Happy Days

There’s a trick to the "graceful exit." It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or past importance.

― Ellen Goodman

Job losses in the event industry are staggering, with some estimates exceeding 95%.

But to mention the industry's downturn, or suggest that the happy days are over, is to invite exile.

The holdouts won't have it.

Although the industry's collapse may deserve a speed-record, collapses have happened before. 

Whole swaths of the economy—industries that once employed tens of thousands—have been suddenly, and permanently, eradicated.

Some memorable examples of such now-extinct professions include:

• Badgers. Badgers were loud-mouthed middlemen who hawked farmers' goods at open-air markets. (The profession gave us our verb meaning "to harass.") Grocers made them obsolete overnight.
  
  
• Lamplighters. Lamplighters were driven out of business with the introduction of electrified street lights. 
  
  
• Pinsetters. Pinsetters set pins in bowling alleys before the job one day was abruptly mechanized.
  
  
• Knocker-uppers. Knocker-uppers woke people, using a bamboo stick to rap on their customers' windows. The invention of the alarm clock doomed them.
  
  
• Leech collectors. Leech collectors supplied surgeons with blood-suckers before "bleeding" patients fell out of favor.
  
  
• Resurrectionists. These wily entrepreneurs—also known as "body snatchers"—supplied med-schools with corpses until the use of paupers' bodies was legalized.
  
  
• Computers. Computers—often women—crunched numbers all day, until calculators made their jobs obsolete.
  
  
• Lectors. Lectors sat before factory workers and read aloud from books—sometimes books banned by management—to keep the workers entertained. A union strike in the 1930s put them out of business.
  
  
• Ice cutters. These rugged specialists, who cut big blocks of ice from lakes and delivered them to homes, were frozen out by the electric refrigerator.
  
  
• Milkmen. Every housewife's friend, the milkman suffered the same sad fate as the ice cutter.

The disruption triggered by the pandemic is horrendous. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. 

But it makes me wonder, can possible good come from the collapse of the event business?

I can think of two benefits:

A cleaner planet. Long before the lockdown, critics of the industry proclaimed the practice of assembling thousands of businesspeople, year after year, to mingle with suppliers and sit through seminars was unsustainable. But event organizers shunned sustainability, because it would slice into their profits. Perhaps tomorrow's organizers, facing a new breed of attendee, will think differently about their carbon footprint.

Better wages. I was among the lonely souls promoting virtual events over a decade ago. (In 2011, with an equally avid partner, I produced a day-long workshop that featured five case studies of successful virtual events. Getting more than a couple dozen organizers to attend the workshop was like pulling teeth, and we discontinued it a year later.) I have long believed that, like Hollywood and IT folks, event professionals can earn better wages as virtual event producers. It's an exciting, emergent field—a veritable "wild west"—and promising territory for those willing to acquire the right skill-set.

For those who can't, or won't, accept that the happy days are over, perhaps it's time for a graceful exit.

The Week Whataboutism Wore Out

You're a criminal for not reporting it.

— Donald Trump 

Historians will describe this as the week the American press rediscovered its cajones.

It refused, at long last, to dignify another piece of Kremlin-backed propaganda, in the process causing Trump to go ballistic.

The reason for refusing?

The story stinks. So much so, Facebook and Twitter both blocked it. Even Fox won't cover it.

It stinks because: (1) the story's principal character is a computer repairman and QAnon follower with a history of lying to the public; (2) the story's source is the Kremlin's own Rudy Giuliani; and (3) the one reporter in America vile enough to touch the story is a Trumpster and former Hannity producer, now working at the New York Post (fish-wrap for morons).

The story is so obviously Kremlin-backed, the FBI is birddogging it.

Today, an IT guy reports on Facebook that, on a hunch, he traced the serial numbers of Hunter Biden's laptops—if they are his laptops—and learned the machines were manufactured four days after the date on the "receipt" produced by the computer repairman (the repairman's alleged "proof" they belonged to Biden).

The story's pure poppycock, from Russia with love. Over 50 former senior intelligence officers have signed a joint letter warning it's so.

Historians will also pronounce this the week whataboutism wore out.

A Russian invention, whataboutism lets propagandists divert our attention from an inconvenient truth by equating it—falsely—with something else. The Soviets perfected the tactic during the Cold War.

Whataboutism is Trump's go-to ruse when faced with criticism:

Yes, 400,000 Americans will likely die from Covid-19 before year's end, but what about Hunter Biden's laptop?

The press is done with Trump's whataboutism. 

And so is the American public.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 23: The Wall Street Journal asserts Hunter Biden’s former business partner—a sketchy investor in Chinese startups—has supplied the paper emails that "corroborate and expand on emails recently published by the New York Post, which says they come from a Hunter laptop.” Likely, reports NBC, a white-nationalist website named Revolver News is behind the effort to hornswaggle America. Meanwhile, deaths from Covid-19 in America as of today has reached 228,423.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 25: Politico reports Giuliani's "evidence" originated in the Kremlin, in all probability. The Atlantic muses that we're not supposed to understand the Hunter Biden's actions—but only fear them.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 27: The Hill reports that a White House lawyer pitched the story about Hunter Biden's laptop—without success—to the Wall Street Journal before Giuliani took it to the New York Post.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 29, 2020: Rudy Giuliani turned apoplectic on Fox Business yesterday when a host suggested the Hunter Biden laptop story originated in Eastern Europe. Fox News' Tucker Carlson also claimed he had “real, authentic and damning” documents proving Hunter Biden had committed crimes, but they had mysteriously disappeared. And NBC reported that a month before the purported discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop, right-wingers circulated a phony document asserting Biden was enmeshed in an elaborate conspiracy. The document is pure fiction and its alleged source a fake "intelligence firm" named Typhoon. Somebody's a windbag, for certain.

October Surprise

Get ready for Trump's October Surprise.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder claims it's hardly beneath the president to burn the Reichstag—or at least its American equivalent.

To cement his political power, Hitler did that in February 1933.

Germany’s Weimar Constitution, written in 1919, after the nation's surrender in World War I, included Article 48, a clause that gave its president dictatorial powers in cases of national emergency.

By the early 1930s, the civil unrest triggered by the Depression had thrust Hitler's new "law and order" Nazi Party from obscurity to the second-most rank among Germany's 40 political parties. 

While unable to reach the uppermost rank among the 40 parties—earning a full majority—by January 1933 the Nazis' strength was such that they could demand Hitler be installed as Germany's chancellor. He was.

As chancellor, Hitler immediately set out to make his the majority party. He announced that his largest rival, the Communist Party, was planning to attack public buildings.

On the night of February 27, a suspicious fire broke out in the Reichstag.

"This is a God-given signal,” Hitler told the president. “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

The president believed him, and the following morning invoked Article 48, abolishing free speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalizing wire tapping and censoring mail; suspending the autonomy of Germany's 22 states; and assigning all legislative power to the chancellor, Adolph Hitler. 

That night, Hitler arrested and tortured 4,000 German citizens, mostly Communists.

Later that year, the German government tried, convicted and guillotined a jobless bricklayer and Communist Party member for setting the Reichstag Fire. But suppressed evidence indicates Hitler in fact arranged the blaze (Germany exonerated the wrongly convicted bricklayer 75 years after his execution).

Okay, I know what you're thinking: Trump is incapable of setting fires. But he's not incapable of blaming his enemies for doing so, as he did last month.

Beware the October Surprise.

The Party's Over

 

That's the great part of capitalism, gales of creative destruction.

— Larry Kudlow

Instead of wringing their hands over the walloping face-to-face has taken, eventpeeps should be celebrating Covid-19 with Larry Kudlow: "creative destruction" has decimated their industry.

And now, after three successive quarters of negative growth, it's time for a sober assessment of where the events industry is heading in 2021 and beyond.

It's heading to oblivion.

Yes, the industry plummeted off a cliff in February, once the organizers of Mobile World Congress called it quits. That event was the first of the big dominoes to topple; the rest of the western world's large confabs quickly followed suit—or wished they had.

But Covid-19 was only a catalyst, accelerating an already-irreversible downward trend. 

As a viable marketing channel, events had peaked before the virus ever left Wuhan, and were inching toward decline. That's for two reasons:

• Exhibitors are done with them. Events are all the things a CMO shuns when choosing a marketing channel. They're expensive, unproductive, unpredictable, unaccountable, unrepeatable, unmeasurable, unsustainable, wasteful and—sad, but true—too much about the salespeople having fun.
  
  
• Attendees, too. Events are all things an attendee shuns when choosing a means to educate and improve herself. They're all of the above—and noisy, to boot.

Eventpeeps predict the channel that's provided their livelihoods will one day rise, phoenixlike, from coronavirus's ashes.

But the hard truth is: it won't. It can't. Covid-19 has clobbered it.

The party's over.

Nonsense

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

― Robert Frost

A high-school history teacher outside Paris was beheaded yesterday by an angry Islamist.

The teacher's sin? 

He showed his class Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

French president Emmanuel Macron responded by declaring that Islamists are at war with "the Republic and its values."

"This battle is ours and it is existential. They will not pass. Obscurantism and the violence that goes with it will not win."

Imagine an American teacher beheaded by a Proud Boy for showing his class the cover of Mad, and you'd have the picture. 

Obscurantism has an obscure history.

The term derives from Letters of Obscure Men, a 16th century book lampooning the argument between a humanist and a monk over whether every copy of the Talmud—being heretical—should be burned (the pope favored burning the books).

Two centuries later, philosophers called all enemies of the Enlightenment obscurantists.

Obscurantism, as Macron means the word, assumes the hoi polloi are morons and seeks to restrict knowledge—especially knowledge about the workings of government—to rulers.

It was obscurantism that provoked the French Revolution, when Louis XVI's clumsy efforts to cover up famines cost him his head.

Obscurantism is alive today, not only in the Paris suburbs, but in the White House.

Trump's effort to cover up Covid-19, disclosed last month by Bob Woodward, is a costly example. Over 225,000 Americans have already died from the virus. Another 175,000 are soon to follow.

“I wanted to always play it down," Trump boasted. "I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Plato called that sort of nonsense a "noble lie." 

I call it obscurantism—and eagerly await our revolution on November 3.