InstaPunk Returns

  I was an international management consultant. You can’t wish that fact away. I did something no one ever did. Put communication people on the line. Gave them a crisis they had to respond to in real time. Nearly got me fired. Didn’t. I made a project, first in the U.S., called the Monster. Yeah. I called it that. Kept them up all night.  Here’s what I did. First in Evansville, Indiana. Then in Paris, France. Same result, both places.  I created a circumstance that put the survival of the company at risk. You get awakened at night by the news. What do you do? I gave them all the tools they had at their disposal. TV, official statements and press releases, the creation of the company narrative, which in this case did not look good. I gave a budget but made it clear that as CEO I had more cash on hand if they asked for it after 2 am. In Evansville, I hired the leading male anchor newsman to say what they wanted him to say. They hired him. They scripted him. It was all a lie...

I’ve written and posted about much of this before, but I never put it all in one place. No fan of Lenin, but he was right about “weeks where decades happen.” Three months that changed my life unalterably for all the years since. What was it all about? Paris? My parents? Life and death suddenly encountered? Puppy love that was somehow more? It began when I was still nine years old. All over when I was barely ten, with a fortyish sequel. Who remembers? I remember. It’s all engraved in me. Suddenly brought back to memory by the nonsensical opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. I will never, would never, return to the City of Lights that once was and is no more. 1963. A hugely important year in American history, ending in November when my mother picked us up at school when as a rule we would have taken the bus. The President had been shot. Learned of his death on the radio on the way home. Not how the year began. We learned, my sister and I, that we were moving to Paris in the spring o...

  At my first Stones concert I wore my dad’s WWII leather  flight  jacket. Outside the Spectrum, there was a rumor I  was selling  acid.  I wasn’t. But I got to see “Star Star”  and the pink balloon. The Stones were a bit raggedy then, as was I. The radio station of Stones fans in Philadelphia was WMMR. For years after this concert, they used the pitiful Jagger attempt to pronounce the call letters correctly. The concert was great, but the Stones were, as I was, still trying to recover from the late Sixties. “Goatshead Soup” got bad reviews.  The only thing the critics noticed was the cleverly misfitled ‘Star Star.’  1973. I was 20. The Beatles were long gone. I wasn’t.  And Mick Jagger wasn’t. Just waiting for a comeback. [Have to intervene here. Blogger is Google, and Google does not like me. I’ve done dozens of music-centric posts, but none have encountered this level of difficulty in the posting. They don’t want me to restore le...

 MICK JAGGER & THE ROLLING STONES I’ve written at least a book’s worth of posts about The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger in my own 55 year writing career. Done a lot of philosophizing and literary analysis about him. Tagged him as an unconscious genius based on all the tales of him writing what would become deathless lyrics in a limo to the studio on a recording day. Learned he was a voracious reader in his concert travels, couple books a week. Wanted to meet him, never wanted to meet him. (Kind of how I feel about Donald Trump. Both ostentatious sybarites, both recipients of a gift not entirely different from the one I received when I wrote The Boomer Bible.) But I met Jagger long before I met Trump. In a closet in the boarding school room I shared with my Russian Jewish roommate who was staying up all night reading Dostoyevsky while I was staying up all night reading Ayn Rand. Together we found an LP in our disastrous closet with obvious scratches and no album cover. It began...

 Yes I do… I had a punk writer queen 30 years ago. Unafraid, unabashed, killed on stage. She died she did. There are always heirs. She fights. Maybe not always smart. But with her heart in the right place. Years are not always kind to women. She’s mad at the President. Look at the hair. This ain’t Trump. And she’s drunk.  Why? Because the world she once knew is completely gone. Same with me. I don’t have anything left I recognize as home. My wife and daughter-in-law have the salvation of pretending life is still cool. Wrong.

The Washington DC Mall. What a million people looks like. In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, there have been a lot of contradictory responses by members of his political opposition. These range from insincere expressions of outrage and sympathy to claims that the event was not real but staged and, in distressingly large numbers, to bitter bursts of disappointment that the shooter missed his target. On top of these displays of Democrat boorishness comes the even more concerning discovery that the Secret Service charged with protecting Trump failed so egregiously in its duty that the biggest question occupying the public is whether the near-miss was the result of incompetence or deliberate intention. Official responses by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the Secret Service leadership appear to be aimed more at obfuscating the investigation than cooperating with it. No one has been suspended or asked to resign over the evident fail...

   From left to right, they’re the Director and Chief Operating Officer. What Cheatle has to say about her priorities. What else do we know about the Director? What Wiki Says: FYI, this WIKIE entry has been tweaked a couple of times just since yesterday. Digging deeper, I went back to the time of her being named to the position and discovered an edit deemphasizing her education.given her talk about diversity in hiring, I was curious about her college major… Criminal Justice? Forensic Science? Public Administration? No.  The most popular course of study for  DEI executives since the Woke era began. NOT a red flag? Maybe so, maybe not, but there are legitimate questions about how she got this job and what she has done as director. During her tenure assistant director of Protective Operations under Obama, she was assigned to the Vice Presidential Protective Division. Was this an appointment made by the first ever female Director of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson (201...