Holiday happy hour

I was ambivalent about going to meet a group of former colleagues for happy hour two days before Christmas. We met at “the agency” and spent a mind-boggling number of hours trying to outdo and unhinge one another in order to curry favor with whomever happened to be in charge at the moment and, theoretically, get ahead. It’s what you do at a PR agency; it’s what’s expected, and it’s what’s rewarded. At the same time, I am thoroughly embarrassed at some of the things that came out of my mouth, and off my keyboard. I know better now, and I knew better then. Over the years, the alliances and allegiances among this group shifted and swerved, collapsed and then re-emerged in ways I would have never dreamed of. One by one we all quit, eventually.

They’re not bad people. There are two guys who are almost exactly the same age as me, and each of them is married to a woman he met in high school, each raising one son and one daughter. One’s wife is a hardcore Catholic – “I love Christian chick lit!” she told me optimistically, after I told her that reading was pretty much all I’d been up to – and the other’s wife is a vegetarian who cannot stop bringing stray animals home. Both of these guys have extensive music collections. Then there’s a guy who is 10 years older, a world traveler who has managed bookstores and studied in Europe and is currently restoring yet another turn-of-the-century house. The woman who was our manager, until three of us got together and orchestrated her downfall, is great on paper, with her degrees, her stints at various newspapers, her travels to politically unstable countries. But in person she’s shockingly mundane, the type of person who likes to project herself as a progressive but who, with very little pressure, yields to convention each and every time. Though nearly fifty, it’s the breathy giggling and hair twirling you tend to remember.

We were joined by a former client, a guy who was a ‘senior comms manager’ at a huge corporation, which he left in the early 2000s to go into politics. He failed spectacularly, and so now he’s a ‘comms consultant.’ And, as fate would have it, one of the people at the table was a PR account woman, who is nice enough, I suppose, but who was very clearly enjoying the little bit of power she held that night. “It just kills me that I can’t keep all these guys busy with projects all the time,” she gushed. The former client, who is fantastically fat, would have leaned over at one point to say to her, in a conspiratorial tone, “Do you have a card?” but since he cannot lean, he sort of sagged instead. Which would have been fine, except for the fact that the guy who organized the get together, the one who’s married to the Catholic, relies on the PR account woman for lots of business, and so …

For the next hour we were regaled with one insider story after another about what it was like to be behind the scenes at this particular corporation, mapping out the strategy, dealing with the PR teams, ‘onboarding’ the journalists so that they could report accurately on the company’s new vision and so on and so forth. I drank one glass of lemonade after another and ate a chicken pot pie the size of a cupcake. I excused myself at one point to go to the men’s room and went outside for a ciggie.

And when I came back everything had shifted.

If you were to boil the first hour of the conversation down, it would go like this: when we spend millions on PR, look at what we can do, look at our influence, look at how good we are at getting others to convey our messaging. And yet, when I came back to the table, we were feeling quite betrayed by Barack Obama. “He just sold out,” said the former manager. “He sure did!” said another. “It’s complicated,” said the former client, in a tone that suggested he believes the authority he had over those of us at the table when he was a client is still in effect. “It sure is,” I said, “when you’re beholden to the banks, which are run by rich folks.” The former manager said she thought Obama had misled the country during his campaign. I said I think we love to be misled, that as far as I can see we wouldn’t have it any other way. “That’s horrible,” she said, and I laughed a bit, in a real, honest way, a way that I could never laugh when I was drunk.

I laughed because it was funny: sitting in a trendy, pricey restaurant with a group of people who make a fantastic living misleading people into believing that certain products and services will make their lives better, bitching about someone not turning out to be quite the engine of change he presented during his campaign speeches. If it were a plot synopsis for a screenplay, I thought, I’d be exiled from Hollywood, permanently. But I wasn’t in Hollywood: I was in Portland, with the eternally earnest and sincere, and so I said to my former manager, the woman who had written my performance reviews, who monitored my comings and goings, who came very close a few times to firing me, “You need to put the bong down, just for a minute.” God, that was fun, showing zero respect for someone who doesn’t deserve any and never really did, and it seemed a fitting way to celebrate the end of the year.

Stuffing the stockings

Even though it’s almost Christmas and I really should be focused on other things, I keep returning to last week’s vote to extend W.’s tax breaks for the ultra rich and – wink, wink – extend unemployment for those who are anything but. I believe that the rich in this country are going to continue to get richer, and that the poor will become only more so, and I’m no good with numbers so I’ve chosen to ignore the mathematical aspect of the whole thing. It’s the basic structure of it that bothers me, and really, to take it a step or two closer to pure honesty, it’s the fact that the deception of the whole thing even registered in my mind as distasteful, not because it isn’t distasteful – it’s plenty distasteful, and then some – but because it is so familiar it’s almost tedious.

At the same time, you have to admit this is damn-near perfect. It’s actually kind of Christmasy.

Let’s say I’m a ‘liberal’ U.S. representative. I can come back to Northeast Portland for the holiday recess. Since my constituents are short-sighted and suffer from memory issues, I enjoy the free pass I get for barely raising the issue during the nearly two years that Democrats controlled Congress not to mention a pretty powerful office a few blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol, a majority that Democrats managed to lose (oops!) in spite of their best efforts to behave like Republicans. So, I’d be off the hook for that. But when the organic, free-range, locally grown tomatoes were thrown at my office or at my Prius as I drove past on my way to an event with the word “sustainable” on the banner because my constituents were pissed off about my support of extending tax cuts for the fine people of, say, Lake Oswego, I could exclaim, without lying, oh no, no, what I voted for was to stand up for those without a voice, for those who have been systematically disenfranchised by the system.

Speaking of Lake Oswego, say I was a “conservative” U.S. representative, elected to preserve and defend the American spirit of entrepreneurship, the very foundation of this country’s greatness. I didn’t vote to further the Democrats’ socialist agenda: I voted because in the midst of a recession the last thing a responsible public servant would do would be to vote to increase taxes. I voted against continuing to take money away from Americans and give it to a government that has no sense of fiscal responsibility, a government that has no clue how to create jobs and put America back on the road to greatness. The extension of hand outs for the terminally shiftless, lazy and unemployed is a problem, to be sure, but it’s a temporary one, because, less than two years from today …

It’s all Obama’s fault. That’s the real beauty of it. The most amazing accomplishment of this knock-knock joke masquerading as legislative action, in my opinion, is that even though our senators and representatives have done exactly nothing in terms of standing up – or not – for their convictions, the opportunity for them to trash Obama is but a soundbyte away. He betrayed the liberals (again) and once again he’s tried to block any notion of progress, as they see it, put forth by the conservatives. And in so doing he’s given the people who make a lot of money to make “edgy” predictions and provide third-grade level analysis and insight on millions of television and computer screens across the land a lot of job security for the next 23 months.

And speaking of elementary blabber presented as analysis, here’s a little something: Does any of this matter? The figures rattle around in my mind, as disconnected and disjointed as a family gathering around the holiday supper table. A billion here, a few billion there, sometimes a trillion of this and that, and I’m speaking here not of the tax cuts but of deficit spending and cash borrowed from God knows where, which makes me wonder, is this kind of like buying property on the Monopoly board with fake money?

Praising Dick

There are many, many pages in War and Peace devoted to debating, disputing and deconstructing who deserves credit for Russia’s eventual victory over France in the early 1800s. Tolstoy’s opinion, which is made clear time and time again, is that when it comes to accolades, the historians couldn’t be more wrong. According to the count, it’s the men of whom we hear very little – a commander by the name of Dokhturov in particular – upon whom the honors should be bestowed. You wouldn’t know it from the sheer heft of his books, but Tolstoy had a flair for being succinct, and here, from page 1021, is one of the best examples: “This silence about Dokhturov is the most obvious proof of his merit.”

It’s that line that keeps coming to mind during the orgy of anything-but-silent eulogizing of Richard Holbrooke, a most influential diplomat who died Monday evening. I’m not an expert on the man, nor do I have any interest in becoming one, but it seems to me that his involvement in many of the major foreign policy sagas, beginning with Vietnam and ending, with his death, with our current (and very dubious, I think) undertakings in Afghanistan, would make a good starting point for a lot of questions.

I have not resumed drinking. I just had a momentary lapse of reason.

Richard Holbrooke was just amazing. In much the same way the supreme court justices are lauded for their “constitutional mastery” after asking a few basic questions about what a law might or might not mean, Richard Holbrooke, according to the post-mortem, had a phenomenal grasp on the finer points of U.S. foreign policy. Pardon my snarkyness, but it seems to me that anything less than that would be cause for serious alarm given the central role he played in formulating much of it. He was really strategic: His office at the U.S. State Department was like no other in that it was staffed by a real mix of people with different backgrounds including, well, including professors. He was genuinely interested in what other people had to say. He read a lot, and he wrote a lot as well. He was networked like no other, and he was generous with his time, his experience and his influence, which he used, as legend has it, to place many people in many jobs. One of the many overweight, suited white guys recalled working on something or another in Central America, and Richard Holbrooke came down for a visit, not because he was involved in the work per se but because he was simply so gosh-darn curious.

Unlike Richard Holbrooke, I’m not going to be remembered for my intellect, or the powerful connections I had with powerful people, but I am quite curious. I am curious about what and who carries the most weight in foreign policy decisions. I am curious about how much money is involved, where it’s from and where it’s going. I am very curious about the cost of the wars we’re currently involved in, not just in terms of dollars, but in terms of lives – lives of U.S. military personnel and also lives lived, or formerly lived, by people in the places where we’re “executing” on Richard Holbrooke’s brilliant foreign policy strategies. I’m really curious about Osama bin Laden. Is he the reason we went to war, or to wars? Where does he live? Where is he working these days? Just for fun, really, I’m very curious to know what the ratio of how much money we’ve spent searching for Osama bin Laden is compared to, say, the average amount of public funds we spend on a young person’s education from the time she enters kindergarten through high school graduation. I’m just curious.

But what makes me most curious about Richard Holbrooke’s death has nothing to do with him at all. Tuesday evening Oprah’s understudy (Charlie Rose) was on, almost unbearable in his smarminess, as usual, when I heard something that stopped me cold. Charlie Rose was bragging about how connected he was to Richard Holbrooke, exchanging utterly irrelevant remembrances with one of the fat white guys, when he let loose with this: Charlie Rose had known Richard Holbrooke for many years, having met him when that particular guest was working as an editor with a foreign policy publication and Charlie Rose was working for … Bill Moyers. I’m still in mourning over Bill Moyers’ retirement. He’s about the only one I’ve seen on television in the last decade who is worth watching, and he employed Charlie Rose? Denial has its place in every life, including mine, so I switched the channel and watched a bit of Antiques Road Show and pretended I had misheard. Because that’s some shit about which I am not even remotely curious. I’d really rather not know the details.

Hot water

One of my more notable skills is the ability to put off, for years, having repairs made at my house. Last week, when I finally had a new water heater installed, I realized why. Every since my very early childhood, I have been terrified of going to the doctor with one malady or another and completely baffling the doctor. We’ve never seen this before, I hear the doctor saying as he shakes his head with grave concern, but whatever it is, it’s not good. And that’s when the real horror begins in my nightmare: ruling things out. We’ll try this, and we’ll try that, and we’ll see where we go.

I have the same dread when it comes to house issues. Repairs that should be minor, it seems to me, are ripe with the potential to become anything but.

The water heater should have been replaced two years ago, if not before, but I had concerns. Over the summer my friend Derek replaced the hardware that sits behind the handle that turns the water on and off and, when it’s working, regulates the temperature. It did wonders in terms of hot showers, but the baths, though occasionally hot, were for the most part lukewarm. But there was never a shortage of hot water at the sinks in both the kitchen and the bathroom. So I envisioned the tile at the head of the tub needing to be torn out. I envisioned walls in the basement needing to be taken down. I envisioned all the pipes needing to be removed and replaced. I envisioned being held responsible for tearing up the street to repair the water mane and being told, nonchalantly, that since I live on a corner there are two streets rather than one, and therefore …

If the bath is tepid, one way to warm it up is to boil a big pot of water on the stove and then, when the tub is almost full, dump it in.

The guy who showed up Tuesday afternoon to install the new water heater looked like the grandpa from The Waltons. “Your stairs here sure are weird,” he said before he’d even reached the front porch. Halfway down the stairs to the basement, he said, “Oh man, this sure is going to be interesting,” and then laughed a little. I told him that today wasn’t the day for small talk or comments about the house. My tone of voice was an assault to my own ears, even as I was speaking: I sounded so much like my mother. Although I’d been told by Stan, who works the phones, that I wouldn’t have to “lift a finger,” I did, in fact, help carry the old water heater up to the kitchen and I helped lower the new one down. On Tuesday night I had a glorious bath, and on Wednesday morning I noticed there was no hot water in the kitchen. That afternoon when I came back from meeting a friend, there was still no hot water. So I called Stan, who told me it was no biggie, that gas bubbles often get trapped immediately following the installation, and proceeded to give me instructions on how to relight the pilot light, and after trying to transcribe a page and a half of his utterly nonsensical rambling I stopped writing and demanded that someone come to my house to show me how to do it. So he put me on hold, and I listened to George Morlan Plumbing commercials for about 12 minutes. An hour later I called back and spoke with Noreen, who told me she wasn’t sure if she could “squeeze me in” that afternoon or not because they have other customers, and I told her that I’d be happy to help her reach a new level of sureness, having spent $733.00 the day before, and at 6:30 a very pleasant, straightforward man arrived and discovered that the reason the pilot light went out is that something had been connected improperly. He fixed that and then showed me how to light the pilot light, which was quite simple. “That sure doesn’t match what Stan told me on the phone,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything,” the man said. “Nice guy, but clueless.”

I wrote the pilot light instructions on a piece of paper and clipped it to my invoice and put it in my file folder marked “House Receipts.” Which was a good thing, because Saturday night the bath wasn’t exactly chilled but it wasn’t hot either. Sunday afternoon I went downstairs, removed the metal safety rim, lay down on my stomach, and had a look. Sure enough, no pilot light. So I relit it. There was something very satisfactory about the sound of a miniature explosion after I’d held down the buttons and counted the seconds, per instructions.

Oddly enough, though, that’s not my complaint. Something was connected incorrectly so, after a bit of bitchiness from me, they came back and fixed it. And then the pilot light went out so I relit it. I am hoping the fact that there have been two issues in less than seven days is a coincidence. But what really pisses me off, for some reason, is the fact that the guy who did the incorrect installation left a couple of metal parts from the old water heater (I presume, and I hope) just sitting on the floor, and when I went in to my laundry room, which sits right behind the water heater, he’d just left the power cord for the washer draped over the dryer. Seriously, pick up after yourself.

Anyhow, I’m now in the process of finding an electrician. There are a couple of things I’d like to have fixed, or replaced, or reinstalled, and rather than picturing having the house torn down in order to determine why an outlet in my kitchen doesn’t work, I’m trying to visualize a nice strand of lights on the front porch, which I’m hoping, naively perhaps, to have up and lit by the longest night of the year, which is next week.

The purists

Did you about fall off your chair, or your barstool, or right out of your bed when you heard that our president went ahead and proposed extending W.’s tax cuts for the ultra rich? I’m currently on a Huffington Post hiatus, and I’m so tired of Tina Brown’s linking as many stories as she can to either Hillary Clinton’s eventual presidency or Prince William’s engagement or, if at all possible, both, that The Daily Beast is no longer recognized in my search bar, having been subsumed, when I type the letter “T” by … The Rotary Telephone. So I have no idea what they have to say.

But in Portland, people are pissed. He’s betrayed us! He’s sold out! He’s caving to the Republicans! It’s fun to rant and rage and talk about organizing and building some coalitions and maybe putting together another “third party” and raising some awareness here and there and maybe it’s time to really learn to hear each other and honor one another’s stories and have a shitload of meetings to ensure not only that everyone has a voice but that everyone is a stakeholder, and so on.

But this is a rerun, and it’s as pointless this time as it was when it was first aired.

That’s because the fact – the fact, the truth of the matter, the official record to which each and all have round-the-clock and round-the-calendar access – is that the largest single contributor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was Goldman Sachs. I’m sorry to be a bitch about this (more on that later) but if even a fraction of your brain believes that that donation and so many others were an act of benevolence meant to preserve the integrity of Democracy and free elections, you are hopeless.

Here’s my bone of contention: Obama is proof, I think, of the inherent value of having a president who understands the language. I am not joking or being even remotely sarcastic when I say that I celebrate his presidency every single time I hear his voice. But language, of course, can be aimed in any direction, and this week, I feel that Obama aimed his language at those “on the left” who supported him in 2008. This was done, I believe, to appeal to the people who are closer to the middle, people who were, from what I’ve read, actually conflicted about whether to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain and his tundra-tested running mate, a conundrum that I will not dismiss or criticize, but one that baffles me outright. (If you’re reading this and you were undecided in 2008, I mean no disrespect: It’s just that we have yet to meet, so I have yet to hear your side of the story.)

Having been on the receiving end of more than his fair share of smear campaigns, Obama certainly understands that one of the surest ways to win hearts and minds, not to mention votes and campaign contributions, is to identify an opposing group and then trash it. And trash he did: Many of us, myself included, oppose this extension of tax cuts. When all is said and done, this bit of holiday cheer will cost the government more than the 2008 stimulus the Republicans have leveraged, in one of the most amazing examples of political cartoonism I’ve ever seen, to portray Obama as a socialist. And those of us in opposition are, in the words of our president, “sanctimonious” and “purist.”

I’ll take sanctimonious – it’s true! – but purist? I’m no purist, I’m not even close. If I were I would have never voted for Barack Obama. If I were a purist it would have been impossible for me to listen to his high and mighty and thoroughly unconvincing – almost embarrassing, really – attempt to mimic black preachers in certain settings, his “unwavering support” for the homos to live as equals to him and his wife, his tough talk aimed at “the bankers” as they helped themselves to record-breaking bonus payments last year and hundreds of other examples of his “messaging” as anything other than audience-driven fundraising tactics. That knowledge, and that knowledge alone, if I were a purist, would have prevented my hand from blackening (pardon me) the circle beside his name on the ballot.

Holiday lights in Northeast Portland

Over the weekend I bought a strand of red and white lights. The bulbs on this particular strand are glass, they are not LED and they are shaped (forgive me for this) very much like a butt plug. These are the kind of lights with which we adorned our Christmas tree when I was a youngster, and I love them. I hoard lights for some reason, so when I bought this particular strand, I needed a reason, a justification. These lights would be hung out on the front porch for the duration of the holiday season, I thought. That, of course, didn’t work out, but that’s okay.

Because over the past few weeks, the Portland police have been putting on light shows in this neighborhood that put to shame even the most intricate of holiday displays.

One Monday afternoon a few weeks ago I was on the phone with a friend, when an onslaught of blaring, glowing cop cars descended on the corner that’s not more than 50 feet from the window in front of my desk. Holy shit, I thought. I told my friend I better go and went to the opposite side of the house to have a better look. I stopped counting police cars at 12, and there were many more. Then, not one ambulance but two, and a fire truck, and then two of those vans with satellite equipment on top and television logos on every other surface. There were news cameras set up on the side street, so I put my jacket on and went outside.

I have never heard the word “motherfucker” sequenced quite so skillfully, with so much variety in tone, placement and volume. I asked the painfully pretty television reporter what was going on, and he said that they’d heard on their scanner that there had been gunshots. Indeed. Grandma, it turns out, blasted Grandpa in the stomach; Grandpa, whose very shapely torso was drenched in blood, finally, after 45 minutes of nonstop mother-fuckering, was brought out to the street on a stretcher. Before he was loaded into the ambulance, true to his neighborly and friendly nature, he waved at the cameras. And with that he was gone. From what I’ve heard, via Grandma’s very loud cell phone calls, which she conducts outside for some reason, he’s doing quite well – in detox.

The other night I could have sworn I’d been woken up by the sound of sirens, but happily so because the noise was followed by that swirled, kind of disco-esque display of red and blue swooshy lights that danced up and down and on and off the walls, the floor and the ceiling. I asked a couple of neighbors if they’d seen or heard anything. No, they had not. A dream, I thought.

But, just as some time passed, here, on my corner, some lights flashed: it was a transition. On Monday night there was an even better display. Reds and blues and perfectly round spots of white danced behind the oatmeal-colored curtains in my living room. I stood in front of my couch holding a plate with two pieces of toast slathered in butter and honey, getting ready to sit down. I peered out the door and saw that the police cars were in the intersection, up the street, down the street and, based on the blare of sirens, many other places as well.

Outside, I learned a couple of things. First, the noise and lights from a few nights before had not been a dream. There had been a high-speed chase at 3 in the morning, which was witnessed by one of my neighbors, who was, he explained, still up working on his computer. And second, all the commotion on Monday night was in response to a robbery. I stood outside and watched the cops talk a guy out of a white car and command him to take three steps back, then three steps forward, then put his hands on his head, then kneel down on the pavement, and on and on. Then a dog barked and, guided by so many high-powered flashlights that it reminded me of a vigil, began to sniff at the trunk of the car.

The first story was that someone had robbed someone at gunpoint on the sidewalk. Then, someone had robbed Walgreens. Then, of course, both: There had been two robberies, both at gunpoint, and the suspicion that the neighborhood is going straight to hell is turning out to be truer than any of us had imagined. But on Tuesday morning there were news reports that what had actually happened even more seasonal than the festive lights courtesy of law enforcement: Someone had pointed a gun to the cashier’s head over at the Christmas tree lot at Safeway, and then made off with an undisclosed amount of cash. The guy whose car was searched a block from my house turned out to be, in fact, the wrong guy, so the police are still looking.

An accomplishment

At 9:30 on Sunday morning, I sat at my table with my coffee and read two words that caught me a bit off guard: THE END. To the southeast there were low, severe streaks of cloud through which the sun burst, off and on, off and on. It was brutally cold (by Portland standards) and windy. Finishing War and Peace left me a bit discombobulated. It was a little sad, in the way that the end of conversations you’re really enjoying are, but at the same time I felt quite a sense of accomplishment that may or may not have been misplaced. War and Peace is not as “hard” as its reputation, it’s just really detailed, and really long. So part of the sense of accomplishment I felt has to do more with me than the book: back when my vocation was getting liquored up every day and night, I couldn’t have even dreamed of finishing such a book. I probably couldn’t have even started it. That’s my own individual circumstance, which, as you’ll see if you ever read War and Peace, is, in an oversimplified, boiled-down sort of way, the book’s main point. Historical events – and that includes, among other things, wars, elections and marriages and divorces – are not the result of a grand, careful master plan but of random chances and circumstances set into motion by random individuals, some of whom are accurately portrayed by history, most of whom are not.

Does that theme require 1,200 pages? I have no idea, but I thought War and Peace, as a book, and the reading of it, as an experience, were well with the time and effort, and here are a few reasons.

First, it’s written by someone who knows his way around the language and knows how to populate the landscape of his theme with people. Even though it’s long and broad, there are only about 10 main characters. I was surprised at how often I would read a chapter, close my book, and then, while washing the dishes, or paying the electric bill, or filling a plastic bag with red lentils in the bulk section at the grocery story, find myself wondering what was going to happen to Natasha, and Sonya, and Andrei and Pierre.

Second, the experience of reading War and Peace is good exercise. I worry about my brain and how certain parts of it have atrophied – or are at risk of doing so – as a result of spending so much time in front of a computer. War and Peace is 1,200 printed, dense pages. There is one illustration – a map of one of the battle scenes. There are no links, no pictures, no videos, no sound tracks, no pop ups. I read the book with my eyes, which absorbed the information and presented it to my brain, which, I’m happy to say, is still capable of translating words into images of my own making. Reading a book like War and Peace is the exact opposite of an Internet experience in that it requires focus and patience.

Third, the familiarity of it is truly shocking. War and Peace was written in the 1860s, and yet, on each and every page, there we are. In pursuit of power and wealth, people lie and cheat and steal and scheme and misrepresent when it serves their purposes. They fuck it up (pardon my language) and then, sometimes, they get it right. I’ve had this sensation with nearly every classic I’ve read (I have not read many), and I used to find the familiarity factor disturbing. Have we not learned a single thing? I’d wonder. Now, thanks to War and Peace, I have a slightly different take on it. Do you ever watch or read the news and find yourself disturbed by the rapid speed at which our standards seem to be declining? Well, they’re not: our standards have been plenty low for at least 150 years. So, while it’s regrettable that we haven’t learned from history, thanks to War and Peace, I can say that when it comes to scraping the bottom of the integrity trough, we’re no worse than our ancestors.

Fourth, finally and closely related, War and Peace seems to me an amazing portrait of what it means to be human. No other book I’ve read has evoked in me such a powerful feeling, as if it were a memory of my very own, a sensation that rose up and off each and every page, a message that’s simple but not, that’s transmitted through the century and a half since its publication, that, in the end, is as follows:

This is how we are.

Part two: disengagement

Shortly after I read the press release announcing Small Business Saturday, I noticed that many of my Facebook “friends” had decided to “Like” it. When a person clicks “Like” on a Facebook page, it’s announced to all of his or her “Friends,” and so I, trying to be a true “Friend,” started posting comments that were attached to the “Like” announcements. Unlike my blog posts, I try to keep the Facebook verbiage short and sweet, so my comments were along the lines of “Please keep in mind that this is sponsored by American Express and that businesses have to sign on with that company to participate.” Then I was accused, though nicely, of not “supporting” small businesses.

Nothing could be further from the truth. What I object to is people being deceived by the millions by wording that’s at best misleading and at worst false. If we made a conscious decision to stop receiving messaging and instead spent a few minutes actually thinking, naïve though it may sound, I believe we could be well on our way to bringing the corporate class to its knees, which is exactly where it belongs.

Here, then, are a few simple ideas that are too wordy for a Facebook comment, but not for a blog.

One: There is no reason to wait for American Express or any other company to advise you to support local merchants. There’s an amazing store down the street from me, for example, called Mr. Plywood. You pay slightly more there, but you get higher quality, you get better service, and the people who own the store are quite generous with the neighborhood. Plus, it’s close. One potential drawback is inventory, but if enough people asked for specific products, I have a strong suspicion that they’d stock it. With Mr. Plywood right down the street, why on earth are there pilgrimages to Home Depot and Lowe’s? In a word, marketing, which, as we know, works.

Two: When you shop at a small business, go out of your way to say that you’re not there as a result of direction, guidance or inspiration by or from American Express. Comments expressed by real people with real mouths who use real words are important. I’d bet that members of the marketing team that came up with the small business shenanigans is counting – literally, as in dollars – on people being rendered speechless, cocooned in the warm and fuzzy afterglow of Small Business Saturday. Somewhere, the holiday bonus for some rising, super-smart, super-strategic marketing superstar is riding on this campaign. Wouldn’t it be fun to help jeopardize it simply by speaking up and stating the obvious?

Three: Pay cash. I know plastic is more convenient, but it’s like a one-way superhighway for money to travel elsewhere, never to return. You get charged, the company you’re buying from gets charged, and the companies who offer us all this convenience get billions in bailouts when their greed, combined with our gullibility, gets the best of them. Go to your bank or your ATM and take out a certain amount of cash on a regular basis. That way you’re only paying one fee. Better yet, move your bank account to a credit union. It’s your money, and it’s your life. Why should you give a rat’s ass about creating “shareholder value”? If you’re short on cash, you could be really old-fashioned and write a check. It’s good to see your handwriting from time to time, and I think it’s time to reintroduce the youngsters to the concept of balancing the checkbook.

Four: I think we should all be really careful with the “Like” button on Facebook. As I understand it, when you “Like” something, you’re opening yourself and all of your “friends” to the individual or corporation – one and the same, according to current court wisdom – that sponsor the page. I apologize for “Like”[ing] Don’t Let Bristol Palin Win Dancing with the Stars and Gay Boys with Beards and a few others, but when it comes to pages with commerce at their core, I think caution is in order. More than 1 million people decided to “Like” Small Business Saturday, and given the deception at work, who could blame them? It sounded like a good idea, as marketing campaigns almost always do. But when it comes to Facebook pages dedicated to Best Buy, The Gap, Microsoft, Toyota and many others, the less cross-channel, cross-platform, light-touch engagement hocus pocus bullshit I’m participating in by refraining from one simple click, the better.

Part one: engagement

Although I didn’t have to invest much energy in looking, I have at long last found a perfect example of the truly sinister nature of what we call marketing. Before I delve into my story, a definition: marketing, as far as I’m concerned, encompasses all of the enterprises dedicated to telling you what you need, and why, and, most importantly, how your existence is lacking without it. Terminally, perpetually afflicted with self-fascination and greed, the practitioners of these endeavors spend lots of time and money trying to differentiate themselves from one another, but when it comes to misrepresenting the value of everything from microchips to new housing developments, communications, public affairs, advertising, political strategy, public relations – it’s all rooted in the same soil.

A few weeks ago I ran across something called Small Business Saturday. This was the day, I read, to support your local merchants, who live and work in the same community that you and your “loved ones” do. That’s suspect right there, I thought. It’s tired, unoriginal language, phrases that have been repeated in a million ways in a million formats. Much like the mostly mindless craze for any and everything the marketing team declares “green” or “sustainable,” this regimenting of sentiment around the folksy notion of shopping at small, locally owned businesses is, in my mind, little more than a stage designed specifically for the contortionists.

Small Business Saturday was orchestrated, managed and messaged by American Express. I’ve written and read many, many press releases, more than a few of which were issued with the sole purpose of distracting people from something else, but until the announcement of Small Business Saturday, I’d never read a release that included footnotes. So I read them, and there, amidst the tiny font, I learned that to reap the benefits of the campaign (which were quite slim, I think) a small business was required to sign on to accept American Express.

That, of course, is not cheap. In fact, it’s notably more expensive than accepting payment with plastic cards with other logos. The unadorned math of it is as follows: As people spend their dollars at stores that open onto sidewalks rather than malls, as they permit themselves the moment of grace that follows purchasing goods or services from a business that’s likely to donate to the little league team or the scholarship fund, what’s actually happening is that a greater portion of the purchase price is going not back into the communities where that money is spent but straight to the coffers of a global corporation.

That, my friends, is the essence of marketing: one thing is actually another.