When tump decided to invade Iran to distract from the 38,000 times he was mentioned in the epstein files, as someone who reads a lot of history, I proclaimed to anyone who would listen (no one) this imperial, racist adventuring would not end well.
My one-sentence summation was pretty simple.
"A man with an eight-second attention span should not invade an eight-thousand-year-old civilization."
That line takes me down two separate but related paths.
One: There's a pithiness to it. Which leads me to conclude the democratic party should hire a gag writer. That is, they need--as all brands do--someone who can "on-demand" come up with pithy quips that lodge, disrupt, upset--and in Candide's 'best of all possible world's" might make a difference.
About a decade ago, I started trading linked-in messages with Rob Schwartz. Rob's a career coach now. Back then, he was CEO of Chiat\Day New York. (I might have his exact title and agency names slightly off. No one can keep up with corporate whack-a-merger and remember who's who anymore. Which doesn't matter anyway, since they're all the same.)
If I remember correctly, and I'm sure I do, Rob and I met at the Friar's Club on East 55th Street. A legendary, but musty place that was on its last one-liner at the time.
My first impression of Rob--I'm not one who goes gently into new relationships--was this: "Oh, he has the gift of quip." That is talking to Rob was a series of jokes, barbs, punch-lines and gags. Mixed in with intelligence, humanity and nice discernment.
Philip Roth alluded to a more malign "gift of quip" in one of my favorite passages from his classic "Portnoy's Complaint." A scene I often show to gentiles who don't understand New York Jewish.
“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”
Rob has no mean in him. But you get the point. What's more, my phrase "Gift of Quip," was also an homage to the great John LeCarre, who said of his most famous creation, espionage agent George Smiley, "He has the gift of quiet."
Leona Helmsley (a convicted felon) once said about donald trump, "I wouldn't believe [him] if his tongue were notarized." Politicians and brands should hire people who can write lines like that.
I do something for clients I call "The Nifty Fifty." Fifty funny attention getting ads that keep their brands top of mind and stop the scroll. The democrats currently besiege people with boring crap. There must be a better way to change minds and hearts and votes.
Two: The second path is more lamentable.
With everything today quick and shallow, nobody anymore knows anything about anything except that which is unimportant.
We can spend billions on a war and we know nothing about who we're fighting or why or anything vaguely related to the history of the region.
As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his new book, "Cauldron," about the area we are constantly invading:
“Today it seems irredeemably turbulent and explosive, which is why I have entitled this book, The Cauldron. The ingredients are beautiful and inspiring but also volatile, pyrophoric–and increasingly fissile.
Its particular, disparate composition is the result of its tri-continental location as bridge and seaway, thoroughfare and crossroads; its very middleness makes it unavoidable for every local power that aspires to intercontinental influence and every planetary hegemon that seeks multi-domain power. Most of the empires who have conquered or influenced it–and what a list it is: Akkadians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Crusaders, Mongols, Turco-Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, French, Italians, Greeks, Americans and Soviets–have done so partly for its own sake but partly to reach, control or protect other places; once inserted and committed, they have each had to expend much blood and treasure just to keep control of this tinderbox, even for the shortest time.
It is not a surprise that this region has been so shaped by these foreign invaders and colonists, migrants and settlers–such movements of people are the engine of all world history and of our present. Its web of peoples, sects and languages vividly reflects every empire that rose and fell here precisely because each tried to change it, to settle it, to shape it to their own designs and to serve their own gods. Even today, the politicians who send armies and jets into the region, and the activists who march in Western streets demanding interventions are both equal parts of that inescapable tradition.”
What I wouldn't give for a political leader, a business leader, anyone, who reads anything with an historical perspective or a point of view informed by more than a sound-bite or the latest outrage.
I suppose what I'm saying is a more than a little self-aggrandizing. But that's ok. What's a personal blog for if not at least a soupçon of feeding one's ego?
But here it is: our world--our politics, our brands, the ad industry--culture itself--would be better off if there were more people who combined the "turn of a phrase" with an understanding of the world.
In other words if you could take what's meaningful and make it memorable.
Like this, from Shakespeare's Henry V's
We've gone too fast and too ugly from Lincoln's eloquence "last best hope on earth," to the tump's gutter, "We're the HOTTEST Country Anywhere in the World,"
That's a Gibbonesque Decline and Fall as depicted by Wile E. Coyote, a cliff and maybe an anvil.
That's what you when you don't hire a copywriter.
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