American Madness

Bumper Stickers

I love bumper stickers. While driving on the I-95 on the way to Hartford, I
will speed up in my ChevyMothra SUV to come within inches of the car in
front of me, just to gaze at its lovely bumper sticker. And even though
people in Connecticut consider it gauche to do this, I’m from Joisey, where
gauche is a way of life.

Some bumpers stickers are actually worth the effort:

I love animals, they taste great.

EARTH FIRST! We’ll stripmine the other planets later.

“Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.”

Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

Give me ambiguity or give me something else.

These new bumper stickers are great! But what about some of the older
bumper stickers from the 60’s and 70’s, that angst-ridden time where Baby
Boomers honed their free sex and fearmongering skills. With a wee bit of
updating, those bumper stickers can be brought back to life:

Honk If You’re ADHD. Again. Again.

I’d Rather Be Outsourcing

War Is Healthy for Cheney and Other Nonliving Things

I Brake for Charlize Theron

Avian Flu Fever!

The Jackson 5 (to 10 with Good Behavior)

My Other Car Is Another Infiniti

Anyway, a word of advice. Some of those old bumper stickers, like Off the
Pigs or Throw the Fuzz Out, might not be understood by today’s younger
police force. The old guys who know what they mean are now behind desks or
tending bar at the Off The Pigs Deli and Salon in Skokie, Illinois. And
anyway, why insult the hard working police, anyway, when you can go after
tastier targets: Off The Outsourcers, Throw The CFOs Out! With a little
imagination, you might even find something funny to say about the White
House….

I’m in Dallas this week for the League Conference on Information Technology. It’s very interesting and I even managed to attend some of the discussions and presentations despite the fact that I’m mainly here to represent my company. I love the discussions and the presentations and the exchange of ideas. I guess I simply love knowledge. And, this got me thinking about my role in society.

I’m a salesman. It doesn’t sound like a very glamorous fact, but in a way I’m proud to be a salesman. The role is often dressed up in lots of fancy language like Marketing Director, Director of Communications, Internet Marketing Professional, etc. However, the fundamental fact remains that at the core we marketing people are all just salespeople pushing a product or an idea.

However, the long derided role of salesperson gets interesting and starts to command some respect when you begin to think about how many people in our society are actually salespeople in one way or another.

Think of all the PR flacks and all the ad execs everywhere. Think of the legions employed by the Drug, Oil, Financial, and Technology industries. Nearly all the employees of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and others are completely involved in building the biggest advertising and sales machine the world has ever known.

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Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World noted yesterday that Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, has decided to speak out about what he witnessed during his tenure. Tom summed the Financial Times piece where Wilkerson speaks out brilliantly:

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made.” Wilkerson said. He also added that The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example  of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”

With this information now becoming public, I’m realizing how prophetic my pseudo-satire piece on the Abu Ghraib scandal, which linked the deeds there straight up to Rumsfeld and the President, really was.

This piece was written in May of 2004, directly following the Abu Ghraib abuses. I had no idea how right I’d be.

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Homeland security czar Michael Chertoff wants to seal our borders and boot out our large immigrant population. (The full text of his comments is available at the DHS Homepage: here)

I doubt this is possible, but if it were the price to our economy would be large.

Chertoff and other border enthusiasts like to talk about “immigrants,” but what they always mean is Mexicans. We aren’t talking about an over-abundance of Canadian loggers, here.

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The introduction of the Video iPod by Apple is a wonderful next step in the advancement of our being entertained at all times by all things. What is annoying is that video is still in short supply in so many places where it is needed.

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By Ben Munson

I find it interesting that this article about GM reducing its healthcare liabilities thanks to a new arrangement with the UAW never mentions what specifically will happen to retirees and current employees. Will they have to pay more out of each paycheck? Will retirees have to get new jobs just to make ends’ meet? Nothing out of this story.

And then of course, there’s this little revelation:

The company has been losing market share to foreign rivals that operate at lower costs, partly because Japan, Germany and other governments provide universal health care for all their citizens.

Well, you don’t say. You mean, there’s a way for companies to be profitable *and* for people to get health care? Shocking, simply shocking.

On a possibly-related note, Beer Manufacturers are now sponsoring Beer Pong leagues. Corporate America really cares about the health of all of us, young and old, don’t they?

If a pleasant gathering to celebrate successful steps in ending world hunger is what you are after, then it is advisable not to invite leading world dictators to your party. This advise was clearly ignored by UN officials yesterday, as they invited Presidents Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to take the floor at the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In their speeches both men launched into the standard dictator’s tirade about the West and how its imperial policies were ruining the world.

Mugabe took the public relations prize for his comparison of George Bush and Tony Blair, in there union over the Iraq war, to Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Mugabe went on to say:

“Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change.”

“The voice of Mr. Bush and the voice of Mr. Blair can’t decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq.”

It is interesting that Mugabe rants “who shall rule… who shall rule… who shall rule…”. I believe the phase is “who shall govern.”

This has always been a difficult concept for dictators to grasp, but it is an important distinction, and Mugabe’s fiery speech points to the fact that world dictators are scared that the U.S. may just decide to oust them from power, as it did in Iraq.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, received the silver PR trophy, accusing “the North American empire” of threatening “all life on the planet.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture officials were in a difficult predicament in deciding who to invite to speak. On the one hand, they didn’t want to turn their event into a mockery of itself, but on the other hand dictators like Mugabe have plunged their countries into such a crisis that they are clearly the leading spokesmen for world hunger. They are the creators of it.

Allow me a moment to bash the greedy higher-ups at the Wall Street Journal.

Folks: I have enough to read already. Like your employees, I write about the financial markets. Although my publication is a monthly newsmagazine, I still must daily read your newspaper, the New York Times, the FT (sometimes), Fortune and Forbes, and all manner of breaking news on the Internet. I must read at least a book a week of pure news and news analysis. Some of it is pleasurable, but none of it is read for pleasure.

Indeed, the only day of the week that was truly free for me was Saturday (as the NYTimes Sunday edition is pretty much required reading, as well).

Recently, you decided to foist a Saturday edition of the WSJ upon me.

My life will never be the same.

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The Rock Opera “RENT” defined a portion of my life. It led me to an understanding of the world around me, and of myself, that may have taken me years longer to come to on my own. Silly and trite as it seems to feel this connected to a musical, the abstraction of themes and emotions through music allows you to imprint on a story in ways that you simply can’t with words alone.

Everyone affected by RENT has their own stories, and feels their own personal connection to the words, the music, and the feelings that they evoke. It’s as much a story about love and life, as it is about grief and loss. It’s also a connection to who you were when you first really heard it, and first felt these things with the characters.

Not your average musical.

Over the years, I’ve drifted from the theatre, especially from the musical theatre, and RENT has become somewhat of a footnote in my past.

When I heard that the movie was being made, 9 years late, I was more than just miffed. I was virulently angry. They’d taken a young, twenty-something cast and let them become
thirty somethings. They’d replaced the spit-fire Mimi and left everyone else in, trying to play “young.” I’m still a big fan of Anthony Rapp and Taye Diggs, but Adam Pascal is the consumate tool now; a Broadway pretty boy.

So when I watched the trailer tonight, I was not expecting this. I was not expecting to be taken back 10 years.

I was not expecting to be moved.
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Okay. I’ll admit it. I don’t play video games.

There. I said it.

I’m a supergeek who hates halo. I’m the sole square-enix fan that has yet to finish Final Fantasy 7 let alone any of the games that followed. I’m the only dork more likely to win the Olympic gold in high-jumping* than to frag someone in quake deathmatch.
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