Future tense

One of the many downsides of the Internet is that anyone with a connection and access to rudimentary graphics software can produce memes and start polluting the ether with them. This explains about 90% of the political crap you see out there—in all directions. But you also see it in the “business” world, particularly among those whose Twitter profiles are chockers with descriptors like “thought leader”, “keynote speaker”, “growth hacker”, “ninja” and “author”. (Keep in mind that anyone can slap together a few pages of drivel, PDF it and offer it online, thus entitling their self-styling. They don’t ever use the word “writer”.)

Frankly—if your profile doesn’t include some tangible connection to actual, you know, operational business, then you can keynote your ass out of my timeline, because first among your descriptors should be “poseur”. That’s your real defining characteristic.

Anyhoo, this crowd is really big on tweeting what they consider either pithy or inspirational (or perhaps inspirationally pithy) “quotes” to up their traffic stats. Then they get retweeted, which only encourages them to produce more, and so it goes. Typically they post a meme—even if it’s only putting the words into a graphic—and often repeat the words in their tweet. In case you find a meme tl:dr.

Someone I follow on my professional Twitter account, who has a frankly disturbing headshot, claims to be Chief Marketing Officer of a Utah company that produces a technology learning platform (yeah—I don’t really care), into tech, marketing, SaaS, start-ups, and is data-driven and mother of three boys (whew!). Yesterday morning she tweeted this:

It did not seem like anything the 16^th President of the United States would have said, so I did what everyone who sees something like this should do: I Googled it. And, indeed, the first time something like this sentiment was used was in a book published in 1963, according to this site, which appears to be the Snopes of quotes.

I replied to super-marketer-mom pointing out that her little ray of encouragement dated from about 100 years after Lincoln’s death. (Hey—I was polite. And I provided the same link that I did here.)

She ignored me and left her tweet up. But she unfollowed me.

There’s a lesson here—probably several, actually—about not being such a muppet for aphorisms, or about pushing them out uncritically to the Twitterverse, or about actual engagement via the social media you claim to be expert at.

As for me, my lesson is that I’ve now unfollowed her, as well.

Market report

Yeah, okay—you’ve heard me kvetch about HR before, and I’m struggling with them again this week.

(First: trying to get an intern hired. The process that ticked along just fine six months ago with HR doing nothing except ensuring that all the legalities were adhered to and extending the actual offer has now slowed to a crawl, since a “Talent Acquisition Partner”* has been inserted into it. I can’t access online applications directly, but have to wait for Ms. TAP to send them to me. So far, aside from the ones who applied to other internship openings and have neither awareness of, interest in nor qualifications for what I need done, she has forwarded only one application. From someone in Texas. Who requires visa sponsorship. “Oh, oops—I missed that,” was the response when I queried her on that, since I can no longer view the actual applications at all, where work status is clearly stated. The one candidate I knew to be qualified and interested, because he was referred by a Georgetown entrepreneurship professor, didn’t make it to me until I asked where the application I knew he’d submitted was. After I interviewed the candidate, I asked Ms. TAP to move this along post haste, and so far have had nothing but crickets in reply. Summer is indeed i-cumen in, but it’s fast a-waning, too, pet.

*No, I am not making that title up. I’m sure the director spent many hours agonizing over the decision to call an assistant recruiter a Talent Acquisition Partner.

(Second: trying to get information on benefits, specifically on regulations around the retirement plan. The benefits “manager” has form WRT non-responsiveness. She generally doesn’t reply to inquiries until you’ve sent at least two emails and dropped by her office. And that’s when she’s not out at some conference or workshop, aimed no doubt at improving her evasion skills. Hon: I’d like the information before I actually hit mandatory retirement age. Or die.)

But today I’m turning my guns to the other department that, in my experience, just cannot seem to get their ducks on a single body of water, much less in a row. That would be Marketing. And in this organization, Marketing seems even scattier than in others I’ve worked in.

As in: every single time I’ve been involved in a project that requires marketing support, word has come back with much hand-flapping that “there’s no bandwidth” in the department.

God give me strength—what do they do?

A couple of weeks ago there was a long-overdue “shake up” in Marketing, and the director has left the company. But those who remain…well, I’m still asking the question in the preceding graf. One fellow, with an MBA in marketing from Drexel, went through the first iteration of our ideation course but never seemed to grasp the notion that a business idea needs to be feasible and it needs to be capable of generating income. He actually submitted one of his pitch competition ideas to me. The submission wouldn’t fill the back of a cocktail napkin, omitting such things as who’s already doing this, what the revenue model would be and level of effort to stand it up. Also, pro tip: consider, before touting an idea for professional networking functionality, that one of the people to whom you’re pitching it is running a platform that he considers already covers this feature set.

But there’s another marketing person—not a recommendation for the MBA program at American University—who signed up for the second cohort of the class, could not be arsed to introduce herself or post assignments to the online collaboration platform, didn’t show up to the third class, and waited a week to respond to my email asking if she’s not going to continue with it. (Recall that we’ve forked over a lot of dosh to the instructor, and that we’ve already witnessed nearly half the class just shrug it off.)

And here is her week-later reply:

Seriously? The wavy red lines in Microsoft products are your friends, cupcake. Pay attention to them. Because this makes you look like an ignoramus of the first order. Do you send out marketing materials looking like that?

Plus: she spelled my name wrong. My first name. After I’ve corrected her multiple times. What kind of marketer does that?

Well, the answer to that question, children, is one who’s worked here for several years.

So, here it is, hump day, and I can’t decide where to plant the gelignite—HR or Marketing. These are not good choices.

Where indeed

Man—what a week. And it’s only Tuesday morning. Damn.

And so, I have to admit that this cartoon resonates with me.

How ever shall I make it to Friday?

Gratitude Monday: Shabbat shalom

Saturday morning a friend of mine was called to the Torah. She was one of four members of the adult B’nai Mitzvah class who’ve been studying for more than a year to come before the congregation, read verses from the Torah and be officially recognized as full participants in Jewish life.

I say “officially” because from the brief statement each of the four gave about their journey to this ritual, it’s clear that they all have already been active contributors to Temple Beth El, and to leading whatever may be defined as a Jewish life. (Bar/bat mitzvah normally marks the shift from childhood to adulthood, and the taking on of responsibility for one’s ethical choices that comes with being an adult; it’s typically celebrated at age 13.) Three are from Jewish families, one is a convert.

It’s been my observation that Janet has long been living the sort of upright life that would earn the highest accolade I could give: although it might seem slightly gender-bending, she’s a mensch. Generosity, kindness, humor, wit, honesty, intelligence, pragmatism—all of them.

I’ve written before how she (and her husband) literally opened their home to me without ever so much as having a phone call, all on the basis of emails.

(The first phone conversation, as a matter of fact, was me in the pitch-dark of a rental car at Dulles Airport, as I was trying to figure out what the hell was up with the damned thing because there was no bloody ignition key. She laughed and told me that she’d come across the very same problem the previous week, but her husband had the solution: you dropped the fob in the well between the seats and pressed something. Voilà.)

Before that, on the basis of reading some of my posts during my period of unemployment, she’d reached out and made introductions to several people who might know of openings. You cannot know how rare that is, or how much it meant to me. It was, in fact, a mitzvah.

(Does she ask blunt and sometimes very disconcerting questions? Yes. Do I ever want to get on her bad side? Oh. Hell. No.)

Since my arrival in the environs of the District They Call Columbia, Janet has included me in several celebrations, including two Pesach Seders. I’ve been grateful for each of them and look forward to more.

On Saturday, in describing her decision to become bat mitzvah as an adult, Janet recounted how she was raised Jewish, and always pretty much felt Jewish—except for the period starting with college, when she proclaimed herself an atheist. (“It was the 70s,” she noted.) When her father became ill and she found herself praying for his recovery, she questioned whom (using proper case, of course) she could be praying to if not to God, and began that journey that led to Saturday.

Her assigned Torah verses in Numbers 8 were the ones about the Levites shedding their clothes and being shaved head to toe for a thorough bath. In her explication of the verses—once she got past the 13-year-old giggling about what the Levites must have looked like in their altogether—and hairless to boot—she beautifully tied it to the stripping away of the old and undergoing a ritual cleansing so as to emerge literally ready for a fresh start.

Look—it don’t come any fresher than stripped down to your birthday suit, hairless and squeaky clean. As Janet pointed out. It seemed to me a splendid set of verses to read for B’nai Mitzvah.

Janet is a master of languages—as you might have inferred from using correct case when holding inner dialogues. Her specialty is Russian, in which she is fluent enough to unequivocally disabuse a Moscow taxi driver of any delusions of fare gouging. (My lodgings back in December 2015 were what I referred to as the St. Petersburg suite, just off the Star Trek gallery.) Hebrew, however, is a different story, and she was struggling with it right up until the day. Something, I’m guessing, to do with the fact that not only do you have to reverse direction in reading, but figure out the missing vowels. Then there’s the chanting issue, and Janet is not musically gifted.

There were a couple of clams in her reading—which the non-Jews probably wouldn’t have noticed except for her hesitation and retries at the words. However, I am persuaded that the Almighty has heard considerably worse, and moreover knows the entire Torah literally backwards and forwards and therefore could be expected to fill in any deficiencies.

On the other hand, I’m betting that her quoting Morey Amsterdam isn’t something the Supreme Being has heard very often from the bimah.

All-in-all, it was a beautiful and moving ceremony. It was an honor to be asked to share this with Janet’s friends, and a unique opportunity for a Catholic to kvell.

Mazel tov, Janet.

The reek of desperation

Unless you’ve only just now emerged from a cryogenic state without cable TV, you’ll know that yesterday former FBI director James Comey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about his interactions with the Kleptocrat both before and after the inauguration.

Because he’d filed his prepared statement with the committee publicly on Wednesday, not only could little Donnie Two Scoops not invoke executive privilege to shut him up, but the Republicans on the committee had to ask at least some questions not about Hillary’s emails. This they did not like.

It was a bit of a disappointment that the Kleptocrat did not, in fact, live tweet the proceedings; presumably his aides locked away his devices, or kept him distracted with chocolate cake and coloring books. (Although Twitter had a different theory:)

 But his personal lawyer did climb out of the ooze to issue a statement remarkable for its ludicrous typos (one Twitter comment: “Did he get his law degree from Costco?”) and bizarre cherry picking of facts and interpretations. (Essentially: Comey is a lying scumbag except for when he doesn’t say bad things about 45.)

Beyond the mouthpiece, the Replicant water carriers were out in force, including the Klepto spawn, various congressmorons (Paul Ryan, R-Sponge, "[The Kleptocrat] didn't understand that presidents aren't supposed to strong arm law enforcement officials; we all need to give him a big hug.")  and the official GOP Twitter account. And you just have to wonder at those guys. Because despite their best effort (best being relative to their standards) to control the “dialogue”, they just blow chunks at it.

And then, this:

Gawd.

I'll drink to that

This morning at 1000, former FBI director James Comey is scheduled to testify before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about matters related to possible collusion between the Kleptocrat’s campaign (and now White House) staffers and various Russian representatives.

Comey, you’ll recall, was suddenly sacked by Donnie Two Scoops a few weeks ago because he refused to stop investigating the connections, or he declined to lie about his investigation, or he was a showboat. You pick.

Since then, the Kleptocrat has toyed with the notion of invoking executive privilege to bar Comey from testifying, but announced with great fanfare earlier this week that he wouldn’t do that. (Probably after his advisers pounded him on the head telling him that if he tried it, he’d look even guiltier than he does now.) He assuaged his wounded vanity, though, by adding that he just might live-tweet a running commentary on the hearing. Because he clearly doesn’t have anything else to do. (Apparently those nearly 500 open high-ranking administration positions will, in fact, nominate themselves in Kleptolandia.) He’s also flung around a variety of tweets about his travel ban, London’s mayor, the Paris agreement, Qatar and other attempts at distracting attention from today’s hearing, which have sent his administration scurrying into frantic damage control, and caused a few resignations.

The most recent example of ham-handedness came on Tuesday, when he had Repugnant senators Marco Rubio (Florida) and Tom Cotton (Arkansas) over for dinner. Both Replicants are on the Intelligence Committee, and neither has anything resembling an actual spine, so it’s not unreasonable to speculate that over chicken nuggets and single scoops of ice cream on their pie they were getting a list of questions to ask today about why leakers aren’t being investigated, and when can Sally Yates be expected to be prosecuted.

Okay, but that’s not what I’m writing about today. Because the nation has risen to the occasion in a way that absolutely gives those of us with three synapses firing in sequence heart: bars are opening early to accommodate those wanting to watch the hearing straight through—with appropriate liquids to wash it down. At least in D.C. they are; probably across the country, too. Maybe even around the world.

There will be breakfast sandwiches, specials on vodka-based cocktails and…drinking games. I’ve found at least two versions online, and I stopped looking early yesterday. Viz.:

One that prefaces the rules by urging players to imbibe responsibly and “refrain from driving, tweeting, or managing a private email server after playing.”

Another that offers such arcane rules that I’m not sure anyone can follow them sober, much less once they’ve started slamming back the Moscow Mules or Stoli shots (c’mon, guys—gotta be vodka for this one).

If neither of these appeals to you, Reddit has a few suggestions. Of course. In my opinion there needs to be special consideration for every Repugnant question that’s an obvious attempt at deflecting from the purpose of the hearing, particularly in light of the completely unsubtle attempts by the White House to subvert the process, and given recent hearings where the Reps went down that weasel hole with Yates and others.

Sadly, I’ll be working, in an environment that doesn’t even condone a little white wine spritzer at its functions. But I’m hoping that this is one congressional action that confers enough of a buzz that I won’t need any distilled substances to augment reality.

Landing the scoop

One thing you may not know about the D-Day invasions is that one of the reporting scoops was scored by someone who had been denied accreditation. But Martha Gellhorn was not the sort of journalist to be deterred by that sort of thing; she sneaked aboard a hospital ship in England, then hid in the head until the morning of the 6^th, and she went ashore disguised as a stretcher bearer to get her story.

I suppose that her years of being in a relationship with that blowhard Ernest Hemingway gave her the kind of experience needed to pull off that kind of coup. They’d met during the Spanish Civil War and married in 1940, but by 1944 their relationship had soured. He’d refused to help her get a press pass that would have enabled her to fly to England, so instead she went over on a ship laden with explosives. Gellhorn, a long-time correspondent for Collier’s magazine, had been set to cover the story, but Hemingway’s ego couldn’t bear that. He himself got accredited by Collier’s, which meant that Gellhorn was off the story.

Ergo the subterfuge. She filed her story, which pissed off the command structure, but it also got up Hemingway’s nose. (Although he filed copy that starred himself as the sole reason for the days success, in fact he never went ashore at all on the 6^th, and his “head wound” was from a pre-embarkation car crash. By nightfall he was back at his “headquarters” at the Dorchester hotel, regaling all the barflies with his bravado.)

War reporting was in Gellhorn’s blood—she covered wars right up to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. Prior to D-Day, she’d reported on the war in China and from Czechoslovakia, Finland and Italy. Following D-Day she was one of the first correspondents to cover the liberation of Dachau. I’m not a rabid fan of her writing style, but she had extraordinary courage and did know how to find the humanity in her stories.

In 1961, she spent time in the Middle East and gave this prescient analysis of the Palestinians:

“The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war… Today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad. The ultimate aim is not such humane small potatoes as repatriating refugees.”

She also reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962, and then revisited Germany two years later. Again, her story sliced open the heart of the matter with surgical precision:

“The adults of Germany, who knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until he started losing, have performed a nation-wide act of amnesia; no one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its horrors… The young realize this cannot be true, yet one by one, each explains how guiltless his father was; somebody else’s father must have been doing the dirty work.”

(Had she filed her report five years later, after the student revolutions of 1968, she’d probably have revised her conclusion. And were she to be writing in 2017, this sentence would have been entirely different: “Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.”)

The nation was lucky to have had correspondents like Gellhorn covering the big events of the 20^th Century.

Images in the sand

I swear, if a body had a mind to it, she could post every day of the year about a different war. Even having a concentration on modern wars involving mass armies of the past couple of hundred years gives one considerable scope.

But today is the 73^rd anniversary of the launch of Operation Overlord, which we mostly know as the D-Day landings. To mark this occasion, I’m sharing one of those installations that use art to examine historical events.

In 2014 we had a spectacular example in the “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” installation at the Tower of London: 888,246 red ceramic poppies falling from a bastion window and filling the dry moat completely. Each poppy represented one dead British or Commonwealth soldier from the 1914-18 war. Individually, the poppies were poignant; in the aggregate they were appalling.

Another example is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, more than 48,000 3’x6’ panels, each representing someone who died of AIDS. And the Paper Clip Project created by children at a middle school in Whitwell, Tenn. They collected six million paper clips to try to wrap their heads around the magnitude of the Holocaust.

In each of these cases, people used art to connect to the otherwise difficult-to-fathom magnitude of loss.

Four years ago two British artists created stencils of the outlines of fallen soldiers, and invited volunteers to etch in the shapes 9000 times on the sand at Arromanches, a flat stretch of sand close to the landing site of Gold Beach. Arromanches was the site of one of the artificial harbors known as Mulberries, used to supply the invaders.

This installation was called The Fallen 9000 because the artists put the number of dead—Allies, Germans and civilians—at 9000 for the first day. Although it’s frankly difficult to pinpoint the actual numbers, 9000 is as good as any for the purpose of making a point. Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss embarked on the project to mark World Peace Day in 2013. Their original team comprised 60 volunteers, but on the day they were joined by another 500 locals. Using the stencils and rakes, they etched 9000 outlines of individual death along the strand.

As I’ve mentioned before, I truly love this kind of installation—not only the intersection of art and history, but the ephemeral nature of the piece. The 560 people on that September day had to work quickly, and within a few hours the water had washed away all their efforts. Kind of like the grass in Carl Sandburg’s poem.

The Fallen | Lest we Forget from Aberration on Vimeo.

Something to think about on this anniversary of sacrifice and perseverance.

Gratitude Monday: Six days in June

I’m turning away today from the current chest-thumping alpha-male diarrhea flowing out of the White House for Gratitude Monday. Because today is the 50^th anniversary of the outbreak of what came to be known as the Six Day War, in which the armed forces of Israel completely whupped the asses (a technical military term) of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, with lesser involvement by Iraq and Lebanon (supported by a bunch of other Arab nations and supplied by the Soviet Union).

The war, provoked by Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and then mobilizing forces along the border, is also known as the Third Arab-Israeli war, since Arab nations had tried in 1948 and 1956 to destroy the Jewish state. It was during this one that Israel captured Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Sinai has since been returned, but the other territories remain under Israeli control, not without controversy.

I’m not going to go into detail about the war or its immediate causes—you can get the drift by understanding that the first strikes by the Israeli air force almost completely obliterated Egyptian air capabilities, but Nasser got the other Arab states to join in the attack on Israel by spinning some seriously fake news that the IAF had actually been defeated. (Also, Nasser was evidently acting on misinformation supplied by the USSR that Israel was massing forces on the Syrian border.)

Man—some countries do not ever learn, huh?

I have a few memories from this time:

Dave van den Eikhof walking into history class and whacking the paper airplanes the Levy twins had made, declaring: “This is how you destroy an air force: on the ground.”

Air superiority, baby—don’t start a war without it.

Also: a political cartoon I cut out of the Los Angeles Times, which I cannot now find. Several keffiyeh-wearing men labeled as the leaders of the Arab states are arrayed around a circle on the ground with an eye-patched Moishe Dayan walking away holding a full bag of marbles. The Arabs are crying, “But we didn’t know we were playing for keeps!”

Baby—you’re always playing for keeps when you break out the war matériel.

Losing three wars against Israel in less than 20 years did not deter the Arab states from trying again. The one Arab leader, Anwar Sadat, who made a substantive effort to broker long-term peace with Israel was assassinated after a fatwa was issued against him by Islamists.

But today I’m grateful for the example of Israel as a state that—despite enormous calls on its national resources just to survive in an environment surrounded by nations that deflect all domestic issues by focusing on driving the Jews into the sea—has done more than survive. It has flourished, and it remains a beacon of democracy and progress in an area that otherwise represents nothing so much as chaos, poverty (economic and moral), theocratic authoritarianism, ignorance and animus.

If by some stroke of I-don’t-know-what Israel disappeared, every Arab state in the Middle East would collapse into the void of having lost its focus of hatred. Yeah—they could still carry jihad to the non-Muslim world (and they would). But their people would still be hungry, ill-housed, uneducated, in poor health and without the basic infrastructure of modern states.

Israel’s citizens have borne the costs of defense (in both blood and treasure) for decades, and yet they’ve also given the entire world amazing scientific and technological advances. (Those who call for boycott of Israeli products need to eschew PCs with Pentium and Celeron chips, anything with Microsoft OS, anti-virus protection software and firewalls, emails depending on the algorithm developed there (so: all emails), mobile phones—all of them, SMS texting, video games, e-readers, water irrigation and other technologies that support agriculture in much of Africa and Asia, generic medications, AZT and other AIDs/HIV meds—oh, hell: forget about treating most diseases or traumatic injuries without technological advances out of Israel—and unstinting contributions to disaster relief around the world.) They also welcome refugees, including those from the Arab world. Yes—they’re tough and they’ve taken unpopular and mistaken stances over the years. I believe they’ve earned the right to be boneheaded on occasion.

(An iconic photo of Israeli paratroopers is juxtapositioned with the three men today.)

One of the great moments in U.S. history was Harry S Truman’s recognition of the state of Israel at its inception in 1948. On this anniversary of one of its many wars for survival, I’m grateful that the nation has prevailed, and hope that it will continue to do so forever.

Send the word to beware

Let’s close out the week with something that marked its hundredth anniversary yesterday. George M. Cohan wrote “Over There” on 7 April 1917, a day after the U.S. declared war on Germany, but it wasn’t published until 1 June of that year.

“Over There” was one of the iconic songs of World War I. It’s kind of pushy, actually—framing a typically brash statement about America’s first foray onto the world stage. Seriously: it’s totally the New World gearing up to sort out the mess the Old World has got itself into. (The Old World View? Ya took yer sweet time about it, didn’t ya? This dynamic repeated itself 24 years later as the U.S. wrapped itself in isolationist splendor until the attack on Pearl Harbor.) I mean, it absolutely announces that “ev’ry son of liberty” will have the Huns on the run in short order. This from a nation that holds military activity of any sort as suspect.

I can’t help but reflect that, 100 years on, and some 72 after the United States carefully crafted alliances and strategies to oppose totalitarianism, we’re looking at an administration that is taking a chain saw to all that and replacing it with a new form of homegrown isolationist totalitarianism whose sole objective is the aggrandizement of those already stupid wealthy at the cost of pretty much everyone else on the planet.

Hey-ho—we’ll have to labor steadfastly for the next year and a half to take back the legislative branch and begin the work of reclaiming democracy for ourselves and our posterity. It’s never over, either over there or over here.