Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

ENDS. (AND BEGINNINGS.)

Human beings seem to have a knack for being surprised when we shouldn't be. Take endings. Everything in life ends.

Everything.

Booms end. Busts end. Seasons end. Wars end. Books and movies. Businesses too. Relationships end. Life loves. Great friendships. Life itself.

Everything ends. And when things end, we mourn as if we never saw it coming. Though we should have. The truth is we did see it coming but we didn't want it to end. So we shut our eyes and protected our hearts and pretended. (Another thing human beings have a knack for.)

Ends are painful. And when we're wrapped up in that pain, there is no feeling more empty, more lonely, more hopeless, more final. The good part is that the end of winter is also always the start of spring.

So goodbye and hello.

And spring, if you're listening, do me a favour? Don't surprise me when you're over, okay?

 

ON GOLDMAN SACHS, LEADERSHIP AND TIGERS RIPPING OUT YOUR GUTS.

Last week's New York Time op-ed by Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs executive director, who resigned in disgust after 12 years (!) of witnessing the firms immoral activities, got a lot of attention and even some hilarious parodies.

But one bit of Smith's fair-weather farewell stood out for me:

"The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence."

Sorry but this is mostly bullshit.

True there have always been selfless white knight leaders. But the big companies don't get to the top by being selfless. They get there by looking for every which way to obliterate their competition. They get there by lobbying (i.e., legally bribing) politicians to change laws in their favor, even if doing so screws average joes or the environment. They get there by rewarding their tiny cabals at the top while putting pressure on peons to be more productive. In short, they do what capitalism requires them to do -- survive at any cost.

Businesses, like tigers, can be majestic and powerful and beautiful to see out in the wild. But ingrained in both their DNAs is a nasty desire to smell weakness and rip your guts out. It's not Rupert Murdoch or Leona Helmsley or even Steve Jobs who's going to save us when the tiger gets hungry. They're riding the tiger, after all. What saves these companies -- and capitalism -- isn't this ephemeral "leadership" Smith pines for. What ultimately saves businesses from themselves is government. In other words robust regulations that keep businesses honest, even when they're tempted not to be.

After the recent and ongoing pain of the housing crisis and banking crisis, you'd think we would have learned. Yet American right-wing politicians in particular keep clamoring for less regulation and they seem to be winning. That is until the tigers rip our guts out again and conservatives fall to their knees and pray for some "leader" to save us.

KONY 2012: QUIT BITCHING.

This week, the naysayers are whining that the KONY 2012 video is too flashy, that it's not non-profity enough, that not enough funds will get to Ugandans, that post-colonial white people shouldn't be butting into African affairs.

Last year, the negative nancies bitched that the Occupy Wall Street folks were a nuisance or that they delayed their trip to the mall for six minutes.

One can safely assume these people's spiritual antecedents told Rosa Parks not to make a fuss on the bus or told French-speakers to just accept that English would always reign supreme over French in Quebec. Maybe they told suffragettes to get back to making babies and dinner. Perhaps they told Jews to stop getting all fidgety about a few broken windows or swastikas painted on their homes.

There have always been those who selfishly would rather go on with life the way it's always been. There have always been those who would rather be willfully blind to the plight of the other because it's just too icky to think about it -- unless of course it directly affects them. Then you can't get them to shut up.

The takeaway here isn't that these vehicles and messengers of change are messy or imperfect. They always are. Change is a bitch. Rather, the takeaway is that KONY 2012 has -- even for a moment in our ADHD culture -- captured our imaginations in a visceral way. Period. Because, in spite of some insignificant reason to criticize this campaign or Occupy or the fight for gay marriage or civil rights, the point of these movements is to effect change by first making us aware and connecting us to the common humanity of others.

Nothing is more powerful, as they say, than an idea whose time has come. So please quit bitching about how heavy the flag is and just wave it.

 

 

SUCK THIS, RUSH LIMBAUGH.

From last year's debate on universal healthcare in the US, it became very clear very quickly that conservatives have some really interesting notions about what socialized medicine actually means. For instance, how many times did we hear the fallacy (lie?) that ObamaCare meant the "government" would decide on what medical procedures you ought to get -- instead of those who should really make that decision of course: actuaries at insurance companies.

So, in some ways, it wasn't all that surprising when radical conservative talk show blowhard Rush Limbaugh last week went off the deep end accusing Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University student who testified to Congress about the need for greater access to contraceptives from, ahem, insurance companies, of being a "slut" and wanting more birth control so she could have more sex.

His comments were, as they often are, repulsive. But lost in the outrage over his misogyny and lies about the purpose of contraceptives is this: Assuming for a moment that his vile premise is correct -- that Fluke was asking everyone to pay for her sexual habits, thereby driving up the cost of everyone's insurance coverage -- I want to know why he'll expect everyone to pay if and when he gets cardiovascular disease from his overeating or tongue cancer from his uncomfortably phallic cigar smoking?

Conservatives, so phobic about anything that vaguely resembles communism, still don't get that sometimes there's a benefit to all of us sharing these sorts of burdens. It's not socialism, dumbasses. It's insurance.