Ask Me No Questions.

About 20 years ago I was between full-time jobs and I got a freelance job working for some pretty hoity-toity creative people at an agency in Durham, North Carolina called McKinney. 

McKinney had an excellent creative reputation and I was intimidated by the job. What's more, I had never met the creative people before and I was working without a partner. Also, I was new to freelance. I had never really done it before. In short, I had no place to go, no one to turn to for encouragement or reassurance. I felt more than a little out of my depth.

I knew I was working hard and doing a lot of work, but I wasn't sure if the work or if I were up to snuff.

Most creatives probably have that feeling now and again. No matter if they're seasoned and ensconced in an agency or on an account or if they're fresh out of ad school. This is a very subjective business and it's not always plain to see how your work is being received. 

About two weeks into the assignment I had just finished reading a bunch of scripts to the group creative director of the business. For anonymity's sake, I'll call her Matilda.

"Matilda," I said "Are you happy with me?"

There was a pause on the other end of the phone and quite a long bit of silence. A pause that added to my case of nerves.

I repeated the question and added to it.

"I've been working for you for two weeks. I've presented a bunch of work. You've given me feedback. But I need to know. 'Are you happy with me?'"

Finally she laughed.

"No one's ever asked me that before," she said. "Thank you. Yes, we're happy."

As people who read Ad Aged regularly know, I've recently had two rounds of cataract surgery at New York University hospital in Manhattan. The surgery itself an experienced doctor can do in about the time it takes to scramble an egg over a high heat. But before the surgery and after, I must have had ten visits. 

Testing and measurement. Testing and measurement again because they forgot to test and measure something. A post-operative session the day after surgery. On Tuesday next week, I have yet another follow-up examination with the surgeon. 

I've also had a dozen phone calls with low-paid but officious phone-callers. Also about forty text messages via something called my chart reminding me of appointments, medications, not to eat before surgery and so on.

In all, I'd guess I've had over 50 points of contact around the procedures.

After each one, I've been asked to fill out a survey on how things went. Each time they ask you to fill out a survey, the letter asking you to do so starts by apologizing in case you've already filled out the survey. 

I feel like we're getting to the point where they'll start sending me surveys on how my survey filling out experience has been.

I suppose all these surveys are translated somehow into ones and zeroes and populate my patient profile. If I complain that the woman at the front was surly and never looked up from her 96-ounce cup of coffee, I'd guess they have some way of codifying in and marking it down.

All this surveying and contact is supposed to make me feel that someone gives a shit. Like I am receiving attention and care. That someone's concerned enough with my well-being that they're conducting surveys to see how they can improve.

Modern life today is monitored for quality assurance.

But the only quality they're assurancing is that you pay too much, wait too long, have a lot of unanswered questions and still feel fairly like a strand of hair swirling down a drain rather than a human.

Since we're subject to so many surveys, it probably makes sense to have a couple rules about surveys. Here are a few.

1. If you're not going to change your behavior, performance or how you serve people based on responses, what you sent is not really a survey, it's a sham. It's like one of those 1970s psych lab experiments where the button you're told to press doesn't actually do anything, but you don't know that.
   
   
2. A machine should never send a survey about how a human performed.
   
   
3. A human should never send a survey about how a machine performed.
   
   
4. Improvements based on survey responses should be tabulated and published. "You told us we didn't have enough cashiers. We've doubled our staff and reduced wait times accordingly.

I don't know when survey mania started, sometime, I suspect during the rise of computing power in the late 1990s. The rise in computing power coincided, btw, with the rise in the power of MBAs. 

I have the feeling in MBA school they teach people "you don't have to make service better. You just have to pretend you're making it better."

There's an old story about a management consultant brought onto a factory floor to find ways to boost productivity. He suggested they change the lighting every couple of weeks or so.

"If they can see better they'll perform better?" some naif asked.

"Not at all," he replied. "You only have to make them think you're doing it because you care. It doesn't matter if you make things better or worse. People just want to know you're paying attention."

This brings me back to a gendered David Ogilvy-ism that nearly everyone today no longer abides by. "The consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife." 

It's so much easier and cheaper to treat people like they're morons. And to assume they're too stupid to know what's being done to them.

The Past is a Present.

If you read, as I do, an endless succession of large, long books on history, you realize the timing we append onto historical events is about as deceptive as a well-groomed congressional child molester or presidential rapist.

Humans like, as a species, hard and fast beginnings and ends. So we can say things like "World War II ended when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945."

Very little could be further from the truth.

If the shooting stopped in 1945, the legacy continued. A dozen wars started when that war purportedly stopped. From the Reds versus the Kuomintang in China, to the wars on the Korean peninsula, to Vietnam, from anti-colonial movements all over Asia.

Things don't stop because we deem them stopped.

Even the religious wars like the Thirty Years' war or the Hundred Years' war lasted longer than their convenient date-derived names suggest. The legacies continue long after we mark things done.

America's Civil War might be the most-expressive example of the ongoingness of ongoing. I'd argue that 160 years after Lee's "surrender" at Appomattox Court House in 1865, that war is still being waged today.

As the January 6th confederate raid on the capital showed, it never really ended. And I'd say that with the resurgence of socially-acceptable hate during trumpism, that in terms of race-hate, amerika today is much like amerika in 1880s, that is we are redefining the permissability of evil treatment, odious terms and racist assessments.

The myth of the Lost Cause emerged in the 1880s. It is re-emerging today. 

In advertising, we are prisoners of the same sort of date-based dopiness. Such thinking leads us to data-ize the work we do that clients run, giving us a calculus so we can create yottabytes of numbers that allow us to post-mortem things that can't really be post-mortem-ed. We also subscribe to the notion of causality in advertising. If we do x, y will happen. Ignoring that the human brain has something like six-trillion neural connections. We don't know what happens with them when we run an ad. We never will

In brief, most everything, including ripples, have ripple effects. Such as an earthquake in Krakatoa that might have caused societal collapse in Nineveh, almost 7,000 miles away. 

As they say, shit harpoons. And keeps on harpooning.

A dumb ad made by AI might start to unravel dozens of years of great advertising done by humans. We like to bubble-boy our efforts--walling it off from the past. We delineate and attribute results to current moments when common-sense says they're not really delineatable or attributable. 

Bernstein had this just about right in Mankewicz's and Welles' "Citizen Kane" from 1940, before even I was born. 

I still covet BMWs based on ads from BMW did back in the 1980s and 1990s. The ads they do today do very little for because they don't seem to understand driving, the car itself or the mind-set of their potential customers. 

I'd bet a good portion of BMW's sales, or Coke's, or IBM's or almost any brand's are based on decades of imagery and messaging that hasn't run for half a century. My guess is the top two ads for Coke above sell a helluva lot more diabetes-water than the bottom two ads--if those bottom two ads ever actually ran. (Oh. And Coke lies about their recycling. They're the world's largest plastic polluter.)

I suppose all of this would have been un-needed if we all just read Faulkner's 1919 novel "Requiem for a Nun."

That's where you can find these words.

Imagine them on a 165-page powerpoint.

164 pages of padding.

Or, if you prefer.

A Prophet of Anti-Pessimism.

I read an article the other day in The Economist.

When I think about that sentence alone, it might serve to differentiate me as a creative person. While a large majority of creatives are creative, there might not be fifteen who read The Economist. In a business that's essentially built on being different and standing out, reading The Economist helps me do just that.

As an Ogilvy CEO said to me over coffee after I was fired, "George, ten out of ten creatives can do the funny spot. You can build businesses."

I'll miss Cannes once again. Too busy building businesses.

But I'll take that. I always have.

In any event, I read this article in The Economist and started thinking as I so often do about advertising.

I wondered, could I learn about what would make a golden age in advertising from reading about golden ages in civilization? What would thriving civilizations have in common with thriving agencies. And similarly, what sorts of conditions lead to the downfall of civilizations and agencies.

My brief for this post. In red, above.

Of course, this Economist article is merely a brief review of a 400 page book that won't come out until September. So, what follows will necessarily be reductive. But I learn a lot from book reviews. What's more, this one is 1100 words long. Which is about the length of a ten-minute podcast--so while shortened it's still about 25 times longer than what we currently regard as "long copy." 

Finally, The Guardian newspaper, called Johan Norberg "a prophet of anti-pessimism." That's a moniker we could, today especially, use a helluva lot more of. While anti-pessimism ain't my natural habitat, adaptability may be. So, I'll take it.

Here are a few attributes Norberg notes great civilizations have had in common over the last three millennia. Alongside those, I've added my thoughts on how successful agencies most-often act in accord with successful empires.

Here's the entirety of the Economist article. Assuming you can still read.

.

Peak Human. By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books; 400 pages; $32.99 and £22

The way to start a “golden age” is to erect big, beautiful barriers to keep out foreign goods and people. That, at least, is the view of the most powerful man on the planet. Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian, makes the opposite case. In “Peak Human”, Mr Norberg charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.

Consider the Song dynasty in China, which lasted from 960 to 1279AD. Song emperors were much keener on the rule of law than their predecessors, who tended to rule by whim. To enforce predictable rules, they hired lots of officials via meritocratic exams. The first Song emperor enacted the “unconventional policy reform” of “[not] killing officials who disagreed with him”.

Peasants were granted property rights and allowed to move around, rather than being tied to a lord’s land. Farm output more than doubled, and the extra food supported much larger cities. In the 1100s Kaifeng, the capital, had 65 times the population of London. Canals made domestic trade easier. International trade followed. Merchants started issuing paper money, six centuries before Europeans did, and the government embraced this brilliant idea—so much easier than carrying heavy strings of copper coins.

“Crowded cities set the stage for an unparalleled exchange of ideas, goods [and] services,” notes Mr Norberg. Artisans devised new industrial processes, such as burning coal to smelt iron. The invention of movable type in the 1040s allowed the printing of books so cheap that one philosopher griped that people would stop learning the classics by heart. By 1200 Song China had the world’s richest economy, a merchant navy with “the potential to discover the world” and a habit of tinkering that could have brought on an industrial revolution centuries before Europe’s. But then the Mongols arrived.

The popular image of Genghis Khan and his mounted hordes sweeping across the world slaughtering and burning is accurate as far as it goes. However, the Mongol dynasty took pains to preserve its predecessor’s technological marvels—even if it did not add much to them. It was only when the Ming emperors took over in 1368 that China really turned in on itself.

Free movement within the country was ended. Free exchange gave way to forced labour. Foreign trade was made punishable by death, and even the construction of ocean-worthy ships was banned. Pining for the good old days, a Ming emperor brought back the fashions of 500 years before. Men caught with the wrong hairstyle were castrated, along with their barbers. Largely thanks to reactionary Ming policies, Chinese incomes fell by half between 1080 and 1400. The country did not recover its mojo until it opened up again in the late 20th century.

Some of the golden ages Mr Norberg describes will be familiar to readers, but he adds fresh details and provocative arguments. Athens was not just the birthplace of democracy; it grew rich because it was, by ancient standards, liberal. Tariffs were only 2%. Foreigners were welcome: a Syrian ex-slave became one of the richest men in town. On a measure devised by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, ancient Athenians enjoyed more economic freedom than citizens of any modern nation, narrowly beating Hong Kong and Singapore. (Such freedom did not apply to women or slaves; a caveat that applies to all golden ages until relatively recently.)

Rome grew strong by cultivating alliances and granting citizenship to conquered peoples. It learned voraciously from those it vanquished—Greek slaves taught Roman children about logic, philosophy and drama. During Rome’s golden age, one set of laws governed a gigantic empire, markets were relatively free and 400,000km of roads sped goods from vessel to villa. As a gobsmacked Greek orator put it: to see all the world’s products, either travel the world or come to Rome.

The emperor Augustus introduced a flat poll tax and a modest wealth tax. Extra income from hard work or innovation suddenly faced a marginal tax rate of zero. Small wonder Augustan Rome grew as rich as Britain and France were 1,500 years later.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of America’s House of Representatives, thinks Rome collapsed because of “rampant homosexual behaviour”. Mr Norberg offers a more convincing explanation. Bad luck—plagues and barbarian attacks—was compounded by policy blunders.

Cash-strapped emperors debased the coinage, reducing its silver content. This caused wild inflation. Price controls were then slapped on everything “from sandals to lions”. Trade atrophied.

Intellectual freedom gave way to dogma, with the persecution first of Christians and then by Christians. Finally, Rome was too weak to resist the barbarian onslaught. Revisionists say the Dark Ages that followed were not so bad. Archaeological evidence, such as a sudden fall in the number of cargo-ship wrecks, suggests they were “the biggest social regression in history”.

Mr Norberg deftly punctures popular misconceptions. The zealots of Islamic State revere the Abbasid caliphate, but would have hated its tolerance. The Italian Renaissance, which modern nationalists such as Viktor Orban see as evidence of European and Christian cultural superiority, began as a revolt against Christian orthodoxy and in imitation of pagan cultures. Despite what you read in Blake and Dickens, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was not miserable for the workers: a study of diaries shows the only group consistently dissatisfied was poets and writers.

Could a history book be more timely? Of all the golden ages, the greatest is here and now. Of all the progress of the past 10,000 years in raising human living standards, half has occurred since 1990. Openness went global after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now it is in rapid retreat, as a multilateral trade war looms and ever more states suppress free inquiry.

Previous golden ages all ended like Rome’s did, jinxed by a mix of bad luck and bad leadership. Many thriving societies isolated themselves or suffered a “Socrates moment”, silencing their most rational voices. “Peak Human” does not mention Donald Trump; it was written before he was re-elected. America’s president will not read it, but others should. The current age of globalisation could still, perhaps, be saved. As Mr Norberg argues: “Failure is not a fate but a choice.” ■

This was all pretty heavy, I know. 

If you made it this far, I'll leave you with 167-seconds of Babs Gonzales. More intelligible than what I just wrote.

Frank Capra Knew.

There's a lot of Orwellian crap going on in what used to be the advertising industry that no one notices anymore. It's ignored because it involves neither fake work nor a pretentious festival that celebrates fake work in a faraway land.

Last week, for instance, literally thousands of humans were replaced by algorithms in what used to be the world's largest communications holding company. This company, with no one noticing (because they keep it out of the trade press) has shed 100,000 humans over the last ten years while it keeps accumulating "Agency of the Year," or "Network of the Year" honors. 

You know the drill. 

War is peace. 

Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Free $400,000,000 planes are ethical.

Shrinking is growing.
Fake is real.
Awards are client success.

The Orwellian bit is at least two-fold and very trumpian. First, we are deluded by the distraction perpetrated by the "list-mania'd" trade-press, a la: "40 Left-Handed Art-Directors Under 40 whose jeans are too tight." Second, and even more pernicious, is the language behind this corporate upheaval.

In the top headline, Adweek uses the word "layoffs." They're not layoffs unless they're temporary. These are job and position loses. Not a momentary, circumstantial set back. If they're not temporary, they're not layoffs. They're reductions in force or, PRIFVA--an au courant companion of EBITDA (Permanent Reductions In Force Via Algorithm.)

In the second headline, Adweek uses the word "restructuring." When a change affects 45-percent of a company, it's not a restructuring, it's a blood-bath.

Frank Capra, the great film director, had seen this movie before. Take a look at this scene from about 1:00 to 1:10.

Because what's happening in the world today is large. And mean. 

It's a war.

A war of concentrated capital against you and I--and everyone else not in the one-percent of the one-percent. (To be in the 1% of the 1%--that's 133,000 households--you need $46,300,000.)

You might like this from Stanford professor Walter Scheidel's book, "The Great Leveler." I drew the chart below myself, updating Scheidel's data which had stopped at 2015.

Yes, 15 years ago it took 388 billionaires to have much as half of the rest of the world. Today, it takes just 26.

Here's what got me going this morning, though. An article in "The Wall Street Journal."

The article, though most people won't see it this way, is about the war I mentioned above. The war between concentrated wealth and everyone else.

Here's what's going on, girls and boys. As Jimmy Stewart says in the clip above, "Don'tcha see what's happening?" While Covid was no Black Death, there was a surge in wages and workers' rights. Now, comes the backlash. 

The laws haven't yet arrived.

But less job security, lower wages and absence of healthcare have. 

In the banana republics of central and south America when those states were run by United Fruit, people couldn't eat if they didn't work for United Fruit. (There was no food in stores and all the land was owned by United Fruit, the church or the junta.) If you didn't work for United Fruit you starved. Today, we just deny health care. Soon, someone will cut out the middleman.

The GINI coefficient (a measure of income inequality) in our country is bad and getting worse. I'd imagine the same can be said for our industry.

Here's a look at the Gini in the United States from 1990-2020. A rise from .43 to .49 is precipitous.

During World War II, a Wehrmacht tank commander who saw tens of thousands of his fellow Nazis killed and thousands of tanks destroyed only to have the battle declared a victory by the war's "upper management" said, "We do not intend to win to death."

Before too many days go by, the agencies laying off thousands will announce that they're "Something of the Year." Their smiles will gleam with falsehood.

And thousands more people formerly in the industry, will trophy themselves into unemployment.

Winning.

When I was a boy, a radio station in New York, WQXR was "the radio station of The New York Times." On the rare occasion that my mother emerged from her underground laboratory and decided to un-freeze food for her three children, she'd have the radio on so she could hear it while she slopped her kids.

My mother, a non-recovering gambling addict, had switched from betting on the ponies to betting on various stock markets. Somehow, at the time, the former was looked upon as low-class and illegal, and the later was the stuff of country-club conversation.

Since the announcers of WQXR would recite the nightly stock quotes after market close, my mother tuned in, when she was sentient with the ardor of someone with a rabid monkey on her back. "Amalgamated Fontesque, 44 and an eighth, down a quarter. Poughkeepsie Woolens, 18 and three-quarters up a quarter." This would go on for what seemed like, to my eight or nine-year-old ears for hours.

But before or after that, there was another list that was recited. An announcer would tell us of the weekly, or daily, or hourly casualties from Vietnam. He would start by saying, "Eleven hundred North Vietnamese dead. 600 Viet Cong dead. 550 South Vietnamese dead. And 12 Americans."

Then he, and it was always a he, would read the name, the rank the age and where the American victim was from. "Robert Mundie, Corporal, 21, Norman, Oklahoma."

Looking back on it from almost sixty-years' distance, it was quite an education. Some years later, when I was an eleven-year-old in a baseball camp, my Dudley Do-Right muscled counselor, Nelson Chase, sat on his well-made cot crying. He had lost his best friend in one of those Vietnamese jungles.

These reports were a horrible thing to listen to. 

But they were truth.

Today, our country fights wars, disappears people, and locks others up for their entire lives and they receive no ink, physical or digital. 

We have no news in our news. 

Instead we hear about lycra-clad d-listers doing a sky-high stunt. Or we mourn a ninth-rate actor with paeans about their time on "The Love Boat."

I think of this when I think about the ad industry. 

Late last week, about 45-percent of the people of the various over-bought WPP media companies were fired. In antiseptic amerika, we don't say fired. We say laid off. As if they'll be hired back when the economy improves. 

They won't be.

There is no economy. There's only a land-grab. And only six people have a bucket to do the grabbing with.

By the way, WPP's buying of all those media companies is like a single man buying 14 pounds of bananas to get one ripe one. They were always planning on throwing out 97-percent of them

Meanwhile, I read something last night in a new, and very good history of World War II called "Scorched Earth," the title of which is a good summation of our current economic and political and greed-driven era.

In writing about the Nazi offensive "Barbarosa," a German tank commander observed that the Wehrmacht needed to stop its bloodletting at the hands of the Soviets “if we do not intend to win ourselves to death.”

Win ourselves to death.

If there were anything remotely resembling the Vietnam reporting I described from my childhood, people reading this would have an idea of the huge destruction (the scorched earth) brooked by the greed of the holding companies. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have been fired since 2000 (WPP had 200,000 employees as recently as 2012--today that have just around 100,000) and literally hundreds of once-mighty agencies have been picked clean like a chicken carcass at a Passover dinner.

In a couple of weeks, the self-congratulations will Kaytusha from various undustry organs. We'll hear about the yachts, the rosé, the side-boob, the quasi-celebrities. We'll hear a list of the "of-the-years," and tales of the bravery and the courage of people and clients and the base-metal golden calves called lions.

We'll hear terabytes of bullshit.

We'll hear everything but the names of those killed.

A Journey.

Ruggero Vann/Corbis, via Getty Images

I'm stealing this, fairly wholesale, from a subscriber-only newsletter by Frank Bruni of The New York Times. In the newsletter, Bruni quotes an Australian reader, Michael Hogan, who writes, “It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey. I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey. Make it stop.” 

Bruni comments on this linguistic-tic this way:

"Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion...And so humdrum activities become heroic acts."

If you use words for a living, and almost everyone does, don't use words you're used to seeing. Don't just repeat things. Don't play into the dominant complacency. Which is a obfuscator's way of saying don't be boring. 

Don't be a "story-teller." Don't promise "robust," or "agile," or "nimble." Don't look like everyone else. As Orwell told us in "Politics and the English Lanuage," "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

To my ancient eyes, Bruni's critique of "journey" is fine, but it doesn't go far enough. He misses at least two points.

1. When you use clichés, you're giving the viewer or the reader permission to ignore you. Like you ignore safety instructions when you're on a plane or the 29,000 emails you get that toggle between a total of about fourteen or eleven subject lines. And so it goes until, your brain stem is frozen like a wart and cracks right off.
   
   
   
   Winter: "These savings will warm your heart."
   January: "New year, new deals."
   February: "I ❤️ these deals."
   March: "Spring into savings."
   May: "The savings are blooming."
   June: "Our deals are hot hot hot."
   July: "The deals are bursting in air!"
   August: "Like Summer, our savings are ending soon."
   September: "Back to School savings."
   October: "Savings so good they're spooky."
   November: "You'll be thankful for these savings."
   December: "'Tis the season for savings."
   
   
2. Part two is even more pernicious. And way more cowardly.
   
   I saw a creative lead on the IBM account at Ogilvy do it once. And he did it with such dumb pomposity that I almost snapped my fountain pen in half in anger.
   
   About fifteen creatives, strategists and account people had been working for days putting together a presentation for the client. The deck probably had twenty commercials, as many print and banner ads and all the accoutrements in the back of the deck that take twice as long to create as commercials and ads that are never bought but you have to show, lest you're accused of just doing print, banners and TV.
   
   The creative puff started the meeting--he had a page that said, "We are on a journey." 
   
   As another ex-Ogilvy friend once said, "fuck me with an iron rod." At a decent agency, they would have shot him like a broken horse.
   
   Calling hundreds of thousands of dollars or work and thousands of hours of labor a journey is merely a circumlocution. A way of saying to the client, "you don't have to buy anything. This is a work in progress."
   
   That sentiment is about as heinous as bullshit gets.
   
   As I type this I'm an hour away from a client meeting where I'm presenting a Nifty Fifty. 
   
   Those 50 ads ain't a journey. They're work. They're carved. They're what the client has paid for and what they have to buy if they want to progress.
   
   When a plumber comes to my house to install a sump pump, I'd show him the door in about in about 2.9 seconds if he told me we were embarking on a "dry-basement journey," or a "black mold-abeyance odyssey."

I don't care about all the New Age bushwa that tinkles around and says the journey is as important as the destination. I am not Lawrence of Arabia or even Lawrence of Oregano. I'm fine with Mao's Long March beginning with a single-step. I get long-haul-isms.

But when we need food in the house, or I need a $69 cable for some peripheral that barely cost $69 in the first place, I don't want a journey, I want the job done. I'm sure my clients feel the same way. 

In fact, below is the second page of the client presentation I'm about to give. I called it an Agender not an Agenda because I'm from Yonkers and that's how I speak. And I've allocated the time as below.

The client doesn't want a journey. Or blah blah blah.

He wants some ads.

The Creep (and Creeps) of Fascism.

I don't think fascism, or authoritarianism, of fick-the-little-guy-ism, when it fully descends with its soul-crushing weight will come wearing jackboots and carrying a riding crop.

I think when the last bits of humanity on earth are finally buried under a trillion tons of micro-plastic and press releases, it all will have happened like going bankrupt. Slowly, then all at once.

We won't even notice it's here. Though we're being assaulted by it every day.

Not just the trmpian evil.

Little insidious actions that everyone is in on.

A friend of mine worked for a holding company until April 1. Then he was let go. Then they offered to hire him back on April 15. He had to once again fill out 71-pages of forms and undergo once again, a background check.

They make you submit.

If I want to watch a clip of the Knicks' surprising comeback win over the Celtics, the Times' site, which I pay for, sends me to a twitter link. So I have to support elon mursk and his child-trafficking, anti-semitic, hate-filled bile to watch a three-point shot.

They make you complicit.

All of my clients pay me electronically. Usually after 60 days. When did making someone wait 16-percent of a year for work they've done become ok? When did it become ok for someone to be paid in May for work they did in January? 

One client, the world's 67th largest, tried to pay me only after making me wait 25-percent of a year. Though I could pay them 1.5-percent of my gross to get my money, my money, 30-days faster.

One holding company, the third-largest or maybe the most-recently disappeared, made me wait more the 33-percent of a year to be paid for work I was charged with doing (a pitch) over-night.

They make you squirm.

Getting paid electronically is easier for those paying you. It's not easier for the person (me) who did the work. The person who did the work has to wait longer for their money.

As your payment nears, you usually get an email that looks like this. 

The "system" has made it ok to try to get you to pay $90, in this case, to get my money. This is after I've already waited 60 days. You want to "mafioso me" to not delay payment any further.

They make you pay.

This is how a person--even a well-off person like me--gets creamed by the system. Every plutocrat is taking, taxing and schtupping. Every little guy is fikked.

125 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt, for all his hypocrisy, introduced the "Square Deal."

90 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt presented "The New Deal."

Back in 1950, Harry Truman presented something called "The Fair Deal."

Today from our politicians, busy profiting from their offices and the beneficences they grant themselves which include free healthcare and legal insider-trading, not to mention payment for "speaking," we get nothing but a "Raw Deal."

Everyone of us--from "self-check-out" to myriad dysfunctional government departments (that we pay for) to the pillaging of social security--which I've paid into since 1963--to the inadequacies of what's fantastically called "health care," (there's neither health nor care) everyone of us is being beaten.

Again, it ain't the jack-booted armies that will destroy us. It's companies like Mars--the fourth largest privately held company in the United States--who spend $2-million on lobbying--and who have the balls to sell individually-petro-chemical-wrapped Lifesavers. 

Or the giant cable companies who charge you monopoly rates to watch TV, then charge you again by dedicating 25-minutes/hour to commercials and promos.

Or every company in creation that makes you download an app just so you can pay your bill, only you can't find what the bill was for, since they hid it on the app.

Or all the times every day you have to click a box to tell some robot that you're not a robot.

Look at this from 2:10. Is this where we are.

We haven't just met the enemy.

We voted them in.

And we pay them to screw us.