World on Fire.

If you've read a decent amount of history in your time, you learn things about the world that they don't necessarily teach in history books. 

I should clarify, I don't read history so I know when the War of the Roses was or to learn about Lord Nelson's missing eye.

While I remember dates and treaties and successions and assassins and wars, and while I like knowing the details of history, what really matters--if you're using the past as a tool to understand the present and the future--are trends that are sometimes apparent only if you've read a lot--yes, a lot--of history.

For instance, take the centuries of wars Rome fought against the Carthaginians. Like the European wars in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they happened every thirty years or so. There'd be a grudging peace for a time, and then things would get incendiary again. 

Basically, regardless of Hannibal, the Alps, elephants, Cannae, Scipio Africanus and more, Rome and Carthage were each competing for world domination. Their rivalry was as intense as two tweenage brothers in the backseat of a station-wagon in 1969. It's not going to be quiet in the back, no matter how often dad threatens to stop the car and come back there.

Likewise, Germany fought the rest of Europe three times in 70 years. In 1870, in 1914, and in 1939. Despite massive carnage and literally millions of deaths, the fundamental causes of war remained. Even after defeat, those causes weren't really removed.

You could probably say the same for Israel and whichever middle-eastern state they're currently fighting. Regardless of the deaths, the costs, the anguish and the despoiling, the reasons for fighting don't disappear just because the fighting is over for a time. 

Weirdly, as destructive as war is, peace is also a killer. 

In the case of Rome and Carthage above, once Rome utterly annihilated Carthage, Rome was no longer on their toes. They no longer needed to be at-the-ready. That led--over centuries--to hubris and Rome's decline and demise. 

(Hubris, by the way is not a ritual Jewish circumcision of boys.)

The same is probably happening now to amerika. Without the Soviet Union as a counter-balance, as a nation we've gotten complacent and flabby. We have let our guard down and will eventually pay big time for it. We've grown arrogant and mean. We are bullies without a counter-balancing big kid we have to reckon with.

You can see similar hubris having an impact on Israel. And should Israel be wiped out, without having Israel as a focal point, my guess is the Shia and the Sunni nations will before too many centuries annihilate each other. As Protestants and Catholics tried to do, for so many centuries in the West.

Now, the advertising point.

I'm on the Amtrak to Connecticut as I write this, a monopoly rail system that is antiquated in part because it has no real competition. The roadbed I'm riding on right now as we pass Port Chester, New York, a blighted formerly industrial city on the fetid Long Island Sound, is the same roadbed Italian and Irish immigrants built in the 1840s. It's the same roadbed that the early railroaders built on stolen Indian trails.

Were there competition, Amtrak would have to improve. Even if route 95--built about 75 years ago and hardly widened since then, were somehow adjusted, Amtrak would have to improve. Right now, both ways of travel suck, so neither eats the other's lunch. That's the good thing about nausea. You eat less.

Now we come to the ad industry. What's left of it. Another monopoly controlled industry that is in worse shape today than it was 60 years ago. And because there's no external existential threat, there's no impetus for the moguls who control the industry to revitalize the industry. Besides, the guys (it is all guys) who run the holding companies and use them as their ATMs are all about 60 and all have about $60 million. Or more.

Further, a quick search of WPP's 2023 annual report reveals the report contained 31 mentions of the word "creativity," and 194 mentions of "compensation." It's clear to me where their priorities sit. And frankly, if I had made it to one of those ivory towers, yeah, I'd be the same. I'd grab for all the Mammon I could post-rationalize,

Why rock that gravy boat?

Further, and maybe most pernicious, is the gutting of the trade press and independent journalists who used to look at matters such as these. If no one's around to call you on your bullshit, if you can get away with it, if no one's watching because your shell-game is so well constructed and the haze of fear so impenetrable, you can basically do what you want to do, say what you want to say, and get away with it.

Every statement they issue is a lie. Every thing they do is gaudy over-compensation.

There's no accountability, no competition, no--so-to-speak--celestial book-keeping.

Like the sybaritic Roman empire, like defense contractors who charge $2700 for a hammer, all of this will, someday after I'm dead, collapse under its own weight--as, say, Boeing seems to be doing right now, (though defense contractors never suffer penalties.)

But with no real integrity, it will all be swept under a $72,000 Persian carpet, and no one will be the wiser. Remember John Thain, former head of the New York Stock Exchange and the outrage--or stink--emanating from his interior design? I believe he and his wife, whom I went to high school with, own 25+ acres on the water in Rye--just two miles from the aforementioned Port Chester. They ain't suffering.

But remember the corny words of the great Grantland Rice, a writer no one reads anymore. Who kept things in perspective:

For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But HOW you played the Game.