The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled

Democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

— Isaac Asimov

I've had it with the truthies, trash and trivia that's vying for my overtaxed attention.

Once intriguing, the big news sites and social media networks have become cyber cesspools.

My New Year's resolution: to boycott them.

The last straw was a click-bait headline that dogged me yesterday: "The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled."

I don't need—or care—to know why ABC executives scrapped a TV sit-com 46 years ago.

Worse, I resent being told the "real" reason was adultery, when in fact it was low audience share.

It's time for all good people to call a halt to America's romance with anti-intellectualism—the willful "dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility," as executive coach Ray Williams puts it.

We should take no pride in the fact Americans choose to be gullible and uninformed.

We should only take comfort in the fact that millions of the most gullible and uninformed are killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and guns.

Butcher's Bible

Democratic theories of government in their modern form
are based on dogmas of equality.

— Madison Grant

Madison Grant was a New York City lawyer who in 1916 published The Passing of the Great Race.

Grant's work flew off booksellers' shelves after Science and The Saturday Evening Post both praised it, and climbed steadily to become an international best-seller.

The Passing of the Great Race attributed every benefit of civilization to the efforts of the Nordic race, and every threat to those benefits to people of other races. 

Based on its claim of Nordic superiority, the book argued for the end of immigration and equal rights and the start of a national eugenics program designed to foster "obliteration of the unfit."

However, thanks to the protests of anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—who produced compelling counter-evidence that showed race had no bearing on culture—the arguments made by The Passing of the Great Race soon fell from favor, and Madison Grant lost his following.

But not completely.

One day in 1934, Grant received a letter from a prominent German, who thanked him for writing "my bible." 

The letter was signed by Adolf Hitler.

From Here to Eternity

As it liberated Rome in June 1944, the US Army came upon the American philosopher George Santayana, missing from his adopted homeland for over three decades. 

The 80-year-old had been living in Italy in poverty, boarding at a Catholic nursing home and writing an autobiography.

A reporter for Life photographed the philosopher on a park bench and asked his opinion about the war.

"Of war he knew nothing," Life's reporter wrote: "I live in the eternal."

America's sorry state has fatigued me to a degree where I'm ready to "do a Santayana" and check out of public affairs.

The kleptocrats who run this country can have their plunder, for all I care. 

Screw them.

Beginning today, I live in the eternal.

Will you join me?

War on Words

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

― George Orwell, 1984

Two decades ago, two child development specialists tracked the weekly growth in the vocabularies of 42 children over 30 months. They discovered a child's socioeconomic status determined her vocabulary's breadth―and her test-scores later in school.

So not only does family of origin determine academic success; words do, too.

So why destroy them?

After a public outcry this week, the head of the CDC denied that President Trump banned the use of seven words by her agency: diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, fetus, science-based, transgender, and vulnerable.

But, as it turns out, new style guidelines imposed by Trump do ban the seven words―and that CDC is by no means the only agency under the thumb of the president's word-police.

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” the German poet Heinrich Heine said. And where they have destroyed words?

But fear not: resistance is facile.

Invent a word every day. 

If you need inspiration, follow Fritinancy, a blog dedicated to new-word formation.

Be like Shakespeare or Dickens or Orwell (who once wrote, "What is wanted is several thousands of gifted but normal people who would give themselves to word-invention as seriously as people now give themselves to Shakespearean research"):

• Shakespeare invented the words articulate, barefaced, baseless and watchdog.
  

• Dickens invented the words coffee-imbibing, messiness, sawbones, and seediness.
  

• Orwell invented the words newspeak, prole, thought-police, and unperson.

My new word for the day?

Automadon.

Killing Marketing: Dead on Arrival

I'm a fan of Joe Pulizzi, coauthor with Robert Rose of the new 260-page book Killing Marketing. 

So I wish I could recommend it.

I can't.

The big idea behind the book―that businesses can convert marketing from overhead into profit―is preposterous; not because it's so wrongheaded, but because it's so thoroughly unrealistic.

Were the idea not preposterous, you'd find more real-world examples than the handful the authors can cite (although I'm flattered they include mention of the magazine I launched for the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, Fire Protection Engineering.)

The "killing" in the title, by the way, is word-play. The authors want you to kill your marketing operation and replace it with a killer media company. (That, or the authors are targeting Bill O'Reilly's audience.)

Killing Marketing argues you can profitably sell the content that drives your marketing, like any media company does.

Sell your content? At a profit? Hell, most organizations can't give it away.

The book further argues you can transform your in-house marketers into crackerjack journalists and media moguls who can "monetize" your audiences.

Fat chance.

When it comes to marketing their products, most businesses indeed "throw good money after bad," as the authors say: they deploy tactics without an underlying strategy; invest in tactics that do not work; and drop successful tactics without forethought.

But to ask every business to "create and distribute non-product-related content" is like asking your auto mechanic to produce Cars, your barber to stage Hair, or your lawnmower to publish Better Homes & Gardens.

Ain't gonna happen.

Yes, LEGO profits from LEGO Club Magazine; Red Bull, from Red Bulletin; and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, from Fire Protection Engineering. 

But could a single additional organization in those markets replicate that success? Probably not.

A logician would say the authors have written an entire book based on the fallacy known as the "argument from small numbers." Arguments from small numbers go like this:

After treatment with our new drug, one-third of the mice were cured, one-third died, and the third mouse escaped. So if we treat 1,000 mice, 333 will be cured.

The gist of Killing Marketing goes something like this:

Marketing-campaigns-turned-into-media-ventures by six organizations became profitable. So if you mimic them, yours can be profitable too.

With apologies to Hugh Fullerton: Saying it don't make it so, Joe.