Flaming Fame.

Maybe there's someone somewhere reading this post who has a background in art.

I don't.

Maybe they'll read what follows and say, "George, you're an imbecile." They won't be the first to call me that. Or the last.

Nevertheless, just yesterday I got an email from the auction house Christie's about upcoming auctions. I'm probably on their list because I like looking at cars I can't afford, or rare books. But of course the operating principle of modern marketing was stolen from the Spanish-language versions of the old Roach Motel ads that used to blanked the New York City subway. 

They used to sign off those ads by saying, "Las cucharachas entran pero no pueden salir." The roaches check in but they don't check out.

That's how about 90.999-percent of marketers treat anyone who accidentally or on-purpose ever visited a site, ordered a meal or even hovered over an ad. No matter how unlikely it is that you'll ever buy from that company, or how little you care about them, or how little they know about you, they have no issue with sending you literally 15 emails a week, addressing you buy your first name, telling you that you left something in your cart. If customer-service was 1/20th as good in this country as customer-harassment, we wouldn't need such assiduous customer-harassment.

In any event, Christie's has me now and they send me at least an email a week announcing up-coming auctions. This one, on great American art, I looked through. That will earn me at least anothe 75 million emails, or two year's worth, whichever comes second.

The two paintings we're placed side-by-side in an online page. To me they looked similar in a few ways. Subject-matter. Colorfulness. And artistic-quality. In fact, the painting on the right by Henrietta M. Shore, whom I've never heard of, looked more like a Georgia O'Keeffe than the Georgia O'Keeffe.

Then I looked at the prices.

The O'Keeffe was $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. The Shore was going for a 95-percent less. $40,000 to $60,000.

There may be materiel reasons for this price disparity that I can't discern.

But to my marketing eyes (one of which is blurry from yesterday's cataract surgery) Shore suffers from a serious branding issue.

A branding issue we in advertising, and our clients could learn from.

O'Keeffe is worth more because she's worth more. Over time, the O'Keeffe brand has built high O'Keeffe prices. When you have to sell the piece, you'll probably get your money back and more. Because the O'Keeffe brand keeps appreciating.

If you buy what Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian has been, for so long selling, that there's essentially one brief, and it's only three words long, O'Keeffe's people have been paying attention and Shore's people haven't been.

The three-word brief is as clear as a lie coming from a presidential press-secretary. It's "Make us famous."

Of course, there's other stuff advertising has to do. But "Make us famous," boils it all down or sums it all up.

It works for just about everything. A "hot" or "famous" ad agency gets more business and gets to charge more. Same with a hamburger joint, a politician, a can of soup, an SUV. 

Make us famous takes everything you want an ad to do--define what a brand does, show how it's better and make it memorable and squeezes all the lipids out of it until it's anorexically-terse.

Make us famous doesn't happen in tiny one-percent increments. A slightly better director, script, actor, colorist, piece of music ain't gonna make something famous. It takes a huge, consistent, and often times notorious amount of work and work with impact not just frequency or decibels. It takes something that knocks down all of the trillion barriers that insulate and isolate us from so much of the world's banality.

We don't see shitty work and say "that's shitty." It's worse than that. We simply don't see it at all.

Can you remember one spot by Kamala Harris?

Earlier on Wednesday, the day I wrote this, I saw this headline and photograph in Ad Age. Ad Age used to be a credible magazine. Today, it makes Mad Magazine look like the Paris Review. It's flaks and hacks and contests and rankings that are tales told by idiots signifying nothing. They've ignored the industry news for industry bushwa.

Somehow the horror of that AI-selected asstock photograph and the absolute blandness of the headline pissed me off and nauseated me. The "please-everyone plastic pablum." 

This piece does the opposite of bringing fame to an idea or its author.

Like 99.999-percent of all we see and do.

It's insulting wallpaper. 

But, you know, shareholder value.

Simple Simplicity.

About two months ago, I read a short piece in a sustainability newsletter from The Wall Street Journal. It's hard for me to believe that every ambitious person in the ad industry doesn't read the Journal. I know its politics are to the right of Atilla the Hun, but the Journal provides so much useful information that it makes you a better creative and of more value to clients. 

I can't tell you how often I hear, from Fortune 500 clients, "we don't know what to do. But you'll figure it out. You know everything." That's in large measure because I read the Journal.

When I was a boy in the business, the Journal had a long-running ad campaign in which they profiled creative stars. They were mostly male in those days, sorry for what looks like a trumpian selection. 

The point of these profiles was that everyone of these luminaries (the people I aspired to work for and become) said why they read the Journal. I took that to heart. Just like a golfer might switch to a new kind of putter if a great pro does, I took the advice of the successful, and have been reading the paper for almost half-a-century.

Back to the sustainability newsletter I mentioned above and the primary point of this post. The newsletter profiles Yishan Wong, former Reddit CEO and former director of engineering at Facebook. 

Back in 2017, from his estate in Hawaii, Wong decided to turn his talents to fighting climate change. He started a company called Terraformation. Their goal is to plant one trillion trees. That's 1,000,000,000,000 trees. Those trees, and three billiion acres of woodlands reforested would begin a carbon accelerator. (For scale, the entire US is "only" 2.3 billion acres.)

But here's the phrase that pays. The phrase the ad industry could learn from. I write this even though seven of GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company's ten largest clients are in the technology business.

Wong looked at every climate change proposal ever made. He concluded, "a high-tech approach would generate more problems than it solved."

He said,“Silicon Valley is great at marketing, and they make it sound like new tech is awesome, but really no one hates technology more than a technologist because in the lab when it is half formed it breaks all the time. So you want a very low-tech, reliable solution."

The last 25 years of my benighted career the ad industry has chased after tech solutions. Ads people would interact with. Customizable ads. Always on ads. AI-derived ads. 

All any of those tech solutions have done is alienate viewers, decrease effectiveness and destroy our industry. 

The other night I watched this 73-year-old clip of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin from Chaplin's 1952 movie "Limelight."

It's a good example of a "very low-tech, reliable solution." No special effects. No laugh track. No AI. Just old pros doing things that have made humans laugh since about the beginning of time.

What if advertising went back to the things that made humans interested? Real comedy? Real emotion? Important information? What if instead of chasing people we provided value, so we would be welcomed?

What if advertising made people laugh? What if it afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted? What if it treated people with respect? What if it helped them buy?

All "very low-tech, reliable solution(s)."

This post was not written by AI.

 

Two amerikas.

by Margaret Bourke-White. Not A.I.

Some years ago, you may remember if you're cursed with a functioning memory like I am, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times wrote an opinion piece about "the two Americas."

We still capitalized amerika in those days, and spelled it with a c, not a k.

Friedman was writing in the wake of an unusual ice storm in Texas that knocked out their electrical grid and water system. Thousands of homes were without power for days on end. The fragility of the grid, the lack of oversight, and the failure to respond to the disaster in a timely way was due to the ethos of one amerika. The one that doesn't want to pay taxes for anything and that doesn't believe in the notion of expertise. 

That same week, the other amerika, landed a Rover on Mars. It travelled 292,000,000 miles from earth (there was no traffic) and put the Rover right on the dot of its intended landing site.

Here, in Friedman's own words.

At a very early point in my career, I noticed a similar dichotomy when it comes to ad agencies. There are agencies that reflexively say no. And there are agencies that say, yeah, we can do that.

What are you crazy? The client will never go for that.
Let's do it! The client will love it.

When I was in my waning days of my second Ogilvy stint, I had a similar realization about agencies and amerika. The agency had become, like amerika has become for so many, a Zero Sum Game. If Marcia gets something (a raise, a great assignment, a primo desk near the air-shaft) Wanda doesn't. There's not enough to go around. That's the prevailing ethos in our country today. If poor people get healthcare, it will cause rich people to give up one of their four or seven private jets. 

Today, it seems like more and more ad agencies, despite their performative and gratuitous clamor for awards (which they pay millions for) don't believe in actual creativity. They are silently and stealthily firing huge numbers of people and promoting instead AI. They are saying creativity can't do it; data can.

The questions clients ask, even if they never say them in so many words, are "can you make us famous? Can you separate us from our competitors? Can you make us lust-after-able?"

More and more, the answers are no, we can't. That's not what the great god Algorithm does. Or, we'll do it through 37,994 banner ads that no one ever sees.

More and more, like in the Friedman above, the minor-potentates who (mis)run the big holding companies have chosen short-term profits over long-term resilience. My guess is that none of the holding companies will be around in their current form by 2035. Certainly the minor-potentates will be in Mustique by then, probably cooking puppies for dinner.

Success takes initiative. It takes perseverance. It demands you keep your eyes on the prize. Often it means you need experienced people who are willing to fail and who know that failure leads not to getting shit-canned but to doing great things.
As Friedman says, audacious goals and long-term investments.

Those attitudes no longer exist in amerika.

Or ad agencies.

--

BTW, I had cataract surgery last week and am having it again this week. My cataract surgery came from the "only in America" amerika. I checked in at 6AM. I was in the operating room at 7:30AM. In the recovery room at 8:06.

A 9mm lens was removed through a 2mm slit. A new man-made lens was put in place.

Starting 8:30, I had eggs in a coffee shop and walked three miles to my apartment. My vision in my "doctored" eye is already 20/25 and after fifteen years of wearing reading glasses, I can throw them out. I have no pain and can see out of an eye that was essentially blind.

I want the agency equivalent.

Dfrent.

Next time you see someone touting the creative capabilities of AI, you ought to try to remember how many thousands if not millions of people made ChatGPT avatars of themselves in the form of plastic-encased ersatz Barbie dolls.

The first one of these I saw I was mildly amused. Not amused enough to try it for myself, but I saw it as something different. At that point maybe I got up from my chair to get a glassaseltza. By the time I got back, I had seen 49,000 of these things.

Everyone of the people who posted their ChatGPT avatar thought it was special, interesting and worthy of being noticed. Instead everyone of the people who posted their ChatGPT avatar instead showed how unoriginal and uninteresting and karaoke'd their creativity is.

One of the liabilities of technology that makes it easy to be "creative" is that it gives you the tools to make something that looks like something someone else made. What the technology doesn't give you is taste, discernment, or the unrelenting drive to be original and differentiating. Replication is the opposite of creativity. Painting like Van Gogh is not the same as Van Gogh. A Beatles cover band is not the Beatles.

In 1966, Charlie Piccirillo of Doyle Dane Bernbach got a brief for "National Library Week." It was a PSA, and he was a young art director, but he got the assignment. You can read the whole story of Dave Dye's "best-in-the-world-blog," "Stuff from the Loft."

Here's the ad Piccirillo created. It's almost 60 years old. Older than 7/8ths of the people reading this post.

Here's the copy blown up so you can read it. At least if you're not tipsy.

AI is an enormously powerful tool. But it's our job as creative people to create things that capture the essence of the verbs in the headline above.

Cry. Giggle. Love. Hate. Wonder. Ponder. Understand.

Those verbs don't come from replication. They come from imagination.

The problem with those who believe in the power of computers is that they underestimate the immeasurable power of the human brain. 

The brain has six trillion synapses. It never buffers. It allows you to react to things like the heat of a frying pan at lightning speed. As far as the 26 letters above, they can be combined 4x10 to the 26th different ways. Imagining that number goes way beyond my Algebra 2 skills. But it's probably more hairs than are in trump's cranial merkin. (According to a site called Tiger Algebra that's 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.)

The point is powerful technology can do a lot of things. But not imagination.

Many years ago during my first stint at Ogilvy, the great Chris Wall asked me to script doctor some ads done by another team. The campaign featured two visitors from an alternate universe who came to earth to learn the secrets of IBM software.

I wrote a lot of funny words along the way. The last sentence in the paragraph below reads: "This makes the Crab Nebula look like small potatoes." 

Chris gave me a lot of respect after that. Because never in the 300,000 years of homo sapiens on earth had such words been put together in such a way.

That's what we're supposed to do:

Different.

Lie. (Down in Darkness.)

The other day I got an direct message from someone on LinkedIn called Shell Redfern. I suspected she was a whore or a scam, but given that her photo resembled Cybil Shepherd and she seemed to work at the sort of company that often turns into revenue for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I was intrigued.

I was 99.7-percent sure she was a whore or a scam, but even so, one thing or another stopped me from deleting Shell's message. I checked back in on the message just now. And over the weekend Shell transformed from a tall, willowy blonde into a tall, willowy Asian.

She's been both deleted and blocked.

What can be neither deleted nor blocked is a bigger issue. About 99.7-percent of what you see online, from connections and brands and politicians and news organs is about 99.7-percent fake.

When I get text messages from "Kelly," telling me I can make between $400 and $1200 for one hour's work and get paid at the end of each day, I quickly respond: "Are you a whore or a swindler?" That usually gets me blocked, saving me the trouble.

 

Even when I get a message like this from a politician I nominally respect, or at least regard as decent, I feel like responding, "Are you a whore or a swindler?"

Sorry, Adam, the moniker "Team Schiff" is so patently pandering it makes me want to throw rocks at your Senate office. I've been told I'm on a team before. But the leaders of the "team" never respond to notes you write to them. Even when you offer to help with their marketing. 

Team in this parlance is a fund-raising artifice. An excuse to send you a lot of mail and a lot of requests for money. C'mon, pitch in for the team.

By the way, whenever I do give money to a cause I believe in, I use an assumed name. Teresa or Horatio.

My name has been sold so often to people I've given money to that I get hundreds of emails a week addressed to Teresa or Horatio.

In other words, I donate to what I consider a good cause, but the people running the cause are scoundrels. They're selling my data. It's not enough to take my money. They want more.

I can scarcely think of a single commercial, social post, or email I've gotten over the last few years that even dances in the neighborhood of honesty. 

When there are no facts, no truth, no trust, no credibility, there are communications just the same, but there's no communication. Because nothing is believable. Therefore nothing has any value.

I remember when I worked at R\GA. It was stretched across four grimy buildings on one of the grimiest blocks in New York. Between cheap hotels, cheap massage parlors and the garages hotdog carts would park in for the evening, after draining theor hotdog water onto the sidewalk. Someone decided it was ok to call that disconnected assortment of crumbling buildings a "campus." 

That's something like calling a puddle on the Van Wyck a Great Lake.

I'm not one-hundred percent sure how blandishments and hyperbole can be addressed on a macro level. When I write ads for myself, I avoid using adjectives and bombast. I use facts and I include citations where I can.

I wonder what would happen if the CEOs of brands--the guys making the big money, or at least, privately held brands wrote something like this.

I'm tired of being lied to at every turn. And worse being treated like I'm too stupid to know I'm being lied to.

Worms Turning. The Come-Uppance Edition.

It's hard, such is his evil, to see anything, read anything, eat anything, talk to anyone etc. and not think about the nastiness of trump and the racism, greed and hatred he emerged from.

Hate, if you hate it, can consume you with anti-hate. As it has so many.

Right now I'm nearing the finish of the book pictured above. Its essential gist is that roads, like the thousands of miles of them the Romans built virtually around their world, are a civilizing force. We think of great buildings as evidence of an empire's reach, or statues or stadiums, but often its most basic infrastructure speaks loudest.

Last night, in a bit of emotional arrears due to my nervousness about the next morning's 5AM wake-up and 7:30AM cataract surgery, on arriving at the chapter shown above, I stopped reading for the night. 

But it got me thinking about roads and dictators. And the practice the willing-go-alongers have of naming roads and buildings and stadii after the soup du jour. Most people, in politics, frat-houses or offices will perform any obsequity to curry favor with whomever seems invincibly powerful at the moment.

Right now, a lot of obsequity is swirling around you-know-who. The more of an ass he makes of himself, the more many in power, or many who want to feel more powerful kiss it. It's only, in my humble opinion, a matter of months before many cities in the (re)Confederate States of America rename main streets and highways after our Charlatan-in-Chief.

This sort of thing happens to roads. Especially when a people are too stupid to incorporate distance into their decision-making. 

Baseball has a rule that you can't be elected into their Hall-of-Fame until you've been retired for five years. Such pragmatism has disappeared from most of amerikan life. As Marlene once sang in "Lili Marleen," "men cluster to me, like moths around flame..." That is, I'm surprised we don't have the Laura Loomer Skyway linking the Gowanus Canal to Fresh Kills Landfill.

All that's a prelude to this. A badly copied list of cities around the world that had Adolph Hitler Strasses or Adolph Hitler Platzs. (Including one right here in the New York suburbs.)

It would be beyond, I think, anyone in the orbit of trump to read Shelley's "Ozymandias." But before too much longer, I pray, the concluding lines of Shelley's masterpiece will be more relevant than ever:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Colossal wreck. It has a ring to it.

What Kind Are You?

A lot of old people in what's left of the advertising industry spend a lot of phonemes and morphemes lamenting how the industry has changed--and not for the better.

A lot of that getting-worse-ness is due to the economics of the industry. When agencies and media companies were together, or when agency fees were based on media commissions, money flowed more freely. Salaries were higher. Jobs seemed more secure. 

Economically agency life seemed better when agencies were independent. They weren't on the hook for some giant holding company's margins and to pay giant holding company overhead.

Some more worse-ness is due to the fracture of media channels. The pressure of time. And the general reduction in production budgets. More might be attributed to a timidity on the part of both agencies and clients. Work seems safer, blander and more tested now.

Yes.

You could say that lots of the worsening is due to economics. Or scale. Or the death of the three network hegemony.

Things over which people like you and me have little control.

But 

But a lot of the worsening is self-inflicted. 

We did it to ourselves.

We often rely on freelancers to punch above their weight, to manage client relationships, to teach and train other creatives, but when the dollars run out--whenever they run out--and without notice, they're usually taken out like yesterday's trash.

Or, we ask people to work nights and weekends (for no additional pay) or over a holiday, and there's scarcely any thanks, save for maybe a stray AI-generated email--addressed to you and eighty-nine other people on the job.

We did it to ourselves.

I did a couple days of freelancing for an agency last week. Accepting the assignment was more about helping a long-time friend than it was about me needing the work. 

To be completely honest, I'm not sure I did a great job. I worked hard, but maybe I missed. Of the four ideas I presented, only one was liked, and that died just before the client meeting. 

Nevertheless, some moments ago, I got this from the agency's creative manager (a long-time friend.)

Similarly, a friend who is a long-time freelancer was abruptly terminated last week--and by a project manager. (No offense to project managers, but senior creatives should be let go by senior creatives. Especially if you're wise enough to realize how small our business is, and that eventually you'll likely work together again.) She's already negotiating a freelance job at another place and just got this note via text.

The point in all this is that regardless of all the materiel changes to how advertising works and how ad agencies and their employees get paid, it's not really that hard to make a little bit of extra effort to let people know that they matter.

Industry-wide the value of ad agencies seems to be perceived as lower than ever. As an industry, we seem to be selling commodity creative at commodity prices.

But depreciating the value of people, and of kindness, makes no sense, either economically or from a human point of view. It seems widespread, ubiquitous even.

When it's so simple to show, instead, a little decency.

A friend sent me this a decade ago. I've saved it for all these years. My friend snapped a photo of it hanging from the ceiling of the studio of TBWA\Chiat\Day in LA or its environs after everyone sweat through long nights of getting a presentation ready.

This is what I mean. 

Kindness. It's free.

Fred and Minnie.

The smartest person I know, the most-voracious, the most-curious, the most-tireless is my big brother, Fred. 

Fred's 21-months older than I. He lives in Chicago and is a lawyer. Fred, counter to his liberal sensibilities has also spent his life trying to bring back the six-day work-week. As a matter of course, he works on Saturdays. And always has.

Fred's competitive. 

Those Saturdays in the office are just one of his TWTW or TW2 affects. Fred epitomizes TWTW. (The Will To Win.)

For the past year or so, Fred and I have been arguing about retirement. I set Fred back on his heels when I told him I've decided to hang up my cleats on January 1, 2030. 

He was surprised that I had chosen a specific date, and so far into the future. Like the excellent lawyer he is, Fred quickly had me on the witness stand.

I explained through beads of younger-brotherly sweat.

"My baseball hero was the great Minnie Minoso. More precisely, Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Miñoso, also known as "the Cuban Comet."

"Yeah, so," Fred eloquented. "If you want me to call you the 'Yonkers Yutz,' just say so. What does Minnie Minoso have to do with your retirement."

I thought about this yesterday as I walked three miles in the pouring-down rain and Connecticut cold. All so I wouldn't break my 92,004-day exercise streak. All fodder for yet another of my over seven-thousand blog posts.

I'm not a lawyer--my mind is far from neat and orderly--but I laid out my case with some forensic acuity. 

"Well, Minnie played major league ball in five decades," I answered. "The 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s. I want to make my living behind the typewriter for six decades. I want to last-longer than the longest-lasting of them all."

Minnie's last hit. 1976, age 52.

Minnie's last at bat. 1980, age 56.

Fred, uncharacteristically, was silenced by all this. Though he's been a Chicagoan since 1978, and Minnie toiled for the Chisox for many seasons, Fred wasn't aware of Minnie's longevity.

(I met Minnie once, in 1978, when I was a summer-job-cashier in an across the street from a whorehouse liquor store, Bragno's, on Rush Street in the City of Broad Shoulders. I worked the night shift, from four pm to midnight and Minnie came in one afternoon as a representative of Old Style beer--Chicagoland's best-seller before the beer market, along with everything else, got bought up, consolidated and oligopoly-ized. I shook Minnie's hand and admired the giant American League Championship ring he wore.)

Fred called me back a couple of days later. And has returned to his invective many times since.

"Your Minoso standard is a fraud," he said. "His appearances in his final two decades were attendance stunts perpetrated by the great baseball showman and team-owner, Bill Veeck. You can't count those as active playing. He didn't really make it five decades."

I let the record speak for itself. I see Minoso played in the 1970s and '80s. He got a major league hit as a 52-year-old, and as the clip above attests, could still put wood on the ball and hustle down the line at age of 56.

What's more, while Minoso didn't make it to what we stupidly and wrongly call the "majors" until he was 25. (You can't really call them the major leagues when they excluded some of the best because of their melanin levels.) 

Minoso's color kept him out. Before that he played for the New York Cubans in the Negro Leagues, and before that (and probably during the 1930s) he played in the Cuban Leagues, which qualitatively were probably the equal of the American majors or at least Double A. He played, ostensibly, as a paid professional for six decades, not five, though 1930s Cuban League data doesn't survive the pixelized putsches of modern record-keeping.

Fred disagrees with me. He regards Minoso's mini-major-league stints in the 1970s and '80s as stunts. He's not entirely wrong. But neither is he right. Minoso, indisputably, played in the bigs for parts of five decades.

(By the way, in our Age of Illusion--in advertising and life--most stints are stunts. When the shouting is over, most of what we're left with--in ads and trumpian politicking--ain't worth a bucket of warm spit.)

Come 2030, if there is life left on our dying orb, I will log my sixth decade in the advertising big leagues. I started at Lowe in the 1980s. Worked at Ally, Rosenfeld and Ogilvy during the 90s, Ogilvy, Hal Riney, Digitas and R\GA during the Oughts, and R\GA, Collins and Ogilvy during the 10s and Ogilvy and my biggest agency, GeorgeCo, LLC, a Delaware Company during the 20s. 

Looking ahead from 2025 to 2030, there seems to be plenty of business for an agency like mine that believes a return to common-sense is the next new thing. I follow two protocols that seem to serve me well with clients new and old and large and small. They might be the advertising equivalent of keeping your eye on the ball, having a level swing and hitting 'em where they ain't. In any event, they've been working for me, and like Minnie in the clip above, they seem to be resistant to the aches and creaks of old age.

I'm sure Minnie, regardless of age, watched what was going on between the chalk lines like an osprey looking for a fish. I'm sure he observed the baseball equivalent of every ripple in the sea. 

My own vision is under duress of late and I have cataract surgery scheduled for my left on the ninth and my right on the sixteenth. 

Seeing clearly works no matter what game you play and however how long you play it. What's more, if you're a potential client, remember what Minnie said above, come to GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, and "Go for a Double."

Green Arrows.

I had quite a week last week.

As did what we used to call the civilized world.

This may be apocryphal but that doesn't mean it's without value. The story goes that Mahatma Gandhi was visiting England and a journalist asked him, "What do you think of Western civilization?" 

Gandhi is said to have replied, "I think it would be a good idea."

It seems cruelty and exploitation and meanness are once again in full-flower. All those so-called Christian precepts, like loving your neighbor, helping those less fortunate, that it's easier to squeeze a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven are today regarded as the punch-lines of giant cosmic dad jokes. It seems 97.9-percent of the world groans when they think of such things.

A friend, booked for a freelance job, was fired with no notice. Creatives aka little people, have to commit to holding companies. They're told it's a two-month gig. Then an account loss and the two-months disappear. They're out the same day. Of course there's no "contractural" obligation to keep someone on. But there very-well might be a human obligation to bring a little kindness to hardship.

A client, at the start of a rough-cut review, told GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company that due to the trump-derived economic uncertainty and its impact on charitable organizations, that she and her entire staff were let go. 

While people with hundreds of billions are getting richer and not paying taxes and transferring more wealth from you to them, people trying to help kids, or support science, or clean the oceans, or support medicine, are being fired, eviscerated.

Is this the world we want to live in?

Feral?

I ask you to consider this scene from Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life." And think about today's muskrat and trumpdump and thielian parallels.

I cannot think of more apt words for today than those I've pointed to above with my green arroz con pollo.

When I was a little boy I grew up with parents who were born out of the great depression. My father had no father and scraped by in 1930s Philadelphia with a blind, non-English-speaking mother and two older brothers who worked night and day to pay the rent. My mother told me stories of coming home from school and seeing her father-less family's furniture out in the street. 

They were scarred by this. And scars of such magnitude often become inter-generational.

My mother, when she was sober, often told me of life during those years. I remember saying, "But where did the money go?"

She'd answer, "There was no money."

I'd push, "No, the actual physical money. Where did it go?"

She'd not answer, not knowing or not thinking like I did.

Now, sixty years later, I understand where the physical money's gone. It wasn't sewn into mattresses or vaulted in banks. It was grabbed by the already-wealthy whose wealth increased like Potter's above.

Girls and Boys when your 401K loses a quarter of its value in a week, when trillions of wealth are said by the bought-and-paid-for-media to have "evaporated," that's a lie.

Your money, like your social security, like your medicare, like your tax-dollars are being stolen, transferred from you to those whom Teddy Roosevelt called, "The malefactors of great wealth."

When your taxes go up while the super-rich don't pay, that's a transfer of money from you to them. 

That's what's happening now about 39-times over.

I'll close with a few more green arrows. Compliments of Thomas Friedman in The New York Times (the news organ trump has been attacking for decades.)

Sounds a bit similar with what is going on in the ad industry, too?

It’s too late to hope not.