Second Amendment: Original Intent???

Charlottesville, VA: home of Thos. Jefferson.

?This is a "well regulated militia?!" 

 

 

 OMG! What are we thinking!?

Damn Kenya Airways!

Last night Ann and I had to miss dinner with another local couple and old friends from Laguna Woods.  It was all Kenya Airways’ fault.

At 4:30, I showered and shaved to go downtown to meet, dine and then attend the Summer Chamber Festival recital and concert.  I noted my nose hairs needed a trim – yes, those obnoxious nose hairs old guys grow.  I clipped away and then . . . I nipped soft flesh on the inside of my nostril.  In 70 years of clipping hairs, I had never before clipped myself.

Since I am on Warfarin, the blood thinner, for A-fib you understand, I bleed.  Boy, do I bleed!  Rich, red, wholesome drops steadily dripped into the sink.  I couldn’t staunch the flow.  Kleenex and TP soaked up blood; drops got away onto an old t-shirt I donned with Ann’s help while I held tissues to the Red River of Mercer Island.   I lay down on the floor but the blood simply drained down my throat.  It’s very salty, by the way; a good protein source; I drink the blood of my enemy.

I pinched my nose where the septum and cartilage meet, as advised by my anti-coagulation nurse.  I pinched it low, as nurse Ann counseled.  A later call to Dr. Hello, How Are You (after 26 years, our doctor still won’t greet us by name) prescribed 20 minutes of pinching (high) followed by 10 minutes off, then repeat.  If that didn’t stop the flow, go to the emergency room; there they will cauterize it.  I sat in a chair, head back, TP up nose, pinching two-handed high and low.  20 on, 10 off; 20 on, 10 off.

It didn’t stop.  We had been at it for over an hour by this point, missing our dinner both out and at home.  Off to the ER we went, Ann driving, I with my roll of TP in lap, holding a wad of paper up my nose. Into Overlake's ER I lurch and am immediately whisked out of the lobby and into an exam room (if you want to avoid waits in ERs, arrive blood-spotted, clutching your own roll of TP as if you doubted their supply, holding a bloody wad and shouting "where can I get rid of this?")

This was all caused, you see, by those idiots at Kenya Airways.

 

In February of 1968, I attended my first of eleven annual Toy Fairs in New York.  I stayed at the old Hampshire House, on Central Park South, between the Essex House (which I would later market when at Marriott) and the St. Moritz.  In my bathroom medicine cabinet, I found a pair of trim scissors left by an earlier guest and either missed by a careless housekeeper or left by a gracious one – blunt nosed, curved of blade, stainless steel, made in Switzerland.  Wonderful scissors, that I subsequently carried on every overnight trip all over the globe, in first class and in coach, in lax times and TSA times. I’d had them inspected on occasion, but their diminutive size and rounded tips always reassured the most intrepid gate minder.  Until Kenya Airways . . .

Sunday, August 23^rd, 2015, Kilimanyaro Airport (that’s right: . . . yaro), Arusha, Tanzania.  Short hop to Nairobi.  No visible security to speak of.  Casual, casual . . . until search of carry-on and out comes the Hampshire House scissors.  Nope.  What?!  Nope.  Wait – the’re blunt nosed.  Nope.  Let me talk to your supervisor, please, with a smile.  She comes.  He hands her the scissors.  I explain these have traveled over five continents, cleared innumerable security screenings, been with me for nearly 50 years – half a century of examinations and never found threatening to pilot, cabin attendant or fellow passenger.  Why?  Are these scissors?  Yes.  Scissors are forbidden.  No, sharp scissors are forbidden.  Are these scissors?  Yes, but . . . .  Scissors are forbidden . . . and into the trash she dropped them – my Hampshire House surprise, my boon travel companion of near half a century. Gone. . .  Confiscated. . .  Trashed in front of my eyes.

A Year of Trimming Dangerously (apologies to Christopher Koch) with sharp-pointed, straight-bladed Swiss Army Knife dreadnought scissors.  Careful. Should get another blunt-nose pair, but always forgetting in haste to leave the drug store; Walgreens are so depressing. Until . . .

Monday, October 3^rd, 2016, Perugia, Italy.  Ann and I are prowling through the Rocca Paolina; into a nick-knack shop we wander, full of pottery, tourist coffee mugs, cheap sun glasses and . . . blunt nosed trim scissors.  But not curved; it's hard to nip oneself with curved scissors. But very small and very keen.  Made in Perugia we are assured.  Of Swedish steel, as Michelangelo used to make his stone chisels.  My Souvenir de Perugia.  Safety in nose hair trimming.   What a deal.  

Not so, after all.

Overlake's ER team was successful. Vaso-constrictor; pinch low, as close to the open artery as possible; cauterize chemically.  To add insult to injury, the buggers drew off three samples of blood for themselves.  Finally, home we went for a 9:30pm supper and washing out spots as best I could.

So it’s all Kenya Airways fault that we missed dinner with friends, a recital, a concert.  It’s all Kenya Airways fault that I spent yet another evening in the company of doctors and nurses, all fine and friendly to be sure, but still . . .

Damn Kenya Airways!

 

"A Better Deal" -- that's it? C'mon!

I am a brander.  For twenty years at General Mills, the last seven of which as it's chief advertising officer and (with my mentor, Bob Blake) protector of GMI's brand equities; then as another twenty-four years as Sr. VP Marketing and Sales at Marriott, Exec VP at Westin; and finally as principal consultant of FCW Consulting, an international branding and marketing management consultancy -- I have some time-tested beliefs about brands which I've successfully applied to employers, clients and not-for-profit enterprises.  I've learned something, from the likes of Blake, Dwight Jewson, Keith Reinhard -- and from my mistakes -- about how brands work and don't work.  A Better Deal ain't going to work.

Brands matter.  Is politics exempt from the core idea that a brand is a distinctive identity that carries meaning not only to its intended, prospective buyer, but also to the community of on-lookers who ask why should I care?  A brand is a story in a nutshell -- who are we; what do we do for our 'customer'; what it means, i.e., what the emotional pay-out is for them; and why should society give a damn?  This is especially important for not-for-profits and political parties which need societal respect and support if they hope to do their work, accomplish things and sustain themselves.

When I was a kid, during WWII, my Mom shopped for us at Montgomery Wards.  They marketed under a Good, Better, Best three-option pricing and branding scheme.  It usually drew my frugal mother up to the Better level.  (After the War, coincidentally, Dad briefly joined Montgomery Ward as Dir. of Personnel, suffering under Sewell Avery before joining David Lilienthal to form the Atomic Energy Commission.)  The G-B-B scheme can hardly be blamed for Ward's demise, but it certainly didn't help as the branding became an outdated cliche'.  Operations as disparate as SeaWorld and Southwest Air are still using a G-B-B pricing scheme, though under different names, to stimulate up-grading and to generate incremental revenues.  But they no longer use the cliche's "Good, Better, Best."

Brands always resonate, sometimes with positive and desirable resonances, sometimes inadvertent, harmful ones.  With what does "a better deal" resonate?  First, it can't help but bring to mind The Art of The Deal, the Manchild-In-The-White-House's brand; why drive an audience to think of the supposedly most skillful -- read "best" -- dealmaker?  At least that is the claim.  Is your deal, Schumer, merely better than his?  Is that all you promise?

The second resonance is the used car dealer and local ads for "Larry, at Stuff-'me Chevrolet" shouting about deals, deals, deals.  Buyers know any damn fool can offer a better deal, and will.  Resonance?: Cheap.

The third, for me, is Let's Make a Deal, with screaming, overweight fans comin' on down to be  exploited by TV Producers as they grovel and scramble for unneeded stuff.  Consumerist excess on parade: a better deal, indeed.

No.  Schumer and Pelosi have blown it.  Do they really think their mission is merely to make a better deal than can McConnell and Ryan?  Is that all there is? 

Or better than the New Deal?  Doubtful.  Better than the Fair Deal or the Square Deal?  C'mon!

The Democrats deserve a brand that promises new energy, new imagination, a new determination to change course for middle America.  One such was touched on by Hilary back in April of 2016, but then she inexplicably dropped it.  She had said her party's task was "to remove barriers."  Now there's a brand.  It can umbrella a wide variety of programs -- access to health care or quality education, job discrimination and voting rights, working wages, immigration, affordable child care, on and on.  It promises to address the major complaint of middle Americans as I understand it: no one listens to me and cares about the system's impediments to equity, justice and opportunity for me and my kids.

It actually was Bill Clinton who coined "removing barriers" back in 1994.  Of course, back then he was up against a consummate brand: "Contract With America."  (No one said scoundrels also don't know how to brand; witness Trump and Gingrich.)  Contract With America was distinctive and memorable. 

Distinctive and memorable: I recall wrestling with Bill Marriott over naming hotels.  He was perfectly happy with the Newark Marriott, the Tulsa Marriott, the Palm Desert Marriott -- despite the fact that the Palm Desert hotel was to be a flossy resort, not just another cat-box by the highway. It was only when the owner of another Palm Desert hotel sued that I was able to prevail and name it, and subsequently all of our resorts, each with a distinctive name of its own sub-tagged "by Marriott."  Thus: Desert Springs, by Marriott. 

Distinctiveness: what sets you apart from your competitors, whether competing for sales or donations or personnel or votes.  So -- rank in order of distinctiveness: "Contract with America", "Removing Barriers", "A Better Deal." 

Personally, I love "removing barriers."  But that's not the point.  The point is that Pelosi and Schumer have got to DO better.  They have to win back the respect of their opponents with whom they must collaborate, the confidence of their supporters, and the votes of the public.  Just to be seen as offering a better deal ain't going to cut it.

Get Over It? NO! This Too Shall Pass? NOT WITHOUT HELP!

Two weeks with family in Idaho and Montana: no newspapers read, no TV watched, little radio heard.  Another week fishing in the British Columbia outback: no newspapers, no cell phone, no wi-fi, no radio.  Clearing the head.  But now, back in this gruesome reality of Russians, Repeal, Replace, Resist -- my head is ready to explode again.

One of my acquaintances, a Libertarian Trump voter, counsels “Get over it!”  Another expresses a Pollyanna confidence in America: “this, too, will pass.”  A third says “I’ll wait; folks will get fed up and then we’ll be ready for a change.”  Basically, all three are counselling me to sit back and let things play out; it is what it is. 

Sorry; that’s not good enough for me.  Don’t misunderstand: these are friends I admire and respect.  We simply agree to disagree.

Of course pendulums swing over time, but unless given a shove, unless the spring is wound, pendulums eventually just run down and stop.  Entropy can be guaranteed to stifle change and cement the status quo.  And ours is not an acceptable status quo.

My friend who styles me the Pessimist, the Cassandra, the Alarmist, who counsels “relax, this too shall pass”, is implicitly saying he expects the Supreme Court over the next twenty-five years to come to its senses; to realize on its own that cash is not speech, that legislative gerrymandering endangers representative government, that corporations and labor unions are not constituents.  Fat chance of that. There’ll be no correction without intervention.

As for my “Libertarian” friend, he will be content with all sorts of government intrusions into personal and public life so long as he gets his tax cut and the estate tax is eliminated.  After that, who cares if this administration abdicates renewable energy leadership to China, intrudes into reciprocal trade agreements (he’s a significant importer of French products, by the way[1]), increases the Federal deficit and debt, and puts more young Americans into danger overseas.

No. To make this pass, to not “get over it”, I need to exert what little energy and leverage I have.  I start with my representatives and Senators – at both state and Federal levels.  Washington State is an opportunity.  A consortium with other blue states on emission standards, carbon taxation, health insurance pools, promotion of multi-state membership medicine, perhaps even drug price negotiations, can turn “Federalism” and “States’ Rights” – red state ideals, after all – to our advantage and overwhelm central government mandates.  California is showing the way; hats off to Jerry Brown.  Our Governor Inslee just vetoed a gratuitous business tax cut; hats off to Jay, also.  And it’s high time the US Senate took back war powers and exercised foreign policy oversight.  Lots to be done . . ..

2018 can be the turning point – if we get out and make it so.  It will take money, effort, and positions on policy that unify and speak to a broad swath of middle America.  It will take being seen as working to solve problems, not mindlessly resisting.  It will take being seen as working – even working with Republicans --  to remove barriers to the American dream of equity, justice and opportunity.

 

Now, step by step, I’ve got to turn those lofty words into action.  Stay tuned.     

---

[1] We run a large and growing trade deficit with France, which Trump will likely spot after his loss of face with Macron.

O Canada

I haven't blogged in quite a while – too obsessed with and appalled by the slow motion wreck unfolding at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  Meanwhile, Ann’s torn-up knee had house-bounded her for over a month.  We needed to get away.  Thank goodness "O Canada, . . . the true north strong and free" is right next door.  

Our 'little sister' to the north shows us up in so many ways.  Her leader is but 47, has a tattoo, believes in global warming and welcomes immigrants.  His countrymen and women are not so crude as ours are becoming; truly, Canadians are nice.  Life expectancy in Canada is 3+years longer than ours.  A lower % smoke.  Their fifteen year olds rank 7th in the world in math proficiency vs. ours at 40th; 10th in science vs. ours @ 25th; 3rd in reading vs. ours at 24th.  Incarceration?  114 per 100,000 Canadians are in the slammer vs. 694 out of every 100,000 Americans.  (Some Canadians like to remind us that they are "Americans" too, as in North American.)  On the UN "happiness index", Canada ranks 7th, we 10th.  And so it goes -- highway deaths, infant mortality, on and on.  Just under 40% of Canadians are first or second generations vs. 20% or so of we Americans.  Does that fresh blood and energy have anything to do with anything??

No, I’m not one of those so disenchanted with the state of US democracy that I wish to emigrate to Canada, as we hear loosely talked of, but for restoration of spirit there she is -- very sensible, very easy to reach (from Seattle) and so very attractive.

So, Ann and I got away to Canada – specifically, to Saltspring Island, one of the Gulf Island chain  between Vancouver Island and  the British Columbia mainland.  Cross the border, two ferry rides and you are really away.

Saltspring is a quarter old money in graceful English beach cottages plus new-monied summer people in McMansions that stand empty 45 weeks a year. The rest: fishermen, artists, graying hippies -- he with ponytail, she in Birkenstocks and hand-woven granny gown -- and their X-Gen, wanna-be hippie grandchildren strumming guitars, sporting goatees and Dylanesquely inappropriate hats.  No VW Deadhead vans seen . . . but, yes, a ‘64 Cadillac rescue hearse, home-away-from-home.  It’s the 70’s Seattle scene distilled into a concentrate.  And all set in stunning scenery -- mountains, valleys, bays and harbors, old growth, deer, narrow roads with nary a straightaway.

Stephanie Welcomes Ann to the Wetherly

Our base was The Wetherly Inn. Our new friends are inn creators Samantha Gardner and Peter Weldon and their inn manager/Afghanistan veteran/daughter Stephanie Roberts.  The Wetherly is a place of peaceful comfort: well-designed rooms exquisitely, tastefully appointed (no Victorian lace or Teddy bears) amid 37 inviting acres of ponds, water courses and walking trails nestled into the flanks of Mt. Manchester.  Befitting her name, Samantha has created and nurtures lovely English gardens all about the inn which were simply glowing on this rainy spring weekend.


Dining? excellent: Wetherly breakfasts heavy with homemade breads and jams (Stephanie is also an experienced chef;) lunches in local seafood spots (great halibut fish n’ chips at The Seaside;) and top notch dinners (best of the best: House Piccolo.)  But why no oyster stew at The Oyster House?  Waiter said in seventeen years, no one had ever before asked.

Our Gabled Room (upper right) with Balcony 

Rainy, Misty View from Atop Mt. Maxwell (650mtrs)

O Canada, the true north safe and sane. When dysfunction overwhelms, O Canada . . .  We’ll be back.

If you are intent on getting even . . . then you’d better make sure you win. Otherwise, you look like a chump.

Democratic Senators sure look like chumps.

What did their Quixotic, Garland Crusade accomplish?

• Gorsuch is our new Supreme Court Justice. 
• The bar for the next Trump appointee, no matter how ill-suited a hack s/he may be, is lowered to a mere 51 votes.

Democrats lost two ways instead of just one -- they had no chance of denying Gorsuch knowing that McConnell would change the rules -- and maybe even three ways if Gorsuch subconsciously carries resentment of Democrat's into his judicial chambers.

Democrats failed to get even and they surely lost: chumps

Immigration, Migration and Me

(I know: it should be “I”, but I like the alliteration.)

This is a story of connections, coincidences, and disturbing discoveries.  The first string in the skein: immigration.

Wallers and Bogues settled in Massachusetts and then Connecticut in the early 17^th C, some moving on into northern Vermont in the early 18^th C.  Taylors and Morehouses appeared in upstate New York in the early 19^th C.  Cooks, in Nova Scotia in the 18th C, emigrating south to Rhode Island in the 19th.  These are the roots from which we Wallers grew.  Despite being here a long time and becoming thoroughly American “Damn Yankees”, they were, still and all, immigrants – without visas – having ventured here to find and take advantage of opportunity to freely make of life what they would.  And they did so, contributing to the American commonwealth all along the way.

My grandfather, Halley Templeton Waller, has always been held up to me as a sterling example of civic leadership, of crusading for social justice, of upholding the rights of newly arrived Americans.  In 1912, HT Waller was recruited by the Akron, Ohio rubber-barons to move from Cambridge, Mass and become Secretary of the Akron YMCA[1].  They were attracted to HT because of his record of success in creating the Cambridge Y’s Americanization program – teaching English and citizenship, civics and history to newly arrived immigrant labor being brought in and eagerly hired by industrialists of Waltham and Cambridge.  And from those industrialists, HT was able to raise capital and expand the Cambridge Y’s facilities and outreach; he was a Y star.

Immigration was a flood.  Between 1900 and 1914, some eleven million immigrants arrived on these shores, mainly from eastern and southern Europe.  In 1910, over 40% of New Yorkers were foreign born or the offspring of foreign born parents.  The burgeoning auto tire industry was centered in Akron; Firestone, Goodrich and Goodyear wanted their share of that unorganized, eager, cheap labor supply.  HT became the champion of turning these folks into Americans, teaching them English, encouraging their pride in their roots while acculturating them to American values and ideals, and teaching their responsibilities and rights as citizens (including the right to organize.)

In 1914, the European spigot closed.  Europe was at war; US industrial demand skyrocketing.  From where would the pool of (cheap) labor be replenished?

Second string in the skein: the Great Migration.  Those labor agents of northern industrialists, shut out of Europe, turned to the South – the southern United States with its huge surplus of exploited, uneducated, potentially cheap labor.  And northward they came, by the millions; between 1915 and 1930, over six million blacks migrated out of the south and into northern industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit – and Akron. 

In 1939, a 20’s something African American artist in Harlem documented the Great Migration in 60 paintings that narrated the causes, tales and trauma of that mass movement.  Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series was competed for by two prestigious museums.  They finally divided it in two, even numbered panels going to MOMA and odd-numbered going to the Phillips in Washington DC.  Only twice since ’40 have the two halves been reunited in a show, and this second time it came to SAM, the Seattle Art Museum.  Why SAM?  Because Jacob Lawrence moved here to join the faculty of UW; he and his wife Gwen Knight lived and died at Horizon House, where I just finished my nine years as a Trustee.  Horizon House has many of their works.  Ann and I proudly display a lithograph of Lawrence’s “Windows”, a Harlem street scene.  My granddaughter, Liza Stoner, visiting from BC, came with us when Ann and I viewed the show at SAM.  For Liza, The Migration Series was a enlightening discovery, a window on a part of America she had known not of.

The third string: backlash.  Last night, Ann and I watched “Digging Their Own Grave”, a segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes that dealt with the use – I’d say, abuse – of H1B visas to replace American workers with low cost, no benefits, foreigners.  Indian in-sourcing companies account for 80% of these abuses, mainly in the IT sphere.  Indian agents recruit labor and sell them to US companies (as did our industrialists' agents in Europe and then the South).  Adding insult to injury, in most cases the displaced, fired American employee is forced to train their foreign replacement; if they refuse, they lose their severance payment.  Quite prestigious organizations are participating in this abuse of H1B, e.g., UCSF Medical Center, which terminated 20+ IT workers and replaced them with Indian imports.  The displaced interviewed by CBS feel, naturally, outraged and betrayed.[2]  They are angry at the Indians, at their former employers, at the system.

HTW and FCW (my dad): c 1920?

Nothing new about backlash: in Akron in 1919, as everywhere, demobilized GI’s were returning home to find foreigners, usually Catholics (in predominately Protestant Ohio,) had good wage jobs in industry and “Negros” were edging into their neighborhoods.   Jobs were scarce as the economy slowed.  The ground was ready to sprout dissension and intolerance.  And populists took full advantage.   In 1921, Ohio boasted the largest among all states in enrollment of Klu Klux Klansmen.  HTW, then both the Y Secretary and Chair of the Akron school board, became a visible symbol of the 'coddling of foreigners', the Americanization of 'these Papist aliens in our midst.'  Dad carried all his life memory of a KKK cross burning on their front lawn when he was about ten.

 

In 1921, the good citizens of Akron elected a KKK majority to the school board, a KKK mayor of Akron, and KKK’ers to important positions in city and county governments.  The KKK-dominated school board fired the school superintendent and replaced him with a totally unqualified KKK member.  Granddad HT resigned from the school board. 

His policies and programs at the Y also brought unwelcome attention and heat, which the Firestone, Goodrich and Goodyear pooh-bahs didn’t appreciate; he was asked to resign. Nationally, this was a time of retrenchment, of the Emergency Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 which put limits on total immigration and set quotas based on national origin and the number of immigrants from each country already here.  The act greatly restricted southern and eastern European immigration and favored northern European sources, for the Irish, German, English, French-Canadian and Polish were already here.  Asian immigration earlier had been shut down by the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act. 

   

The KKK tide receded in the middle twenties and Akron slowly came to its senses, though discrimination, race riots and hate crimes continued to roil the mid-west throughout the ‘30’s.  In time, HT again came to be esteemed as a civic leader, heading up the War Bond drives of ’40 and ’41, chairing Akron’s wartime Rent Control Board. 

 But . . . my image of HT as champion of the underdog and social justice has been tarnished in my research on him and his times, first by discovery that African-American Christian young men were not welcome at the central Y; they had a Young Negro Men’s Christian Association of their own.  HT was not prejudiced; he supported them and participated in Secretarial training for African Americans, but still, he went along with separate but equal, which did not end in the Y until well into the 40’s in the north, well into the 70’s in the south.

Second, I have found newspaper reports of a speech HT gave to the Akron Chamber of Commerce calling for support of the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921.  His thesis was that the values of Western thought were rooted in the culture and beliefs of white, northern Europeans, and that America must act to protect the primacy of such cultural values and heritage to avoid their being subordinated to others.  HT had become a lesserly Christian as he matured, not churched, philosophic, a humanist deeply committed to the civic values of Western civilization; he wanted to protect that legacy and insure its primacy in America even at the cost of arbitrarily restricting access to our shores.  Even sub-consciously agreeing that some peoples are inferior to others.

So . . . no American tale is pure -- compromise, enabling, acting and reacting, backsliding.  These strings weave a repetitious pattern for my Waller family -- from my Grandfather to his great, great granddaughter – as they do for all of us Americans.  For here we are today, again – cheap labor agents at work, newly arrived aspirants with strange customs and religions, resentment and backlash, immigration control controversy, arbitrary restrictions by national origin, populist demagogues, prejudice and hate crimes, even KKK endorsement of the President of these not-so-United States.

Perhaps these inter-connected strings are an inevitable part of the warp and weave of the continuous fabric we call America, with our glories and flaws and, I hope, our belief that despite set-backs we will over time become stronger, more durable and more than ever a model to the world.  It’s now ours to look back and look forward, to repair and re-weave, to bind ourselves together in commonwealth, and to re-examine where we stand and for what.  Now is the time.

---

[1] A “Y” Secretary is the chief operating officer, equivalent to the Exec Dir. of a not-for-profit org.

[2] H2B visas are similarly abused.  E.g., there are 20+ Romanian low-pay, no benefit, part-time workers on duty at the Mar a Lago Club, the “Southern White House.”