The state of American retailing.

There are large, bundled-up black men standing on various corners throughout my neighborhood holding day-glo yellow signs that are emblazoned with a Circuit City logo. The signs say "30% off," "closing this store" and, predictably "everything must go." (When must everything NOT go? The idea that some things may stay is an affront to both capitalism and the natural order of things.)

I decided to head to Circuit City---which I call Circuitous City--to check out all bargains great and small. There's a fevered frenzy that hits all of us in America when we hear something is on sale. The hopped-up bender of over-consumption takes over--we must go, we must shop, we must buy!

Circuit City was one of those stores where you could never get either sales help or a straight answer. Ask for information about a product and you got surliness in return. Still, the heroin-tinged rush of a bargain was pulsing through my veins. Maybe I can buy a new portable hard-drive, I calculated, or a new laptop, or a new Flip, or a flat-screen TV. I found, once inside the fluorescent big-box cellar every DCV and every CD on sale. I quickly scooped up five second-rate flicks I will never watch. No hard-drives--all sold out. No Flips. So I wrestled my way to the flat-screens. Ah, my built-ins permit a TV that is 35.8-inches wide. "Have you a tape-measure?" I asked three sales-people. "No," they answered without the slightest concern. "How do I know if the TV will fit in my home?" I asked. "I dunno," they shrugged and went on with their word-jumble. And so I left that fresh linoleum hell having bought nothing.

I guess from a Macro point of view, this isn't about the state of American retailing at all. It's about the state of everything. After all, who in government, health- care, education, work, gives you answers to what should be simple questions? Who gives you help? Who has a spiritual tape-measure? Who serves? Who makes things better?

No, as a nation, as a society we are enmeshed in a giant world-wide Inventory Clearance sale. We have turned into a "Shrugocracy." If there's a problem, a question that requires thought--shrug.

Cartoon classic.

Click to make it legible.

And now, a metaphor.

When I was an early teenager--13 or 14, I loved Steinbeck's book, "Of Mice and Men." Also, there was a 1939 movie of the same name starring Burgess Meredith as George and the hulking Lon Chaney Jr. as George, the simpleton. Aaron Copeland composed the music.

In one of the seminal scenes in the book, Whit, an old man, is persuaded by Curly, a cad, to let Curly shoot Whit's old dog--to put the dog out of its misery. Whit relents and Curly executes the aged canine. Whit angry at himself for giving in to Curly--angry at his own cowardice hears the single pistol shot and remarks: "I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog."
-
I read Mark Harris' classic novella "Bang the Drum Slowly," about eight years after I read "Of Mice and Men." In the story Bruce, a journeyman catcher, is suffering from Hodgkin's Disease, a terminal illness. Henry, his friend and the star of the team, is Bruce's protector. Their team, the Mammoths, goes on to win the World Series, and Bruce goes on to die. Henry is the only one from the team to go to Bruce's funeral. Henry (via Harris) writes this after Bruce dies. "In my Arcturus Calendar for October 7 it says, 'DeSoto visited Georgia, 1540.' This hands me a laugh. Bruce Pearson also visited Georgia. I was his pall-bear, me and 2 fellows from the crate and box plant and some town boys, and that was all. There were flowers from the club, but no person from the club. They could of sent somebody."

Those are my thoughts for the day. When something nasty has to be done. Do it yourself. In person. No matter how much it sucks.

One of the great cosmic jokes of our times.

When one gets fired these days we rush to offer them a chance to continue their health insurance shrouded in something called the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act is also called COBRA. I find this a remarkable example of government-inspired gallows humor. Cobras--for the non-Herpetologists in my vast readership--are both vicious and venomous. They are the world's largest poisonous snake. What is more, some cobras can even spit venom. And that projectile venom as Bob & Ray might have said, "can render a man senseless" on contact.

We name that which helps protect us in our unemployment after a deadly reptile. Nice marketing.

The ways of looking at problems.

I just recently finished a merry little book by an English historian called John Hatcher. The book is titled "The Black Death: A Personal History".

As you may or may not know, the black death was a scourge like no other in the history of man. In fact it wiped out--depending on whose estimate you cotton to, between 30% and 70% of the population of Eurasia and Europe.

Hatcher's account studies records from one small town, Walsham, England. Walsham was a town of about 1500 people that was struck by the plague in the summer of 1349, back when I was just knee-high to a cockroach.

One of the interesting things about the plague was that people knew it was coming. Though there was no radio or television and most people couldn't read, news of disasters always travels in internet time--even 650 years before the internet. So people learned through sailors, traders and merchants of the plague's impending arrival and the devastation it caused in the regions it hit.

Here's what I find interesting--a glimpse at the character of the world, politics, our industry. By and large people responded to doom in one of two ways.

1.) They fornicated with everything they could. They spent every last coin they had. They lived like there was no tomorrow.
Or
2.) They believed that despite the wrath of god, life will go on. These people helped others, prayed, helped their community.

I suppose I have a point buried in here somewhere. Maybe it's this. Crap happens at work. With your family. With your friends. In your country. Nothing is going to change that.

How you respond to crap is the measure of man.

If you were a boy at the turn of two centuries ago.

If you were a boy 100 years ago, you read Rudyard Kipling. He was the most popular writer in the English-speaking world. "Gunga Din," the movie based on his poem was a huge hit when it came out in 1936. (How could it not be--it starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Cary Grant, Victor McGlaughlin and Sam Jaffe.)

Kipling has fallen out of favor over the last 50 years or so. Too much "White Man's Burden," colonialism, and the racism and sexism that then infected the English-speaking world is present in his work.

Nevertheless, a certain turgid profundity is there too.
Last night, given the state of so many things, in my agency and out I read the poem below and sent it to my daughters as well.


If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Do you suffer from E.D.?

We all work with myriad people who suffer from the embarrassment and pain of E.D.

No, not erectile dysfunction. E-mail dysfunction.

They cc everyone and his cousin. They don't proofread. The matter of their email is trivial. And the worst--they send an email when they should have a conversation.

E.D. is killing our business.

Don't ask your doctor.
Just stop.

Some wisdom from Norman Mailer.

I am lucky enough to have been blessed with a peripatetic mind. I can take in a lot of information and know a lot of things and can make a lot of connections. Of course this upsets clients who prefer people who think in manner depicted by the directional chevrons you find in powerpoint and act as if the world were an orderly and logical place.

This morning I somewhat randomly picked up Norman Mailer's reportage of the 1968 Republican convention in Miami Beach. You can find all this in his book on the 1968 conventions, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago."

Here's a passage I particularly enjoyed. "Unless one knows him well, or has done a sizable work of preparation, it is next to useless to interview a politician. He has a mind which is accustomed to political questions. By the time he decides to run for President, he may have answered a million. Or at least this is true if he has been in politics for twenty years and has replied to an average of one hundred-fifty such queries a day, no uncharacteristic amount. To surprise a skillful politician with a question is then approximately equal in difficulty to hitting a professional boxer with a barroom hook."

I read a lot. From Virgil and Euripides to Maureen Dowd to body copy. Mailer's words above are some of the best I've stumbled across in a long time.

A burning question.

What stock do we use in order to look different?

I meant to put this in powerpoint.

Will somebody please tell me differently?

Is there an agency anywhere--anywhere--that spends as much time creating work as it spends creating decks?

SFX: ONE HAND CLAPPING.

I didn't think so.

That being said, for now on creative girls and boys, I propose just running the deck. No, I'm serious. A 30-second spot should accommodate about four slides, so a campaign of six spots will get you through about 24-pages. OK, I know that ain't ideal--24 pages is only about 1/4 the length of most decks, but that, friends, is why we supplement out broadcast efforts with a robust print campaign. Imagine an eight-page insert which contains the entire deck, plus a "call to action" that sends you to our website where you can download the entire presentation--in color!

Now you're saying Ad Aged is being stupid. "Decks aren't 'customer facing.'" Well, if that's the case and we're in the customer communications business, why does decksturbation dominate our days and nights?

So maybe it all comes down to this--some Seth Godin/Malcolm Gladwell-esque pronouncement. Advertising is dead. Deckvertising has replaced it.