The Holdout

Do not give up under any circumstance.

— Japanese Imperial War Department

When it comes to Covid-19, I'm amazed at some Americans' lack of a grasp of the basics. It's like, as we used to say of clueless coworkers, "they didn't get the memo."

History's strangest case of missing the memo is that of Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda.

An elite member of the Japanese Imperial Army, Lieutenant Onoda was stationed in 1944 on Lubak, a tiny island in the Philippines.

When the Allies recaptured the Philippines that year, Onoda was ordered to retreat to the interior of Lubak and "harass the Allied forces until the Japanese reconquer the island.

“You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand,” the orders continued. "It may take three to five years, but we’ll come back for you, no matter what."

At home in the jungle—and willfully ignoring the Allies' leaflet-drops announcing Japan's surrender—Onoda undertook guerrilla strikes against the local Filipinos—strikes that would go on for 30 years.

In 1974, a dashing adventurer named Norio Suzuki announced that he would find the mysterious guerrilla fighter, Onoda. Suzuki indeed found him, sheltered in his hiding-place in the jungle, and persuaded the steadfast soldier that the war was over. 

A month later, Suzuki returned with written orders from the Japanese government directing Onoda to cease fire and—at long last—return to his home in Japan, which he reluctantly did.

NOTE: Tomorrow marks the 75th anniversary of the formal surrender of Imperial Japan.

All These Condemned

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 

― George Santayana

When I was a kid, it was routine to see people toss trash from the windows of their moving cars. Bottles, cans, cups, cartons, wrappers, bags, napkins, tissues, you name it.

It took a full-court mass media campaign—led by the packaging industry—to put an end to Americans' loutish behavior. The now-quaint Keep America Beautiful campaign sang out "Don't be a Litterbug," and we bought it (fines introduced by local governments helped).

Thirty years earlier, another mass media campaign—led by the Red Cross—was rolled out nationwide as the Spanish Flu decimated American cities. The even quainter Wear a Mask campaign spouted "Don't be a Mask Slacker." Americans bought it.

Our Executioner-in-Chief has resisted, mocked and politicized mask-wearing—and continues overtly to do so—with the result that he's condemned to death 183,000 Americans, with an additional 134,000—or more—soon to follow.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is poised to spend $250 million of taxpayers' money on a new mass media campaign that urges America to Reopen Now, despite virologists' warnings that Covid-19 thrives on crowds.

The better use of the $250 million would be to fund a campaign preaching "Don't be a Maskhole."

But, hey, what's a few thousand more Americans' lives, when an election's at stake?

Klepto

Donald Trump has always put America first and
he has earned four more years as president.

— Nikki Haley

THANK GOD the four-day pageant of parasites known as the Republican National Convention is nearly over. I no longer have to shield my eyes.

I don't know about you, but I can't take another montage of lies, slurs, fantasies and fascist propaganda.

Trump's stooges have a vision of America, alright: it looks just like Putin's Russia. A kingdom of kleptocrats.

And Trump is the Klepto in Chief.

Trump's niece would have us believe Trump is a psycho, and he is. But he's also a klepto. Big time. Bigly. HUGE.

He needs four—better twelve—more years to amass America's greatest fortune.

Bezos, Gates and Buffett—the schmucks—had to work to acquire theirs. Trump, as president, can just steal his.

Trump's convention's over. Now his campaign begins.

Queue the violin.

NOTE: September 8 marks the 60th anniversary of the theatrical premiere of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, movie history's Number 1 thriller according to the American Film Institute.

Suite Nothings

At the conventions, fella, everything goes.

— John D. MacDonald

I have been whiling away the lockdown reading John D. MacDonald's "standalone" thrillers, paperback potboilers from the late 50's and early 60's. 

It's no wonder Ian Fleming and French mystery readers loved John D. His prose is pungent and punchy, and his take on Americans' habits raises his work to the level of the "literary" writers of his day (think of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal).

A Key to the Suite, which earned John D the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, “examines the ferment of a big-time convention," according to the cover of the original 1962 paperback.

Corporate hatchet man Floyd Hubbard has been sent by the home office to a trade show. His mission: to dig up dirt on a has-been sales manager, Jesse Mulaney. Management wants Mulaney gone and knows his obsolescence is on full display when he attends trade shows.

But Mulaney's ally, Fred Frick, knows Hubbard has it in for his buddy, and plans to turn to the tables.

Frick hires Cory Barlund, a classy prostitute, to woo the family man Hubbard. He instructs Cory to bed Hubbard, then “make some horribly slutty embarrassing scene" in front of his coworkers—a scene guaranteed to send Hubbard running back to headquarters.

The gorgeous Cory rather quickly seduces Hubbard, but then feels sorry for him and tells him about Frick’s scheme. 

And that's when the fireworks start.

As a veteran of the industry, I'm captivated by John D's taut descriptions of trade shows and the goings-on behind the curtain—both the innocent and the vile.

You find yourself so on edge following the fates of the husbands, wives, whores and hoteliers who populate the pages of A Key to the Suite, you can hardly put it down.

It's gritty realism at its best.

Down for the Count

Last week, The New York Times listed 11 popular pastimes that, thanks to Covid-19, may already be "things of the past."

According to reporter Bryan Pietsch, you should no longer expect to see people:

• Blow out candles on a birthday cake
• Drag on a buddy's vape pen
• Let their kids jump into a ball pit
• Get a department store makeover
• Play in an escape room
• Drink at a crowded bar
• Sip from a scorpion bowl
• Host a poker game
• Perform karaoke
• Shop for pleasure
• Shake hands, kiss, and hug

I'd add a 12th activity you're unlikely to see people engage in again:

• Attend trade shows

Wait, what?

Face-to-face events are vital.  

Schmoozing is irreplaceable. 

Trade shows mean business.

Yes, once upon a time, that was true. 

But the world has been turned upside down by a microbe.

It's hard to imagine a world without trade shows. 

But whoever thought trains, alarm clocks, encyclopedias, maps, drive ins, and pay phones, would disappear?

Eighteen years ago, SARS dealt the trade show industry a body blow; but the disease was contained swiftly, and the industry rebounded.

This time 'round is different. Covid-19 isn't SARS. 

The punches keep coming.

Bark

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do and bark. 

— Samuel Johnson

Only now has it occurred to me: I launched a new business in the midst of the pandemic.

Call me crazy. 

Speaking of which, last week I wrote about life's brevity in my new blog, also launched during the pandemic.

Frankly, fears about mortality—not income—drive me to succeed in my "encore" venture as a still life painter. (Certainly income's a driver, too; otherwise, I'd be neck deep in a hobby.)

Behavioral scientist Richard Johnson calls retirement a path on which "we are called to become more interesting, more curious, more personal, more diverse, and more meaningful in all that we do."

All that is true, but fails to pay respect to the "inner hound."

How about you?

Who's your inner hound? 

Will you sit and growl? 

Or come out and bark?

Excepted Perils

What fortune has made yours is not yours.

— Seneca

An antique mirror of ours crashed to the floor last Monday morning when the nail that affixed it to the wall failed. The mirror didn't shatter, thank heavens, but its ornate frame was mauled.

Our insurance adjuster made clear late Friday that no money would flow from the company's coffers due to this misfortune. As our policy proclaims, she said, shoddy nails are among the "excepted perils."

So now we have to decide whether to spend the stimulus check that may never arrive on the mirror's restoration.

Parting with money is never easy, but the mirror's an oddity. Years ago we named it the "Phil Collins Mirror," because the singer previously owned it; and it appears to be a relic of the World's Columbian Exposition. Gilded and gaudy though it be, the mirror's too pretty a thing to toss on history's trash heap. We can't in good conscience just put it on the curb for the garbageman.

Seneca sure nailed it (much better than I did the mirror): What fortune has made yours is not yours. The gift given can be withdrawn. 

Excepted perils can pulverize it.

Shinola

My father's frequent use of World War II lingo amused me when I was a kid.

One phrase he reserved for encounters with people he disagreed with went, "You don't know shit from Shinola."

My five-year old self had no clue what Shinola was, but context always made the meaning of the expression clear: "Your judgement's off."

Call me a procrastinator, but I have at last looked up the meaning of "Shinola."

Today, the name is owned by a luxury goods retailer; but in the now-faded past Shinola was a shoe polish manufactured in Rochester, New York.

Shinola was the brainchild of a Gilded Age chemist named George Wetmore, who formulated the stuff in his spare time, experimenting in a makeshift lab in his basement. 

The product was a hit, fast becoming the world's leading brand and making Wetmore fabulously wealthy. Manufacturing continued until 1960.

The luxury goods company bought the abandoned brand name in 2001, in large part because its investors thought my father's funky phrase would make a good tagline.

What'd they know?

Cry Baby

At a farewell ceremony at Los Alamos, physicist Robert Oppenheimer handed every member of his lab a silver pin stamped "A BOMB."

"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world," he told the team, "the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima."

A week later, Oppenheimer visited the White House, where he told Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman flew into a rage and ushered the "cry baby scientist" from the Oval Office.

Truman had missed Oppenheimer's point: he felt guilt not for Hiroshima, but some future nuclear genocide he imagined.

But other members of Oppenheimer's team weren't so imaginative. They saw the hard evidence of the effects of the the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it horrified them.

Fellow physicist Mark Oliphant, considering that evidence, would later lament, "During the war I worked on nuclear weapons, so I, too, am a war criminal."

The Perfect Icebreaker

I’ll give you justice, I’ll fatten your purse, 

Show me your moral virtues first.

— Bob Dylan

A meeting I attend—online, of course—begins every week with an insufferable icebreaker, a long round of introductions the point of which is to clarify everyone's pronouns of choice.

Tell me, who was first responsible for virtue-signalling via pronouns? Because I'd like to murder him. Or her. Or them.

Want the perfect meeting icebreaker? "Everyone please tell us in four or five words what value you add."

Virtue-signalling via "inclusive" pronouns, I can assure, adds no value; in fact, it destroys value. My time's limited. Please don't waste it with pronouns, when you should be telling me how you justify your existence. I don't care that you might be "gender fluid." And I care less you're a hero of the "wokeing class." I just want to know why are you here?

Recall some grammar: personal pronouns substitute for a specific person or persons. The personal pronouns are: I, we, you, he, she, and they. 

Simple.

Recall also, there are indefinite personal pronouns; they substitute for no person specifically. The indefinite personal pronouns are: all, another, anybody, anyone, each, everybody, everyone, few, many, nobody, none, one, several, some, somebody, and someone.

Again, simple.

Virtue-signalling via pronouns—let's call them "PC pronouns"—screws with grammar—and your head. 

Worse yet, it promotes what philosopher Martin Heidegger called the "dictatorship of the they" (Diktatur des Man).

Heidegger believed that, when you use indefinite personal pronouns, you unconsciously surrender to what's socially acceptable—to what's PC.

When you refer to yourself as, say, "everybody" ("Everybody knows TikTock is stupid") you are surrendering your authentic self—your individuality—and submitting to an invisible authority, to the "dictatorship of the they." 

According to Heidegger, indefinite personal pronouns secretly control the masses.

PC pronouns do, too.

I'm not just my genitals. And I'm not just he or she or they or X. 

I'm Bob. The name is Bob. Bob James.

Who the hell are you?