Fake News' Forerunner

When you strike at the morale of a people,
you strike at the deciding factor.

— William "Wild Bill" Donovan

You may recall that, in March, a web video circulated in which Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked fellow Ukrainians to surrender.

Forensics experts within hours identified it as a "deepfake," and the major platform providers deleted the video—but not until this Russian-made propaganda piece had reached millions.

When we think of fake news, we tend to think of Russia, Q-Anon, and—first and foremost—Fox News.

But the US government perfected the art of fake news—at the time called "black propaganda"—80 years ago.

In March 1943, against FDR's wishes, Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan formed the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Forerunner of the CIA, the OSS had been Wild Bill's brainchild. 

He modeled it after Britain's MI-6 to function as an immense spy ring comprising 13,000 soldiers and civilians, including celebrities like John Ford, Sterling Hayden, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood, Paul Mellon, Carl Jung and Julia Child (over a third of the spies were women).

But the Moral Operations Branch was something else. 

It was specialized.

A distant admirer of Joseph Goebbels, Wild Bill fashioned Morale Operations to be the US government's propaganda arm. 

Its mission: to sow doubt and distrust within the armies and civilian populations of the Axis nations.

You win a war, "by mystifying and misleading the enemy," Wild Bill said.  

"When you strike at the morale of a people, you strike at the deciding factor."

To this end, Morale Operations manufactured and delivered tens of thousands of pieces of fake news during World War II:

• It airdropped into Germany fake newspapers that claimed anti-Hitler resistance was on the rise.
  
  
• It airdropped flyers that showed the US produced a new warplane every five minutes—far more than Germany.
  
  
• It printed facsimiles of an official Nazi flyer after D-Day, changing the text to instruct German soldiers to shoot their own officers, should they order a retreat. The Germans unwittingly circulated the fake flyers among their troops.
  
  
• It mailed fake letters to the families of German soldiers that claimed their deceased sons were victims of mercy killings by Nazi doctors.
  
  
• It produced a fake weekly economics newsletter that suggested German businesses would prosper if the Nazi Party were removed from power.
  
  
• It instigated rumors designed to incite rebellion in Nazi-occupied territories. The rumors described successful revolts and assassinations that had never happened.
  
  
• It broadcast music programs on a fake radio station, embedding news reports of German defeats every hour on the hour. After Operation Valkyrie, the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, newscasters announced the names of hundreds of "suspects," hoping Germans would conclude that the plot was widespread than it actually was. The Gestapo executed 2,500 of the "suspects."

Even though FDR deplored such tactics, "Wild Bill" outlined them in the Morale Operations Field Manual, a 60-page handbook he published in January 1943.

The top secret manual stated that field personnel engaged in Moral Operations must be reliable Americans with "demonstrated proficiency in administrative affairs and the theory and practice of influencing human beings."

In their jobs, all field personnel would "within the enemy's country, incite and spread dissension, confusion, and disorder; promote subversive activities; and depress the morale of his people."

Triumphs in Publicity #315

The art of publicity is a black art.

– Learned Hand

Publicists are dodgy by nature, but some handle it better than others.

A publicist who appeared on CNBC in October deserves a medal for his artful dodge.

He appeared on the weekday program Power Lunch to puff up investing in the tech firm Upstart.

The publicist was clearly addled when the host asked him a simple question.

"What does Upstart do? What kind of company is it?"

The publicist paused, frowned, then pretended his audio had cut out.

He never answered the question, leaving the host to confirm that Upstart was a great investment.

Triumph #315: 

Asked an unwelcome question, he claimed jiggy audio.

Postscript: CNBC has since declared Upstart a "disaster." On Friday, its stock price fell 55%, placing the company among the week's "top five biggest financial losers," according to Seeking Alpha.

The Forgotten Lem Boulware

Ronald Reagan's insane policies helped create today’s Gilded Age.

— Ben Gran

They are ideologues. I hate ideologues. 

— Philip Roth

Historians credit Ronald Reagan's antediluvian notions of "big government" to the influence of the right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater.

They've forgotten the more important influencer: Lem Boulware.

Boulware was GE's head public relations man in the 1950s. 

While on the job, Boulware gained a national reputation for extolling laissez-faire, bashing Washington bureaucrats, and bullying labor leaders.

Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of raw capitalism, Boulware insisted.

Nothing.

Boulware's libertarian influence on American businessmen was so pervasive that it endures today, when a nonnegotiable stance—such as the price of a new car—is called an instance of Boulwarism.

The paranoid Boulware believed that American workers, abetted by New-Deal era intellectuals in Washington, posed a mortal threat to the business-owning class—and made no secret of it. He rang the reactionary's alarm bell at each and every opportunity, using GE employees like Ronald Reagan as his shill.

Reagan had befriended Boulware while the Hollywood actor served as the weekly host of "General Electric Theater," one of the nation's top TV shows for over a decade.

As they toured the country hosting press junkets, Boulware took it upon himself to "tutor" the dimwitted actor (Christopher Hitchens once called Reagan "as dumb as a stump" and his deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver told me that he "babysat" the puerile president).

Like a sponge, Reagan absorbed Boulware's Hobbesian views.

America, Boulware preached, was the land of opportunity, private ownership, free markets, and low taxes. 

Anyone who wished to call himself an American accepted those qualities—plus the fact that prosperity trickled down from the "beneficent" 1%. 

Resistance meant you were a goddamn Communist.

Boulware's Gilded Age views were known in Chamber of Commerce circles as the "philosophy of private enterprise."

The gullible Reagan, while traveling with the wily PR man, would listen to his teachings and swallow them whole.

The actor wasn't the only one of GE's 190,000 employees to imbibe Boulware's Kool-Aid during the '50s. 

Tens of thousands did.

The PR man made sure of that by circulating right-wing books among management and publishing four in-house magazines that explained the philosophy of private enterprise; arranging continual in-house workshops on the topic; and deputizing supervisors throughout the company to act as his mouthpiece.

To prepare GE's supervisors to carry his message, Boulware also circulated reprints of articles by the arch conservative William F. Buckley.

Boulware viewed his task as one of re-educating the serfs.

The simpleminded star of Bedtime for Bonzo was merely one of them.

Fluff

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

— Mark Twain

Verbose writing is frilly, flowery, frivolous and fluff-brained. A thing, at all costs, to avoid.

But some fluff is tasty.

Take, for example, the kind used to make a Fluffernutter.

The Fluffernutter was invented in by one Emma Curtis, who with her brother began making and marketing Snowflake Marshmallow Crème in 1913 in their home-state of Massachusetts.

The great-great-great-granddaughter of Paul Revere, Emma knew to keep watch on her competitors, of which there were scores.

To outdo them, she published brochures packed with recipes for marshmallow-crème treats, and advertised the brochures in newspapers and on radio. 

One, published in the middle of World War I, contained Emma's short recipe for the Liberty, a marshmallow crème and peanut butter sandwich.

The Liberty became her all-time hit.

But, sadly, Emma was not to reap all its rewards.

A local competitor, Durkee-Mower, trumped Emma, not by running ads, but by sponsoring an entire radio show. 

Named The Flufferettes, it aired in the half-hour spot before The Jack Benny Show and featured comedy, music, and recipes—including the recipe for the Liberty.

In 1960, Durkee-Mower's ad agency renamed Emma's sandwich The Fluffernutter, and rest, as we say, is history.

America's Most Hated Man

We were fighting for an idea, and somebody who realized that had to say it and keep on saying it until it was believed.

— George Creel

Before there was foxification, there was creeling.

Named for adman George Creel, the flack who ran White House communications during World War I, creeling means to repeat a lie incessantly, expecting listeners to buy it—which they usually do. 

Propaganda experts also call Creel's trick the ad nauseam tactic.

Creel made no effort to disguise his creeling, which he defined as "propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the propagation of faith.”

Lacking the broadcast technology Fox exploits, Creel relied largely on an early form of brand advocacy to weaponize his palaver.

He dispatched a 75,000-man army of public speakers he called "Four-Minute Men" to "meet customers where they are"—or were, in 1917.

The Four-Minute Men would stand up in the nation's movie theaters between reel-changes—which took four minutes in the day—and mouth the White House's lies.

They lied about German atrocities, the fairness of the draft, the urgency for rationing, and the value of US savings bonds, over and over and over.

Creel supplemented his army of brand advocates by distributing millions of garish posters, booklets and films that demonized the enemy and glorified us, insisting, "America must be thrilled into unity."

To do any less, Creel believed, was to let the Germans win.

"The printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, the telegraph, the wireless, cables, posters, signboards, and every possible media should be used to drive home the justice of America’s cause," he said. 

"Not to combat disaffection at home was to weaken the firing line.”

Historians haven't been kind to George Creel, calling him, among other things, a "warmonger," "petty tyrant," and "irredeemable villain"—even though his intentions might have been patriotic.

But, well intentioned though he be, Creel perfected the propaganda tool that bears his name—creeling—and handed it to the dybbuks at Fox.

For that, we can hate him.

Shot Heard Round the World

Drugmaker Pfizer announced today it has developed an effective vaccine against Covid-19.

Despite the good news, public health officials are insisting that anti-vaxxers, by refusing the new vaccine, are likely to weaken its role as a safeguard.

In only 10 months, Covid-19 has infected 50.5 million people, and killed over 1.25 million. 

The new vaccine could cut the number of infections by 90%, according to Pfizer.

But not if anti-vaxxers—estimated at 7% of the world's population—get in the way.

Anti-vaxxers have tried to sabotage vaccines before.

In 1956, the influential newspaper, television and radio columnist Walter Winchell told audiences—inaccurately—that Dr. Jonas Salk's new polio vaccine was a "killer" because it contained a live strain of the disease.

To rescue the truth, Elvis Presley agreed to be inoculated in public.

On Sunday, October 28, backstage before his second appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," Elvis posed for the cameras while two New York City health care officials gave him a shot of Salk's new vaccine.

Americans witnessed, close up, that the King was no anti-vaxxer, and agreed, right then and there, they wouldn't be, either. 

Thanks to Elvis' stunt, vaccine adoption rates surged, polio contraction rates plummeted, and polio outbreaks—once the scourge of every American summer—soon faded from memory.

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode V

Fifth in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining; in Episode III, that they sympathize with him; in Episode IV, that they believe he's a useful idiot.

I have one more theory.

The 70 million Americans who voted for Trump this week don't believe in Trump, because they don't believe in anything.

Like Trump, they're narcissistic solipsists. They believe nothing exists outside their own minds.

NOTE: It's tempting to ask. "What's wrong with America?" But realize only 2 in 10 Americans voted for Trump. The rest of the population—80% of Americans—did not. 

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode IV

Fourth in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining; and in Episode III, that they sympathize with him.

A fourth theory occurs to me: Trump's supporters don't believe his crap. They merely tolerate it.

What they believe are the century-old tenets of the GOP: low taxes, corporatism, and a strong state.

Trump's just a useful idiot.

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode III

Third in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining.

One more theory occurs to me: Trump's supporters—though themselves victimized—think he's the victim.

Blame it on sympathy, the emotion Adam Smith described as the part of our imagination that lets us picture what others feel.

Sympathy elevates our humanity, Smith says—and as every fundraiser knows. It allows us to feel for sick children, frightened refugees, and abandoned pets.

But it has its downside, the philosopher says, giving rise to irrational beliefs.

We sympathize with the dead, for example, imagining how miserable we'd be, were we dead. This "illusion of the imagination" gives rise to our belief in an afterlife.

We make a similar mistake, Smith says, when we imagine the "rich and powerful."

We imagine their perfectly happy lives, and relish that imaginary happiness so strongly we come to believe the rich and powerful deserve their wealth and privilege. So we grieve for "every injury that is done them." 

We could care less about the plight of the poor and powerless; thinking about them provides no vicarious joy.

The rich and powerful, however, aren't perfectly happy, Smith says; in fact, they're often miserable, cunning and vicious. 

But they know how to exploit our sympathy—our illusions about them—by continually claiming victimhood.

Sympathy deludes us, Smith says—and leads us to love our oppressors.

Sympathy: that's how Trump's fans can still believe his crap.

Don't miss Episode IV

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode II

Second in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters.

But another theory occurs to me: Trump's supporters think he's funny.

With the cancellation of The Apprentice, the Reality TV star has taken on a new role—that of the clownish "know nothing" Sergeant Shultz, the laugh-a-minute prison guard in CBS-TV's Hogan's Heroes.

Harold Livera, a high-school classmate of mine, once told me a story about his dad, who'd been a POW in a German stalag during WWII.

It seems the guards in the prison camp amused themselves one morning by knocking Harold's dad to the ground and kicking him in the stomach repeatedly. 

The beating caused such damage to his body that Harold's dad still suffered from his injuries in 1967.

Harold's dad was outraged that Hogan's Heroes was on the air. By turning a blind eye to Nazism, fans of the show gave permission to CBS to turn atrocity into comedy.

Trump gives his fans that same permission. His antics distract them from evil.

While his henchmen perpetrate crimes that result in thefts of the Treasury, destruction of the environment, the imprisonment of children, and the deaths of 400,000 Americans, his followers forgive Trump—because he's hilarious.

Trump can act with impunity because he's so freakin' funny.

What's the matter? You're not laughing?

NOTE: If you notice a physical resemblance between Shultz and Trump, just tell yourself, "I see nothing. Nothing!"

Don't miss Episode III.

How Can They Believe This Crap?

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

— William Blum

The Trumpian twaddle that pollutes my social-media streams is deadening.

The obvious question I always return to is: How can so many Americans believe this crap? 

Are they all stupid? 

Or are some stupid and others venal? 

Or are they neither, but brainwashed instead?

Flash back 160 years for the answer.

The Civil War, the greatest trauma to wrack our democracy, was waged because wealthy cotton planters—20% of the South's population—needed cheap labor. 

Those 20% convinced the 80%—one million Southern men altogether—to fight to the death to defend slavery. 

How in the hell did they do that?

Through three cadres of influencers, says Civil War historian Gordon Rhea.

In "Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought," Rhea asks you to "travel back with me to the South of 1860." If you do so, you learn:

• Southerners had no problem enslaving four million Blacks. They weren't real Americans, after all, but "immigrants," as Ben Carson says.
  
  
• Southerners were terrified Blacks would rebel. They'd not just "destroy the suburbs," as it were, but organize and form their own states. John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry Raid looked to them a lot like the BLM disturbances this summer.
  
  
• Southerners felt beleaguered by Abolitionists, the critical, cranky "Libtards" of their day.

Rhea says three loud-mouthed groups swayed the 80% of Southerners who owned no slaves to die, if need be, to perpetuate slavery:

• Clergymen. Before there was Fox News, clergymen were the South's broadcasters. Insisting the Bible was infallible, week after week they told churchgoers that slavery had the "sanction of Jehovah" and that Abolitionists were infidels who insulted God's word. One clergyman labeled the Abolitionists "atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, and Jacobins." (AOC, are you wincing?)

• Politicos. In late 1860, five states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—sent traveling envoys throughout the South to speak in public, hand out brochures, and place op-eds in local newspapers. Their message was one-track: Lincoln craved not merely emancipation, but equality for Blacks, which meant "the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Like today's Critical Race Theorists, Lincoln wanted to destroy the "American way of life."
  
  
• Local leaders. Local Southern leaders—who tended to be planters—told their communities that Abolitionists were "haters" and the enemies of "law and order." Abolition meant releasing "more than four million of a very poor and ignorant population to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” Defeating Lincoln, they claimed, was the only way to ensure the "heaven-ordained superiority of the White over the Black."

Don't miss Episode II.

The Mike and Joe Show

News policy is a weapon of war.
It's purpose is to wage war and not to give out information.

— Joseph Goebbels

For 40 years, the scientists at CDC have issued a weekly "morbidity report" to help doctors combat disease. Since April, the weekly report itself has been doctored by a Trump lackey named Michael Caputo.

A GOP flack at war with the "deep state," Caputo has no science creds; he's merely a low-end buildup boy—and an unseemly one, at that. 

After leaving a PR job in the army, Caputo linked up with Ollie North, helping spread American lies in Central America. He then studied advanced propaganda under Roger Stone and packed off to Moscow for six years to aid Vladmir Putin and his crooked friends. Caputo has spent the past 20 years peddling Tea Party candidates and staging paltry stunts designed to help Trump buy the Buffalo Bills at a rock-bottom price.

Now, as Trump's assistant secretary of public affairs for Health & Human Services, he's again doing the Emperor's bidding by cooking the books on Covid-19.

By way of self-justification, Caputo told Politico last week, “Our intention is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC."

Critics attribute Caputo's propagandist style to his mentor, but it owes more to Joseph Goebbels than Roger Stone.

While Hitler waged war, his propaganda minister kept a 20-volume diary in which he formulated his playbook. 

Among the proverbs therein:

"Not every item of news should be published; rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."

"I regard myself as responsible for the morale of the German people. From that fact I derive the right to keep out of the German press everything that is harmful or even fails to be useful."

"The Minister formulates the principle for the immediate future that in enemy reports anything that could be dangerous to us must be immediately denied. There is no need at all to examine whether a report is factually correct or not."

Unless Caputo is fired for doctoring the CDC's reports—an unlikely event—it's certain he will next turn to publicizing "alternative facts" about the virus, using $300 million of taxpayers' money he has appropriated from the CDC's operating budget.

You might call these alternative facts "bald-faced lies." 

Caputo prefers to call them "best practices." 

Goebbels would have called them "poetic facts."

In November 1944, as Germany's defeat began to look certain, Goebbels' assistant Rudolph Semmler observed that his boss "has introduced a new expression into the vocabulary of propaganda. 

"He is now using the phrase 'poetic truth' in contrast to—or rather in amplification of—the 'concrete truth.' We should describe things as they might have happened.

"Many events, he said, could not be understood unless we embroidered them a little with the 'poetic truth' and so made them understandable to the German people."

So stay tuned for The Mike and Joe Show.  

Gaslighting you with best practices.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 15,2020: According to breaking news reports, Michael Caputo went off his rocker yesterday. Rumors had it that Goebbels also suffered a nervous breakdown in December 1938, while writing a book he planned to title, Adolph Hitler—A Man Who Is Making History. 

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 16, 2020: Michael Caputo left HHS today on extended medical leave. Congress is investigating his abuse of power.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 26, 2020: Michael Caputo has been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. While Goebbels never suffered cancer, he loved to discuss the subject with Hitler.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 18, 2020: Michael Caputo's dream has been smashed by Congress.

UPDATE, DECEMBER 16, 2020: Emails reveal Caputo had been pushing the herd immunity theory on CDC officials. Journalists uniformly react with scorn.

UPDATE, MARCH 19, 2021: A federal investigation has revealed that, before joining HHS as assistant secretary of public affairs, Caputo had been working for Russian state propagandists on Trump's behalf.

UPDATE, APRIL 9, 2021: Congressional investigators have released emails proving Caputo altered data from the CDC to conform with Trump's claims that Covid-19 was harmless.

UPDATE, APRIL 12, 2021: Forensic News has revealed Caputo failed to disclose to the Justice Department a lavish gift he had accepted from Russian agents just weeks before he was appointed to his role at HHS. "The failure to report his gift to the Justice Department has raised numerous questions about the true purpose of Caputo’s work, given his concurrent work with Russian spies."

Decade

Goodly is 10 years old.

What began as a meager stab at search engine optimization a decade ago has become a vocation—you might say, a compulsion—of mine.

With nearly 400 thousand readers, Goodly no longer serves as a device for driving website traffic, but as a way of shouting, Hey, I'm still here.

I recently launched Blog, a new venture that's going to consume my time if it's to succeed—as, I hope, it will.

Meanwhile, God willing, Goodly will continue, pandemic or no, recession or no, civil war or no, global warming or no. 

I'm still here.

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?

Your Mother Should Know

The comedian George Carlin liked to quip, “Business ethics is an oxymoron.” 

While most people on the receiving end of commerce would likely agree, having spent over forty years inside various businesses, I would rephrase Carlin's gag: Business ethics may not be an oxymoron, but it sure is an oddity.

It's as odd in the workplace as frontal nudity, purple hair and Hitler mustaches. 

Most business executives are decent folks who—to my view, anyway—conveniently "park their ethics at the door" along with their BMWs. Their workweek amorality doesn't make of them monsters or mobsters, but it does lend credence to Balzac's claim, "Behind every great fortune is a crime;" or a misdemeanor, at the least.

You'd think they would have learned right from wrong from their mothers.

Thank heaven there's now a guidebook for the ethically-challenged executive—one perfectly timed for the current global crisis.

Crisis Ahead, by crisis-management expert Edward Segal, provides a 250-page map through the corporate crisis minefield. But Crisis Ahead seeks to do more than that: it seeks to convert business ethics from an oddity to a commodity.

Segal is the author of a previous how-to, Getting Your 15 Minutes of Fame and More!, a cookbook for ambitious executives hungry for glory. Crisis Ahead is, in a way, that earlier book's "evil twin," a checklist for amoral executives eager to avoid the press's attention, a possible pillorying, or—worse—a pink slip.

Whereas the majority of books on business ethics—written by philosophers for b-school professors—are as impractical as they are impenetrable, Crisis Ahead is daringly straightforward, simple and "strictly business."

Segal states in his introduction—which includes a late-breaking essay on the Covid-19 crisis—that Crisis Ahead comprises only "quick, practical advice." The author's tips are aimed not at the academic, but at the business executive who needs to "prepare for, prevent, manage, and recover from a crisis, scandal, disaster, or other emergency." 

In other words, you'll find no theories, models or conundrums here. Crisis Ahead instead offers a bagful of "lessons learned" from illicit schemes, inside deals, sex scandals, errant emails and shoddy products, as well as no fewer than "101 best practices" intended for the beleaguered executive who needs to know "what to do in the moment: what levers to pull and what moves to make in real time when faced with a crisis." 

You also won't find terms like "environmental justice" or "social entrepreneurship" anywhere in the text; nor the names of philosophers, psychologists or theologians in the index.

So why consider Crisis Now a book on ethics? (Amazon—no paragon of the topic—has done just that, listing the book under both public relations and business ethics; but we'll set that aside for now.) 

The reason becomes clear when you read "Edward's Takes," brief sidebars by the author that accompany each case study. While these reflections consider "how well or poorly the company, organization, or individual did in responding to—or in some cases creating—a crisis," the vast majority also shine a light on the myriad misdeeds that led to the crises in the first place.

Time and again, we learn that executives themselves—not some error, accident, or act of God—bring about the catastrophes; that unscrupulous executives are indeed their own worse enemies.

You'd have thought they'd have learned better.

The Pity Pot

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that
lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

— Anthony Powell

The owner of a large Texas-based company saw fit today to blog about her "heartbreak" over furloughing her employees.

"Nobody wants to go in front of their employees and deliver bad news," she says. "But when the news to thousands of employees is that we were enacting a plan to save their jobs in the long term by furloughing them in the short term… well, nothing can quite prepare you for that."

She describes her discomfort at handing out several thousand pink slips; how she had to forgo her prepared speech and speak instead "from the heart;" and how she's truly madly deeply empathetic with her now-former employees. 

"Empathy cannot be something you only do halfway," she says solemnly. "Empathy is the thing that helps you truly connect with the people around you, guiding you through the tough moments by reminding you that, in the end, we are all human."

I have no doubt, on the heels of her self-disclosure, the owner feels better. 

After all, confession's good for the soul. 

But how do her out-of-work employees feel? Are they consoled by her reminder that, "in the end, we are all human?" We are. But not a few of us are also facing the breadline.

Self-pity isn't only humorless—tiresome and banal—as the novelist Anthony Powell says; it's unbecoming, in the way Marie Antoinette's toilet (above) is unbecoming: you can dress it up, but you can't take it anywhere. "Sitting on the pity pot," as they say in AA, is equally unbecoming; blogging from there is worse.

Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo thinks sitting too long on the pity pot reveals an individual's sense of entitlement: the "inner brat," frustrated by adversity, believes she's helpless, a "victim of circumstance."

In a leader, self-pity is particularly unseemly. As Edward Segal, a crisis-management expert and the author of Crisis Ahead, told me, "Self-pity is not a good look for a leader. Singing 'Woe is me' only shows you cannot put yourself in the shoes of your furloughed employees."

You'll recall how frequently BP's CEO Tony Hayward sat on the pity pot when he was interviewed by reporters during the Gulf oil spill. It won him no friends.

And you're aware, thanks to the daily Coronavirus briefings, how the president seems permanently affixed to the pity pot when he's interviewed. It isn't pretty.

I've managed people in my time; I've had to lay some off; and it was indeed painful—but not nearly as painful for me as it was for them. Denied their livelihoods, my self-pity was a luxury they simply couldn't afford.

Self-pity is pointless when those around you are looking for a leader.

Like hope, self-pity is not a strategy.

Song and Dance

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass;
it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

― Vivian Greene

When students at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts demanded tuition refunds this week, insisting online classes aren't satisfactory, Dean Allyson Green responded by sending them a video of herself dancing.

According to The New York Post, the students claimed classes hosted on Zoom "are not worth the school’s $58,000-a-year tuition."

Green notified students by email they would not receive a refund, attaching the curious video.

She told The Post, "What I meant to demonstrate is my certainty that even with the unprecedented hardships of social distancing and remotely-held classes, it is still possible for the Tisch community to make art together."