I hadn’t thought much about Gary the Veeper in recent years, even in my loneliest and more nostalgia-filled moments. One tries to bury sources of childhood torment as deeply as possible.
Gary lived in my neighborhood, though we were hardly friends. Gary had few friends, mostly swaggering his way through classes with bravado that his actual report card average wouldn’t support. He was a big kid who clearly didn’t spend his free time in the gym, but he did hone the skill of painful face-slapping which he laughingly referred to as a “veep”. Since at the time I was an ever bigger kid, and nowhere near as tall, I was an easy and frequent target.
Teachers and school officials often considered me a provocateur and were reluctant to get involved when I’d complain. Even when they did, Gary would promise to change his ways, crossing his fingers behind his back as he did. I knew him well enough to know that he was downright addicted to the special blend of frankfurter that the German delicatessen in our neighborhood offered in contrast to the blander style that the Glatt Kosher one did. In a fit of desperation, I offered to give him enough money so that he could saunter out for lunch and get a couple of those delectable brats. He took me up on my offer, mockingly reminding me that “I could stand to miss a few meals”. So could he, but I digress. If nothing else, it got him off school property while I had what lunch I could still afford, and at least finish with the only red marks on my face from tears, not his veeps.
But in recent days I’ve seen more than a few headlines that have brought back those painful memories, and all I can say is apparently I’m not the only executive who may have had a Gary the Veeper in their lives at one point.
As AXIOS’ Mike Allen detailed over the past weekend:
A Wall Street Journal headline calls this “The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump.”
Driving the news: Apple CEO Tim Cook dined at breezy Mar-a-Lago last night — a day after a pilgrimage to Trump’s table on Thursday by Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg flew in on Thanksgiving Eve. Jeff Bezos will sit down with Trump next week.
- Meta! Amazon! OpenAI! Rat-tat, each donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios.
And it continued this week, as THE WRAP’s Stephanie Kaloi noted yesterday:
Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos will meet with President-elect Donald Trump at the president-elect’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, a source familiar with the meeting confirmed to TheWrap.
CNN’s Alayna Greene first reported news of the meeting. “Trump is scheduled to meet with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, a source familiar with the meeting tells me,” she wrote on X. “The visit comes as Trump has met with major CEOs in recent weeks.” He’ll meet later today with TikTok’s CEO, and is slated to meet w/Bezos on Wed.
For Fat Orange Jesus, such kow-towing serves two purposes. One, it satisfies an ego as voracious as his appetite, as BLOOMBERG’s Akayla Gardner and Hadriana Lowenkron noted on Monday:
Donald Trump said he’s being embraced by business executives — in a stark reversal from when he first won the White House eight years ago — as tech executives and founders flock to Florida to meet with the president-elect.
“We have a lot of great executives coming in, the top executives, the top bankers, they’re all calling,” Trump said at a press conference Monday in Florida, adding that he recently met with billionaire Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
“In the first term everybody was fighting. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” he said.
And the other, of course, is a reminder that failing to kiss his pimpled fake-tanned ass could result in some unwelcome publicity. Ask the folks at Disney, who paid a larger price tag which, as usual, TOO MUCH TELEVISION’s Rick Ellis covered with finesse and insight in his nightly newsletter on Monday:
There has been a seemingly endless number of hot takes on the ABC News decision to settle the defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump, for a $15 million payment to his presidential library, a $1 million payment for his legal fees and an apology.
This is one of those stories where we don’t know what we don’t know. Perhaps this was a effort to make nice with the incoming President. Perhaps ABC News wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of being in the middle of a trial during the early months of the new Administration. Or perhaps there were some uncomfortable internal ABC News emails or messages that would have become public during the trail’s discovery period.
The truth is that we just don’t know what we don’t know. And it’s unlikely that either Disney CEO Bob Iger or any ABC News executive is going to provide any useful details.
Forget the fact that the face of his top-rated (and top profit-contributing) GOOD MORNING AMERICA is not exactly a happy camper, as THE NEW YORK POST’s triumverate Alexandra Steigrad, Ariel Zilber, Carlos Greer chortled last night:
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos is “apoplectic” and “humiliated” by the network’s decision to pay $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by President-elect Donald Trump, The Post has learned.
Stephanopoulos, who claimed Trump had raped E. Jean Carroll during an interview with Republican lawmaker Nancy Mace, was particularly upset about being forced to apologize, a source with knowledge of the situation said.
Maybe ol’ Bob was more concerned that something like what POPULAR INFORMATION’s Judd Legum reported in his morning newsletter earlier today:
Working at the “Happiest Place on Earth” can be a nightmare.
A landmark 2018 report by researchers at Occidental College found that workers at Disneyland were paid such low wages that they struggled to make ends meet. According to the report, “hourly wage for Disneyland Resort workers in real dollars dropped 15% from 2000 to 2017, from $15.80 to $13.36.” As a result, “three-quarters say that they do not earn enough money to cover basic expenses every month.” More than half of Disneyland employees said they were worried about being evicted, and one out of 10 reported being homeless in the last two years.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger was paid $65.6 million in 2018, as much as “the total pay of 9,284 Disneyland workers.”
Or maybe something worse. I guess $16 million is to him the equivalent of what a couple of German hot dogs cost back in the day.
Or ask some of the folks at one of their competitors who went to bed last night with this disturbing turn of events which THE WRAP’s Lucas Manfredi reported on:
The Center for American Rights has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission expressing concerns over Paramount Global’s pending $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
The non-profit, which describes itself as “non-partisan, public-interest law firm,” says an investment in Skydance from China’s Tencent Holdings raises questions about “troubling questions about undue foreign influence from China.” It also claims that CBS News has “exhibited improper ideological bias” and that CBS Television has “apparently engaged in illegal racial quotas for its hiring.”
“The Center asks the Commission to condition its grant of approval of the merger on specific commitments by the new corporation to address these issues, and to place the approval on a probationary status for an appropriate period of years until compliance with the conditions is evident,” CAR wrote in its petition.
Sage advice and perhaps some hope for for my fellow executives relative to what they’re doing with their own lunch money these days. Maybe if one could heed it, the current iteration of the school bully, our real-life Nelson Muntz, might actually be on a path to his own eviction.