hellafiedgangstalean

[hellafiedgangstalean]

Big Words Don't Lie

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No one knows what the Emoluments Clause is, because nobody knows what the fuck an emolument is.

Emolument is not a regular-conversation word like burrito or Kardashian. Emolument is fancy term for money earned from holding a position or title. 

The Emolument Clause is Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution (a fancy term for rules the country is required to follow). It says members of the government cannot receive money from leaders of other countries. 

For example, if the president wanted to host the G7 Summit (fancy word for a meeting with foreign leaders) at a hotel he or she owns, he or she could be in violation of that law because the president would be profiting directly off the presidency. 

In a move to avoid violating the Emolument Clause, one former president famously put his peanut farm into an independent trust while he was in office so that no one in his family could be affected by profits or losses while he was president. The rule was put in place to limit foreign influence (fancy term for swampiness) in American politics. 

Emoluments are the glaring weaknesses of a republic (fancy word for country that doesn’t have a king). Those are not my words; they’re Alexander Hamilton’s in The Federalist Papers. Federalist is a fancy word for states united under a central government. 

It’s up to the people to decide how they feel about laws, so you might think it makes sense to name them in a way that allows the average citizen to better understand what they are. The problem is it’s very easy to mislead the average citizen - and lawmakers have done exactly that with these simplified naming conventions, whether it’s passing the Patriot Act which isn’t patriotic at all, or the Affordable Care Act which took the world’s most expensive healthcare and made it more accessible. 

I thought about Emoluments today while watching people protesting the sweeping actions in Ohio that have significantly reduced the transmission of the COVID19 virus in the state, effectively flattening the curve as well as or better than any other state. 

Specifically, this sign:

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Yes, he spelled Constitution wrong - misspelled signage is practically required by law at every uninformed protest. You could say it’s in the Contitution. 

At this point in the pandemic, there are probably two reasons for not knowing that COVID19 can’t be solved by only quarantining the sick, because this disease can be passed from a One Person Who Feels Just Fine onto Dozens of People at the Office without HR knowing anything about it. 

The first is willful ignorance (a fancy term for flaunting that you are a dumbass). The governor of Georgia doesn’t even live 20 minutes from the Centers for Disease Control (a series of buildings filled with smart people whose entire focus is to control diseases, like COVID19) and he said, on television, that he didn’t know.  He was flaunting that he is a dumbass.  

But the second reason may be a vocabulary deficiency (fancy term for not knowing what some words mean) and that could just be an innocent information gap. No one knows every word in their first language. English has a million words in it, and in 2020 we’re only using about 170,000 of them - like burrito (Spanish, actually, for little donkey) and Kardashian (Armenian for stone carver).  

You probably know about 20,000 words. Asymptomatic Transmission might be two of them! And English words can be confusing; asymptomatic transmission looks like something you would hear during a car commercial. 

Asymptomatic Transmission is a fancy way of saying 1) someone with cooties 2) who might not realize they have cooties 3)  could give other people their cooties. HIV is passed around like that, but that virus requires intimacy for transmission.  

COVID19 isn’t nearly as sexy. You can get it from a close talker. A regular talker. A handshaker. A salt shaker. COVID19 is very easy to catch, and even though most people survive it, so many people either don’t or require medical help that it can tear down our entire system for healthcare delivery.

Like other coronaviruses, COVID19 doesn’t make any loud beeping sounds or give you a second head if you catch it. The disease appears to be spread around mostly by people who do not even know they have it. They are without symptoms, or asymptomatic. 

And that really sucks, because it means the best way to slow this phantom down is to practice social distancing (fancy term for wear sweatpants, watch bad television, lie awake in bed every night and gain two pounds every day). I had never heard the words Social Distancing in that sequence until this year - and I’ve worked in healthcare for most of my career, spanning other epidemics and pandemics. 

This one is different. Viruses don’t care about election years, paychecks, baseball season or birthday parties. They’re assholes. You beat them by playing to their weaknesses, not ours. 

It’s understandable why people are frustrated about life grinding to a halt while they feel well enough to exercise their Contitutional Writes but we have enough recorded history to know exactly how pandemics stop rolling through the world and enough current science to tackle this one. 

I don’t know all one million English words, but I do know that there are rarely any simple or elegant solutions to complicated problems. Maybe instead of using Big Accurate Words or Simple Misleading Ones - we could do society a service by having better messaging on behalf of experts. 

Public trust is shattered, and the Americans’ general comprehension of *gestures broadly at everything* could use an upgrade. Messaging in 2020 seems to be sourced out of a machine that’s meant to be polarizing (fancy word for designed to get you to click or watch more to drive up advertising rates) while we slowly die from Both Sidesism, breathlessly giving equal platforms and legitimacy to Altruistic Evidence-Based Perspectives and Dangerously Stupid Emotional Outbursts - because fairness is vital to a thriving republic in the Information Age.

It’s up to the media to embrace those big words, explain them clearly and honestly, lay out the genuine, informed sides to a debate while disqualifying the contributions of grifters. Dunning-Kruger live-action cartoon characters are too entertaining to ever go out of syndication. Being dumb, loud and confident is reliably good television. It’s usually great internet. It’s always a bad source of guidance. The topic doesn’t matter. 

There’s no legitimate debate to how COVID19 can be defeated, but there’s plenty of discussion to how to responsibly emerge from social distancing and containment measures. And there’s an enormous opportunity to re-engineer how we communicate information, laws, perspectives and developments en masse (fancy term for to all of us). 

I have little confidence of this happening in my lifetime, but hey - it’s fun to imagine while I try to remember what the inside of a tavern looks like. We might end up less afraid of what we don’t know. Perhaps we would understand each other a little better. 

And maybe we could finally learn what an Emolument is.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

Dad

My father had a disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, and he battled it for the better part of a decade before succumbing to it on June 25th. It started with spells of dizziness, and it slowly compromised his balance, his ability to see, to walk, to talk, even to eat and drink, until eventually he was left bedridden after catching a cold. He never got up again, and was dead two weeks later. He had been in in-home hospice care for just over a week.

There are many ways one could describe the process of watching a loved one slowly pass away. It was utterly gut-wrenching. It felt like I was being pulled apart in a hundred different directions. I desperately wanted it to stop, even though the only resolution left was the one I could not bear. My siblings joined my mother in keeping watch over him essentially 24/7, expecting that every shallow breath was going to be his last.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but our vigil was going to last nearly a week. We said everything we needed to say, everything we could possibly think of. We told stories. We talked about family. We broke out the old slide projector and looked at photos from family vacations we took in the early 90s. But Dad just kept going. He could not eat or drink any longer, so we knew it was only a matter of time, but he held out far longer than any of us expected.

A funny thing happens when you know an emotionally shattering event is about to happen. You do everything you can to prepare, but if it doesn’t happen when you think it will… well now what? Our tear-soaked vigils around his bed could only go on for so long before we needed to eat. I have an infant at home. She’s the fifth grandchild in my family, and my brother and sister had their own kids and families to keep tabs on. It felt like time had ground to a halt inside that house, but it had done nothing of the sort outside those walls. Eventually, I became kind of cavalier about the whole thing. Sure, Dad might pass away at literally any moment, but we need a few things from the grocery store and I need to go home and get new underwear. 

We started taking shifts at night, staying up for a few hours each to give him his medication and to make sure he wasn’t alone. One night became two, became three, before my sister woke me up at 3:30 am on June 25th to tell me that Dad was passing. His anguished, shallow breaths were punctuated by several deep sighs, and then he was gone.

This past Father’s Day was my first as a dad, and it was Dad’s last. I came to his bedside, and read him the card I got for him. He was largely unresponsive after I had finished, just continuing to wheeze softly and stare off into the distance. I got up to leave the room, and I heard, clearly, just clear as a bell:

Pete. I love you.

They were the last words I heard him speak. I love you, Dad.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

One of the Good Ones

It started happening during the spring of my junior year in high school. 

First it was every few weekend nights, then every other night. Then every night. Our mailbox at end of the driveway would curiously separate itself from its post. I would find it laying in the yard right next to the base each morning while backing out of the driveway on my way to school.

We lived on a cul-de-sac, so the possibility of reckless drivers repeatedly knocking it off was impossible. It was firmly attached, so wind was also unlikely. Yet each morning it was on the ground, upright, so we just kept re-securing it by tightening the nuts and bolts without stressing too much about why they kept loosening. 

Repairing that dumb mailbox became one of my high school chores. Like mowing the grass;  faster but less peaceful.

One day I went out to get the mail and noticed the lawn around the mailbox post was discolored in an odd manner, like it had a fungus or something. I got down on my hands and knees to take a closer look - something was definitely happening in that exact area and nowhere else in the yard. A day later those off-white splotches began to turn orange. 

I pulled some blades, along with a few healthy ones for comparison and planned to take them to school to show my botany enthusiast biology teacher and see if he knew what could be causing it. But later that same week the discoloration which at first appeared to be random patches filled out and that examination was no longer necessary. The lawn and mailbox mysteries were solved.

It wasn’t a fungus. It was a swastika. Beneath it also in bright orange were the words Go Home.

The mailbox troll’s message had lost its nuance. It took days to appear, delivered by salting the grass under the cover of darkness. In the spring of 1991 America had just finished consuming its first reality show, Operation Desert Storm, which took place in Iraq, a country populated by brown people with Arabic names. It looked very sandy on TV. The operation’s name even had sand in it. 

If you were in high school in America at the time, you probably told or heard jokes about the bombing causing no real damage, seeing as how there was nothing there of value to ruin. Iraq was already a shithole. That’s where shithole people come from. America won the Cold War. We were the good guys. The Soviet Union was falling apart. The bad guys now came from places like that.

Anyway, when you have an Arabic name, that tends to come up in conversation a lot more when America is involved in an active Middle East conflict. The country itself doesn’t matter. They were all the same. Sandy shitholes that needed to become glass parking lots for Walmarts.

My family wasn’t from Iraq, and we’re barely religious at all. But we loved to overeat, hang wreaths and lights, throw parties and send Christmas cards each year, which could have been construed as a convenient cover to suspicious people who didn’t want to believe that anyone, regardless of complexion, could be “normal.”

No one wants to be proven wrong, which is how conspiracies flourish. Inconvenient details get swallowed by an unrelenting belief or blind emotion. I have Allah in my last name. It’s inescapable. That’s the only detail that mattered.

I was 17, angry for my parents and felt guilty for causing it to happen (because adults wouldn’t do this, right?) but I didn’t feel any personal sadness. That type of harassment stopped bothering me in grade school when I first learned of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that was posted on my homeroom wall: No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

That was freeing. The mailbox thief and swastika artist didn't have my consent. The kids who called me A-Rab at recess during tag or touch football in grade school didn't have my consent. The authors of the notes that were bravely slipped into the vents of my locker in high school that had words like yard ape, camel jockey, sandnigger and Ramzy Ayatollah scribbled on them didn't have my consent. 

They were just love letters from secret admirers. It was flattering. Some people have to actually try to inspire others. I was boring and did nothing to command the attention I was getting. 

A new patch of sod was installed around the mailbox and my parents eventually replaced the wooden post version with a brick one. They had arrived in the United States in the early 1970s from Beirut. Mailbox vandalism? They were basically like lol, try harder.

I eventually found out who the mailbox guy was. His girlfriend had been cordial with me, which was unacceptable. I also inadvertently discovered who one of those locker vent note authors was when I noticed his imitable handwriting in a class, a dead-on match. 

That one did bother me. Eleanor couldn’t stop it. He had always been friendly; we had even had lunch together. I was never brave enough to approach him and say, "hey Chris...Yard Ape? Really?"

Getting harassed for being brown wasn't a big secret among my friends. They usually expressed embarrassment and tried to show empathy, however awkward it might have been for them. They wanted to talk through it. They couldn't understand why I, in particular, was taking the abuse, since I was one of the good ones. 

One of the good ones. 

I have heard this expression all my life. It was a compliment during the Gulf War and then again after 9/11, two tough periods where people with funny brown names were guilty by association. Ramzy is cool, actually. He writes about sports. He’s more American than you are. He’s one of the good ones.

Being called good feels good. The opposite of Eleanor’s quote is equally true - no one can make you feel good without your consent, either. Everyone had my consent. Not having your guard up against flattery isn’t weird.

But plenty of vetting goes into being deemed one of the good ones. Having immigrant parents who came here and thrived for decades was a decent start. They tried hard enough and assimilated; good, good. We all dressed well. They were self-made. Everyone in our family obsesses over speaking in flawless, untainted English (my sister and I even majored in it). None of us are troublemakers. Good ones!

That’s how immigrants and their immediate descendants generally roll. This is the safest bet in America. It does not matter where they’re coming from. They carry the same intentions. We are a nation of immigrants became a bumper sticker at some point, but it’s important to remember what went into making it stick.

Few if any people leave one country for another one just to fail or mooch. Poor people hate being poor. The oppressed hate being oppressed. Mediocre people want to improve their lives. For centuries people have come to America to try and get better. 

Regardless, there are many Americans whose position on immigration is that they only want the good ones. They want people who are doing well and living their best lives. Those people don’t emigrate; they globe-trot. The ones America gets on a permanent basis are trying to get better, because everything is possible for them here. 

That’s why my parents uprooted everything to become Americans, which they’ve now been far longer than they weren’t. That’s probably what your parents did too. If not, it was their parents. If not, just keep going back in time until it’s true. Someone you were related to showed up here from somewhere else. It might have even been a shithole.

And the good ones can come from anywhere, even shitholes. Try to pass the red-face test arguing against that. You will fail. America takes all bets, and most of them pay off handsomely. People get better here, they make more of themselves, they elevate their communities and that upgrades the country.

Dark-skinned immigrants come from shithole countries and dark-skinned Americans come from shithole counties are two firm beliefs racists have always held; they're just a little less nuanced about communicating these days. They don’t have to knock mailboxes off their posts anymore to send their message.

Whenever someone emerges from an artificially predetermined shithole destiny, they get to be one of the good ones too. I’m a little slow, but I finally figured out that’s what that backhanded compliment really meant. I know you meant well, because I didn’t do 9/11 or like Saddam Hussein and I always rooted for the home team, not the clearly evil people who had names sort of like mine. 

They were a few people out of several billion. The good ones outnumber the bad ones. It’s not even close. And that’s because people are born good. 

Every single pretty and ugly baby begins its journey on a good path. We’re all the good ones, at least once. A few of us do get poisoned along the way. Unfortunately, they tend to get emboldened and believe they’re the good ones, and they choose to redefine good as being like them. This is the core principle of racism. It’s literally skin-deep.

Good humans have a disparate presentation. There are more flavors of good people that we can process, and you see this every time we marvel at a feel-good story that goes viral and defies belief. A young black man and an old white woman play Words with Friends together! Hoboken elected a man with a turban to be its mayor, and he’s graceful and empathetic! How is this even possible?

Anyway, the latest dispatch from the White House regarding shithole countries caused me to remember that mailbox I fixed a few dozen times back in high school, which will always remind me of Eleanor Roosevelt. We’re emotional beings. Consent means everything if sanity means anything. 

So whenever someone says or does something that’s incomprehensibly dumb, mean or tone deaf, we own the consent to what impact that has on us. And maybe - even if you’re just trying to be nice - try to remember that nobody has a predetermined shithole destiny. You don’t need to congratulate anyone for overcoming something that doesn’t uniformly exist.

We are all the good ones, up until we decide not to be. Good is not a color that becomes a nation. It’s a birthright that becomes a choice.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

Hillary Clinton and the Art of Persuasion

It’s me, American-born independent voter with a masters degree who has lived on both coasts, Chicago, and rural parts of Iowa, Indiana and Ohio. Small business owner and senior manager at a Fortune 30 company. Hi.

My parents were immigrants. My friends are city slickers and country fucks, full-blown racists, casual racists and staunch progressive social justice warriors. The diversity of my life is a fun perk of being an approachable white guy with a foreign name who moves around a lot. At least part of me seems safe to everyone.

Politically I’m an a la carte guy, subscribing to components of both the progressive and conservative political agendas. Choosing either one side or the other completely intact means accepting deeply flawed positions. But what you’re about to read here - and what I couldn’t stop myself from writing - isn’t going to be about issues or stances.

I’ve spent all of my professional life in sales and strategic marketing both foreign and domestic and have had to sell ideas to city slickers, country fucks, full-blown racists, etc. Often times this is done through languages I don’t speak, using local assets who are fluent instead. I persuade them to persuade decision-makers. Persuasion doesn’t have one language, nor is it always a simple A to B transaction.

HR departments call this activity Delivering Results Through Others around annual review time. That’s what I do. Coincidentally, that’s also how elections are won and lost. Candidates are part of leviathan machine composed of direct and indirect stakeholders. Some can be controlled. Others, nah.

It’s comforting to believe Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton (in the Electoral College, I know, I know) because America is mostly 8th grade educated Klan members living in Bumblefuck, Alabama who objectify women and are too dim to see the big picture. That may allow the losing side to feel better, but it gets them nowhere - in fact it’s what got them here. 

The goal isn’t to feel better. It’s to win over people. That requires selling.

Everything in life is sales. Clinton and the DNC in general are just atrocious at it, even if at the core their product works well enough and has virtuous intentions. The best product doesn’t always win and there’s no such thing as common sense in the marketplace of ideas or anything else. That’s a fantasy. One person’s common sense is another’s crazy talk.

Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan are the models for executive sales among post-television presidencies. What separates those two - to use a sports metaphor - is Reagan left behind a huge coaching tree and masterful succession plan. Obama did not. Reagan is Woody Hayes, and his lineage continues unabated. Obama is Frank Beamer. They don’t know who’s next.

But competent selling could have overcome that transition gap. Clinton didn’t sell well, and even worse - the people she needed to deliver results through - Hillary enthusiasts - are and were often sales repellant. Her coalition faced inward from the start. That’s what happens when you know you’re right, and it’s how sales cycles die. It’s how layup deals are lost.

So here are some unemotional postmortem election thoughts exclusively through the lens of a sales and marketing lackey:

The Product Objectively Sucked

The most inspiring things about the idea of President Hillary Clinton were her gender and tirelessness. Otherwise, she’s a duplicitous government nerd who, as Colin Powell put it in an email that was leaked, screws up everything with hubris. And yet I still voted for her only because to me the alternative was a monster. 

People like me were the Reluctant Hillary Voters, and holy hell there were a lot of us. This was obvious in every bit of coverage, at every water cooler and every tavern in America and the world. And yet Clinton said, incredulously, on camera, why am I not 50 points ahead? Powell was correct. She does it in plain sight, not just in private emails.

Campaigns are about the people you still need to reach and keep, not the ones you already have, are getting by default or through sheer reluctance. Broken products are successfully sold all the time, and that was the DNC’s starting point with pre-selecting Clinton.

It opened the campaign by offering voters what they had already rejected, as a replacement to a popular president. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz impaired the sales cycle for her party from the very beginning. Obama is an historically popular lame duck, which makes following him a challenge for anyone. This meant the DNC required a product that was both different and unifying; an upgrade in some categories because holistically it would be impossible. Unfortunately, Frank Beamer didn’t groom a replacement.

Instead they rolled out a retread who had already gotten her ass handed to her by Obama back when nobody even knew who the fuck he was. This isn’t hindsight. It was a bad idea that was greeted with dread from the very beginning. And then they sold it as a foregone conclusion.

“Non-college educated whites.”

Code for “stupid country people.” In a selling exercise they’re known as “customers.” And in an election, they’re “American voters.” Flawed people with unmet needs, just like the rest of us. This is the cornerstone of where the venom behind the term elite comes from.

College tuition has quadrupled over the past 35 years while college professor compensation has barely increased. Meanwhile, college administrator headcount has multiplied like weeds across campuses everywhere and their compensation has increased ten-fold. If the cost of a car had done this over the same period, an average automobile would run $80,000 now.

So when attainable Trump voters are dismissed as being part of a stupid and uneducated racist cabal it pushes them further away. It’s anti-selling. They couldn’t and can’t afford the crippling cost of higher education, whether they wanted to go or not. If the car cost parallel had come to fruition it would be like Chevrolet making fun of people for taking the bus. 

As for the country part, not everyone prefers or aspires to live in urban areas. It’s a valid life position.

That’s one side of educational resentment. The other goes back to that well-compensated college administrator. I always think of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank, who famously called for college football coaches to take on a salary cap. Blank makes over half a million dollars from UW and lives in a mansion for free. College football coaches earn their compensation through market value. Entitled, tone-deaf administrators like Blank - who like everyone in her field doesn’t think college athletes should be paid at all - maintain their bloated salaries through skyrocketing college tuition which keeps much the non-college educated that way.

It’s not just shareholder primacy that’s killing the American middle class. But what does college education have to do with selling during a political campaign? In the 2016 presidential election it represented arguably the biggest missed opportunity to upgrade a broken product.

Bernie Sanders specifically addressed this gaping hole in the American Dream. He put it front and center, actually. Meanwhile, the DNC’s pre-selected candidate spoke to the problem in sterile, throwaway canned phrases and then later paid empty lip-service to it while extending a dead fish handshake to try and capture his supporters. 

Nobody bought that bridge. It was catastrophic, disingenuous selling.

Empty 25-Cent Words

Yes, Trump is a demagogue, bigot and misogynist. All true. Three dictionary terms that were tossed around throughout the campaign by Democrats as if Americans knew or cared what they meant.

Common people do not know what a demagogue is (which makes it one of the most ironic words in all of English, along with phonetic). It’s not a powerful or persuasive word to the attainable voters you're desperately trying to steer to your side. There was zero value to labeling Trump with academic language. It actually siphoned venom away from his venom. Only Michelle Obama genuinely seemed to understand this.

The DNC rubbernecked at Trump like the rest of us instead of focusing on making its own product more appealing. It should have been the stark contrast. And it should have used words all people understand, the way Trump did to everything in his path going back to the primary. Demagogue versus Crooked is a fight that will always end with the nerd lying on the ground.

You know what other words people with any level of education understand? Make America Great Again.

Baby Boomer vs. Baby Boomer

Angry rural whites were largely raised by this generation, which did not teach them to think big, courageously, competitively or globally. Too many of them were taught that finishing high school and getting a job in town where they could raise babies with the girl or guy they first held hands with at age 13 would work out just fine.

No wonder they’re pissed. Make America Great Again to them is a flicker of hope for a broken social contract. Even worse, they barely know who to be pissed at - so they shoot at convenient targets. MAGA may seem like Make America White Again, and in some circles it is. This isn’t about those circles. Clinton simply needed to reach the reachable; the attainable, non-deplorable (a voter-repelling moment for her, by the way) voting bloc that she just assumed she would get because her predecessor did.

The irony of a Baby Boomer believing she would just waltz into the White House because it was her turn is the thickest one in modern presidential election history. Yeah, it’s harder now. They don’t just hand out jobs anymore. That was a Baby Boomer thing.

And when Trump’s MAGA promise fails to unbake the global economy cake and leaves his passionate supporters no better off than they are now (shocker!) We Told You So isn’t going to work either. Neither is Now It’s Our Turn.

Black Lives Matter

One of three subordinate and associated movements tangentially related to and associated with the Democratic Party. Remember Deliver Results Through Others? Whether they know it or not, they’re on the sales team.

BLM is an important movement with the highest ceiling of these three, using basic language and sobering statistics to open people’s eyes to pervasive and institutionalized racism in America. Nothing gets 100% market share, so it does alienate some people who cannot be reached anyway. But like anything that’s sold, its message can be improved.

The spiteful and legitimate use of White Privilege as a term to point out things that are just taken for granted when you’re not black may not be the most efficacious manner of bringing more people into the fold. It forces white people to become self-loathing, and while some of us can swallow that along with 400 years of America’s enduring shame and original sin, White Privilege limits BLM conversions and can foster resentment. Selling is not about being right or righteous - it’s about winning more people to your side and building the largest coalition possible.

I’m not arrogant enough to believe I know the right answer here, but rubbing a dog’s face in its own shit on your living room carpet doesn’t work all that well with humans. Enhancing the outreach to bring more people into the fold is how BLM will advance social change.

This would help bring in votes for the democratic presidential candidate, regardless of who it might have been. Results, through others.

Social Justice Warriors

This isn’t a safe space, so brace yourselves: SJWs are the anti-sales pitch.

Pervasive rape culture and subjugation of women in America is appalling and fosters deep levels of hate and resentment toward half the population. Hate and resentment toward institutions can foster a healthy coalition. They’re counter-productive as hell when directed at a gender or race.

Reconciling that rage and organizing to make meaningful change, drive awareness, understanding and be the cure for the disease in this country is something SJWs do not appear to be focused on accomplishing. How they’re presented is more an exercise in group venting.

They’re not wrong. They’re just ineffective.

Combatting subjugation with man-shaming makes enemies of us all. It turns males who possess that understanding and awareness into betas and cucks, two of the dumbest terms to come out of Trump’s ascendance. SJWs are rightfully mad as hell and they’re failing their own cause by abandoning the art of persuasion in favor of sweet, righteous anger.

It should be about getting results you want, which requires selling; not repelling. For one, stop telling harmless men they’re mansplaining things. Not all of them think you’re too dumb to know better. A lot of them are just trying to be helpful and enjoy that rare opportunity to describe stuff they can actually explain.

By the way, you know who is extraordinarily talented at handling the patriarchy with grace? Hillary Clinton. SJWs work against her. Being offended or triggered is not only not a political strategy, it’s the world’s worst sales pitch.

The T in LGBT

Do you want to know how Democrats lost North Carolina? Because this is how Democrats lost North Carolina.

Yes, I know all about voter suppression, intimidation and gerrymandering - that’s outside the scope of this discussion. This is still about selling. The advancement of gay rights in America was sold brilliantly, finally, once politicians stopped trying to take all sides of the issue. Love and family were the centerpiece instead of sexual orientation. This expanded the coalition for human rights and ultimately gay marriage, which is now just “marriage.”

And then there’s inserting government into public restrooms on the backs of trannies, and making that a nationally-televised fight for equality. Restrooms, man. Urinal cakes, blow dryers and private parts.

This isn’t a discussion of its merits or rationale. I can only comment as a non-resident observer of North Carolina - trying to advance the transgender/public restroom cause is the hill Clinton’s chances died on in that state on election day. It was and is a bridge too far, and it became an anchor for social progressives. From a sales perspective it’s the customer objection that overshadows every positive feature, benefit and aspect of the value proposition. It crippled the sales cycle.

This issue reminded me of the discussion between staunch abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln about the point of knowing where pitfalls and swamps were in between points A and B in getting slavery abolished and the 13th Amendment passed through the House. The transgender/public restrooms debate was a swamp where too many attainable votes drowned in the other direction. It’s what Stevens would have done without Lincoln in his ear, and he would have lost it all.

So now we’ve got four years of President Trump and the clock doesn't even start ticking for a few more months. The next time he runs for president it will be with an incumbent track record people will have seen and endured. 

When the time comes for his opposition, regardless of who the DNC is selling in 2020, it’s going to have to market that candidate both directly and through others far better than it just did with Clinton. The good news is that it’s nearly impossible to do worse than it just did. 

The bad news is that better still might not be good enough.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

You always think you have more time

You always think you have more time.

My mom was 25 when I was born, and 19 when my brother was born. All my adult life, on every birthday I would calculate how old my brother and I were when my mom was my age; it was a study in how different our lives were. Last summer when I turned 33, I did the standard math: when Momma was 33, Matt was 14 and I was 8. A high schooler and a third grader! I remember being 8, which means I remember my mom at my age. Meanwhile I was single, no kids, no responsibilities other than my job and my friends. My mom’s age was my age plus 25. The math was always so static, so comforting. Now the math is broken.

On December 10, at the maddening age of fucking 58 years old, my mom had a heart attack at home and died instantly. She had woken up early to make coffee for my dad before his early work shift as she did every morning, and she just collapsed. My dad called 911 twice, screaming that she wasn’t breathing, trying to give her CPR. The paramedics did their work. It was all too late.

She had been in perfect health, visited her doctor regularly, took a massive assortment of vitamins that crushed us when we found them in the kitchen cabinet. PROTECT YOUR HEART! implored a bottle of fish oil capsules. IMPROVES HEART HEALTH! bragged the Vitamin E. I had never realized what an act of hope it is to take vitamins, to worry about preserving your health for your old age. You always think you have more time. The sugar cream pie we found in the freezer; it’s my brother’s favorite and she had surely hoped to surprise him with it at Christmas. The vacuum-packed Greek olives I brought her from my trip to Athens last year, stacked carefully in the refrigerator drawer. Saved for a special occasion. The post-it note near the stove where she had taken notes during our last phone conversation - she took notes on post-its every time we talked on the phone. I was thinking about buying my dad a golf membership for Christmas. I’d asked her for her lasagna recipe. GOLF. LASAGNA.

I woke up that Wednesday morning to a missed call and a voicemail from my dad. My dad never called me, and I remember thinking that maybe Aunt Sharron was in the hospital again, or god forbid it was Aunt Edna’s heart. All I remember from that conversation with my dad is his numb clinical monotone giving way to a gasping wail and me repeating “I’m coming home. I’m coming home.” All I remember from the flight home is some asshole who noticed me crying on the plane and said “bad breakup, huh?” That guy can still go fuck himself.

An important thing to know about my mom is that she fucking loved the song Love Remains by Collin Raye. Dozens if not hundreds of times, she said “When I die, I don’t care if you put me in a Hefty bag and roll me down a hill as long as you play Love Remains.” This was a classic family joke; we all laughed because we knew she would outlive us all. As we sat sobbing and broken and staring straight ahead at the memorial service, Love Remains playing, my brother whispered “the front fucking row.” I still don’t know if he knows I heard him, but those words haven’t left me. It’s really happening. We’re in a fucking funeral home and we’re sitting in the front fucking row because that’s where the fucking family sits and what the fuck. It was (and is) unthinkable.  

Another important thing to know about my mom is that she was always, always, always thinking about other people. Always. At buffets, she would come back to the table balancing 6 tiny plates, one for each of us. “Stef! I remember you saying that you loved the pork and pineapple at that new chinese place you tried last month and look, they have it here too!” Trips to the grocery store were the same. “Matt! Look! They had that salsa you like!” She was an encyclopedia of how to make everyone around her feel loved.

Fuck. She was.

In those days immediately afterward, it became incredibly important to me that people acknowledge that this was the most tragic, fucked-up thing that had ever happened. I listed all the reasons, repeating them over and over in my mind, thinking that if I could just articulate the perfect sentence about how wrong it was, I could somehow undo it. She was only 58. We didn’t have any notice. It was two weeks before Christmas. 8 days before I flew home for the holidays. It was 3 months before my dad retired and they had so many plans. She had lost her own mom at 15 and loved us with a ferocity that could only come from surviving that hellfire at such a young age. And oh goddammit, her grandbabies, her FAVORITES. The “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament we found in her car is now a symbol of heartbreak rather than celebration. Even when friends and acquaintances who had also lost their moms generously reached out to comfort me, the darkest and most jagged part of me thought, “Yeah but your mom had cancer. You knew it was coming! You had time!” as though extending the horror over a few months or years could ever possibly do a thing to minimize it.

Late one night as I lie on my parents’ couch staring at the ceiling and hoping to a god I don’t believe in that somehow this was all just a big misunderstanding, I got a notification from OKCupid and, desperate for something else to think about, I opened the message. It was a thoughtful, interesting few paragraphs from a handsome dude with a great beard who had clearly actually read my profile, and through my sleepless grief, I remember thinking, “Oh. There he is.” I replied a day or two later with a brief summary of my situation: “you seem great but I’m kind of in the middle of the absolute worst moment of my life soooo.” At a time when I hated everything everyone said, I didn’t hate his reply. I found out later he’d worked on it for hours.

Our first date was about a month later, a shift at the food bank followed by several hours of talking and crying and laughing and eating barbecue. I’d worried as the date approached that I wasn’t capable of happiness, not then and maybe not ever again, but Jason was just so easy to be around that eventually my worry shifted to guilt about being SO happy when I was still grieving so hard.

I’ve been staring at a sentence that starts “Jason is” for about 20 minutes because it’s just impossible to articulate how effortlessly supportive he’s been, how endlessly comfortable he’s made me feel, how patient and easygoing he continues to be when I have to cancel plans because I saw someone wearing a sweater on TV that my mom would have liked and I need to cry for a while.   

There’s something fundamentally heartbreaking about meeting the love of your life so soon after losing the person in your life who was most fanatically committed to your happiness. For weeks I would pick up my phone to text my mom about something wonderful Jason had done or said, and one morning I actually took a picture of him standing at the sink washing dishes, smiling as I composed a caption that was sure to delight her. I still can’t quite wrap my brain around how much they would have loved each other. How they would have bonded over being the only two people in the family who aren’t obsessed with football. The swooning look she would have given me the first time he offered to wash the dishes. How excited she would have been to dance with him at our wedding.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, which means I think my mom has entirely ceased to exist. She didn’t get to see how it all turned out. She will never know the name of the person I’m going to marry and if I have kids, she won���t know their names. She won’t get to find out whether my nephew keeps the red hair she was so proud of because it came from her.

If I can use this space as a public service announcement just for a moment, please allow me to beg you to not assume that someone who is grieving shares your religious beliefs. Please. While there’s usually not a right thing to say, there are definitely many wrong things to say. Those things include:

“She’s in a better place!”

“It’s all part of the plan!”

“Everything happens for a reason!”

“She’s smiling down on you!”

“She’s your guardian angel now!”

Please don’t ever, ever, ever say any of these things unless you are 100% certain that the person to whom you’re speaking shares your religious beliefs. You know what though, probably not even then because think about what you’re saying when you say “she’s in a better place.” Not only is it deeply presumptuous, it is usually fundamentally fucking untrue. There just isn’t anywhere, earthly or otherwise, my mom would rather have been than her living room on Christmas morning, watching her grandbabies tear into the presents she had so thoughtfully picked out. Or at my wedding. Please understand that when you say this, you are saying that there is a “better” place for my mom to be than at my fucking wedding.

Also, I never imagined this would need to be said, but absolutely under no circumstances should you give someone who is grieving the sudden loss of a parent a greeting card that says “I heard you’re having a tough time. Do what I do - use it as an excuse to go shoe shopping!” Really. That actually happened. An adult human made that decision.

It’s been 8 months now and there isn’t an end to this story; there’s only a string of heartbreaking firsts. The first time I went on a trip and didn’t bring her home a refrigerator magnet. The first time I moved into a new apartment and didn’t send her a million pictures. Dylan’s first birthday, first steps, first words. Katie’s first day of fourth grade. It doesn’t get easier, but you do get more used to it. You have to remind yourself fewer and fewer times per day that it actually happened and that it wasn’t some hideous nightmare. After a while you even get so used to it that you can begin a thought with the awareness that it will happen without her instead of being slammed to the ground by it halfway through. But it still isn’t fucking okay. We were supposed to have more time.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

A two-word review of U2's Songs of Innocence:

Prologue: Back before it hit its stride in what's now known as its prime, The Simpsons got it all wrong. The show was centered around Bart Simpson's antics vis a vis chronic depantsing and trite catchphrases like cowabunga dude. It was still a novel departure from traditional cartoonery but it had the shelf life of glass of milk.

It didn't take long for its writers to figure out who the show's protagonist would be, and it wasn't Bart: It was Homer. The Simpsons grew like a weed and matured into a show where the patriarch of the family was the protagonist while the son joined his frustrated mother, wistful sister and speechless baby as bit players supporting the real star of the show. It mirrored Married with Children in that regard: Father knows best, and he's also the funniest character on the screen.

From an evolutionary standpoint, U2 figured out who the star of their band was early on, even if most of its fans didn't realize it. The Edge has carried the best moments of U2's catalog since its inception with his guitar riffs and vocal harmonies. Anyone who has seen U2 in the current or any of the previous three decades (like I have) can tell you that the most energy from the crowd occurs when the Edge does all of the heavy lifting. Bono has been performing what amounts to a Bono impersonation since Zooropa was recorded in the back of a van while the band was touring and promoting Achtung Baby.

It's a concert dynamic that is without exception among the band's greatest moments: I Will Follow, Sunday Bloody Sunday, New Year's Day, Pride, Bad, every beautiful second of The Joshua Tree, Achtung and the infrequent pockets of brilliance that have come since are all driven by the Edge with Bono in a supporting role. This is U2 at its best, but in the recent past it's not as if the band has run out of ideas or talent; it's just that U2 devolved into Bono and the Irishmen, which you can find in any pub in America for less than a $5 cover charge.

Two-word review of Songs of Innocence: Cowabunga dude.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

Yesterday Sports on Earth, a site catering to readers craving depth in sportswriting was basically cratered. It was a lousy day for any passionate sports fan possessing both an attention span and anything greater than sixth grade reading comprehension.

It was an even worse day for a whole bunch of writers who do it for a living. They weren't fired from their jobs manufacturing dopey lists, dippy slideshows or measly 400-word cookie cutter articles spread out over three clickable pages. SoE produces (not ready to go past tense yet - the body is still warm) the kind of content you click on without being baited; it publishes stories you read - actually read - to learn something and become better informed.

Blaming the consumer here is easy and short-sighted. We're not dumber than ever; we just have better visibility into our least sophisticated citizens than ever before. The biggest problem here is that we still have not yet figured out the optimal way to profitably distribute quality content. Since cognitive skidmarks like slideshows and lists are cheap to produce and humans are helpless against the charms of rubbernecking, that's exactly what's winning out among media assets. Quality writing and shitburgers use the same distribution channels.

Containing the costs for quality sportswriting is prohibitive to allowing writers to do it for a living. This is where my head went when I learned of the SoE carnage yesterday. I own the media company where I publish most of my work. Sure, it's a business, but it's also a hobby - in the 17 years I've been actively sportswriting I've always had a full-time job to go with it. Some guys golf, some guys play poker in other dudes' basements, some guys fish: I prefer to write. Yeah, I suck at golf and cards too. Fish tastes too fishy.

Sportswriting doesn't pay my bills; just my bar tabs. I also find great utility in being a business owner at tax time. The SoE writers who received terrible news yesterday are braver than I'll ever be, because I've never bet on myself the way they do. I'm too chickenshit about days like yesterday happening to me tomorrow regardless of my performance, because we still have not yet figured out the optimal way to profitably distribute quality content.

We need to figure out distribution because long-form journalism, stories with depth and provocative prose (not just photos) are vital to sportswriting's biodiversity. It's needed for the annals future historiographers will use to try and figure out what the hell we were up to. It's nourishment for those of us who have never taken or needed Ritalin or Adderall.

We need to figure it out soon, because if we don't - someday we'll run out of writers like SoE's who are all braver than me, and I'm totally uninterested in clicking on a list of reasons long-form journalism died and finding out it's a slideshow.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

[hellafiedgangstalean]

Krossed Out

Chris Kelly has died. He's the one pictured above that's closest to the camera as part of the Kriss Kross post-backwards clothing renaissance that was never truly reborn. Kelly is survived by his other rapping half Chris Smith, several others and - most prominently - his group's legacy.

His rapping career serves as an important mythbuster for cynics today who believe music has never been dumber: Kris Kross was a Jermaine Dupree creation, marketed to propagate a fictitious rap war with rival children rappers Another Bad Creation, which was created in parallel by the Biv in Bell Biv DeVoe.

See, the kids of ABC wore their clothes inside-out, while Kriss Kross wore its clothes backwards - 'cause inside-out is wiggidy-wiggidy-wiggidy wack. Your move, Ke$ha.

The opening salvo to Kriss Kross' flagship hit single Jump asked you to choose between these two playground factions. Competition is good for business, so both Kriss Kross and ABC benefited from the battle; no one really "chose" a side. Meanwhile, actual gang violence was approaching its all-time peak in America.

Musically, Kriss Kross was part of the G-rated alternative rap offering for a hip-hop era largely defined by gangster rap. Young MC had already come and gone, and Kriss Kross arrived shortly after ABC in providing another alternative to DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, which itself had both grown stale and distracted by Will Smith's success as an actor.

As is the case when previously-famous people die, the obituary transforms into a time machine. You hear that half of Kriss Kross died at 34 and instead of considering the tragedy of Kelly's abrupt demise, you're a child again, or you're wearing your clothes backwards at a costume party in 1994, or you're me at the Ohio State Fair that summer with a free ticket to see Kriss Kross shouting WARM IT UP, CHRIS! and hearing dozens in attendance shout back I'M ABOUT TO!

And while Kriss Kross has been no more for some time, now Kelly is no more, and once you get past the fond recollections of his fame you're left with someone who died at 34, which as with all deaths so premature is perverse.

Thanks for the wonderfully stupid memories, Mr. Kelly. I will imagine you in the clouds with angel's wings attached to the front of your ribcage.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

The sky this morning when I left the house cast down a sense of gloom, gray clouds rolling in from the west, choking off the small stretch of open sky to the east. I headed out to run as confused and scared as everyone else. About a mile and a half into the run, I came to the Capitol, where the...

[hellafiedgangstalean]

VERY IMPORTANT.

Yesterday, a photo of Steve Spurrier coaching shirtless made the internet rounds, mostly with incorrect information that it was a new/recent thing. In fact, the picture was from last year. The confusion, however was understandable as Spurrier is but one of a grand tradition of (mostly, but not...

[hellafiedgangstalean]

[hellafiedgangstalean]

MR. PRESIDENT! NOT AGAIN!!

[hellafiedgangstalean]

It's not too soon. Art Modell is dead and isn't cold yet, but it's not too soon.

It's not too soon because Art Modell's epitaph has been written for 17 years. It goes something like this: [who gives a shit no one cares] MOVED THE FUCKING BROWNS TO BALTIMORE, AND THEN HE [who gives a shit no one cares].

Northeast Ohio loves high school football as much as small Texas towns do. They're passionate about college football in the same way that Birmingham is. And they obsess over the NFL the same way that everyone else in America does.

So like selling mittens in the arctic circle, selling football in Northeast Ohio is a relatively simple venture. You can even sell shitty mittens and still do quite well in the North Pole. Cleveland loved its shitty mittens. It still does.

The city was happy to accomodate Modell's Browns in the same icky "let-the-common-folk-pay-for-the-stadium-so-the-rich-owner-keeps-our-team-here" way that the rest of the league operates, except that Modell wanted nothing to do it. He even issued a public moratorium on the discussion while he was secretly meeting with Baltimore, just to make things easier for him.

Once Modell erased the Browns, a dozen other NFL cities quickly used taxpayer money to build new stadiums for other billionaire owners. No one wanted this kind of episode to happen to their town. He made Cleveland into a cautionary example of what can happen if you don't meet owners' demands. Or - in Cleveland's case - even if you do.

And with that graceless act of pure fucking selfishness, Modell wrote the epitaph that finally gets to be put to use today.

So no, it's not too soon. Rest in peace, Mr. Modell. May your grave be afforded the opportunity to stay on the same plot in perpetuity.

[hellafiedgangstalean]

My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court

I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.

I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.

Read More

[hellafiedgangstalean]

NASA just landed a rover on Mars, this is the very first picture.  This JUST happened minutes ago.

1:42am EST 8/6/2012

[hellafiedgangstalean]

It comes from a chicken - not a bunny, dummy.

#RIPMCA