American Hucksters

[BigBagel]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/op...20rich.html?hp

Frank Rich details details America's current Age of the Huckster.

[jk]

Re: American Hucksters

he's got bernanke pegged. and i love "the sand trap" image at the end.

[santafe2]

Re: American Hucksters

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/op...20rich.html?hp

Frank Rich details details America's current Age of the Huckster.

To compare Woods to Enron or the lies that got us into Iraq is just dumb. If it turns out he was using like Bonds and McGuire, that's a new issue but as this article stands, it's just whining about Tiger's personal life. Maybe Rich should just man up or shut up.

[GRG55]

Re: American Hucksters

To compare Woods to Enron or the lies that got us into Iraq is just dumb. If it turns out he was using like Bonds and McGuire, that's a new issue but as this article stands, it's just whining about Tiger's personal life. Maybe Rich should just man up or shut up.

I think you completely missed the point of Rich's article...which is surprising because that's not normal for someone as perceptive as you are santafe2...

[santafe2]

Re: American Hucksters

I think you completely missed the point of Rich's article...which is surprising because that's not normal for someone as perceptive as you are santafe2...

There is a much deeper issue here. We want to compare our collective social failures over the last 20 to 30 years to a series of affairs by a famous golfer. He's you and me with a lot more choices...lucky us, we'll take the high ground. Tiger Woods is a guy with too many choices and no one to kick his butt when he's being dumb, (remember his dad is gone). Rich dismisses evil by calling out Woods for his failures. Woods is a person, like you and I. Give him some space, he's not evil, just a bit dumb like all of us, and too much alone. Enron is and was evil. I've no respect for Rich as he would diminish evil to meet a deadline. I'm calling him out for an apology.

[Anon21456]

Re: American Hucksters

To compare Woods to Enron or the lies that got us into Iraq is just dumb. If it turns out he was using like Bonds and McGuire, that's a new issue but as this article stands, it's just whining about Tiger's personal life. Maybe Rich should just man up or shut up.

Please use your abstract thinking capabilities and try to see the whole forest through a simple leaf. The world is fractal in nature and that's all that this article is saying.

You not willing to make an effort to see the big picture is exactly the same as the SEC not willing to investigate/nail Madoff. But I think that this type of comportment is great because it allows some of us to make mucho dinero ;)

[jk]

Re: American Hucksters

There is a much deeper issue here. We want to compare our collective social failures over the last 20 to 30 years to a series of affairs by a famous golfer. He's you and me with a lot more choices...lucky us, we'll take the high ground. Tiger Woods is a guy with too many choices and no one to kick his butt when he's being dumb, (remember his dad is gone). Rich dismisses evil by calling out Woods for his failures. Woods is a person, like you and I. Give him some space, he's not evil, just a bit dumb like all of us, and too much alone. Enron is and was evil. I've no respect for Rich as he would diminish evil to meet a deadline. I'm calling him out for an apology.

the accenture link to woods was the point: cashing in on a false image; the disparity between appearance and reality and the u.s. government's chronic political preference for the former over the latter. i'm with rich.

[flintlock]

Re: American Hucksters

People are rarely as good (or as bad) as they appear to be on the surface. Only a fool would have believed Tiger Woods was the Superman/Boy Scout his marketing people were projecting. Almost no one could have guessed he was the cad he turned out to be either.

I am well aware we live in a time where presenting an exaggerated fake front to people is considered acceptable. I take it into account in my business dealings and learn to proceed with caution and even use it to my advantage at times.

[Verrocchio]

Re: American Hucksters

People like to think themselves to be hard-headed empiricists as in the oft-heard "I'll believe it when I see it." If truth be told, the governing phrase is more often "I'll see it when I believe it!"

BTW, SantaFe, Rich made it clear that he used Tiger as representative of a widespread cultural problem: As cons go, Woods’s fraudulent image as an immaculate exemplar of superhuman steeliness is benign. His fall will damage his family, closest friends, Accenture and the golf industry much more than the rest of us. But the syndrome it epitomizes is not harmless. We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over.

Why are we fooled so easily? Because we want to see the image that is ever so sketchily indicated in the images drawn by the con artists!

Read the lyrics:

I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

The Boxer, Simon and Garfunkle

[don]

Re: American Hucksters

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: American Hucksters

Why are we fooled so easily? Because we want to see the image that is ever so sketchily indicated in the images drawn by the con artists!

Our instincts and emotions are adapted for the tribe, like other herding or pack animals. The intellect of our outer brain forms fancier notions, but usually only by way of justifying metaphor to what our more powerful but more primitive lower and middle brain and body determine. However our outer brain has an enormously powerful ability to bend and mold our more primitive brain. Civilization above the level of the tribe builds on this, spreading ideas, images, knowledge, and dictates that find fertile ground in our minds and bodies, bending them towards the benefits of the more powerful institutions and individuals.

[santafe2]

Re: American Hucksters

the accenture link to woods was the point: cashing in on a false image; the disparity between appearance and reality and the u.s. government's chronic political preference for the former over the latter. i'm with rich.

I understand the other point of view and several of you have stated it well. But I'm concerned that we no longer understand or care about the difference between weakness and evil. Rich diminishes evil by comparing Woods to it. If someone would care to defend the lies that lead to death, dismemberment and tragedy that is the war in Iraq as equivalent to Woods' lies, have at it.

[GRG55]

Re: American Hucksters

I understand the other point of view and several of you have stated it well. But I'm concerned that we no longer understand or care about the difference between weakness and evil. Rich diminishes evil by comparing Woods to it. If someone would care to defend the lies that lead to death, dismemberment and tragedy that is the war in Iraq as equivalent to Woods' lies, have at it.

I understand what you are saying santafe2, but it's also not that uncommon for me to use an apparently trivial observation or anecdotal incident to try to illustrate a wider or more important point. Sometimes people get it, and sometimes they don't. C'est la vie.

[don]

Re: American Hucksters

"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth." George Orwell

“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, or to consider the most wretched sort of life as a paradise.” Adolf Hitler

"Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party. The writer is the engineer of the human mind." Josef Stalin

tip of the hat to Jesse's Cafe Americain

[GRG55]

Re: American Hucksters

"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth." George Orwell

“Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, or to consider the most wretched sort of life as a paradise.” Adolf Hitler

"Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party. The writer is the engineer of the human mind." Josef Stalin

tip of the hat to Jesse's Cafe Americain

These can all be distilled down to one concise modern leadership equivalent:

"Never start to believe your own bullshzt..."

...and I am very much coming around to the view that this is the sole guiding philosophy inside the White House today...