Debates are impossible unless words mean roughly the same things to both sides. These days they don’t and that’s part of our national problem.

For instance, to people of a certain mindset, justice means social justice – which doesn’t have anything to do with actual justice and doesn’t mean anything anyway.

The two most puzzlingly interpreted words these days are new and change. One loud group thinks socialism is new. The same people think Progressives are actually progressive and that the word change is a synonym for good.

Worse, in the last election a great many people fell for the fraud that Americans people didn’t have hope. That was absurd on the face of it but it became obscene as soon as you considered the people who really have no hope, people like Haitians, Sudanese, Cubans or the poor Mexicans who risk life and limb to come to this county where they might find … hope.

There are three groups involved in misusing and misunderstanding words: cynics who know what the words really mean but misuse them intentionally (e.g. Hope, Change, Choice, Stimulus), their acolytes who also know what the words mean but help to perpetrate the fraud, and, the largest group by far, the defrauded victims who, for one reason or another, simply don’t know better. Like the lady in Detroit whooping it up after the election of our current President believing that he was going to buy her a car and a house with money from his stash.

The rest of us sit and watch this nonsense, aware that there’s no chance of a real debate now that important words have no meaning. We hope the situation will change before we get to something really new – a poor, broke, weak, sitting duck United States of America.

I’ve always been a dog guy. At our beef cattle farm in Québec we had a bunch of them: two Border Collies, a Newfoundland, a Saint Bernard, two Bouviers, a Bull Terrier, a Whippet and, the outdoor boss, a shepherd/collie mix named Peanut.

Cats were in the background. They lived in the barns catching mice.

Things changed a bit in New York City. There’s a lot of dogs there and, thanks to Manhattan’s limitless array of disgusting odors, they love the streets. But we traveled a lot for business so we decided on a cat and drove out to Long Island to adopt Cody, a little all black (except for three white hairs on his stomach) kitten who grew into a sleek and smart cat who delighted in telling everyone what to do. But still, we traveled. So we went back to Port Jefferson and adopted Mortimer, a tiny orange critter with thumbs on his front feet and an extra toe on each of his back feet.

Cody and Mortimer became best friends after an initial period of Cody hissing and Mortimer rolling on his back and stretching out his legs: “See, ain’t I cute?” Mortimer grew huge and gentle and he and Cody usually slept in the same cat bed.

Then we lost Cody to cancer. He was only 10. Back out to Port Jefferson for a really small black and white kitten we named Lucy. She and Morty loved each other instantly. She was so small that we had to get her her own litter box. The sides of Mortimer’s box were too high for her. Within a few weeks, after she’d grown a bit, Mortimer and Lucy had worked out an interesting arrangement: they’d do #1 in Morty’s big covered box and #2 in Lucy’s little uncovered box.

Besides color and size, there was an amazing number of differences between Mortimer and Lucy. Lucy’s afraid of nothing, Mortimer was afraid of everything strange – even falling snow; we had to lower the blinds so he’d stop creeping around low to the ground. Mortimer liked people, Lucy ignored them – when we had people over for drinks and chitchat, Mortimer had his own chair and followed conversations, cocking his head toward the speaker while Lucy slept in a bedroom ignoring everybody. Mortimer spoke a lot; Lucy almost never spoke. Morty loved cat treats; Lucy had no interest in cat treats. Mortimer’s purr sounded like a Ferrari straining in second gear; Lucy’s sounded like a murmur in another room.

Then we moved to Florida. I like to work on the back deck, in the shade, and Lucy decided she should join me out there, lying beside me on the floor, like a dog. Mortimer visited us on the deck but only for a few minutes each time.

Then Mortimer, at the age of 15, developed a cancer. There was a chance, not a great chance, that we could cure it so I made a deal with the oncology veterinarian: as long as he’s not in pain and we have a shot at fixing him, let’s try. A lot of people thought I was nuts but Mortimer lasted another six months until he told me he was ready to go. He was never in any pain but he’d grown very thin and finally decided to stop eating.

For some reason, he’d decided to spend his last few months out on the deck with me, lying in a chair where I could reach him to scratch his head. He purred whenever I touched him right up to his last breath – in my lap at the vet’s.

Lucy had been amazing, switching deck duties voluntarily. She came out to visit Mortimer and me but only long enough to see how he was doing.

As sole cat, Lucy clung to us for months then came out of her shell and started channeling Mortimer. She’d never sat on a deck chair. Now she does. She’d never spoken, now she speaks as often as Morty did. And she loves cat treats. The other day, she joined us as we talked to a guest. Then she rolled over and let the stranger scritch her. Her purr now sounds like a Ferrari straining in second gear. And she’s back out on the deck with me every morning. Very odd.

For a while now, the USPS has been yammering about bandaging-the-wound-to-stop-the-bleeding options such as closing thousands of post offices, dropping Saturday delivery and asking the public to vote on who should be the first living human being to appear on a US postage stamp.

Then on Thursday (9/29/11) Biznik had an amazingly disheartening discussion string under an article by a direct marketing agency guy who wants the post office to raise postage … if that’s what it takes to keep the medium operating.

Whoa! What else could we try first?

I had six thoughts immediately.

One is to divide all postal zones into three parts and then deliver the mail to every address twice a week: Monday and Thursday in Zone One, Tuesday and Friday in Zone Two and Wednesday and Saturday in Zone Three.

The second is to NOT CLOSE any post offices at all but to move the ones they were going to close to the nearest Walmarts (with non-union employees.)

In order to avoid any unpleasantness, all current postal union members affected by these moves would be grandfathered in, even the redundant ones who will be allowed to go to the movies until they’re needed or they retire, whichever comes first.

The third move is Reaganesque: test doing the opposite of raising postage on Standard Mail (what we used to call Third Class.) Drop Standard postage even lower than it is now and see if business picks up. Betcha it would.

The fourth idea is to contract FedEx and USPS to handle all giant mail moving operations (planes and semi-trucks, etc.)

The fifth has been around for a while but nobody has mentioned it lately: a quarter of a cent postage on all emails in/to/from the US. It would raise a bundle for the poor old USPS and it would have no impact at all on honest emailers (40,000 emails for $100!). It would have the beneficial side effect of stopping spammers in their tracks because they need millions of emails to find a couple of suckers.

The sixth is classic Direct Mail thinking. The US is a giant laboratory, big enough to test a dozen sensible-sounding ideas all at once and roll out with the ones that work.

If an insignificant copywriter like yours truly can come up with 6 ideas in a heartbeat, just imagine what the giants of the industry could come up with in a day or two.

Let’s do it. Let me know what you think and I’ll gather all ideas into an attractive bundle and send them to the Postmaster General, whoever it is these days. (I think it’s John Potter.)

Otherwise why would we see them so often?

All image advertising:

30 second spots: entertain for 24 seconds, mention brand in remaining few seconds. No link necessary between entertaining part and brand part. 60 second spots: entertain for 54 seconds. Consider borrowing other companies’ commercials and slotting your brand in at close.

Target: Middle class of all ages, races and sexes:

Set up situation: Idiot and/or wimpy male set on right track by wise female. Seems to work in all product categories.

Target: Teenage Males:

Rap or hiphop soundtrack, impossible feats and/or violence.

Target: Young males over 21

Find deeply moronic premise, e.g. “manliness” of drinking Miller Lite.

Target: Older males

Macho deep voice narration, lone wolf cowboy situation, old school soundtrack.

Target: Yuppies, Buppies, Gen X

MOR soundtrack, extremely beautiful, well-dressed people dancing on Manhattan rooftops.

Target: Geezers

Talking heads speaking distinctly and loudly. Show couples and clear demonstrations. Okay to make man a doofus.

Product: Perfume

Imitate Ingmar Bergman at his most tedious. Incoherent, black and white movielet involving surly Italianate male (shirtless), irrational long-haired blonde (almost shirtless), in surreal romantic setting. Breathe product name at close.

Product: Automotive, MOR car

Race through empty downtown Manhattan streets. Tout paddle shifters, whatever they are. Pretend the car has a clutch.

Product: Automotive, Luxury car

As above, say the word luxury several times unless you’re Mercedes Benz in which case you need a snotty voiceover, too, and you must mention German engineering often. If it parks itself and avoids collisions by itself, mention that you can send it out for a drive by itself.

Product: Captain Morgan Rum

Perfect spots, great tagline: “To Life, Love and Loot.” Nothing to do with rum but what the hell? Do not imitate (although it imitates Jameson spot)

Men.

Once upon a time, society was all about men. They were either mostly good guys or mostly bad guys and, for better or worse, men ran everything. Dad brought home the bacon, Mom cooked it.

That was before we became a mobile consumer society, before society fractured along so many lines that it’s impossible to keep track.

Since then, men seem to have largely faded into the buying-things background and mass marketers have lost sight of them to the point that some companies think it’s a good idea to run commercials that show men to be feckless dopes.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that because women buy more things than men do, men are irrelevant.

Conventional wisdom is, as usual, wrong.

Part of the challenge is that the rise of women led to exciting marketing strategies, the most prominent of which is “You can have it all!” That’s the underlying premise of women-focused TV networks, TV programs, commercials, movies, books, and all those magazines you see at supermarket checkout counters … where there are no men’s magazines.

“You can have it all” just makes men shrug and laugh, “Okay, that’s great. Listen, where’s the menswear department?”

My favorite female on the planet can’t drive from Fort Lauderdale to Miami without GPS, preprinted Yahoo Map and cell phone poised to call for help.

On the other hand, she can stroll into the gigantic Aventura Mall through any entrance and know exactly where every store is, how to get to it and what’s likely to be on sale that day.

Advertisers believe that women are complicated and men are simple. In a way, they’re right. But a more accurate view is that women think about a lot of things at once and from dozens of different angles. Men focus.

Women enjoy shopping. They can spend hours at it and not buy anything. Men get in, find what they want and get out as fast as they can.

BTW, none of this is true of 100% of either sex. Think 80/20 instead, then store and forget (for now) all the anomalies you know about. Until recently, I never had to say that in any discussion about marketing, sales, advertising. People just knew that mass marketing is largely about generalities. Now it is inevitable that someone will pop up with “That’s not true, I know a man who …”

I’m sure you do. We can stop talking about tens of millions of American men and focus on the guy you know, or we can file him under anomalies and move on. Your choice.

According to the National Retail Federation’s Big Blog (October, 2010) men actually spend more than women on Christmas shopping. Not a lot more, $698.76 to $679.48, but the fact that it’s even close is surprising.

In broad categories, most of what men and women buy overlaps: food, cars, houses, clothing, technology, entertainment, financial services. The differences are in the details, the scope and the intensity.

A November, 2007 Wharton School study put it this way: “Men Buy, Women Shop”. There’s a ton of research on the topic but most of it predates the current economic disaster conditions in the US.

The details have less overlap and that’s where we see the split between men’s things and women’s things.

Some are obvious. Fashion, for example. It’s not just that men and women wear different kinds of clothes; it’s that women are much more interested in clothes and accessories, including hair, makeup, jewelry and, especially, shoes.

Women tend to be more trendy.

That sharp intake of breath you hear is a gasp of disbelief. But just watch a few movies and you’ll see an interesting difference between men and women.

A man today could wear Bogie’s wardrobe from 1943’s Casablanca without raising an eyebrow. Not true of the women’s outfits. Ditto hairstyles.

1944 gave us Going My Way and Double Indemnity. Same thing.

Leap ahead to 1954’s On The Waterfront and Three Coins in the Fountain.

Women’s clothes and hair are quite different ten years later, men’s are about the same.

By 1970’s Airport, women’s clothing had changed almost completely. Men’s, not so much.

The point is that men are less trend conscious, less attracted by new-for-its-own-sake than women are. Much less.

What that means is that if the things men buy don’t wear out and don’t go completely out of fashion (top hats), they don’t buy new things. A great many men wear the same kind of clothing – even the exact same clothing – for 50 years or more: penny loafers, button down shirt, gabardine slacks, blue blazer. Fine in 1951, fine in 2011. This holds true for more than clothes. In varying degrees, it’s true for toothpaste, food, tools, furniture, art, music …

It’s not that men are averse to change. They’re averse to what, to them, is pointless change. The notion of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a man’s notion. Nor do we like old things because they’re old; we like old things that are good … because they’re good.

But we’re talking about marketing now, about people buying things in the near future. Do men matter? Well, no, in a lot of categories men are irrelevant.

But in other categories, men are pretty well the whole ball game. But there’s a problem. Most women-dominated categories are mass market categories. Most men-dominated categories are niches, large niches to be sure, but niches just the same.

And because a lot of the things men buy are for life, we tend to gather a lot of information before we hand over our credit cards. And that’s where direct marketers come in. We’re good at selling to niches profitably. That may be why direct mail is still the best discipline for reaching adult males.

None of this changes the fact that a supermarket’s best customer is a hungry man on his own after he’s had a drink or two.

In the doctor’s waiting room, I was idly scanning a magazine called Smart Money which is put out by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Riffling through the pages backwards, as is my wont, I got to the inside front cover quickly and came across this double page spread.

Believe it not, it’s an ad for, not a mini-jeremiad against, The Wall Street Journal.

The huge image is bad enough: a punk defacing someone’s property. A kinder interpretation would be that he’d been commissioned by the owner of the property to spray paint a wall. Nonetheless, the punk is defacing the property.

The headline makes it worse. Bad enough that the WSJ tinkers with its name in its signature font by replacing the word Wall with the word Cultured: The Cultured Street Journal, but WSJ is telling us that graffiti is culture. Maybe, but it is a symbol of a base culture, street culture, destructive culture. The Wall Street Journal approves of it and wants to be part of it. Why?

It is possible that some graffiti is art worthy of our approval. But that is not what graffiti really is. Take the 7 train from Grand Central Terminal some time and look out the window when you surface in Queens. Building after building after building, overpasses, billboards, traffic signs, store fronts are all defaced with irrational spray painted scribbles – graffiti. The “art” is more than ugly, it’s threatening. It says “this is a dangerous neighborhood”. The building owners might as well mount large signs with the words “We are helpless against the punks”.

And The Wall Street Journal approves, calling it culture and muddling the concept with its valuable 122-year-old name. In a double page spread on the inside cover of one of its magazines.

Imagine if Emily Dickinson had decided to write fewer of her brilliant little poems in order to devote more time to Limericks: “There was a young man from Nantucket …”

The truth may be that someone at the Journal thought it would be a good idea to appear cool, hip, with it, happening. It’s kind of sad.

Whoever approved the ad didn’t understand something visceral about communication: you can’t be all things to all people. You can’t be serious and a buffoon, you can’t be The Wall Street Journal and XXL Magazine (“Hip Hop on a higher level”) at the same time. There’s almost no overlap in the audiences.

Besides, there are already at least two dozen magazines that cover graffiti. The world doesn’t need another one.

A few years ago I read about two schools that had just built new student centers. One of the schools was private; the other was state run. The state school put in sidewalks immediately. The private school waited a year to see where students walked and then put in sidewalks. The state school had sidewalks and paths ever after. The private school had sidewalks, no paths … and pristine lawns.

Since April 10, 2007, eight states and the District of Columbia, with 132 electoral votes among them, have joined something called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

The eight states, in the order they joined the Compact are Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, (District of Columbia), Vermont, and California. Most of the usual suspects.

They’re all idiot-dominated states with governments that believe Democrats will always have a permanent advantage in the national popular vote. (They’ll probably change their minds after the 2012 election.)

Once enough states with a majority of electoral votes (270) join the Compact, they will all be committed to ignoring the winner of the popular votes in their states and awarding their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

One problem with this brilliant plan is that there is no such thing as a national popular vote.

There are only state-wide votes, 50 of them plus DC.

In theory, under Compact “rules”, 11 states would be able to decide the Presidency all by themselves. They could do that now if all 11 of the most populous states voted for the same candidate. However, with the Compact in force, those 11 states could vote for Candidate A and then watch their electoral votes go to Candidate B.

But right now, it’s a state by state thing. There is no national vote and a lot of people just don’t understand that.

The simplest illuminating example might be the 1960 World Series. The Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees were evenly matched. The Pirates finished the season with a .617 record and the Yanks with a .630 record.
The Series went 7 games and the Yankees outscored the Pirates 62-20 over those seven games. It was a slaughter, a runaway, and the Yankees would have walked off with the World Series title had it not been for one minor detail.

The hapless Pirates somehow won the Series for the outlandish reason that they’d won 4 of the 7 games – 6-4, 3-16, 0-10, 3-2, 5-2, 0-12, 10-9.

Had there been a baseball version of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to fix that, the Yankees would have won the Series. They scored more runs, right? And fair’s fair.

Of course, if that happened, strategy in all future World Series games would change dramatically as will strategy in Presidential elections if the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, the biggest gerrymandering scam in history, ever sees the light of day.

Who doesn’t like the Harvard Business Review (HBR)? It’s full of interesting ideas and insights.
The May, 2011 issue was a surprise, though.
Casually thumbing through it, I paused at the Letters to the Editor (which HBR cutely calls Interaction) and burst out laughing. Apparently a previous issue had had an article about “Capitalism for the Long Term” and readers’ reactions included:
“The Anglo-American model of capitalism is due for an enormous shakeout. We should look at the European model (seen in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, France and the Netherlands), where the strength of society is maintained through a degree of social mobility based on merit, social cohesion, and social services that help smooth out the difference between those who have and those who have not.” Kenneth Armitage, former chairman, Committee 86B, International Electrotechnical Commission.
We’ve already looked at Europe and it’s a disaster even in Armitage’s cherry-picked 8 countries. High unemployment, Swedes abandoning cities (like Malmo) to immigrant thugs, Iceland effectively bankrupt, Paris surrounded by hostile immigrant suburbs into which cops venture only when they’re armed like Patton’s Third Army, massive unemployment is the norm, and even enlightened Europeans are abandoning the nanny state idea. Most of the other 42 European counties are basket cases. In the meantime, the US has wasted plenty of time and trillions of dollars trying to “smooth out the differences between the haves and those who have not” … and things have just gotten worse, mainly because we keep ignoring the reasons for the differences.
The idea that growth can be infinitely sustainable is the mathematical and physical impossibility upon which our entire economic system is based. Nature has no system that can spout this kind of growth; the closest example to something that can is cancer. Unfortunately, once the host has been devoured, the cancer is also destined to perish. Richard Chrenko, senior advisor, The Natural Step Italy
There are a mere three sentences in Chrenko’s letter; the middle one has two parts. Let’s deal with them in order: Sentence 1: Who said that infinitely sustainable growth had anything to do with our economic system? Nobody sane. Our system, when it’s allowed to work, is based on creative destruction and on recovering from the more or less constant string of uncreative destruction inflicted by various cretins such as, oh, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez and lesser black holes on the dark side. I suspect Chrenko really means infinite growth of population. Populations in civilized countries are shrinking (that’s why those countries import so much labor); the challenge now is to get the uncivilized countries to do the same. Sentence 2a: Whoever said our economic system has anything to do with systems in nature? Nobody. But Chrenko needs nature to set up the pointless cancer analogy in Sentence 2b. Sentence 3: Cancer gets into a body, devours it and the body dies and the cancer dies a little later. We get it, capitalism is a self-destructive cancer to Chrenko. On the other hand, a lot of us know that capitalism is the engine that, remarkably uncancerlike, comes up with the food, medicine, technology, etc. that make our lives longer, happier and safer. You could look it up.
This is an excerpt from a letter:
“And to claim that tough regulations would stifle entrepreneurship is to argue that entrepreneurial companies thrive only in sleazy environment.” Shivakumar Kunapuli, corporate advisor
Kunapuli is an extremist. It’s either tough regulations or sleaze. Let’s call sleaze “A” and tough regulations “Z”. Most of us, until recently anyway, operate in the I-R range and that’s where entrepreneurial companies thrive. The A to H and S to Z zones are for losers.
This is another excerpt:
What we need is a new system of incentives (laws and regulations) that promote long-term thinking.
David Salahi, software developer, Kelley Blue Book
Laws and regulation are not incentives; they’re disincentives. A system with too many laws and regulations is a cancer on the engine of wealth creation (to borrow a conceit from Kunapuli). India discovered this the hard way. So did China, Eastern Europe and, now, Western Europe. Apparently, we’ll have to go through hell to learn it here.

I love a good chuckle in an otherwise serious magazine, don’t you?