from back then are currently being ignored and violated by our leaders today. (Admittedly, the code is a bit harsh for my taste. A lot of ears cut off. A lot of putting to death. But at least they punished serial child-rape.)

But this is a blog on advertising, remember?

What does any of this have to do with advertising?

Well, the same f-upped-ness that leads us to think we could subdue Mesopotamia today has led our industry--especially the rose-tinted "performance" and "measurement" sides of it down a similar poison-ivied garden path.

We have forgotten time.
We have succumbed to the illusion of quick wins.
We have fallen prey to magical thinking.
We tactic-ize and hope for quarterly success.
We work so we can cash in and cash out.
We willingly forget that brands, relationships, life are built over time, not over spreadsheets.

We forget that the only things that work are:
-work
-repetition
-time

Our eight-second attention span will lead to untold amerikan and iranian deaths. Our eight-second attention span will cost us trillions of dollars in brand-equity. Our eight-second attention span will accomplish nothing while costing everything.

We worry about immediate returns for things that take decades to pay off. Or we think hard can be done easily.

Check back with me in 8000 years.

I'll still be writing.

There Is a Season.

I wrote earlier this week about a precept from my favorite living author, Robert Caro. Caro is a two-timer. Two times he won the Pulitzer Prize. Two times he won the National Book Award. As Sullivan, Preston Sturges' directorial alter-ego said in "Sullivan's Travels" (one of the greatest movies ever) about a movie he wanted to shoot, "It'll put Shakespeare back with the shipping news."

Caro is an historian who believes history writing should be held to the same literary-standards as literature itself. He not only writes of his topic, he writes beautifully. He writes with style good enough to subdue the bushwa about disappearing attention spans. In fact, of Caro Mr. Gossage might have said, "People don't read history. They read what interests them and sometimes it's history."

The precept I previously wrote about was Caro's dicta, "find out how things work and explain them to people." I think that's a good policy whether you're working on a car, a burger joint, a perfume or a technology. Or even a politician you're trying to get elected. Dissection might be the best form of inspection and introspection.

The Caro-ism I'd like to underscore today might be a codicil of what's above. It's about a doggedness of approach. A relentless belief that the truth sells, but that finding the truth (which sells) takes work.

That bon mot (or bone mot as Sparkle, my 2 1/2 year old golden retriever might joke) is "turn every page."

Turning every page--as a modus operandi has been MBA'd out of the advertising business today. 

We no longer talk to customers. 
We no longer go to the grocery story and look at products.
We no longer try things or use things ourselves.
We no longer talk to engineers or visit factories.
We seldom even read the volumes of pixelated prolix emauled to us late at night.

Today our dogma might well be rendered "turn every page you can in the 90 minutes you were scoped assuming you don't have seven 12 minute minutes before the initial tissue session that demands, no tissues, but snotty tissue detritus we call "work" with a level of finish that would make Reubens look like a slacker.

Turning every page is no longer, in short, allowed. Not after 35 years of MBA-Holding Company hegemon.

Turning every page is the single essential of good work. And, I suppose, because the aforementioned hegemons can't figure out how to "monetize" it, they ignore it. They default instead to an array of insipidities, like "being part of culture," or something on the order of a "shorty" award, or even a Cannes award. 

So much of so called communications today reminds me of Macbeth's "Tomorrow" soliloquy from that little number called Macbeth. I started to highlight the portion I usually recite--the bit Faulkner pinched--but then I read the whole thing and realized Billy Boy turned every page.

And wrote every phrase.

Coming Up Short.

There was an article in Saturday's New York Times about the Los Angeles Marathon. Apparently it's especially warm in LA--and though the 26.2-mile run started at 7AM, the weathertariat was predicting no cloud cover and temperatures approaching 90-degrees.

From 1981 to 1995, a younger, thinner George ran a dozen marathons. Eleven in New York and one in Philadelphia. My fastest time was 3:10:15 and my slowest was 3:57:20. I dropped out of one with severe leg cramps. During those dozen marathons, I ran through snow, torrential rain, adverse winds and an extremely humid day where the temperature and humidity in New York hit the mid-80s. 

It was no picnic. Marathons never are. 

This year in LA, race organizers are worried about the heat and its effect on entrants.

They're allowing runners to get a "finisher's medal" after just 18 miles. In other words, you can complete 68.702-percent of the race (in my grade-book that's a D+) and still get credit for finishing.

If I finished the whole thing, and someone else finished under 70-percent of it and got the same medal I got, I'd be pissed. I'd be equally-pissed if I were wearing the medal (you're allowed to wear it on your way home without looking like a dickweed) and someone asked me how far I ran.

Finish for the entirety of the existence of the word has meant "completion." Etymology online, above, defines the verb as to come to an end, to stop, die, a close, a conclusion, the greatest degree. 

Finish, as a word is like "unique." It either is or isn't. It can't be modified. You've either finished or not. Like you're either unique or not. You can't even be very. You just are or have. It's on or off. Dead or living. Erwin Shrödinger need not apply.

There's no question in my mind why Schubert's Symphony Number 8 is called his "Unfinished Symphony." It's not finished.

What bothers me about this, of course, is that calling people who don't finish finishers is the sort of practice that has done so much to denigrate our industry and, yes, our world.

Some of the supporters of the 68.702-percent-finish-standard sound like so many apologists in our business. The ones that applaud awards for ads that never ran, and clients that never paid for those ads. The ones that herald a CCO as "most awarded" though her agency's revenue, client list and number of employees has decreased by 80-percent or 90-percent.

The Times reports, that Steph Dunlap, a "pacer" said, "marathon medals represent the memories, not the distance." I suppose that would allow me, who cut myself shaving this morning, to qualify for the Purple Heart. My blood represents trauma not a war-wound.

Ms. Dunlap continued "All runners count, even if they don't complete the race. I think they should be incredibly proud of how far they've come. I mean, 18 miles is still nothing to scoff at."

Undoubtedly 18 miles is a long way to run. As stated above, it's almost 70-percent of a marathon. But the medal is question is for finishing a marathon. (Unless they're giving you 70-percent of a medal.) 

When standards plummet, whether in running 18 miles of a 26.2-mile race, or praising work because it gets through the polyp-lined client and agency digestive tracts, what happens is a wholesale denigration of "good."

I've seen too much bushwa like this of late.

This is praising 18-mile marathons. As Ms. Dunlap says, "I think they should be incredibly proud of how far they've come." That's like being incredibly proud of telling jokes and getting no laughs or writing a string of words that make no sense and calling it a story. Or thinking about applying for a job and believing you would have gotten it had you applied.

Great work is what makes something great.  

A sports team.
A Brownie troop.
A nation.
An ad agency.

Sure, effort matters.
But it's effort and results that count.

Life isn't free swim.

As Tennessee Williams wrote in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,"  (the movie)

If everything deserves applause--just because it ran, what do you do with the spots below? Why bother trying for greatness. After all, you get a medal for 68.702-percent?

What Does it Do.

Imagine yourself in one of those incredibly stupid 1960s sitcoms that a lot of people my age grew up with and somehow survived. Almost any sitcom will do. From ones that featured a genie in a bottle. To ones that featured benign blonde witches. To ones that featured talking horses, talking cars, Martians who suddenly appeared on earth or modern-day astronauts who somehow went back to caveman times. (No. I'm not calling them cave-people. Call my cave-lawyer.)

Almost all those sitcoms involved situations where something 99% inexplicable to half the cast had to somehow be explained. How the fuck did Lassie know that kid was in a well? How did Mr. Ed dial a phone.

It's 65 years later now. 

I'm an OFM (old f'in' man) and about 99% of everything I do in advertising--and yes, life is taking something apart, looking at it and explaining to people who either don't know or can't be bothered or who are somehow intimidated by whatever, how something works. 

I bought an indoor clothes line the other day. The instructions that came with it are more complex than anything ever written by John Maynard Keynes. (BTW, Keynes was more than anyone was responsible for the 60-years of post-war stability the world, relatively speaking, enjoyed before trump destroyed it.)

There are even, I'm told, agency or production companies (they're kind of the same thing today) who make a living creating explainer videos. And most of the time if you can't figure out something with your Mac, or your Microwave, or your Mrs., you can find a badly-produced YouTube video that says press this, click this, and voila, marital bliss.

Robert Caro, my favorite living writer, once described his particular facility as "Find out how things work and explain them to people." When I was helping run the IBM account at a now defuct and defuct agency called Ogilvy, when I interviewed writers, I'd tell them, "we were in the translation business. We take things people don't understand and understand-ize them."

About 75% of my current book of business comes from financial companies or technology companies. 

They:
1. Don't know what they do.
2. Can't explain it.
3. Can't say why they're better.
4. Get scared when you ask them--angry even.

I recently had to buy a streaming service. There was no way to evaluate them other than price. No one did anything different, told you anything different, or said anything different.

I'd be damned if anyone anywhere knows the difference between one pubicintercom agency and the next, much less the difference between this award-winning credit glommer and that. Much less this agency that formerly stood for something and that. 

When they're all the same, you buy the cheapest. Cheapest means what they do sucks. And eventually to get you back they have to re-cheaper. Eventually their margins are thinner even than they're ethics and they're out of business.

The same, sadly, has happened to politics. There's no humans. Just regurgitating focus-group tested sloganeering wrapped in a thick paste of meaninglessness. So we buy the emptiness who's the best liar and promises the lowest taxes, not worrying about the debt bill that's well-over due and the collapse of everything government is supposed to help with like health, schools, roads, clean air, defense and access to progress.

There's not an iota of difference (or morality) in anything or anyone, so we vote for the protoplasm we'd most like to 'have a beer with,' though the only ones politicians have beers with are $12,000,000 lobbyists or felons begging for pardons with million dollar checks in tow.

The way around this is to stand for something.
To say something different and back it up with an actual difference.
Different gets more business.
Different can charge more.
Different is liked.

That's the difference.

The Tyranny of Algorithm.

Because I read so widely (at least by my estimation) and get book reviews from a variety of sources (the Times, the Journal and the Economist) I rarely take a reading recommendation from either friends or the amazonian algorithms that have grabbed control over our discretionary spending. (amazon pays a smaller percentage of its revenue in taxes than your neighborhood bodega. You probably pay tax at about a 50% rate. jeff bezos pays less than 1/50th of that, about a 1% rate. See those synthetic breasts below? Your tax dollars at work.)

Taxes aside (if you believe as I do in systems collapse owing to major amounts of money not being taxes, you can't really put taxes aside. So consider that a drf--dumb rhetorical flourish) taxes aside, there's something solipsistic or naval-gazing or creativity destroying about amazon using their sophisticated prediction engines to recommend your next book, blouse or sex toy.

It means you're being guided, in a closing of your mind sort-of-way, by a recency bias without even being aware of it. The restaurant equivalent would be ordering chicken parmesan on Tuesday, then getting recommendations every subsequent meal time for chicken pecorino, chicken granaa padano, chicken asiago and so forth.

In short, a persuasive prediction engine is an imagination-and- try-new-things-limiting mechanism that rewards you (with ease and comfort) for never leaving your ease-and-comfort-zone.

I am amazed about 92 times a month how a word or phrase I've pretty much never used or heard in my entire life becomes just about the only word or phrase we hear in the course of a day. 

I wouldn't be surprised if the first words uttered by my younger grandson who's turning one in a few weeks, were, "this is a deliciously robust, agile and well-curated bottle of apple mush. I'm glad you bought it from a digital-first grocery and received the appropriate loyalty reward points which you can redeem for valuable prizes. Blackout dates and terms and conditions apply. Do not try this at home. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Professional driver closed course. Also use under adult supervision. Do not operate heavy machinery."

This algorithmic hijacking, of course, is a huge detriment to our society and our industry. Orwell's "Newspeak" after all, was conceived as a controlled language that deliberately limited vocabulary size. Fewer words limit the complexity of thought and by eliminating words that can express dissent or complexity you encourage obedience and one of the great words of our modern era: compliance.

In advertising we limit our creative thinking to what we've seen before. If we're ambitious we seek to copy last year's cannes winners. If we're not ambitious, we copy last year's pharma ad or toyotathon. 

2026 award winners look like 2025 award winners look like 2024 award winners. As in the Marvel "universe," the sequels are here.

Not only to we live and breathe unaware of the crushing effects on creativity of the recency bias, the algorithm is so almighty, we can barely escape it. Using book-choice as an example, there's likely no difference between the selections at amazon and barnes and ignoble, and independent stores (like independent thought) have been crushed by our need to save 12-cents and speedy delivery. 

As somewhat of an aside, amazon offers for sale over 600,000,000 items. But I'd imagine if past Pareto is any guarantee of current performance, a couple hundred of those 600,000,000 items make up a good 80% of amazon's sales.

What's happening is bad.

Almost all human flourishing in the roughly 15,000 years of human history came from the free-exchange of ideas, technologies and methods. The Greeks wouldn't have produced Aristotle, Euripides, Aeschylus and Sophocles if they hadn't swiped wholesale the phonic scribblings of Phoenician merchants. 

I suppose this is a roundabout way of suggesting that you put your phone, computer, tablet, implants, glasses etc. away for a couple hours a day. Take a walk to someplace you've never been. Talk to a stranger. And try something new. 

Or old.

Anything but another recent.

Syzygy.

I've become friends over the past couple of decades with a luminary and luminous art director called Dave Dye. Dave's a Brit and as Brits seem to say so often, I'm gobsmacked by all this.

First of all, I've always regarded myself as only moderately talented. I never scaled the great agency heights and never won the gigantic awards. I was never one of those ad people who you might speak about with awe or reverence. I'm not being modest here, just truthful. Throughout my 45 year career, I was always the guy who wrestled to the ground the impossible brief. I was never the guy who did the industry-shaking hilarious spot with the giant director and giant talent.

In fact, if you told me a dozen years ago, I'd be partnering with Dave on an assignment through my agency, GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company I would have laughed. That would be like a summer-stock actor working across from Meryl Streep. 

Almost eleven years ago, however, Dave and I started trading the occasional email. Mostly because we are both avid about advertising--not just its current trends but its history, and Dave read about some books I had found after the great Julian Koenig (of "Think Small" fame) had passed away. You can read about our concord here, in a small post from Dave's amazing blog.

Dave and I met for coffee about eight years ago when I was still at Ogilvy and he and his large SLR were visiting New York. Since that time, we've shared stories, referred people and generally become at least tangentially connected. 

Some months ago, I had engaged with an I.T. client. The work I usually do is sort of a 50-50 mixture of "account planning and copywriting." My belief is, and I see this every day, that very few brands are able to define and differentiate themselves. Very few brands have a meaning in anyone's head--and that includes the people who work at the brand. 

And I always held that the purpose of a brand was to help people organize their minds. They can't keep track of the one-hundred soaps in the grocery store, but they can remember Dove is 1/4 moisturizing cream.

My job I spiel-erize is to help a company find its all-important "epigram." The one line, eight-word definition. Their "We run the tightest ship in the shipping business" or "The ultimate driving machine" or "The antidote for civilization."

In my long view of advertising (or more broadly, communications in general) finding an epigram is the single most-important thing an agency can do. In today's impecunious let's-drive-rates-into-oblivion era, many have decided such lines no longer count. They no longer count, in my estimation, because they take time and effort--two things our world has all-but eliminated. However, what I've seen in my personal experience that such epigrams are where the true "value add" is in our business. 

Anyone can, and will, create a spot with crappy effects, crappy ideas, crappy production values with a crappy message. Such crap is the sine non qua of our business today. But defining lines, and work that can cascade from them is, where the money is.

The executions come and go. "Betcha can't eat just one," earned Lay's billions.

We forgot that that's what we can do.
That's what we did.
Until we stop believing it mattered.
(I'd wager one-trillion dollars of brand equity has been lost in amerika alone with the disappearance of such brand pillars.)

I despise the man with every fiber of my being, but "make america great again" is one such line. I can hardly remember Kamala's. And Hillary's was so bad (I'm with her) that it might actually have cost amerika its very democracy.

Dave and I are working on a project now and had a nice hour-long "chin wag" this morning. We had about four minutes of work to discuss, but we zoomed for an hour. 

Also, Dave sent me long pdf drafts of two different books he is working on. One on David Abbott, picture above, and one on the equally surpassing but less-well-known to amerikans at least, Tony Brignull.

Dave and I talked about these books. We talked about the work. But just as much, we talked about the marketing of these books. Does anyone care anymore? In fact, I can't imagine there's a single agency CEO much less a holding company CEO who has even heard of either of these creatives--much less is aware of their work, their skill, their caring.

From that, Dave and I tumbled down a long and twisted Alice in Wonderland tunnel. Bouncing off the walls during our shared descent and hurtling into phrases like "why do we care?" "What's wrong with us?" And other giant ontological questions that might keep otherwise sane people up at night. 

We also started talking about what we do. Dave shepherds the single greatest advertising archive in the world today. He told me a story of traveling halfway across London to get ahold of two Tony Brignull ads that he wanted to feature and couldn't find anywhere else except from a distant relative of Tony's.

I mentioned to Dave a word, an astronomical term, I had learned about twenty years ago from my wise therapist Owen. 

The word is syzygy. (zizzagee.)

Non technically, it's when three or more celestial objects align in the sky. I said something to Dave about the energy, excitement, thrill and fulfillment that comes when you arrive at syzygy at work. I mentioned how I've worked with six Hall of Famers in my time, and three major directors. Each one of them, no matter how buttoned-up and boardroomed their age and payscale had rendered them would fairly froth when they had a syzygy moment. I used the word "froth" as a shared tribute to John Webster, the English art director who had earned the sobriquet, "The Human Ad Man."

Dave said to me as we were wrapping up, "Have you written a post on syzygy?" I replied, "Dave, I've written over 7,000 posts. Damned if I know."

But that, sadly, is the point.

We work now in a business run by people who have no love. No love for a joke. No love for a touch. No love for humanity. No love for their profession. No love for their co-workers. No love for their agency. No love for their clients. No love for the ability to look at the mirror and like who's looking back at you. 

We work now in a business run by people who don't syzygy. Who don't froth. Who don't have love for anything but how much, how soon and with how little effort.

We needn't be good, they believe.
We can use science to reach people.
Techniques.
Starbursts (speaking of syzygy.)
Rewards points.
Exclamation points.

We needn't be good. 
Funny.
True.
Real.
Moving.

That's hard work.
And we have a bag of snake-oil tricks that are proven to work. 
Click now! Learn more! Enter and win!

That's what's done us in.
It's abandoning good for expedient.
(That's what does most everyone in. The short-cutting away of hard-work.)

It ain't the fractured media landscape.
It ain't consolidation.
It ain't business schools.
It ain't A.I. or some other techno-wizardry that teeters on the brink of medieval alchemy.

It's us.
It's us having forgotten.
It's us no longer fighting.
Even though it's stupid to fight.
For the right to be proud of the way we earn our bucks.

My first ECD, Marshall (whom I'm still in touch with) was a very wise man. When he hired me back in 1984, he said to me, "I want this to be the kind of place where you work hard all day. And when you get home, you're proud to tell your spouse what you did."

That ain't in any agency about section. It doesn't even mention the word "culture" or "intersection." You won't find such language in an annual report.

It's syzygy.

Casting.

I get a lot of calls from friends and people something like friends who have reached a state of career arrears. (Flattering myself, I'd say "career arrears" is a Cole Porter-ish way of saying they've been fucked up the arse by macro-economics.)

I've spent my career in career arrears and I've learned exactly one thing:

Do something.

It doesn't much matter what.

But do something.

Something that gets you noticed. 
Something that gets people curious about you.
Something that's funny and pass-along-able.
Reach out to people you like.
Reach out to people you've had a falling out with.
But do something.

Speaking of doing something, about thirty years ago I shot a fairly large package of commercials with Errol Morris. When I flew out to Santa Monica for casting, I was a-twitter with excitement. Casting with Errol Morris--a man who always seems to make precisely the right casting choice. I sat at the cheap folding table right next to him, and prepared to be wowed by his absolute genius of discernment and direction.

In six hours or so, 94% of the time we were seeing talent he said only two things. Better life advice you'll never get.

When talent stood on the little piece of tape and stared into the video camera, Errol would say (in his charming, slightly cross-eyed and daffy way) "do something."

If he liked the do they did he'd start them over again. He'd say "do something different."

If you spend anytime whatsoever on LinkedIn, or read what's left of the advertising trade magazines, there is no shortage of absolutely stunningly asinine advertising advice about breaking through in whatever they call today's era. 

They'll be bushwa about influencers. And AI. And algorithms. And "craft." They're be absolute nonsense from painerchuks and the like about "authenticity." There will more pablum than you'd get from a presidential press conference wrapped in a new business pitch covered in an agency about section.

None of any of that is anything more than a modern rendition of Shakespeare's Polonius lip-flapping platitudes masquerading as wisdom.

Your job when you're looking for work (and smart people are always looking for work) is to

a) stand out;

b) get noticed; 

c) make an impression and

d) stay top of mind.

There's really not too much more to job-hunting, advertising and life than that.

I've written about this before. But since most of all readers soak up information like a cheap locker-room towel soaks up sweat, it's probably swirled down your mental drain.

Over 50 years ago, I read this book.

I remembered the author, whom I liked, sorted amerikan presidents into one of four categories.

You can sort almost anything into these categories, including yourself.

There's only one demarcation that's any good if you want to survive what in many cases is a world that seems bent on knocking you down.

Passivity, while it might work if you're staring down a bear in the woods, is not usually an option in every day life. Good things might come to those who wait but more good things come to those who go and get them.

So we're left with one box.

Active (do something) positive (memorable.)

That's the brief, boys and girls.

It's not about what you've done (I won this award. I pitched this business. So and so recommended me.)
It's about what you're doing.

Every day.

It's about being avid.

Being fearless.

Letting your ass flap in the wind.

Even leaving my readers with that horrific image is better than leaving them with nothing.

I'll probably get a job out of this post.

Fake Blame.

Last week a fake video made the rounds of musk, altman and bezos (I refuse to capitalize proper nouns when the people, places or things they're noun-ing are by no means proper) about AI being powered by newly unemployed people riding exercise bikes to power data centers. 

Yes, according to these people, we were put here on earth to be draft animals and/or cannon fodder for the plutocrat class. Before long we’ll bring back Hobbes’ nasty brutish and short lifestyle, if we haven't already. Those are the terms and conditions we’re forced to accept.

Meanwhile, back in reality-ville (a shrinking community of pariahs) headlines like these are all-too-frequent.

In what's left of the decimated ad industry (editor's note: decimatio was a Roman military concept--over 2,000 years old. It was a form of military retribution that called for the execution of one out of ten of a particular group. In modern usage, we bastardize the word to mean complete annihilation. We don't really decimate our enemies anymore we more eighty-percent-imate them) A.I. is increasingly being blamed for decimation. It is blamed for the destruction of thousands of jobs, dozens of agencies and trillions of dollars of brand-equity accumulated through the decades.

WPP blames AI. It never blames its abject "out-of-touch-with-reality-ness." What do I mean by that? They've shed 80% of their revenue and their clients and their viability. They're shrinking as fast as a libido in an old-age home. Yet they are trying (vainly) to position themselves as something they call a "growth partner." HINT: Before you call yourself a growth partner, make sure you're growing. 

AI, to my non-cataracted eyes, has become a convenient scape-goat for the destruction of entire industries and countless lives. Just as when two-feet of snow are dumped across half the country or 500-year-storms occur roughly every other years, we don't blame exxon and their fellow petrodestructors, we blame something vague and un-arrestable. We castigate climate change not big oil's role in it. 

This is a semantic shifting of the blame that 98.98% of all people are too busy bemoaning to actually realize what's happening.

Here's a more concrete example.

We blame job loses in an amorphous way on AI. (AI is un-prosecutable. We can't lynch it, despite the mention of pitchforks above. We don't even tax the billionaires behind it.)

We blame job loses on AI.

We never say, who's behind AI.

We never say
if elon musk pays himself one-trillion dollars,
that's $1,000,000,000,000,
that's the cause of disruption.

No one ever does the math and says
$1,000,000,000,000
is ten million (10,000,000)
$100,000 salaries.

The disruption is not caused by AI,
it's caused by one person deciding he is worth more to the world
than ten-million people earning $100,000/year.

musk pays himself enough to give everyone in all these states $100,000/year.

Or, the same to every resident of the 2, 3, 4, 5, and 1/2 of the 6th largest cities in the US. 

Back in 2016, WPP had an annual revenue of about $14,000,000,000, just slightly more than their annual revenue today, a decade later. (Profit has decreased in that time by more than 75%.) 

Martin Sorrell took $100,000,000 of that money as his own compensation. The compensation committee agreed to policies like these.(The compensation committee decides its own compensation):

I refuse to blame "exogenous" technologies for the destruction of giant swaths of our industry and the world economy. 

I blame those who treat everything like it is an extractive industry. They remove all value and leave nothing but slag and mercury-poisoned water behind.

An example of destruction from "The Radical Potter,"
by Tristram Hunt.

I blame greed. That most biblical and second-most damning of all sins. (Hubris is first.)

And the world’s most-effective and least-prosecuted killer.

Shakespeare, as usual, could have written this post in a dozen words. As in Cassius' to Brutus in "Julius Caesar." (Not about salad.)

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, 

Wolf Man.

There aren't many people who have experienced Lycanthropy, just as there aren't that many who even know what the word means. But having grown up as I did, with a borderline mother given to fits of uncontrollable madness, I am well aware of the ailment, though you can't ever, really, get accustomed to it. 

Lycanthropy is an ancient disease. It's named, in fact, after a king in ancient Greece, four millennia ago, who was punished by Zeus by being turned into a wolf.

Instances of Lycanthropy appear in western thought as early as the bible. In Daniel 4, Nebuchadnezzar (who is more well-known today as a large bottle of wine) was "driven from men, and did eat grass as an oxen." He was in real need of a makeover. His "hair grew like eagles' feathers" and his nails as "birds' claws." 

William Blake painted Nebuchadnezzar like this, hardly a picture you'd put on your Hinge profile, unless, of course, you're into wolf-kink, as so many are.

Of course, if you think for a minute about modern horror movies, werewolves are practically a leitmotif, with literally thousands of films made about, in essence, Lycanthropy. Here are a mere smattering.

These movies didn't emerge fully-formed from the head of Zeus. For thousands of years, around the world cautionary tales of primarily men being turned into wolves abounded.

Some years ago, my therapist of four decades, O, suggested I read "The Parnas," by Silvano Arieti. Arieti, a psychiatrist, a survivor of both the Holocaust and an attack by wolf-Nazis was one of the Twentieth Century's great minds. He was one of the world's foremost authorities on schizophrenia and has written one of the great books on creativity, "Creativity: The Magic Synthesis."

Here's how Arieti describes his up-close encounter with a small group of Nazis, seeing them transform.

Freud in his study of Little Hans--a boy who turned into a wolf wrote, "Lupus homini lupus." Only a wolf acts like a wolf to man.

I'm 98.7-percent Freud was wrong here. I've seen Lycanthropy. I'm a survivor, in fact.

This isn't something I joke about.

There are many who know about Lycanthropy who claim that whole cultures can turn lupine. I am one of them.

Sixty million Germans shuffled their iPods one morning. They switched from Beethoven and Mozart to the Horst Wessel lied and Deutschland Über Alles.

Today, fifty percent of amerika is snarling and drooling spittle and blood and chanting in Leni Riefenstahl guttural exhortations USA USA!

Soon goons will be clamping down on those of us not goose-stepping. We will be arrested. Assaulted. Categorized as üntermenschen. The wolves are here. 

They attack in packs.
And the packs normalize the attacks.

My country tis of thee,
Sweet land Lycanthropy,
Of thee I mourn.