InstaPunk Returns

  I’m going to preface this post with some personal provenance, to show that its subject is nothing new but an idea I have held for decades. Back in 1993, I received a call from my client at Whirlpool Corporation wanting an overnight rewrite of an article slated for publication in the Harvard Business Review, which was not acceptable in its current form to the executive committee. It was Christmas Eve. I was given a phone number for the HBR editor, who gave the go-ahead after informing me that it was expressly contrary for HBR to accept ghost submissions from consultants to Fortune executives. I told him I was intimately involved in Whirlpool global initiatives and could meet the 24-hour deadline. The latter commitment carried the day. On schedule I emailed him the  rewritten copy  and within hours received an unexpected encomium from the editor. He said he couldn’t believe what I had done within the permitted timeframe and allowed that he would be open to other submissio...

Reprinting this from May 3, 2021 , unchanged. Disinformation specialists at WAPO, the NYT, and the Alphabet actors at ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, PBS, NPR, and Po-li-ti-cooo are already busy writing their stories about the bungled Hundred Days of Trump 2.0. Today’s Rasmussen reports that 56 percent of likely voters approve of the President’s immigration and economic policies. Remember that when the lies start flowing to the contrary next week. And remember this blast from the past…   January, February, March, April. Not a day’s worth of truthtelling anywhere. This is the last piece of writing in  this book . Why I’m going to pretend it’s a preface, because it comprises the whole. And also obviates it. Don’t read this book. You don’t need it. It won’t help you. You won’t understand it or believe it or accept that it has anything to do with you. Because it doesn’t. It has only to do with me, its author, and I am, in a finally fatally insane nation, the last aware mind. I saw a m...

  This cropped up this morning in my FB notifications. As I explain in the text, it triggered me to respond with this comment: “Committed yet low velocity Christian”? The partitioners of Christianity into the good kind versus the scary, obsolete, somewhat silly (that is, ‘other’) kinds of the faith are just Bible beaters of a different version of the book. You know, the right version, the one that reconciles the common sense in ancient myths with the neo-Darwinian hegemony over all of what we think of as science. Always reminds me of the classic disclaimer “Some of my best friends are… [fill in the blank]”. I think the partitioners miss the point almost completely. Christianity is not the winnowing out of the less enlightened flavors. It is the totality of it, the All of it, a never-ending exploration of the most fertile generator of human consciousness ever granted as a gift to Mankind. It goes everywhere, it inspires different people and peoples in different ways, and as its some...

  Feeling lazy today since I got up too early and not enough back-to-sleep time later. I’d been thinking about a post on one of the real virtues of the Internet, which is easy to blame for everything from cultural ills to incredibly annoying irritations in trying to use it for various tasks. Something the other day reminded me of an event I’d almost forgotten about when I was eight. Saw a big-time Broadway musical at a theater in the DuPunt Hotel in Wilmington (yeah, that guy’s state). I remembered the star and the first name of his co-star, Susan I thought, cross with myself with forgetting her surname because I developed an immediate crush on her. So I used the Internet to reconstruct it all, the place, the show, the stars, the music. Which is all racked up on my disk waiting for me to write it up. Worth it for some of the songs and the period setting alone. But… I don’t feel like writing it today. Then I thought of another reconstruction job I had done of a dramatic encounter I ...

Riminem Where do fun ideas come from? Juxtapositions that no one’s put together before. Oranges and apples type stuff. In my last year of academic French studies, I took an AP course from an exceptional teacher who focused a good part of the year on writers not included on the recommended AP reading list. Early in the fall, he slapped a copy of Camus’s “L’Étranger” on his desk, told it was on the list, but informed us he wouldn’t waste time on such trash in our class work. We could read it if we wanted, just not in his class.  Instead we devoted well over a month to the study of the four great French Symbolist poets who were seminal to the development of, among other things, modern poetry and modern art. Their names were Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. The first two  were very accessible and quickly enjoyed by everyone. I memorized and still remember some verses of both of them. The other two were more difficult, considered so in their own country, so not surprisi...

  It’s Eastertide and I am moved to look for whatever bridges there might be to the people who suffer from TDS but are not necessarily evil at heart. The compound fracture in the soul of this nation needs to be healed, at least enough that we can begin to work together in sensible ways to repair years of decline in so many institutions and belief systems. This post is an attempt in that direction, a search for some different ways of describing and understanding the rifts that imperil us all. I’ll begin with a proposition: Susceptibility to irrational hatred of Donald Trump is not primarily a function of political convictions. It’s deeper than that, which is why it’s so hard to understand. The haters are so fond of labels that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Or forest s to be more precise. There’s more than one forest of TDS sufferers. This post is not about establishing more labels. It’s about describing several different mentalities that lead inadvertently to the Occa...