I have never stopped wondering what motivates war correspondents.

The recent deaths of Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger’s colleague in the making of the remarkable Afghanistan documentary, “Restrepo,” as well as Chris Hondros, whose photos of the war in Libya are beyond startling, has me contemplating again the rationale for putting their lives at risk to tell a story. Perhaps, I am a coward; I never thought a story was worth dying for. Or maybe Hetherington and Junger and Hondros believe the story is worth the calculated risks. Dying might be compartmentalized and left out of their calculus but that seems unlikely. You can, of course, only tell the tale if you are living. Hetherington and Hondros died during an assault on the Libyan town of Misrata, and they became a story; a very sad one.

Casualty of War

Journalists in war zones provide invaluable information to cultures in conflict. Political opposition to the Vietnam War reached a level of criticality in part because of network television’s film cameras turning the conflict into history’s first “living room war.” Seymour Hersh’s reporting on My Lai meant that we all had to confront the horrors of what was being done in our name. Pick a war and there are names of journalists associated with its prosecution. They might be small print names in bylines from newspapers or high-profile reporters convinced there is romance and value in writing about our bloody battles. There are also reporters like Judy Miller, late of the New York Times, who did such a shoddy job of gathering information that she helped lead a nation into another bad war.

I wrestle with how a person makes a choice to take the risk of working in a war zone and where they derive personal value from the experience. I see the importance of the public service. I was in the streets of Washington, D.C. for several protest marches against the Vietnam War and I doubt I would have been driven to join the masses were it not for what I had read in the papers and seen on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. But why did the reporters who put their lives in jeopardy to provide me that information willingly endanger themselves? I realize, in one sense, the answer is obvious but in other regards it is less clear, psychologically, why one is willing to risk their chance to live to convey information.

Always in the Midst of Chaos

I was also in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador for a short time during those civil wars and considered myself barely functional. In the hotel, there were often correspondents and photographers drinking themselves into a stupor for various reasons. There were also more of them that were out in the jungle walking with rebels and government forces to try to acquire a story. The conversation at the bar frequently turned to the disappointment felt when crews returned from a week in the bush without any “bang bang.” The political context never seemed as important to some of these reporters as the drama of the gunfire.

I was particularly distressed by a late thirties TV photographer named Roberto, who worked out of Miami. He said he went from war to war, fight to fight, and could not imagine a different life.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why?”

“I can’t explain it,” he answered. “All I know is that the first time a bullet whizzes past your ear it changes your life.”

“Yeah, well, the first time it whizzes into your ear it changes it, too,” I said.

Roberto laughed. “I hear what you’re saying, my friend, but there is something addictive about this. It’s adrenaline and dramatics and everything. It’s like you’re living a movie. Plus, I make a hell of a lot of money.”

In the glory days of TV news, before cable and the Internet, photographers on international assignments and presidential campaigns were able to get their hourly pay scale to a level they referred to as “golden time.” The first 10 hours of overtime were paid at one and a half times the hourly rate, the next 10 at double time, and the subsequent hours were all at quadruple their hour wage, which came to be known as golden time because every hour after a certain total, even when sleeping, was logged at the big dollar tally. There is not, however, enough money at any scale to make such risks viable to those of us who consider ourselves even marginally sane.

Victims of My Lai Massacre

There is, however, no shortage of people willing to testify to the thrill of being a target. In “Restropo,” one of the US soldiers looks at Hetherington’s camera and says, “A firefight. It’s like crack. Bungee jumping or kayaking. Whatever. There’s no rush like being shot at.”

Martin Bell, a long time BBC correspondent, told me in Nicaragua that money had very little to do with the allure of combat reporting; it was a thing he almost could not name. Bell had stood in the streets of Managua as the Sandinistas and the Contras fought for control and the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza unraveled.

Felled on Camera

“It’s just anarchy that I love,” he said. “I know it’s stupid. And it’s dangerous. But the sense of anything goes, that everything is falling apart, is just intoxicating to me.”

I was staring up at a ridgeline on the Nicaraguan border and scrub brush and palm trees were turning into Sandinista rebels in my imagination.

“I don’t know, Martin,” I said. “I think you’re a little crazy.”

“Of course, you have to be. But that doesn’t mean the work isn’t important.”

Unequivocally, Martin was and is right. When Daniel Ortega formed a new government in Nicaragua, Bell became bored and moved onto the next conflict and then the one after that. In Bosnia, Martin Bell made history when he was injured by shrapnel from a grenade while doing a live report on BBC television. Such a thing had never happened before in broadcasting. The empathy for Bell was so great that he rode its crest to an electoral victory and became a Member of Parliament, and subsequently, a UK Ambassador.

The saddest of these war correspondent yarns, for me, is about Margaret Moth. I met her in sedate Austin during a session of the inane Texas legislature. How she came to cover such an undertaking as a state legislature, I will never know. She liked punk music and raves and dyed her hair jet black and chased men half her age, very successfully. Margaret was a New Zealander and had come to Texas to do TV news after hitchhiking around the world with her mother, taking tramp steamers from Third World countries to reach new continents.

"Completely, utterly, fearless"

She ended up at CNN and was in Bosnia when a sniper shot her through the window of a car that was clearly marked as conveying journalists. The round took off her lower jaw and all of her teeth. The network moved worlds to keep her alive and get her out of the country. Margaret underwent dozens of operations to reconstruct her face but she survived and could hardly wait to get back to Bosnia. The compromise with her editors was that she return to the Paris Bureau and take intermittent, instead of full-time assignments in the war zone. A bullet didn’t take her, though; Margaret was dropped by cancer.

I have worked around many war correspondents like Margaret. I know them and yet I don’t understand them. But I am grateful for their courage.

It has obviously changed the world.

American Made

Farah Pahlavi, who was married to the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, told MSNBC’s Kari Huus that she was hoping the uprising would happen “in spite of the dictatorship of the theocracy.”  Regardless of the nature of the current Iranian government, dictatorship is a precise description of the regime maintained by her late husband.  Shah Pahlavi, as even casual students of history are aware, was an American puppet placed in power by a coup, which had been orchestrated by Kermit Roosevelt, Jr, the grandson of the former president.

When the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was nationalized in 1951 by Iran’s democratically elected President Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, U.S. and British intelligence services set in motion a plan to install the Shah and overthrow the man who had been voted into office.  The historical rationalization was that Communism was afoot in that part of the world and the West was worried that the Iranian communist party might take control of Iran’s vast natural resources and assist the U.S.S.R.  The truth was the U.S. and Britain wanted Iran’s cheap energy and the Shah turned into a cozy lap dog that bought American weapons with his country’s billions while providing the oil needed by the West.

The Shah ran a frightful government.  He established SAVAK, a secret police service that was actually trained at an American university.  SAVAK tortured and killed thousands of Iranians over the course of Shah Pahlavi’s rule.  Dissent was brutally crushed.  Empress Pahlavi, almost pathetically, tried to describe her husband as a man “who didn’t want to keep his throne over the bloodshed of his people.”  This, obviously, is utter nonsense.  He killed an untold number of “his” people to keep his throne and it is one of our country’s great shames that we helped to facilitate his oppression.

The empress makes mention of how much the Iranian people “have suffered over the past 30 years.”  There’s little doubt that the mullahs have created a theocracy that does not allow for true expression of the will of the people and it is abundantly clear that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as brutal as any other dictatorial leader.  What the empress again fails to mention and is not asked about by the MSNBC reporter is the nature of the government run by her husband from 1953 until he was tossed out of his country by the Islamic Revolution in 1979.  There was no form of demonstration under the Shah, and mass protest was virtually unheard of until Iran’s religious leaders began to assert themselves a few decades into the Shah’s rule.

When the Ayatollah Khomeini led the revolt of 1979 and the U.S. Embassy was stormed, the anger grew out of decades of misguided American financial and political support of the oppressive Shah.  Iran’s politically oppressed were seeking an answer to his power and angry mullahs were the only ones willing to confront the strong man.  Iran’s youth has largely followed the religious leaders ever since those 66 Americans were captured.

Until the Internet.  And Obama.  The more Iranians see of the west and America and our new president the more they want what is offered by a better form of democracy.  Their protests now are as much about a lack of real choice as they are the bastardized and corrupted electoral process in their country.

They don’t know, however, whether they can trust America.  We have a poor record of performance with their country.  Iran’s educated population knows that Ahmadinejad is a lunatic and his rumblings against Israel and denial of the Holocaust are embarrassing absurdities.  They wonder, however, how the west can deny them the sovereign right to develop nuclear power, whether for peaceful or military purposes.  Even if they know their president is a fool with his claims about Israel, Iranians still see an acute hypocrisy in the fact that Israel is a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Israel also refuses to formally acknowledge it has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world but still receives unflinching support from U.S. leadership.

The Empress Pahlavi wrapped up her interview with MSNBC by saying she stands ready to help the movement for democracy in her home country.  Whether this is humor or irony hardly seems to matter; she is as oblivious to her history as we Americans are to our own past in Iran.  Her son, Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, has long said he hopes to return and lead his country some day.  His time in America has not been wasted, either.  He has learned to use the mighty lever of fear.  In Washington, D. C, speaking at the National Press Club Monday, he sounded like he was a graduate of the Dick Cheney School of Nuclear Fear and Sound Bite Fun when he said, “Fanatical tyrants who know that the future is against them may end their present course on their terms, a nuclear holocaust.”

The people of Iran deserve far better than another Pahlavi, Ahmadinejad, or Mousavi.  They also have countless reasons to be angry.

And a part of their rage belongs to us.

“I gotta admit,” the man said.  “I agree with him.  I don’t like him much, but I agree with him on this torture thing.”

I was staring at my Sam Adams and had not initiated a conversation.  I’d rather talk to Sam Adams than anyone who agrees with Dick Cheney on anything; especially torture.

“You think we should torture?”  He nudged my elbow and became impossible to ignore.

The man was wearing a Texas Rangers gimme cap, a blue denim shirt, and a pair of Dockers.  His belly was doing the middle-aged beer push over the rim of his belt and his eyes appeared scrunched up against his nose.  An open expression and a round chin made him look friendly, though, and I didn’t want to be rude.

“No sir,” I said.  “I don’t think we should torture.”

I was hoping this ended the discussion but the amber-colored liquid melting the ice in his glass was also warming him up to a talk with a stranger.

“Why not?  What if it was your kid they was gonna kill and torture would get the information so the Seals could rescue your kid?”

“It’s not very likely it would provide that information, sir.  My guess is that it would end up sending the Seals on a dead-end mission and they are not men to be trifled with.  I’d hate to get them mad.”

“Yeah, I know; you’re being funny.  But if it was your kid you’d want the terrorist tortured to get some truth out of him.”

Maybe, I thought, but right now I’m being tortured.  I looked down the long bar and there wasn’t an empty stool, nowhere to hide.  My flight was still two hours away and my work was completed and I didn’t want to unfold my laptop.  I just wanted to talk to Sam Adams and stare at the TV.

“The thing is, sir, it doesn’t get the truth.  It just gets you something to stop the torture.  When they figure out what you want to hear they just make it up and you waste a lot of time chasing after phantoms.”

“I think you’re wrong and the vice president’s right.”

“Maybe.  I’ve sure been wrong a lot in my life but I think the vice president’s been wrong more in the past few days than I have in my entire life.”

I took a big gulp of beer and looked back at the TV.  A glistening-lipped blonde with cerulean blue eyes was offering Rupert Murdoch’s daily interpretation of the endeavors of America and the wider world.  If only she were as intelligent as she was fetching.

“You don’t think America should torture, do you?”

He had turned on his bar stool and was staring at my right ear.  I raised my empty glass to let the bartender know I needed another and maybe another and another, depending on when the neighbor at my right was departing.

“Nope, I don’t.  Never.  Not ever.  Period.”

“Well, you’re wrong.  We gotta do whatever we need to do to protect ourselves and our families.”

“Sir, here’s the thing.  That doesn’t protect us.  It only makes us more enemies and W has planted a big crop of those for us already so the market is kind of glutted right now.”

My voice was steady and not confrontational.  I just wanted him to leave me the hell alone and go catch his flight back to Booger Hollow.  Turning back to the TV, I had to wonder why we were still talking about the merits of torture in my departure lounge bar or on news broadcasts.  What bothered me even more was that Dick Cheney was still in the midst of the discussion.  I realize he’s a citizen and has a right to an opinion but I don’t understand why editors still put him in front of cameras and ask him questions.  Of course, I was watching FOX.

“I think you are wrong.  That’s all.  You’re just wrong.”

“Yes, I reckon you’ve made that clear.”

“But tell me why not.  Why don’t you think we should?”  The man’s face had gone soft and his voice sounded slightly tremulous.  Alcohol may have launched new emotions.

“Sure.  I’ll tell you and I’ll tell Cheney and W and any other person who would torture a person in my name or my country’s name: it’s immoral to torture another human being for any reason.  I think it’s immoral to torture any living creature.  Let’s remember who we are and how we got here.  We got moral power in the world by being a force for right and good.  America doesn’t torture people.  That’s what Nazis did, for god’s sake.  Why would we for a second let ourselves become anything like the vilest types of humans that ever lived?”

My argument sounded convincing to me and my barstool buddy sat silent.  He scratched at his chin and ordered a scotch and water.  Please don’t let him be on my flight, I thought.  He’ll try to sit next to me.

“You know, if it were up to me,” he said after a few minutes of silence, “I’d stick a red-hot branding iron on their ass until they talked.  Let ‘em suffer.”

“It’s probably a good thing it’s not up to you then, I suppose.”

This time he spun quickly on his stool and I turned immediately in his direction almost instinctively as if I were going to defend myself from a swing.  But he stuck out his hand in friendship.

“I sure respect what you’ve got say but I also respectfully disagree.  Our country’s in danger and we’ve got to do some new and different things to protect ourselves.  I know it ain’t right but I think it’s worth the risk to get whatever information we can from the bad guys.”

I shook his hand.

“Well, I’m afraid you are wrong, my friend.  It just slowly turns us into bad guys, too, and to hell with anyone who ruins the name of my country by using torture to protect it.  If you have to torture people to save something then you need to look hard at what you are saving.”

In a minute we were both zoned out on the television again and then he just laughed.  I wondered what was funny until he said, “I’ll bet we can agree on something.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll bet you are as happy as I am ol’ W ain’t still in there makin’ things worse.”

“Ha.  Finally, common ground,” I said.

We touched our glasses in a toast.  And then I bought him a drink before he left for his plane, which, fortunately, was not the same flight as mine.

The news that America’s policies toward Cuba are changing will further humanize our country while de-humanizing Castro’s government. We minimize our political gains with the people of Cuba when we further their hardship under Castro by not allowing any type of transactions with the U.S. President Obama’s loosening of restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuban families with relatives in the U.S. will further weaken the hold of the Castro brothers’ regime on the island.

The Cuban people have managed to retain great hope through all of their sadnesses. During my only trip to the island in the early 80s, there was consternation about the traction being gained on the global sugar market by NutraSweet. Cuba’s economy was reeling. I found it both troubling and funny that Reagan’s America was afraid of a nation that might be brought to its economic knees by an artificial sweetener.

The embargo first imposed on Cuba by John Kennedy has not punished the politically powerful in Cuba; it has only harmed the workers and the families and the people who would otherwise love America without reservation. I understand the misplaced notion that if we do business with Cuba we will help their economy thrive and the Castros will receive credit and political power but the Cuban people are considerably smarter than most U.S. policy makers believe. As our entourage was led around the island by “minders,” we were made welcome and consistently told by everyone from business owners to cane cutters and master cigar rollers, “We don’t blame the people of America. We understand your government does things you don’t like.”

I thought, “Yeah, that happens now and again.”

Our conflict with Cuba is also a product, in many respects, of our government’s previous behavior. The U.S. propped up Fulgencio Bautista for many years as he reaped fortunes off the backs of campesinos chopping sugar cane, cutting tobacco, or distilling rum while he also allowed the American mob to run casinos and provide him with a big slice off of the top. Dictator Bautista imprisoned and tortured as many or more people than has Castro. If people had not been so poor and suffered for so long as they watched the rich Yankees come play on their island and give more money and power to Bautista there might not have been the political support for Fidel and Che when they crossed the gulf to start the revolution.

Cuba remains locked in a great time warp today. 1959 American automobiles still roll the roadways because that was the last year the U.S. allowed imports prior to Castro’s control. However, a few multi-national corporations from America use foreign subsidiaries to sell items like refrigerators and appliances to the Cubans when they are shipped from factories off sovereign U.S. soil. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a market since most Cubans don’t have an income to afford such luxuries as modern electronics. The old Riviera Hotel, once gloriously towering over the seawall in Havana, is mildewed and in need of rejuvenation. The city has an almost ancient ambiance that leaves a visitor feeling time is flowing backwards and almost nothing will jar the culture or the economy into the contemporary world. Regardless, there is also the sense that Cuba’s intellect and energy and belief in itself is a potential waiting for an opportunity.

True freedom and capitalism are likely to sweep the island like an intoxicant if America ever gives Cuba actual business reconsideration. The country could balance its budget on a few shipments of rum and cigars to New York and Chicago. In fact, more progressive political leaders from some of the U.S. agricultural states have been pressing since the B**h administration to begin limited trade. Cuba can also be a big market for American products. Perhaps, the simplest way to change Cuba’s political system is to give the populace a little sample of our economy. President Obama’s first steps are cautionary but they are longer than any of his predecessors in about a half century.

America’s policy toward Cuba has been rank hypocrisy. In the years since the embargo was launched, we have done business with bad actor power abusers like Saddam Hussein and have courted the friendship of Saudis, whose money and sovereign soil gave sanctuary to most of the villains that attacked us on 911. As we consider Cuba today U.S. oil companies are lusting over the oil fields in Iran even though we despise that country’s government. How many killers and dictators have we had commerce with since the beginning of the embargo? Isn’t it safe to say policy would have changed long ago if Cuba had been sitting atop oil reserves? The genocides in Rwanda and Burundi might have been checked by American power had those countries produced a more alluring resource than yams. We don’t pick up our guns for yams.

The people of Cuba have suffered far too long. Give them a taste of freedom’s honey and watch what happens.

Mended Man?

There is an attorney who can get to the bottom of our current financial crisis and lay the blame and guilt at the foot of the culprits. He has already gone after fraud at AIG, brought down the Gambino crime family’s control of trucking and garment industries in New York City, prosecuted predatory lenders, computer chip price fixing, securities frauds, and sued Richard Grasso, the former head of the New York Stock Exchange for not fully disclosing his $140 million deferred compensation package.

Eliot Spitzer, phone home.

Spitzer would make an ideal federal prosecutor for the government to go after all of the people who sold the ponzi scheme known as derivatives or Credit Default Obligations or Credit Default Swaps, which were bound to end with the last buyers in line having the pyramid of paper collapse on their heads, and then all the way down the row to the sellers and investors. The former governor of New York has the resume’ as attorney general and serving in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and, in both capacities, he concentrated on white collar crime.

Name one person better qualified to get to the bottom of what happened on Wall Street, prosecute the bad actors, and help design laws that prevent a recurrence. There is no one more ably suited for this critical task. Of course, the Obama administration isn’t talking about a federal prosecutor but there seems little doubt we are in need of legal scrutiny regarding bonuses, buyouts, salaries, and, indeed, even a deconstruct of the derivatives market and how these contrived instruments were allowed to morph into the hairy monster that ate America.

I don’t want to hear about Spitzer’s moral lapse. I live in a country where my former President showed similar bad judgment, many members of congress conduct themselves poorly with regards to matters sexual, and the entire population has human failings. I don’t condone Spitzer’s behavior but I also don’t believe a man with his education and experience needs to be permanently marginalized by a culture and an economy that needs his insight and skill. American society has made an accommodation that allows, rightly or wrongly, for a distinction between an individual’s personal conduct and their professional performance. Washington and most of the corporate offices in this country would be empty structures if we had not made this compromise. We are human beings; we screw up and need redemption.

Let’s give Spitzer another shot. Put him on this task of getting to the bottom of what went wrong on Wall Street and how our retirements did the amazing disappearing act. As an example of his tenacity and skill, consider what he did regarding mutual fund abuses way back in 2003 when we were all flush with excitement about our thrumming economy. Spitzer knew people were playing games and running scams to make things better than possible with natural market forces. Using arcane practices known as front running, late trading, and market timing, Bank One, Putnam Investments, Prudential Securities, Invesco, Janus, and Bank of America were providing benefits to some of their big investors using practices considered to be fraudulent and unfair by the SEC. The feds investigated in the wake of the work conducted by Spitzer’s team and these fancy fiscal maneuvers were shut down. The heads of several significant mutual funds resigned in disgrace.

The man knows what to do and where to start looking. Why would we not put him on point to help taxpayers and the government better understand what has just transpired? Don’t we need to know or are we afraid to learn that the pirates are still in control of the high seas?

Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about American lives. There are second acts. In fact, life in America is all about second acts. If ever there were a culture that offered redemption and renewal and loved a comeback, it is ours. We enjoy seeing people fall from high places but we seem to be pleased even more when they pick themselves up, mend, and get on with other challenges because we know, as Papa Hemingway wrote, they have become “stronger in their broken places.”

Eliot Spitzer’s broken place is healed. Let’s put him back to work.

]]> http://www.moorethink.com/2009/03/19/a-second-act-for-spitzer/feed/ 3 http://www.moorethink.com/2009/03/18/the-death-of-a-brand/ http://www.moorethink.com/2009/03/18/the-death-of-a-brand/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 07:08:31 +0000 Jim http://www.moorethink.com/?p=242 [...]]]> There is an old saw in marketing and public relations that if you don’t quickly brand your company’s products and services the public will brand them for you. Whether that brand ends up being good or bad becomes secondary to the fact that you are not likely to ever get out from under the image the marketplace has provided.

Funeral for a Brand

The new adage we are likely to see adopted will say something along the lines of, “When the president of the United States starts bad mouthing your brand, it’s not going to survive.”

AIG’s predicament will be studied for years to come in marketing and communications classes. When the company decided to pay out millions of dollars in retention bonuses after seeking billions in bailouts from taxpayers, there was probably nothing the greatest crisis communications expert in history might have ever done to manage the situation. AIG’s first step was to insist that it had contractual obligations to pay and this is factually correct. The company had signed deals to keep critical employees in the competitive financial products division. However, the people getting these bonuses are precisely the same individuals who created the nonsensical derivatives that turned America’s economy into a stick of butter in a microwave.

If you were consulting the company and were sitting in some of those meetings after the public had learned of the bonuses, what might have been your advice? According to most reports, the checks have all been delivered, even to several people who had already left AIG. The source of the company’s money, even though it came from taxpayers, seems to be irrelevant to the legal obligation to pay the derivatives traders. AIG executives had a choice to violate a contract and not pay or to anger the taxpayers who had just given the company a hand. Had they refused to pay they were almost certain to have lost every court case filed against them for contract violations.

The morally correct decision would have been to not pay and then consult with legal advisors for the company and immediately begin discussions with Washington. There may have been job performance language that would have enabled a refusal to pay based upon the failed derivatives markets. Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to make those choices and now the company is faced with a firing squad on the left and a gallows on the right. There is nowhere to turn that does not suggest an ugly fate. There’s no spin to be spun.

There is talk in Washington of designing a tax that speaks directly to the bonus structures of these traders in an attempt to return the money to taxpayers through a circuitous route. In one of the bailout bills coming out of the capitol, there was also an amendment that would have prohibited the paying of these bonuses or at least would have taxed them at a level that net profits to the failed derivative traders would have been minimized. The amendment was mysteriously stripped from the bill so nothing has happened preventively, and AIG is doomed.

There is, quite frankly, nothing a crisis communications expert can do to mitigate AIG’s situation, which is why you have seen the company and its executives remain decidedly silent. First, they run what amounts to one of the world’s greatest financial scams and help send the U.S. economy into a state of collapse and then they ask taxpayers to save their company because it is so important to America and the world that it can’t be allowed to die and then they use that bailout money to provide bonuses to the precise individuals who drove the company and the country off a cliff. How can that be fixed, either in reality or perception?

It can’t. No matter what a communications expert advises an AIG executive to say, it is too late; actions have outstripped any ability to undo harm. Anything anyone says will be a bit like what Texans describe as “puttin’ earrings on a hawg; there’s some ugliness there ya just can’t hide.” Consequently, AIG is dead. The company may continue to exist in some form but the brand must disappear. AIG is a brand that will forever belong to the company that screwed up the economy and then used taxpayer money to give bonuses to the screw ups. That is their brand through eternity. They will never get out from under that nor will they recover from a president saying bad things about their decisions.

RIP AIG.

As SMU struggles with the notion of being associated with the most profoundly failed president in American history, Mr. B**h’s friend Karen Hughes is talking about classes that might be taught at the Freedom Institute. What kind of classes? Cooking classes? How to cook intelligence. Waterboarding 101. What kind of recipes, Karen? Take a pinch of distortion and puree all the facts and mix in a large fruit bowl of lies and stir until the world is on fire?

The actuality of what the B**h gang hopes to achieve on the SMU campus is a kind of legacy campaign. They are creating a new facet of what Sidney Blumenthal described as “the permanent campaign.” After leaving office, the president’s next campaign is to exert control of how history will judge his time in office. There seems to be little doubt that the “Freedom Institute” will be working to change how history and time view B**h. What we are going to have back in the Lone Star state is a kind of academic version of both Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans or the White House Iraq Group. Both of these facilitated the Iraq War by cherry picking intelligence and then spinning it out in webs of fear. The Freedom Institute will be designed, however, not to “cook” intelligence but to “cook” history.

Who’s going to want this job, though, of running this institution? W is sort of the 16 year old whose daddy bought him a hot new car and he has lots of friends until he totals it and they all decide he’s not worth hanging out with unless he’s got wheels. B**h continues to insist that history will judge him differently years after he and his constituents have slipped away into the ether of mortality. He’s wrong, however, because there simply is no contradictory evidence to be exhumed that he isn’t history’s most profoundly failed of presidents. In their search for someone to lead the “Fantastic Freedom Institute” the B**h believers will likely have to settle for someone like Alberto Gonzales, the persistently unemployed former attorney general whose memo insisting the Geneva Conventions against torture were “quaint.” His analysis sent American policy into a moral spiral, which is a perfect resume’ for the Freedom Institute.

Even people without the slightest sense of irony have to be giggling about the idea that the W gang is going to be pursuing the truth on the campus of an institution of higher learning. The currency in the marketplace of ideas at SMU is about to be devalued by the B**h attempts to prove he was right and the rest of the world was wrong. SMU cannot expect any more free thinking from that B**h institution than was ever proffered while he was in the White House. If, however, any independent scholarly work were ever to be conducted at the B**h Library or Freedom Institute, my suggestion for the most worthy project might be a thesis on how people arrive at a willingness to sacrifice their country’s economic and political vitality for the sake of their own power and vanity? Not a new story, of course, but one still worth understanding.

The B**h team is insisting that SMU, the university which is going to house the library and institute, have no administrative approval on curricula or any projects to be conducted as part of the Freedom Institute’s function. This condition contravenes the relationships between presidential libraries and other universities, which historically have given free access to scholars and researchers and allowed them to reach their own conclusions. While these protocols might be exercised at the Bush library, the Freedom Institute to be associated with the library has no intention of adhering to any university controls or guidelines.

The donors and the founders of the Freedom Institute seem to have no compromise in them with regard to SMU’s standards for rigorous academic research. Their unrelenting approach on this means the Freedom Institute is a tacit admission by B**h and his people that they got it wrong and there are years of work ahead of them in trying to create documents and theses to offer alternative interpretations of their many failures. They are going to try to “cook” history precisely the same way they cooked intelligence to launch a war in Iraq and the way they cooked it to deny global warming and…….

Bush needs to return to his ranch and concentrate on chopping down cedar trees instead of the truth.

The King of Social Media?

There are few cultural shifts whose timbre and tone rumble down through the ages. But this whole social media movement has me wondering if we aren’t in the midst of a shift no one saw coming or has yet to define. I am in Las Vegas where the big brains of social media are gathering to explain its power to us lesser lights in the web’s firmament. Just as I was launching into Web 2.0 I am going to a conference where Web 3.0 is being outlined and clarified. What the hell? Can I catch my breath before we start the next interval?

The uninitiated are probably not going to be reading an article of this nature but let me simply say that social media generally encompass online functionalities like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, personal web sites, and the various services that promote and link them together into a semi-cohesive communications network of individuals. The notional value of this is to drive an increase of awareness in either a person who has something to say or a company that has a product or service to sell.

But it’s not that simple. It never is.

Very few people have been able to use social media to make money or move themselves into the role of cultural leaders in terms of thought and communication. The challenges are far too great when even your parents (well, not mine) have Facebook pages and your high school teacher is “tweeting,” (nope, probably not mine.) In my estimation, social media is very much akin to a stadium full of people jumping up and down trying to get the “kiss cam” to find them and put their mugs on the jumbotron. How does a person or a business actually stand out and succeed in such an environment? If everyone has a Facebook page or a fan page, or is on Twitter, or has a web site or a Word Press blog, how do we distinguish value from noise and what is meaningful communication?

I don’t usually ask a lot of questions when I write because the people who read anything I write generally want at least an allusion to an answer but on this matter I have none; I’m looking for a few. As an example, one of the people I am “following” on Twitter (I agreed to follow him because he was flattering regarding my writing; pretty pathetic,) seems to never do anything beyond crank out 140 word “tweets.” I have logged onto my Twitter URL and have had to wade through pages of this guy mentioning that he is going to take his daughter here or is writing this or even that he is going to bed. I don’t need this information to attain full functionality in my life. A woman he communicates with (another “love your work” person who I agreed to follow) writes the limited 140 character messages on every topic from high desert weather to her dog’s diet and what she is thinking about doing with her hair. Do we need this kind of facility? Just because we can communicate constantly and instantly doesn’t mean that it is necessary.

The only person I know of who is doing very well with social media is a former PR guy turned public speaker and social media guru named Peter Shankman. Shankman developed an email list serve known as HARO, which is the acronym for Help a Reporter Out. Reporters looking for source interviews send Shankman info about the type of people they want to interview and how to contact them and then Shankman zaps out the email to about 65,000 people. This is more than enough to make a lot of us wistfully wish we had thought of the idea but Shankman does better by selling each email, three times a day. Sponsors get a glowing paragraph of endorsement at the top of the email with their URLs included and that’s about the sum of what they purchase. Shankman, wisely, gets a premium for his ads and endorsements and makes more in a day’s worth of emails than many middle class wage-earners knock down in a month. Reporters wanting a more immediate response on deadline ask Shankman to tweet their requests on his Twitter account.

I have suspected Shankman of inventing social media to make himself rich. He has a maximum number of friends on Facebook with 3000 and has about 4000 more in cue while he rants about the incompetence of the FB platform. Meanwhile, last time I looked Shankman has 33,000 plus people following him on Twitter. As charming and competent and engaging as he must be, there’s little doubt that his reputation would not have spread this far without social media.

Shankman’s an anomaly, however. The bigger challenge confronting social media is how to make it work for businesses. If you are my client, I need to find a way to connect you to my web site or my Facebook page or get you to check my Twitter account to see what my company is doing today or even get you to read my blog. This is not a simple task.

Shankman is keynoting this convention I am attending in Las Vegas and I’m sitting through numerous sessions on how to use this technology. I assume I will learn much. I was pleased to read in the advance literature about Sabre’s new in house social network that has 6500 of the company’s 9000 employees engaged. Further, they add, “Even people in their 50s are getting involved.” We do that. And sometimes we take charge – without even being asked.

Watch your back, Shankman.

I chose this return migration as the topic for an amateur song-writing contest with my friend Jack Holt. Amateur, of course, is the most important word to remember as you read these lyrics.

Goin’ Back to Texas

Got my notice just last Friday

Said the graveyard’s got to go.

Put the house up on the market.

Asking price is way too low.

Grandpa went north back in 50.

Tired of choppin’ cotton rows.

Now this line is barely movin’

And there’s nowhere left to go.

(Refrain)

But we’re goin’ back to Texas

Warm air that’s filled with song.

We’re headin down to Austin

Where dreams can still grow strong

Across the Brazos by mornin’

Texas hard times never last too long.

My daddy earned an honest dollar

We set this nation on a roll

Men in suits just got too greedy

Dumped our country in a hole.

Buildings now are standin’ empty

Our jobs all shipped away.

We’ve got no offers comin’

Just words ’bout brighter days.

(Refrain)

So we’re goin’ back to Texas

Where bluebonnets last so long

We’re rollin into Houston

Thinkin’ nothin’ can go wrong.

Over the Sabine by sunrise

Texas hard times never last too long.

My baby dreamed along the highway

A shining city by the sea

I promised to keep tryin’

Livin’ in the land of free….

(Refrain)

Yes we’re goin’ back to Texas.

We’ve found a hopeful song.

We’re ridin’ into Dallas

Knowing nothin’ will go wrong.

We crossed the Red at sundown

Texas hard times never last too long.

More than a decade ago, I spent some time in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez with a couple of TV crews. I had long been fascinated with the border culture after living in Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley and lately had been wondering if the stories about the drug problem were embellished. A colleague prompted the trip by saying he was going to find out and I ought to come along and we could share our technological resources.

On our first day, we came across families on both sides of the border with gut-wrenching stories. Two parents sat in front of our camera in a hotel and told of how their daughter was swept up out of a parking lot downtown and disappeared. El Paso police and the FBI had no clues. A father described how his son and daughter-in-law were walking across the plaza in Juarez and two black Suburbans with dark windows stopped and men with machine guns pulled the couple inside and drove into the darkness. Neither was ever heard from again nor was their bodies discovered. They left behind three daughters that are being raised by their grandparents.

The two preceding anecdotes do not even begin to give a sense of what is happening in Juarez. In the past decade, estimates of the dead and disappeared range from 5 to 10,000. Single women without transportation, who work in the maquiladora factories, often take the bus to work the late shift and many are required to change buses at the plaza. If they are pretty and alone as they walk to their connecting bus, they are in danger of being snatched. Locals think the narco-trafficantes are taking what they wish, doing what they wish with the victims, and leaving their bodies in the desert outside of the city. Thousands have been found desiccated by the sun. While we were present doing our reporting, almost a dozen people were killed in assassinations, five in one restaurant.

The problem for Mexico is much greater, though, than even those sadnesses. Federal and state chiefs of police are being discovered decapitated and few survive in office more than a couple of weeks before they are gunned down in abject ignominy. The US State Department has issued various types of travel warnings for Mexico and there is reason to exercise caution but the danger south of the border appears to be in standing between the cartels fighting for business dominance and the law enforcement attempting to stop the flow of drugs and money.

The question, of course, is how close to anarchy is Mexico and how much blood is on the hands of those of us who live north of the border? An ex-pat friend of mine who lives in the mountains in central Mexico says there are simple issues for the Mexicans. Most are poor, hungry, and disenfranchised and often their only choice for an income is to get involved in the cash-rich enterprises. Actually, the option is described as an either-or equation, which, in Spanish is “plomo o plata?” If the narcos decide they need your assistance to grow or transport or take chances then they give you a choice between “lead or silver.” How hard is it to pick money over death? My buddy equates Mexico with Prohibition Era Chicago when Capone was lining the pockets of cops being paid barely enough to sustain their families.

Mexico’s tragedy is connected to America’s behavior. We are the grand market for marijuana and cocaine and brown heroin and that turns into about $50 billion in cash annually that goes back to Mexico. Drugs, my friend insists, are recession proof and a form of capitalism at its purest and as long as there is a demand there will remain a supply.

And on the matter of corruption, there is more than enough on this side of the Big River that requires attention that we are hardly able to cast judgmental eyes across the water. Starr County is famous for janitors and small business owners living in mansions and not many years ago a sheriff in west Texas worked out a deal for traffickers to leave a trailer parked on the local rodeo grounds. He made nice money for not noticing when it arrived, or disappeared, or inquiring as to what might be inside. The sheriff’s in prison now but he’s hardly the only person of trust that has made money violating the law on the US side of the border.

We also seem to be wasting our time and indulging in symbolic nonsense like busting the two-bit smuggler to make a point. But we ruin a life and do nothing to stop the problem. Why do we waste resources trying to bust every individual pot smoker or the casual user of something harder when the more relevant questions go ignored? Most likely, it’s because the political side of our culture wants to claim progress. But nailing the little guy one suspect at a time is not a method for ending the madness. Maybe there is nothing meaningful that can be done.

Is it possible the War on Drugs is over – and drugs won?

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