This latest depression has been brought about by financial nabobs – can anyone dispute the facts? The remedy, it would seem, is to chastise said nabobs and prevent further damage. Alas, no. The remedy is to reward them with countless treasure, ensure that the best of them continue to do their stellar work (hence the bonuses), and to castigate the middle class workers, unions, and anyone else with calluses on their hands or worn patches on their jackets. Let’s give the middle classes a chance to survive – they are the backbone of American democracy and give capitalism meaning. Without them, Marxism will raise its ugly head once again.
Strange thing prejudice; it can cohabit with a man of letters, a felon, a scientist. It’s probably a descendant of tribalism and nationalism, and it might have been expected to become extinct once man started walking erect and began reaching for the stars. The maddening aspect of prejudice is that it defies logic. It is even less plausible than superstition; the god Vulcan was invented to explain lightening until a better answer could be found, but there is no answer to replace prejudice due to skin color, religion, ethnicity, or whatever.
The nazis attempted to turn anti-Semitism into a science; physiognomy, skin color, eyes, nose. Europe in the middle ages chose the religion route. In the U.S. and elsewhere it’s been some kind of nebulous social thing, lurking in the background like a malignant tumor ready to spring into action.
Black Africans were considered by slave owners as chattel, and no matter how well documented their mental agility, the notion of their inferiority persists with people whose own mental prowess must be brought into question. Genghis Khan gave rise to the “Yellow Hordes” syndrome, but not really – any excuse would do, because prejudice needs no grounding in logic. In relation to women, prejudice is often replaced by outright arrogance; they should know their place at the feet of men, while some religions make it a canon that men are the supreme beings.
It is a testament to the endurance of prejudice that even enlightened societies find it necessary to enact legislation to combat it. In the U.S., for example, we need civil right legislation, anti-discrimination laws, gay rights legislation, and so on. And we walk erect. Civilized. Planning to colonize the heavens.
The title persists, but the function has vanished, disappeared in a distant past when authors could be loners and the word “pitch” referred mostly to baseball. Today’s literary agents might be better described as commercial agents. The most perfunctory glance at how a writer might gain representation – and without it, entry into a publishing house is firmly barred – reveals that certain requisites are basic; without them, the would-be writers should consider some other occupation.
The first and most important thing the writer must learn to do is write a pitch letter. That’s a letter addressed to an agent that touts the attributes of the submitted work. It must be short, it must get the recipient interested, and it must convey the essence of the story. The writer must learn how to create advertising copy. Modesty not allowed.
If the pitch is successful (and there are as many notions about what makes a successful pitch as there are agents), the first five pages of the submitted work come into play. No matter that your novel consists of several hundred pages, the first five pages are critical – they are not critical to the quality of the entire work, but they are critical in the process of getting an agent. It’s unlikely that Crime and Punishment would have made the cut.
If it looks like you might have a saleable commodity, your biography is examined for signs that you can be a good salesman. Can you shine in an interview? Are you prepared to appear at book signings? And more to the point, do you have a business plan? (What are your ideas about promoting your book.)
Of course times have changed. Tragedies can be turned into Broadway musicals. Pamphlets might make excellent films. The commercial agents must keep abreast of what the market wants and proceed accordingly. When the printing press came into being only a privileged few wrote books and had them published. Today, writers are everywhere (the use of the word writer here is not suggestive of any qualitative attributes). But electronic publishing is about to cause fundamental changes. The future may well see the disappearance of both agents and conventional publishers, with the emergence of a class of discerning critics who will point the way to what is worth reading – literary agents?
The Libyan revolution is headed for its own version of The Terror unless cooler heads prevail, but it doesn’t look good. Had Mirabeau succeeded in his quest to find a compromise in the French revolution, Danton, Marat and Robespierre would have been kept from making the guillotine a byword of the uprising. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be a Mirabeau in Libya, and anyway, Gadhafi is no Louis XVI. So, it would appear that The Terror is the inevitable fate of the Libyan people. What is amazing, is that the web of deceit, even at this time of immediate communications, continues to be spun and accepted. Entrenched governments, fed by gargantuan sums of money meant for the welfare of the citizens, but hoarded in secret numbered accounts, continue their despotic rules under a veneer of lies. The Facebook revolution has provided the spark to strip away the veil, but where are the wise men or women that will keep the Jacobins from taking over?
In the age of “spin,” managers tend to look for easy fixes when faced with serious disasters. Oil spills or lead-painted toys may be part of a manufacturing problem, a financial problem, or even an administrative problem – they are not problems caused by a faulty public relations strategy. Some will say that someone such as Britney Spears, for example, had a PR problem; all that negative publicity caused by drinking, drugs, and reckless behavior should have been papered over with a positive PR campaign, thus restoring her personality to her former glory. But Britney Spears did not have a PR problem at all – she had problems with drinking, drugs, and reckless behavior. PR was able to rescue Tylenol from a devastating blow to its sales figures when some criminal tampered with its products on the shelves, but the company itself was not culpable. A PR counter-offensive could be mounted, and, as it turned out, a highly effective one. Which brings us to the core issue – can PR save bad management? The short answer is no. There may be some exceptions, but they are rare. What management often fails to recognize is that PR counsel should be taken into account at the early stages of corporate planning, instead of being used as a last resort. Successful companies do. The rest inevitably end up with PR “problems.”
It has become fashionable, of late, to draw parallels between an assortment of complaints and the evils of the Nazi regime. It may be argued that in some cases they trivialize the horrors of Nazism, but in reality they often show an embarrassing lack of knowledge. A talk show person recently compared a reporter on ABC to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. Goebbels had a chokehold on all cultural activities, from the cinema to publishing, art, and architecture. Apparently, this same radio person often refers to various perceived misdemeanors as evidence of Nazism in America today. But he’s not the only one; Hitler’s name is brandied about by all manner of people to drive home all sorts of arguments. I don’t think it requires a degree in psychology to realize that the very people who invoke Nazism as a paragon of evil are probably influenced by its dark shadow – why else would the comparison come so readily to mind?
Eric Larrabee asked the question in a 1960 article in Horizon magazine. One of the cartoons illustrating the article showed a Detroit vice president with sample auto fins on his desk. It was a time when a 4% national growth rate could pay for just about everything the government needed to do – wage the cold war, build highways and bridges, journey into space. Social programs had a way to go, but an affluent middle class was more interested in new cars, refrigerators, golf carts, and assorted gadgets. With robots starting to do all the work, the future’s problem seemed to be what to do with the leisure time that was sure to follow. By way of illustration, Larrabee quotes Frederik Pohl’s The Midas Touch, where an imaginary society has all the work done by robots, but the middle class has to consume all the goods produced – being frugal or thin are the prerogatives of the rich.
Fifty years later the prediction doesn’t appear to have to come to pass, or hasn’t it? Wall Street is practically begging the consumer to go out and spend, since it would appear that upon consumer spending hinges the well being of the nation. Robots have not lived up to expectations, but the flood of products coming from China might as well be made by robots – they’re certainly not made by Americans. What no one predicted in 1960 was that the middle class would begin to disappear. It is a dangerous time because social change often leads to unpredictable consequences – revolutions, religious intolerance, wars. The answer for the new millennium likely hinges on redefining capitalism to be more inclusive: After abundance, enlightment.
How’s this for de-privatizing your body – some biotech company could own your genes (yes, own) and you wouldn’t know it until a crisis emerges. I recently read Michael Crichton’s Next, where the main plot revolves about corporate ownership of genes and their right to “mine” them from your body. Good yarn, I thought, but come on, this is taking a flight of fancy into sci-fi. Last Sunday I watched CBS’s 60 Minutes, and one of the segments explored – you got it, corporate ownership of genes via patent protection. University medical school are prevented from studying those genes, testing labs are prohibited from searching for them in your body, and the owning entity will deal with any medical condition related to those same genes if they feel it’s profitable enough. While we fret about the possible creation of ‘death panels’ by a government run health system, the private sector is quietly inserting its imprimatur up our rectum.
Of course companies are in business to make a profit, but within the framework of legal and ethical rules. And there was a time, not so long ago, when even our financial institutions adhered to some kind of ethical standards. Insurance companies used to rely on statistical data to work out premiums, while competition took care of the rest. That is not to say that outrageous situations did not emerge, with sick people being denied treatment on some technicality. But lately the situation has changed for the worse. Large institutions no longer seek to make a reasonable profit; they are actively engaged in swindling the public using any method at hand – very often through advertising.
You have doubtless come across ads for free credit reports, a ruse to get your credit card number and start charging you a monthly fee. You’ve also been exposed to car insurance ads touting the savings you can realize by comparing rates from other companies. If you’re over 65, there’s the bewildering maze of insurance offerings to supplement Medicare (and make Medicare a practical reality). The high cost of developing medicines is more than offset by profits that defy imagination, and the value of said medicines may be questionable in many cases (some manufacturers cheerfully inform their prospective customer that death is a possible side-effect, but not to worry – it’s FDA approved). The unfortunate reality is that unethical companies are run by unethical people. It will not be easy to replace criminal greed with a sense of ethics – besides, no one seems to be trying.
The following is a quotation from Book VI of The Annals, AD 32-37, by Cornelius Tacitus – it requires no explanation:
Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all credit, the current coin too, in consequence of the conviction of so many persons and the sale of their property, being locked up in the imperial treasury or the public exchequer. To meet this, the Senate had directed that every creditor should have two-thirds of his capital secured on estates in Italy. Creditors however were suing for payment in full, and it was not respectable for persons when sued to break faith. So, at first, there were clamorous meetings and importunate entreaties; then noisy applications to the praetor’s court. And the very device intended as a remedy, the sale and purchase of estates, proved the contrary, as the usurers had hoarded up all their money for buying land. The facilities for selling were followed by a fall of prices, and the deeper a man was in debt, the more reluctantly did he part with his property, and many were utterly ruined. The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the emperor (Tiberius) interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount. Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found.