Suck.

This is my third attempt to write a post this morning.

The first one--which I began typing on the M15 around 56th Street--I couldn't get my head around.

The second one I started at my desk then lost my train of thought amid serial interruptions.

Now this.

Which also seems to be going nowhere.

Writing, as easily as it often comes for me, is hard.

And some times it doesn't come at all.

Some times your thought processes are as jammed as the Major Deegan in a major rainstorm.

I've got a ton of copy to write this morning.

I was hoping someone would organize it for me. Tie it up and put a bow on it.

No luck.

As Hank Williams used to yodel, "I've been down this road before."

I'll get through this.

But it won't allow me a decent post on top of it all.

Brutality. Police and otherwise.

We've heard a lot of late about police brutality.

But that phrase downplays the bigger problem we're facing in America.

Police have acted brutally not merely because they are ill-trained or tainted by racism. It's worse than that.

There is police brutality because we pay them to "protect" a brutal society.

Our society is brutal because we don't pay millions of people a living wage.

Our society is brutal because we permit the greatest inequality of income distribution in the world.

Our society is brutal because we underfund schools, and nutrition, and hospitals, and housing.

Our society is brutal because we allow the financial institutions to prey on the poor in the form of sub-prime mortgages, usurious credit card and pay-day loan rates and more.

Our society is brutal because we have created an underclass that will never escape its poverty and deprivation.

Our society is brutal because we've allowed the top 1% to have more than the bottom 90%.

If you look back to America's first Gilded Age, similar conditions existed. And cops and Pinkertons behaved in a brutal way. Haymarket. Cripple Creek.

If you look back to the flowering of the KKK and lynching in the 1920s, you'll see similar brutality.

We have created a brutal world.

The cops are only policing accordingly.

By the way.

If you want to learn the real root causes behind the slow diminishment of the advertising industry, read the about the destruction and havoc in the news industry.

Read this.

Then read this.

Sorry Stuart Elliott. These are the stories of our age.

The destruction of once viable industries by rapacious "investment bankers."

Goodbye Stuart Elliott.

I'll say it flat out. I never thought much of Stuart Elliott, advertising columnist for "The New York Times."

He followed a legend, Phil Dougherty, and that didn't help.

But that alone isn't the reason I never warmed to him.

My two cents says he covered his beat without really covering his beat.

He wrote, sparingly, about the day to day, new campaigns, comings and goings, account wins and losses.

But he missed the big story of our era: The disembowelment of the advertising industry by holding company one-percenters.

What larger perspective did he bring?

Elliott never wrote about the downsizing in advertising. And the downward pressure on wages. He never wrote about the industry's lack of diversity. He never wrote about the paucity of women in high places. He never wrote about pernicious ageism.

When in about three years, for instance, Y&R went from over 1,000 employees to under 400, he missed that story.

Elliott seemed to have all the depth of the nightly TV news.

Glib sound bites punctuated by forced laughter.

Gruesome bits followed by ephemeral "infotainment."

Much of our "news" today is lacking value.

Try to find coverage of our many wars.

Of the financial piracy of the malefactors of great wealth.

There's very little "real news."

And a lot of  "Newsia."

News plus Trivia.

That was my issue with Elliott.

Writing with your eyes closed.

There was an obituary in “The New York Times” yesterday of a writer I had only scarcely heard of, Kent Haruf.

Haruf (rhymes with Sheriff) wrote fiction, which I seldom read. He wrote a book called “Plainsong” in 1999 at the age of 56. It was nominated for a National Book Award. And though he’d been writing for over 30 years, he was suddenly an “overnight success.”

What I particularly liked about the obit was how Haruf wrote—his process. There’s something those of us who sit in subway-quiet open-plan work spaces can learn from.

I quote (and excise) from the “Times.”

“Kent Haruf pulled a wool cap over his eyes when he sat down at his manual typewriter each morning so that he could “write blind,” fully immersing himself in the fictitious small town in eastern Colorado where he set a series of quiet, acclaimed novels…Punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs — they waited for the second draft. The first usually came quickly, a stream of imagery and dialogue that ran to the margins, single-spaced.”

Here’s the best part of writing blind, according to Haruf.

“It takes away the terror when you’re blind and you can’t go back and rewrite a sentence. It calls for storytelling, not polishing.”

By the way, I looked online to see if I could find a photo of Haruf at his manual typewriter with his woolen cap pulled over his eyes. I'd pay to see a video of it, or his sloppily typed manuscripts.

But, I gather, there is no such imagery. Or at least I couldn't find any.

It's a private thing Haruf did. 

Shockingly, he kept it private.

Football and advertising.

I am not a fan of professional football. 

Never really have been.

It's too big, too violent, too corrupt.

Ray Rice and his ilk seem to me to be more the rule than the exception.

The league, and its fans, seem to condone, even encourage really criminal behavior both on and off the field.

The other thing is the game itself as it's played in the television age.

It's 20% action, 80% talking about action.

Each play is followed by tele-strations, analysis by expert ex-players and pundits pontificating.

I can't really understand the game's televised appeal.

Then it hit me.

The game is our life. In advertising. In whatever.

A short burst of actually doing something.

Followed by long discussions of what we've done or what we didn't do.

A football game on TV takes about four hours.

Actual action lasts about 11 minutes according to Fox. 

Let's round that up to 12 minutes for math's sake.

1/5 of an hour in four hours.

So doing something that matters 1/20th of the time. 5%.

That seems about right.

In our so called eight-hour-day, 24 minutes of real work.

Almost 7 1/2 hours discussing, pontificating, doing over. 

No wonder we watch football.

We're bored.

Early morning and the cold hard light.

When you've lived your life in one place, or in nearly one place, for as long as I've lived in New York, every day, every walk down every block is a walk through time.

Today I walked down 13th Street between 2nd and 3rd, wearing a too-thin-for-the-cold-jacket just as I wore when I was a college student here. Then it was because I was too poor, having left my parents with literally the clothes on my back. Now, I'm too stubborn (or too stupid) to feel. Or too thick-blooded to let on that anything less than a cold wind off the Steppes could bother me.

It was early, like it was 40 years ago when I walked down this street, and I was rushing somewhere--where doesn't matter. 40 years ago I passed only old people, clomping their way to stupid jobs, stupid have-to-dos. Today, I passed only young people, smoking cigarettes, holding pastel-colored mugs of too-expensive coffee. I rushed past, like I do, on my way.

When you've lived your life in one place for as long as I've lived in New York, you can find yourself walking down a well-worn street then look around and realize you're in a place you've never been before.

Everything's different. The signs, the dirt, the people, the dreams. And everything's the same. The signs, the dirt, the people, the dreams.

You realize you're like Irving's Van Winkle, or Swift's Gulliver. You wake up where you've always been and it's a completely different place.

It's like that in agencies too.

You've been there before. But the there you were in is no longer.

Like they say, you can't  step in the same river twice.

Maybe the same can be said about cities.

And agencies.

Beware of Ideology.

I'm reading a book--doing research on a book I am trying to write--about Prohibition and its effects on New York City.

The Drys saw a modern-day Utopia rising in New York, if only we would ban demon rum. 

Immigrants, who made up more than 50% of New York's population (counting first-generation as well) would become more "American." They wouldn't have ethnic saloons in which to propagate their native culture.

Crime, drunkenness and immigrant laziness would all decrease. 

Hard-work, patriotism and godliness would all increase.

We could spend less money on cops.

Our economy would boom.

Hospitals would empty.

Etc.

Etc.

Of course, exactly the opposite happened. Lawlessness and corruption skyrocketed. Police forces and the Judicial system were overwhelmed. Hospitals filled with young men sickened by drinking wood alcohol.

Ideologues and their ideologies have done well in our industry. They always do. "If you do this," they say, "a million flowers will bloom, sales will skyrocket, your best customers will stay loyal and buy more and you'll attract new customers in droves."

Life isn't ideology.

Things never go as planned.

And "reform" like anything else takes time, hard-work and, most of all, luck.

The fact is, there are no magic bullets. No panaceas. No inextricable causality that brings an if-then proposition to success.

I close with this quotation. 

One of my favorites.

In "The Captive Mind", Czeslaw Milosz's memoir/essay/study about artists and intellectuals living under Communism in the early 1950s, he attributed the epigram below to an ancient Jew from Galacia. 

"When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal."

Dark Monday.

I just read something in "The New York Times" that really got me a little down.

It was a report of the death, four years ago, of a Nazi killer called Alois Brunner. He was as Adolph Eichmann's right-hand man and sent 128,500 Jews to their death.

Brunner somehow escaped from justice and from various Mossad attempts to assassinate him. He lived in Syria for many years, seemingly untouchable, seemingly enjoying life. He said he had only one regret, "I didn't murder more Jews."

Why do good things happen to bad people?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

I've read more than a few books on the topic and can find no neat answer.

I usually conclude with a Jewish joke. That is, humor steeped in darkness.

If there is a god, I say, it proves he's an underachiever.

Some slogans.

I'd guess that less than 1% of Americans know what the Latin slogan printed on some of our money means. "E pluribus unum" translates as "Out of many, one." It speaks to our diversity and how we've blended that diversity into one nation.

That very notion seems about as quaint and antiquated as a Tin Lizzie.

Not only is no one educated enough to read the Latin, no one even cares enough to find out what it means. Further, the concept of welcoming diversity, welcoming otherness and working with it to unify is virtually non-existent.

Maybe I had too much America this weekend.

Too many shootings.
Too many wife-beatings.
Too much of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Too much turkey.
Too much football.
Too much of too much.

It occurred to me, maybe we need some new slogans for America. I suggest these.

Have a Koch and a smile.
I'm rich. You're poor. I count and you don't.

Now 25% off.

Hurry! Quantities are limited.
Amusing ourselves to death.

Health care not included.

You want fries with that?
Land of the free and the home of Kim Kardashian's ass.

Please don’t shoot me.

Check for cameras before punching women.

Taxes are for other people.

Blame it on the black guy.
Chris Christie. 

Are you ready for some football?

God is on our side.

What global warming?

Now in high-def.

Guns, yes. Taxes, no.

Don't vote, it only encourages them.