A Gay Day is a Good Day

Any day 20% of the population has a basic right affirmed — otherwise known as a “freedom” by our conservative friends — is good day. So it’s easy to appreciate the enthusiasm and celebration taking place over a law putting to rest decades of legal prejudice against gay people in Minnesota.

But I have to confess to a certain emotional detachment. While this may be another symptom  my chronic, morbid, sociopathic tendencies, (I should probably drink more to modulate them), an easier explanation is that as a straight male I’ve never had a direct personal investment in the gay rights campaign.

As a squishy liberal it’s not like I had to be educated in the fundamental injustice at play in the treatment of gays. But since it wasn’t me, it was simple enough to consign gay prejudice to the sloshing bin of intractable cultural malignancies doing their rotting work on the American promise. The same applied, I guess, to the civil rights movement of the Sixties, when all I could do as a kid was watch from a small Minnesota town. (The highest pitch of anti-Semitism was before my time.)

Voting for progressive politicians, doling out a pittance of cash to various causes and making explicit my distaste for bigoted comments is fine … as far as it goes. But there was a resignation factor at play here as well.

What’s interesting this time around is both the speed with which the gay rights campaign surged from minority-to-majority support and the events that catalyzed it.

I do hope at some point, celebrants in St. Paul or in bars around the state hoist a glass to Archbishop John Nienstedt, his retrograde wing of the Catholic church, various other ersatz “Christian” religious organizations and of course the usual clutch of conservative policymakers who feed off the ignorance and superstitions of the ill-informed. The blowback against that crowd was vital and fierce. A lot of people, myself included, had an “enough all fucking-ready” moment over the past 18 months.

In my humble opinion the over-reach of cultural dead-enders like Nienstedt and his fellow travelers was the accelerant that jump-started this final campaign. In particular, Nienstedt’s notorious $400,000 anti-gay DVD mailing, (financed by persons still unknown), was a bell-ringer for people like me. The appalling hypocrisy of that move — from an organization nearly bankrupted by the cover-up of criminal sexual activities of its closeted clergy — plus the tenor of fear in their canonical warnings, was like someone telling me, “these guys are sweating.”

The time had come to put down a sick beast.

Pre-dating that though was a long campaign of the most effective messaging imaginable in a pop culture-saturated society. And by this I mean to compliment Hollywood and the entertainment industry for its genuinely positive contribution to advancing the cause of gay citizens — much as it had done for blacks in the era of Sidney Poitier, and Jews with “Gentlemen’s Agreement”. (There are of course abundant ironies in Hollywood’s long resistance to pushing the question of discrimination against Jews).

Hollywood has plenty to answer for with its persistent, numbing reliance on sadistic violence to sell tickets and goose ratings. You don’t have to listen to more than one “gun rights debate” to appreciate the effect a century of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, “Lethal Weapon” and all the other vigilante/revenge fantasies have had on the culturally isolated and simple-minded. Every other gun-clutcher parrots Hollywood-like verbiage about “them” coming through the windows and how manly heroism requires their twitchy “good guy” trigger on a loaded .44.

But with everything from Liberace to “Will & Grace” to Frank Ocean, the entertainment industry has painted sympathetic portraits of gays as co-workers, friends, neighbors and engaging personalities. When sociologists study how this “victory” happened, they’ll credit the impact pop culture had on the young and urban and how acceptance among that group worked its way up the age ladder, marginalizing the most resistant along the way.

On my personal list of “shit I want fixed”, Wall Street’s on-going buy-off of government and our lunatic levels of gun ownership and violence ranked a bit ahead of gay rights. But with experience you learn to take progress where it comes and be happy with it.

But as messaging/cultural  education goes, the process that achieved this win in gay rights can be replicated. Apply the techniques of the most popular, broadly accepted, role-model creating medium ever invented — entertainment — and watch the proportionate collapse of the ill-informed and bigoted.

“Terror”, Right There in My Hometown.

Back in the day, terror in my hometown of Montevideo was pretty much confined to the cops cleaning the last drunks of the night out of Sarge’s Bar or chasing my buddies and me through alleys for throwing water balloons at trucks. But now the old town has real knucklehead poster-boys for the over-armed, paranoid, anti-gummint trailer park militia movement. And they’re feeling the wrath of the Monte cops … and FBI.

The laugh line in this past week’s news out of “Mo-Town”, as we locals refer to it, was that Buford “Bucky” Rogers, his garage full of molotov cocktails and ample reserve ammo withstanding, was not believed to have any “overseas” connections. Riiight.

Based on what we heard from his proud camo-attired Pappy, I’m kinda thinking little spawn-of-pappy Buford may not be exactly too up on which sea is where, much less what it takes to get over one.

FoxNews, whose primetime hyper-ventilators pretty well wore themselves out flogging every imaginable “muslim” connection to the nearly as knuckleheaded Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, largely ignored the Montevideo terrorist. My guess is that Buford confronted them with a counter-effective narrative. How so? Because from the get-go it was clear that Buford and his family were yet another episode of an all too familiar commodity on the American landscape … low-information, gun-obsessed, talk-radio/FoxNews-fueled conservatives. Another round of forlorn characters fueled by the implausibly grandiose belief that “the government” not only knows who they are, but is personally harassing them. We see these guys every time the Tea Party rallies at a gun show. They’re as familiar to us as, well, the folks in the trailer next door.

I don’t think it matters much what happens next to my guy Buford. By the sound of it, I get the distinct impression that his “terrorism” was pretty much directed at settling local Mo-Town feuds. I’ll be stunned if we hear he had a plan — hell, the thought of Buford “planning” something is kind of funny — to attack the Federal Reserve or the Megamall or the Gander Mountain gun counter.

But there’s something politically useful about the episode.  Buford’s Insane Clown Posse-style terrorism further marginalizes the country’s gun obsessed at a moment when the NRA brand has reached a level of toxicity that has to take even House Republicans’ breath away. While the NRA core celebrates its victory in defeating universal background checks, signing up a million new members since Newtown and holding a splashy convention in Houston last week, they choose to ignore something pretty fateful … for them. Namely that the greater public, which supported background checks by anything from 70% to 90%, is looking at them with fresh eyes. They see the same crowd of paunchy, goateed, middle-aged to geezerly white guys buying up assault rifles and ammo and giving Wayne LaPierre standing ovations, and are steeling themselves for the next rounds of this fight.

Crazy’s best days are behind it.

Which is why it is disappointing that House Speaker Paul Thissen — with coordination from Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, a proud Iron Ranger with all that implies –  decided not to push a vote on background checks and more here in Minnesota.

Of course they don’t have the votes to actually pass it now. Obama and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein knew that when they pushed it in D.C. But the point was … the vote. A critical step forward, if elections matter, is getting fretful yobs to press a button and go on record in a highly visible, unambiguous way saying where they stand  … on something that has 70% to 90% public support against five million fanatics.

Obama made a good show of indignation after the vote, gathered with Newtown families in The Rose Garden. But he knew he wasn’t going to win … yet. Guns are a fanatical obsession for those who are obsessed with them. It’ll take three, four or a half-dozen more slugfests like the universal background check fight to get something effective.

There’s a lot of messaging work to do. But the upside is that the fanatics are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us. Every gun-related atrocity, every news clip of an NRA spokesman, every gun nut-on-the-street interview becomes part of the gun control message.

But the first important legislative step is to make legislators pick a side.

Who with, dude? The 70% – 90%? Or the NRA/Buford Rogers/Black Snake Militia?

Time is not on the side of the gun lobby. If someone like Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, whose poll numbers slumped badly after her “no” vote, suffers political consequences, which gun control advocates will find a way to make certain she does, the NRA’s fearsome threat will be neutered. The redoubts will be the South and the hinterland trailer parks, like Buford’s daddy’s in Mo-Town.

A yea or nay vote in Minnesota would force some serious political assaying. Until recently, out-state/hinterland legislators have (correctly) assumed the only threat a gun vote poses to their careers comes from the goateed fanatics who put their lives on hold and make four dozen calls every time a gun bill pops up in the legislature. Are those legislators truly confident that is still the case?

Thissen and Bakk were no doubt queasy about forcing embarrassment on out-state DFLers who were taking the heaviest flak from the fanatics. But sometimes effective leadership strategy requires pushing your own comrades into situations they’d rather avoid. Ron Latz, from St. Louis Park, (not exactly a hot bed of ersatz-patriotic gun slingers and gummint haters), and Mike Paymar (Mac-Groveland, Highland park … ditto), two guys who pushed gun control bills,  should keep on making serious noise about exactly this tactical step.

You have to make them vote. With every Buford Rogers, Insane Clown terrorist, tolerance of our wholly unfettered gun insanity weakens, and there is less peril in campaigning against the NRA.

Even in my home town.

Bangladesh to Pope and All of Us: We Are You

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

We are responsible for the deaths of garment workers in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Just as we are responsible for the deaths of garment jobs in the United States. Our never-slaked appetite for more and cheaper consumer goods hurts the livelihoods and lives of millions of other people.

I always sound so preachy when I write something like this. I buy stuff I don’t need too — so I’m talking to myownself here, as well. I am a child (old man) of the Sixties and global ecological consciousness just won’t leave me.

What if we had fewer clothes, and better clothes? Made of good material by skilled workers who are treated and paid well, whether in the US or Bangladesh. What if companies made less profit? Top executives made fewer millions? Investors looked at human, not just financial, return? Business journalism measured and covered more than just financial factors? I know, I know, this is all so “Imagine,” so John Lennon.

The new pope, Francis, said he was shocked that many of the 400 workers killed in the garment-factory collapse in Bangladesh last week were paid about $40 a month. “This is called slave labor,” he said. Unfortunately, Francis speaks for too many of us. If we’re shocked at how poorly the people who work in the countries that are on the labels of our clothes are paid, we just haven’t been paying attention.

Because we don’t want to. We want to buy yet another shirt, cheap. We want to see our stock price go up. We want to collect another fat bonus. And we don’t want to know, don’t want to think about, whose shoulders or heads we’re standing on to get the endless “more” that we hunger for.

Many Southern writers have illuminated the toll that slavery and segregation took on the whites who enforced this inhuman behavior. They had to continually lie to themselves about the conditions they created for black people. “It’s better for them. They’re content and happy. It’s all they’re capable of. This is normal, what God intended.” Lie after lie, minute after minute, shrivels the soul.

I just read Devil in the Grove, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s about the horror of lynchings in Florida after World War II, and about Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP fighting against the white supremacist hijacking of law-enforcement and the courts in the South. During one major trial in the early 1950s, a racist prosecutor comes to have respect for Marshall, and a white reporter covering the trial says she wishes Marshall and the prosecutor could sit down and have lunch together — but no restaurant in Ocala, Florida, where the trial was held, would serve a black man and a white man together. That was normal then. In my lifetime

Just as in my lifetime it’s normal to wear clothing made by people paid a pittance and working in conditions we would find appalling. If we looked.

We lie to ourselves that it’s okay. Okay that the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has been growing since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Okay that the gap between the rich in this country and the poor in the rest of the world is a wound wider than the Pacific. And widening.

My friend Ron Meador, environmental writer for MinnPost, on Earth Day this year recalled a conversation with the conservationist writer Scott Russell Sanders. Meador wrote of Sanders’s “wry suggestion that we might reframe our consumption habits with a slight shift of language:

‘As a first step in that direction, let us quit using the word “consumer” for a season and use instead the close synonym, “devourer.” Thus, the Office of Consumer Affairs would become the Office of Devourer Affairs. In schools, the study of consumer science, which used to be called home economics, would become devourer science. Savvy shoppers would subscribe to Devourer Reports. Pollsters would conduct devourer surveys. Newspapers would track the ups and downs of the devourer price index.’”

Devourer. We Americans are devourers of the world’s resources, gobbling far more than our share. I’ve quoted before on this blog the Dakota word Wasichu, which the Indians called the whites — “Takes all the fat.” The whites took the fat part — of the buffalo, of the land — and left the Indians with bones.

We can afford to pay a higher price for our clothes so that workers in the US and abroad can make decent wages. Top executives can afford to make only 100 times what the average worker makes, not 500 times. Companies can afford lower quarterly results if the company builds sustainable performance over the long haul.

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. This disparity between rich and poor, this growing suppurating gap, is not okay. The people working in sweatshops in smog-befouled cities are not happy with their place — no more than the blacks who were slaves or the blacks who rode the back of the bus were happy with theirs.

Choosing not to look — being shocked — is another way of lying to ourselves. Companies that were getting clothes from the Bangladesh factories are falling all over themselves saying “Oh we didn’t…” “Oh we don’t…” “Oh we’re pressing for safety standards…” For most companies, the hit to their reputations will not outweigh the boost to their bottom line that low wages and unsafe conditions provide.

Those workers are us. We are them. It’s in our hands. We can buy goods from companies that treat workers and the environment with respect. Those goods will cost a little more — so we can buy a little less. Better stuff. Better made. For more peace of soul. We can invest in companies that treat workers and the environment with respect. Maybe we get a smaller return. In money. But so much greater, in peace of soul.

Let’s stop being shocked.

Ted Mondale’s Entitlement Tab

My favorite local news story in recent days was the one about Ted Mondale finally agreeing to a $50,000 clawback of a $150,000 loan he got from Ponzi king Tom Petters back in 2005. The original Strib story was a terse recitation of the known facts. Mondale and Petters shared several business ventures. Petters openly traded on the Mondale name in the process of expanding his nefarious empire. The loan in question was never repaid.

Then a couple of days ago Strib columnist, Jon Tevlin, weighed in, with a juicier telling of the tale, along with mating it to Mondale’s breezy assurance that e-pulltab revenue would help cover the “public share” of cash for the new Vikings stadium, generally believed to be about $348 million.

A couple of key lines from Tevlin’s column: Asked whether Mondale was cooperative, the receiver on the clawback, Doug Kelley said, “It was a long and tortured path for us to come to an agreement with Mr. Mondale.”

And this: “The business Petters helped fund and Mondale ran, Nazca, promoted itself as a software company that could track real estate transactions for clients. Mondale promised it would be working in six months, but three years later he hadn’t delivered. By 2008, the company has losses of $5.7 million.”

And finally this: “During testimony in his trial, Petters said that he used the Mondale name to solidify his company’s reputation. Mondale held several positions at Redtag, which did business in Asia. His father, former Vice President Walter Mondale, had served as ambassador to Japan, and Petters said in court that the affiliation ‘opened up incredible doors’.”

I bet it did.

Now, I’ve never met Ted Mondale. I was introduced to brother Bill once, if I remember. I ran into their late sister Eleanor a couple of times in Los Angeles and did a feature story on her here after her first bout with cancer, and I’ve interviewed Dad, The Veep, a couple of times. So no deep familiarity. But enough with Eleanor to detect a rather thick strain of entitlement. Not obnoxious. Not even off-putting. (She knew how to play the boys.) Just the vibe that, “I deserve this”, which in her case was the attention for being a fun, good-looking gal … with a famous name.

It’s a shame there isn’t a serious city magazine left in town, because this Mondale-Petters story is full of tantalizing facets. Obviously the two were far more than passing acquaintances. Each, I speculate, saw opportunity in the other. That neither fulfilled it for the other only adds to the drama.

But it is striking that Mondale, who may not have Tom Petters-in-his-prime kind of dough, doesn’t have the wherewithal to get a loan … to pay back the Petters loan. Or, even better, a well-heeled pal who’d bail him out, to spare him the public embarrassment of fighting Kelley and looking like a guy who saw no good reason to part with easy money pulled from a massive fraud. I ask you, how much better off would Mondale’s reputation be if he had cut a deal with rich buddy so as to be able to put out an “official story” that he had “fully cooperated” with Kelley, and “in the interests of being an example for others, quickly and completely repaid” the $150,000?

Anyhow … I was delighted … yeah, “delighted” … to see Tevlin take on the story. I like Jon. He’s a very good/sometimes terrific writer. But post-Nick Coleman, the Strib mandate was pretty clearly for a less polarizing choice of column topics. Assuming they know better than me what the reading public wants in a metro columnist, (not likely), all I can say is that I have far (far) less interest in feel-good homilies on community spirit than vanity and connivery among the entitled elite … whose famous names have them in positions to spend vast amounts of our money.

Ship-for-Brains Kmart

For many of us, our biggest strength often also turns out to be our biggest weakness.  For ad agencies, their biggest strengths often are their creativity and sense-of-humor.  Those wacky guys in the skinny jeans and pointy shoes crack me up!  But when not checked by clients and agency grown-ups, that strength can sometimes manifest itself as a weakness.

Witness K-Mart’s ad agency, Draftfcb.   (You can already tell how hip they are just by the funky corporate name.)  This is the assignment Draftfcb was given:  Promote Kmart as an online shopping outlet, something Kmart is lightly associated with.

But, it’s also critically important that any ad agency also be mindful of the overall brand backdrop for their narrow marketing assignment:   Historically, K-mart has had shitty stores, a shitty customer experience, shitty customer service, and shitty products, and, consequently, a shitty brand image.  Kmart desperately needs to change both the reality and perception of its wall-to-wall shitty-ness.

So, Draftfcb created, and Kmart approved, this gut-buster:

What a hit!  Over 13 million Youtube views!  Young people – Kmart’s future! — are Tweeting up a storm about it!  Some of them are even checking out the online shopping offerings!  They like us, they really, really like us!

I’ll give Draftfcb this:  At least they momentarily made Kmart relevant, which was a very difficult thing to do.  But what about the impact on the overall Kmart brand?  Even if it didn’t further damage the Kmart brand, did it do anything to repair it?

Don’t get me wrong, that there is some  seriously funny shit.  Even at my age, I’m not above snicker-worthy potty humor.  I’m sure the hipster boy geniuses at Draftfcb had a blast creating it, and will probably win oodles of awards for “buzz creation.”  I’m also sure the long-suffering Kmart marketing executives felt AWESOME when they showed this hilarious ad to their cocktail party pals, to prove to them how hip and edgy they are making shitty old Kmart.

Maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong, but I worry the comedic desires of the ad agency team overtook Kmart’s strategic brand need.  I worry that this iconic viral video effort will further cement in consumers’ minds the association between Kmart and all things shitty.  I worry that when viewers of this “eeeeeeewwww”-inducing ad now think Kmart, they also have a little visceral eeeeeeewwww residue in their psyche.  Shitty Kmart is uniquely susceptible to that, after all.

It’s true that I now am infinitely more mindful of Kmart as a place for online shopping.  (However, search engine optimization would arguably be a more cost-efficient way to achieve the same thing.)  Draftfcb nailed that part of the assignment.  But the problem is, I still think of Kmart as a really shitty brand with shitty customer service, etc., and I therefore wander away to a myriad of better brands that all also offer online shopping.  It’s not sufficient to merely let people know that Kmart offers online shopping.  You also have to fix the lousy brand, or that awareness won’t turn into new business.

Humor in advertising can be a powerful weapon to employ against competitors, such as Apple’s deadly funny and effective “I’m a Mac” ads.    But this case study reminds us that it also can lead to serious self-inflicted wounds.

- Loveland

Neuter the Rabble.

Last Thursday night, during the blizzard before last, I drove out to the high school here in beautiful, misunderstood Edina to catch weatherman Paul Douglas’s act on climate change. The operative cliché for “my people” is that they’re all self-absorbed, hyper-competitive materialists restless-to-bored with any conversation or endeavour that doesn’t add to shareholder value in the next quarter. Nevertheless, over 100 fellow citizens slogged their way through the right-angle sleet to hear what Douglas had to say.

Being that he’s spent the bulk of his career on TV, his name and face are familiar to every Minnesotan over the age of 15, and sure enough there were people posing with him for souvenir pictures in the lobby before the “show”.

And it’s a pretty good show. Douglas, TV performer and demonstrably shrewd businessman, has a polished, credible and engaging act laying out the known reality of climate change. I doubt there was a skeptic in the theater, but the impact of deniers, willful ignorers and utter know-nothings is stark in his story of building effective consensus. (His shtick was the main attraction in a night raising awareness of Edina’s various green initiatives, for which, as Mayor and MC Jim Hovland proudly pointed out, the city — of preening, avaricious capitalists (not his words) — has already won national acclaim and regard as a leader.)

Having followed Douglas’ career since his KARE-11 days, through WBBM in Chicago, back to (and then out of) WCCO, including more than a half-dozen businesses along the way, his evolution into a prominent consciousness-raiser for climate change is surprising only in a couple of ways. There’s never been a question he is smart enough to grasp the metrics of true science, the only issue was whether he’d take the career-risk of actually proselytizing for what he knows to be true.

But he has. Perhaps most aggressively after realizing that his days with network affiliate TV were over, but he has. And it’s dramatically more than any of his meteorological colleagues left behind at any local station dare to do. In case you haven’t noticed human-caused climate change is a taboo in local weather reports … and not much less on The Weather Channel.

Douglas makes only passing reference to his experiences dealing with nervous news directors skittish about injecting anything into weather (or any element of news coverage) that comes with so much as a hint of political provocation. As he says, “Everyone on TV wants to be loved”. And you’re not creating love (translation: ratings) if you’re making some people irrationally angry.

But who, at this point in the climate change discussion, are we making angry? As Douglas and everyone who is actually conversant in science, peer review, climatology, core samples, etc. fully accepts, the “debate” over human causation is over. (Has been for years.) Those who continue to deny it, citing transparently fraudulent counter-studies (usually underwritten by the Koch brothers or other carbon producers), have no credible standing on the matter. They can make noise, bluster and rage, but from the perspective of everyone who can read a graph on carbon dioxide release, that crowd is the rhetorical equivalent of a drunk armed with the same handful of bogus bar stool talking points.

But as we’ve just seen in the Senate vote on universal background checks, an absurdly small minority of irrationally angry/misinformed citizens still has powerful influence over the well-being of the … vast … majority.

How to reverse that dynamic?

Ninety minute seminars for the choir will only do so much. Likewise, simply writing campaign checks to sympathetic politicians for election season ads has obvious effectiveness issues. Not the least of which is that the crushing majority of ads during a campaign cycle are little more than noise and annoyance to viewers.

My suggestion, both for gun control and climate science awareness, is an experiment in the full, sustained impact of … theater. Paul Douglas long ago learned and honed the techniques of performance. You have to engage and sustain an audience to get your message across. In terms of building broad cultural awareness, what if we combined the talents of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, two industries full of people who “get” the science and the consequences of doing nothing. (Add to them the military and insurance companies, two other entities long past the point of denying climate change.)

Given Hollywood’s progressive attitudes, I have to believe writers, directors, editors, actors and camera people, would fall over each other to be a part of a campaign producing PSAs on the reality of human activity on climate, pulling back the curtain on the disinformation industry, and the modest lifestyle changes that can be made (not to mention the employment opportunities in renewable energy). Ditto, a sustained campaign to further delegitimize the NRA, with the intent of rendering it inconsequential to the election prospects of Bible Belt and rural legislators.

The commonality of climate deniers and ardent gun “enthusiasts” is striking.

And the money for it? How much did Hollywood and uber-liberal fat cats pour into the 2012 election? How fast do musicians volunteer for the latest disaster relief telethon? How much of this kind of work could be had pro-bono? How much (if any) could the networks be pressured to provide at discount through their affiliates? (Okay, forget that one.)

Point being: The vast majority of the American audience is receptive to both messages, particularly on guns. The demographic downside is minimal. You’re not exactly pissing off the well-educated, top dollar crowd. Moreover the artful, entertaining application of humor, visuals and message association would likely have a solidifying effect among the young, much as gay rights has enjoyed, largely due to representations in the entertainment industry.

It’s one thing to ignore the angry rabble. It’s something better to neuter them into insignificance.

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, Please. Let’s Keep Calm.

Bad things have always happened, and always will. Even in a place as “exceptional” as the United States.

I think the majority of the public understands this on both an intellectual and emotional level. Something terrible could happen to any of us at any moment. Such is as life on this planet has always been. If not some meat-eating predator, it could be a drunk in the on-coming lane, or an over-armed psycho blasting away in a movie theater, or someone planting bombs on a public sidewalk as people cheer on a marathon race.