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.
Like 190 thousand other Irishmen, Mike Folliard, my cousin six times removed, fled County Roscommon in the 1850s to escape starvation.
He wound up living on a farm outside leafy Franklin, New Jersey.
Mike was 18 in late July 1861, when Congress authorized formation of an army of 500 thousand volunteers—a call to arms that was immediately met by men like Mike, who enlisted for the thrill of marching into battle and the steady paycheck promised (Mike mailed all his army pay to Ireland, as boat fare for a widowed sister).
On August 27, Mike was mustered into the 1st New Jersey Cavalry (the "Jersey Cavaliers") at Trenton. At some point the next month, while stationed in Washington, DC, he visited a photography studio—likely that of Matthew Brady—to have his portrait taken in his handsome, new uniform.
That was the last time he'd do anything so civilized.
Just a few weeks later, he found himself in Virginia, riding scout to defend the capital from Confederate takeover.
Cavalry was used throughout the Civil War as an infantry commanders' "eyes and ears," so Mike's regiment was nearly always exposed to enemy fire.
Mike's regiment fought in major battles at Cross Keys, Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and Bristoe Station.
During the latter engagement, in October 1863, Mike was captured by surprise outside a village known as Buckland. The cavalry officer who allowed Mike's regiment to be entrapped, as it had been, was none other than General George Armstrong Custer.
Mike was summarily transported to Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where he lived among 45,000 other Federal POWs inside a stockade surrounding 16 acres of land (the size of three city blocks).
As it was to many other prisoners, Andersonville was unkind to Mike.
He died of scurvy on July 25, 1864, six months after his capture.
A thousand other POWs at Andersonville died, as Mike did, of a disease brought on by starvation.
He was only 21.
Above:Little Soul by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. 11 x 14 inches. From an 1861 photograph of Corporal Mike Folliard, who is buried in grave Number 3938 at Andersonville National Cemetery.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
— Ecclesiastes
A fellow artist expressed to me yesterday her disappointment that realist painters—even of the caliber of Monet and Van Gogh—never add anything original to our culture.
Photographers have a word for that wistful feeling: vemödalen.
Vemödalen—the feeling everything has already been done—was coined by the Swiss blogger John Koening, whose Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows defines "emotions we feel, but don't have words to express."
According to Koening, vemödalen is "the frustration of photographing something amazing, when thousands of identical photos already exist."
Those thousands of precedent photos turn mine into "something hollow, pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself."
By this definition, vemödalen (a word doubtless derived from the Swedish vemod, meaning "melancholy") is a kind of weltschmerzthat mistakes every work of art as another flat-pack item from Ikea.
It's easy to understand where vemödalen comes from.
Unoriginality is baked into human existence, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger proved in Being and Time.
Heidegger calls the self of our everyday being the "they-self" (Man-selbst).
The they-self is a conformist and unoriginal way of engaging with the world.
Heidegger claims that I am not myself as I go about the tasks that preoccupy me every day.
The they-self, he says, represents "concerned absorption in the world we encounter.
"The 'they' prescribes our way of interpreting the world."
In other words, I don't encounter the world: they do.
"It is not 'I', in the sense of my own self, that 'am,' but others, whose way is that of the 'they,'" Heidegger says.
While being a they-self feels comfortable, Heidegger insists, remaining one is a choice: a choice to surrender your soul to the "dictatorship of the they;" to surrender, sheepishly, to conformity, mediocrity, practicality, and ingenuousness.
In a real sense, Heidegger says, we wear a disguise our whole lives: the disguise of the they. And that disguise—that inauthentic self—tricks us into believing "there's nothing new under the sun" when, in fact, everything under the sun is new every moment of every day, if only we open our eyes to it.
. "It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die," Oscar Wilde once wrote.
"Most people are other people. Their life is a mimicry."
When the left becomes grimly censorious, it incubates its own opposition.
— Michelle Goldberg
During an interview with a professor of English yesterday, I asked whether the late novelist John Updike belongs in the modern canon.
Wryly he answered, "It depends on whose canon."
The cause of his caution was obvious: not knowing who I was, the professor wanted to be spared another bashing by a possible wokescold.
Wokescolds—those busybodies who bash you for any show of disinterest in their causes—are the bane of the Democrats.
They're why the party will lose the midterm elections.
Wokescolds are dangerous because they're smug and obnoxious.
While they relentlessly shame us for our indifference to special-interest issues like "transgender equality," "microaggression," and "cultural appropriation," they remain blind to the fact that most of us care more about guns, gas, and the stock market.
They're dangerous because they make ready targets for right-wing hipsters, who can mobilize uninformed voters with post-apocalyptic visions of a Stalin-style government—even though 8 of 10 Millennial voters don't know who Stalin was.
So here's my two cents.
Wokescolds should take a vacation.
A long one.
I recommend Mexico.
With its tropical beaches, boutique hotels, and feisty cuisine, Mexico offers the ideal spot for a getaway.
That's where they'll find these morsels of wisdom:
A statement is persuasive either because it is directly self-evident or appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case, it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades.
But no art theorizes about an individual. Rhetoric is concerned not with what seems probable to a given individual, but with what seems probable to a whole class of people.
Rhetoric, too, draws upon the routine subjects of debate. The duty of rhetoric is to deal with key issues in the hearing of persons who cannot take in a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.
Got that, wokescolds?
And if Aristotle doesn't convince you to drop the smug and obnoxious rhetoric, maybe you should stay in Mexico—permanently.
Who can forget the last line of the 1973 film Soylent Green?
I worry that with the ever-rising price of groceries and Millennials' open contempt for Boomers we may be heading for the ghastly future the movie portrayed.
And why not?
From a public policy standpoint, converting old people into grub makes fiscal sense, when you consider the cost Boomers will soon impose on our nation.
As of 2022, the average retired man in this country has only $118 thousand in savings; the average retired woman, only $57 thousand.
Among retirees, 14 percent of men, and 24 percent of women, have less than $10 thousand in savings.
The average nursing home costs $108 thousand a year.
Safety nets for indigent retirees are in place, of course; but there are nearly 70 million Boomers still living—after the Millennials, the nation's second largest population group.
Who can possibly afford the cost of those safety nets?
