If you’re looking for positivity and good cheer this morning, I’d suggest you stop reading right now. Having an overdrawn bank account and being threatened with losing the one job you’ve been able to have gotten, and one of the few I was even allowed the chance to interview for, in what is now more than five years for the simple reason that I can’t somehow coerce enough people to invest a mere thirty minutes of time into considering the possibility of buying something they claim they need to replace can do that to anyone. It certainly has me even more frustrated and panicked than my usual high alert level.
It wasn’t always that way. I built a career, and indeed a favorable reputation, on being able to educate some of the most intelligent and successful people in the world–certainly in media–on the information they needed to know in order to make the best decisions possible toward optimizing their own success. My own opinions rarely mattered, inasmuch as I know exactly how insignificant and atypical they are. Those that did listen often benefitted greatly from my counsel; far more than I ever did in the long run.
But in more recent times, we have seemingly become not only a polarized world, let alone industry, but the level of determination in standing one’s ground despite empirical and objective facts to the contrary has intensified. We have certainly seen how stupidity has risen to new heights of empowerment over the past week with the revelations that THE ATLANTIC’s Jeffrey Goldberg shared with the free world, initially only the fact that it happened but then, if for no other reason than to attempt to counter the implausible response from the White House that painted Goldberg as a biased traitor for even daring to insinuate what he saw with his own eyes was actually there, he shared the text messages. Only a moron–or a toadie–could possibly deny the detail that was evident was significant, and only semantics would possibly serve as an alibi for the level of incompetence on display. And yet, there were our beloved CIA director and Director of National Intelligence offering the same kind of blank stares and defiance that I continue to experience when I ask someone to invest less than the price of a high quality face mask to make sure their air conditioner doesn’t die out in the dead of summer and potentially cost them thousands in repairs.
There’s been more than enough attention given to those back-and-forths elsewhere; personally, I’m sick of it. Many friends–at least that’s what I still think they are–apparently feel otherwise. They have literally been posting nonstop online with more and more opinions and revelations eminating from what Goldberg’s emulation of Daniel Ellsburg (Google it if you must) has produced. Some are even urging formal protests; planning rallies in remote small towns where their crowds might get into the dozens if the weather cooperates.
I’ve lived in a world of numbers my entire professional life and if I’ve learned anything is that if you don’t have enough of them, you don’t matter. In past lifetimes (or so it seems) it was ratings points; these days it’s favorable P & L projections. Nary a week goes by where some otherwise determined and impassioned media executive pays the price for assuming their niche view could somehow resonate enough with the masses. So when I’m odious enough to merely remind people of the realities of their actual impact what I get is private messaging that effectively tells me to STFU and let them piously believe otherwise. Here’s one such example from someone I really do respect:
So what is up with you? Please dont knock what people are doing to protest what is going on in the world. We are standing up and you might think its enabling the felon in chief but I see things changing because people are stepping up to the plate…I do not put my head in the sand, neither do my friends. You are entitled to you opinion but not to make fun of my community.
This person resides in a DMA within the bottom 60 out of the 210 Nielsen measures. They are not even a significant factor in their own state; let alone nationally. Those are facts, inconvenient though they may be. The “community” is meaningless. To believe otherwise is indeed the very definition of being an ostrich.
Then again, how stupid of me to expect anything other than that sort of defensiveness. Because I see and experience it every single day myself. From everything from the lines at fast-food restaurants offering processed crap and playing up its “healthy” qualities to hearing the relentlessly insulting commercials for the “value” of My Pillows, silver coins, 30-day carbo-laden emergency food supplies for the pending End Times and bone broth merely because they’re being marketed by “good Christians”.
And if I were to be deluded enough to think that there was hope on the horizon for any sort of change, we were reminded this week by the likes of OUTKICK’s David Hookstead that such a belief isn’t well founded, either:
I’m still very confident I’d know basic American history, like who we fought in the Revolutionary War, who won the Civil War and 5th-grade level civics.
The same can’t be said for some people who ended up being interviewed in a now-viral Liberty Hangout video.
Presented without further comment. Enjoy…..and also shake your head at the future of America.
It’s easy to dismiss this as yet another iteration of stuff we’ve seen from late night hosts like Jay Leon and now Jimmy Kimmel for decades, much as Bill Maher did on last night’s REAL TIME. But do consider this: many of these people willingly voted for Trump, and still more of those who worship him even more because he’s somehow seen as a “cool dude” want to make babies with them, courtesy of their idol who self-gratifyingly references himself as “the fertility president”.
Is this a sign of defeatism? Arguably. An indication that I’m not supportive of being part of “we the people”, as the person referenced earlier literally just accused me of in private messaging? I’d contend otherwise, but my track record of successfully getting others to agree is pretty weak of late.
Here’s all I can muster up at this point. Yes, yes, YES, a moron is in the White House and he’s surrounded by an awful lot of people with scant fewer brain cells. There’s less than one degree of separation between me and people who actually know them and to a person they will swear on a stack of Bibles that my conclusion is accurate. He does have access to others, particularly strategists, who are truly evil geniuses, and they operate with far larger pulpits and far greater spheres of influence than my sadly politically naive friend could ever hope to amass. Combine that with an attitude honed at the feet (or perhaps higher up) of the ultimately morally bankrupt Roy Cohn, let alone a plurality of America that chose to vote that shares his belief that Big Macs are part of a balanced diet and actually raised their daughters to dress, behave and think the way Kaitlin Bennett exposed them as, and you might begin to grasp why my degree of learned helplessness is as off the charts as it’s ever been.
And I’d bet my bottom dollar that those gals don’t have a safely functioning air conditioner to come home to, either. That is, if I already hadn’t spent it.
Until next time…