Snarknado: 1, JPMorgan: 0

Okay, normal blog service is herewith resuming. It’s Friday, and this week we witnessed another stellar example of what happens when your communications people don’t really understand social media in general and the Twitter-dot-com in particular.

It seems, my children, that someone—well, probably, a lot of someones—at JPMorgan & Chase thought it would be a good idea to have a nice, PR-worthy Q&A “exchange” between investment banker Jimmy Lee and…well, whoever wanted to compress questions into 140 characters using #AskJPM as the designator.

Oh, dear.

Because not only did that idea make it all the way to “Hey, you can ask Jimmy Lee everything” Twitter invitations, no one in their organization seems to have held her hand up and said, “Um, listen—have we thought this through? Because, you know, there are all kinds of people on Twitter; it’s not really like one of our annual stockholder meetings where we can keep out the riff-raff. Twitter is where all our riff-raff went. Just search on #EuroVision or #MileyCyrus. Bad things can happen there. Bad, bad things.”

But either that didn’t occur, or everyone was in such a rush to sit at the social media cool-kids’ table that they just steamrolled right over her.

Well, now we understand how they made so many egg-suckingly bad investments, don’t we? Anyone comes up with a crack-brained notion and they just run with it. Like they think they’ve got some sort of invisible shield around them, and what happened to BP can't happen to them.

And yet the utterly predictable happened. The Q&A session, scheduled for yesterday, never saw the light of JPMorgan day. Because long before then the Twitterati had deluged the hashtag with…well, all manner of questions that no investment banker wants to deal with. Some examples:

They should have closed it down right then, because it wasn't going to get any better.

See—what IB could handle the Kierkegaard? Clown suit is maybe doable, though.

At least that one’s economics-related.But who would publicly talk Kardashians?

And:

I confess that once I realized what was up, I, uh, well, I just… Look—how was I not? And I got a few retweets for the likes of:

“Would you hire me if I have a couple of #misdemeanor convictions on my record, or do I need a #felony? #AskJPM” And, “Which circle of Hell do you inhabit? I’m thinking 8^th, for fraud; but could be 4^th for greed. Or 9^th—treachery? Pls advise. #AskJPM”

But the one that really seemed to draw them in was, “Did you actually meet Satan, or did you do everything via email? #AskJPM”

Well—once you get going it’s like potato chips.

Anyhow, sometime during the day on Wednesday, JPMorgan slunk off into a corner office on the 74^th floor somewhere, licking their wounds. They cancelled the Q&A session. But the questions still remain.

And this tweet pretty much sums it up:

You can see for yourself. Just do a search on the hashtag #AskJPM. But don’t be drinking anything you don’t want to snort out onto your tablet.

Coffee with a snap

Still on the theme of veterans of our armed services, I just never get over how many ways there are to hang them out to dry. I mean—they suit up to do a necessary job that ranges from frequently boring and unpleasant to fatal, for completely crap pay, and basically no respect from the people they protect.

And when they get out, having been trained to do things like accurately fire the M4 carbine in tight situations, efficiently search vehicles for IEDs or maintain Apache attack helicopters in places you’d have trouble pronouncing—for some reason, no one wants to hire them to work in an office or a factory.

So—even though I’m not at all a fan of either their products or their ubiquity, I say big up to Starbucks for committing to a program to hire 10,000 vets over the next five years. They’ll be placed in a full range of positions from front-line baristas to corporate management.

And, since it’s ‘Bucks’ corporate policy to offer health coverage to all employees, they’ll have access to a full range of health care regardless of how many hours a week they work. Which wouldn’t be the case at other companies that have set up similar programs.

Yes, Walmart, that’s you I’m talking about.

One of the most telling aspects of the NPR story about this is the comment by Rob Pocarelli, the ex-JAG prosecutor who’s now a staff attorney at ‘Bucks. Before joining the coffee giant he was told by an interviewer that he might not be a good fit for the particular legal establishment because, “I think you’re going to find more of the intellectual type in the law firm environment.”

Yeah—because anyone stupid enough to say that, to a lawyer, in an interview is a mental giant.

Anyhow—props to Starbucks. I really hope this program is successful and that it goads other corporations to step up to the plate the way these veterans have done.

The fields of Flanders

Still on the theme of veterans this week, some pictures from a trip I took a while ago. I called it my “700 Years of Wine and War” tour—driving from Strasburg to Caen primarily visiting battlefields from Crécy to Normandy.

(But also making a pilgrimage to Rheims and Épernay, the fountainhead of Champagne.)

In retrospect, I don’t recommend doing that many battlefields and military cemeteries in that short a time, because there’s not enough wine to wash away the sense of loss, futility and anger that you feel. Seven hundred years, for heaven’s sake; and still at it. (At the time I went, the battles-du-jour were in Bosnia and Rwanda.)

I concentrated on conflicts of the 20^th Century, in particular on the Western Front battlefields of World War I. Which were legion. I won’t go into details of that trip, but here are a few of the many, many military graveyards I visited.

First, the Meuse-Argonne American military cemetery. It holds the largest number (more than 14,000) of our soldiers in Europe, most of them from the campaign of the same name in 1918. The crosses just go on forever.

The area around Ypres was fought over essentially from October 1914 to October 1918; historians talk about the Battles of Ypres—from the First up to the Fifth. After about the first 20 minutes of that time it was nothing but a roiling sea of mud; in all those years the lines couldn't have shifted more than a few hundred yards in either direction.

And Tyne Cot Commonwealth Graves cemetery near Passchendaele stands witness to the British losses.

  

I don't know how Tyne Cot stacks up in terms of size of Commonwealth War Graves, but it's just staggeringly huge, with more than 11,000 graves, surrounded by this enormous wall.

Then you come to find out that the wall is engraved with the names of those I refer to as "the lost but never found"--men whose remains were never found, or who didn't leave enough of their remains to be identified. It's stunning to walk past panel after panel--think the Vietnam Memorial that won't quit; tens of thousands of names. And then you learn that they actually ran out of wall before they ran out of names.

(I mentioned this on Facebook and was somewhat taken aback by this comment from a “FB friend”—you know the sort I mean: “I do wonder how many of those lost but never found were in fact successful deserters.” This is someone who lays claim to being cultured and educated, who takes umbrage at the expression of any views not fully aligned with his own and feels free to scatter his opinions authoritatively far and wide. But he doesn’t seem to read posts very thoroughly before bestowing his comments, so I’ve stopped paying attention to them. In this case, however, I did note in passing how gobsmackingly crass he was being. Well done, you!)

Tyne Cot is huge, but there are other, smaller, cemeteries in the vicinity. Here’s Polygon Wood—just a small graveyard in the midst of a cornfield.

One of the more moving memorials is at Vimy Ridge. Vimy was contested from 1914, when the Germans took it. Successive attempts by French and French colonial regiments just couldn’t dislodge the Germans. Finally, in April 1917, the Canadian Corps took and held the high ground.

When you go to Vimy, there’s the park, and a memorial sculpture and the engraved list of Canadians killed in France with no known grave.

Note that H.W. Parry served as H.W. Madden. The minimum age for enlisting as a volunteer was 17, but boys of 15 or 16 would take the name of an older man; so "served as" usually means someone not yet 17. There are right many of them listed on that memorial.

The French gave Vimy to the people of Canada, and Canadian students staff the memorial, take you on tours. You have to walk on designated paths because of unexploded ordnance. And they use sheep to keep the grass down, because even the weight of a mower could set that stuff off--96 years after the Canadians finally took the ridge from the Germans.

I was appalled to realize that the forward observation trenches from the two sides are about 50 meters apart. I just sat down and cried, right there.

Near the battlefield of Beaumont-Hamel is this stunning memorial to the Newfoundland regiment that fought there.

But there were others on the Western Front. My photos of the huge cemetery at Verdun—a six-month battle that was begun with the expectation by Falkenhayn that he would “bleed the French Army white”—aren’t particularly good. But there are plenty of other graveyards, especially in the Somme corridor.

The area around Albert has many. I was taken by this grave—one named soldier, three “inconnus”. Three unknowns.

Or these two stones—one for a Jewish soldier, one for a Muslim (probably from one of the colonial regiments. Both Britain and France pulled on their empires to feed the meat grinder of the Western Front.)

  

Both “died for France”.

There are German military cemeteries in the area, too—although not as many nor of the size of the Brits and French. Here’s one in the Albert region:

The Germans mark their graves with black metal crosses--except for the stone one, which was for a Jewish soldier. (I'm told that during the German occupation of 1940-44, the Jewish markers were destroyed, but they’ve been replaced since.)

It's a small cemetery, and you think, "So, not many died here." And then you realize that each side—front and back—of the crosspiece has either a name or an "unknown" on it.

See what I mean about not packing too much of this into a couple of weeks? After a while, there’s just not enough wine.

The boys are back

I mentioned yesterday that the generation of World War I veterans has died off, and the ones from the Second World War are also fading away. But they’re going with style. And here are two stories about that.

Three of the last surviving airmen of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942 held their last reunion yesterday at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The fourth was not well enough to join them. They’re all in their 90s.

At a time when Americans were still stunned by the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japanese advances throughout the Pacific, James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle led 80 men flying B-25 bombers on a one-way raid into the heart of the Empire to essentially make the point that the sleeping tiger was indeed awake and that there would be consequences. Because there were no aircraft that could fly round trip, they dropped their bombs on Tokyo and then flew on to land in China. Many did not make it.

It was a bold, possibly suicidal mission, but it shocked the Japanese and raised American morale at a time when both outcomes were magnified in the extreme.

Yesterday Richard Cole, 98, Edward Saylor, 93 and David Thatcher, 93, met and drank a toast with 107-year-old cognac from a bottle that was at one time Doolittle’s. Cole proposed the toast.

“…To those we lost on the mission and those who have passed away since. Thank you very much, and may they rest in peace.”

My second story is also about a vet from WWII—an air ground crewman for the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command named Harold Jellicoe Percival. He died last month in a Lancashire retirement home, aged 99. Percival was part of another seminal bombing operation, the Dambusters raid of 1943 over the Ruhr.

Because he never married and had no direct family, the managers were afraid that his funeral would have no one to mourn him. A small story in the local paper went viral on social networks as the call went out for service members to ensure that Percival did not go alone into that good night. It came multiple times into my Twitter feed at the weekend.

And it turns out that hundreds answered the call—more than 400, as a matter of fact. The 300 who couldn’t get into the funeral home stood outside in the rain and then followed Percival on his last journey.

Like I said—that generation is fading. In their 90s now; and that’s the young ones. But they’re not forgotten, thank God.

Gratitude Monday: A joke, a look, a word

Today being Veterans Day, I’m focusing my gratitude on the men and women who have ponied up to our nation’s defense and paid the highest price for it. And since today is also the 95^th anniversary of the event that triggered the holiday, I’m thinking in particular about that war, even though the generation that fought it has completely died out. (And the World War II generation is fast fading.)

Veterans Day started out as Armistice Day—marking the cessation of active hostilities of what at the time was called the Great War, but a couple of decades later came to be known as World War I. Just as we had to change the designation of the conflict, we retitled the holiday to take into account the fact that the wars—and the dead—just kept on coming.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, an armistice went into effect between the armed forces of the Central Powers and those of the Allied Nations. And thus ended, not with a bang but a whimper, the worst systematic slaughter the world had seen up until that time.

The First World War is the vortex of my historical studies, for a lot of reasons. But it didn’t make the big time in the American cultural conscience—outside of academic circles, you just never hear much about it. They call Korea the Forgotten War; but WWI just never seemed to take a place in our memory at all.

It was one of those appalling confluences of technology, politics, idiocy and willful refusal by those in positions of power to view the world as it really was and not as they expected or wanted it to be. Among the worst offenders were the military commanders, the generals, the field marshals, the planners and the strategists.

The First World War is a nightmare of pitched battles and wholesale slaughter, repeated again and again throughout a four-year night. It exhausted nations, natural resources, gene pools and national political and moral fiber. It left a legacy of broken men, broken dreams and broken faith, and I don’t think we’ve fully recovered from it nearly a hundred years on.

But—it’s Veterans Day, remember? I don’t intend to focus on the technology or the politics or the rest of that. I’ve got personal accounts (via the Imperial War Museum’s Book of the First World War) from two people who survived the war. (In general, the Brits have done a better job of documenting this sort of thing from that war; if I’d found anything equivalent from our own history, I’d have used it.)

Here’s Harold Clegg, former Rifleman, Liverpool Rifles, returning home in May 1919:

“I found I belonged to that generation of men who, even if they had escaped its shells, were destroyed by the War. The youths of 18-20 who were thrown back into civilisation whose only training had been that of musketry, bombing, killing and bloodshed; those who regarded carnage with complacency; whose conversation during the most impressionable period of their lives had been War, Women and Food.

“While men were being churned up by shell fire until there was nothing left of them but pieces of flesh adhering to the revetting on the trench, Army Contractors and Munition Makers at home had been waxing fat and greeted those returned from the Wars with a gross display of opulence.

“During our absence the old order had changed; the genteel of 1914 were gone; blatant riches reigned in their stead; money was the power in the land; money that had been reaped from the bodies of the dead.

“This was the Victory. The War to end War.”

And from Joyce Taylor, about her brother, Captain Norman Austin Taylor, 1/21^st Battalion, London Regiment, who died of wounds during the German offensive of March 1918:

“When he was hit he told the men to leave him but they carried him back in a blanket and put him into the hospital train. He died either in the train or at Étaples where he is buried. Five foot ten of a beautiful young Englishman under French soil. Never a joke, never a look, never a word more to add to my store of memories. The book is shut up for ever and as the years pass I shall remember less and less, till he becomes a vague personality; a stereotyped photograph.”

Yeah—I read these words, remark upon their universality and wonder how much we’ve really advanced since 1918. Clegg could have been getting off a plane from Iraq or Afghanistan (where we’ve had soldiers for ten years, people) last week and wondering how the hell he’s going to find a job or explain to his mother what it’s like to be looking out for IEDs everywhere you go. And how many families of the soldiers returning via Dover AFB are—like Taylor—trying to imprint their memories of their child who is headed to a VA cemetery?

So I’m grateful for the men and women who have suited up over the decades to do about the dirtiest job there is—for whatever their reasons, they put their lives on the line in service to the nation. Many never returned, and their jokes, their glances and their words are buried with them. Those who did were changed forever, and we haven’t done nearly a good enough job at welcoming them back and making them part of the community.

At least we can express our gratitude for them.