Arrrggh! What Did You Expect?

January 2006 By Denny Hatch

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Word got out that parts of the book had incurred Kennedy displeasure and were removed prior to publication.

After "The Death of a President" was published in 1967 to huge sales and notoriety, Krassner announced that he had come into possession of the excised material and that it would run in the next issue of The Realist.

Krassner carefully studied Manchester's prose style—the measured tempo and authoritative tone—and crafted a narrative so grotesque and sick—yet so realistic—that it caused an international uproar. This tsunami of outrage and revulsion broke over the government, the media, intelligentsia and Joe Lunchbox. The legal community weighed in on his First Amendment right to publish it. A friend of Manchester's went to work trying to revoke The Realist's Second Class mailing privileges. That issue sold 100,000 copies.

It was down-'n'-dirty, old fashioned satire, but Krassner never let on. As he told an interviewer:

Well, I had to establish verisimilitude. When Jonathan Swift wrote his "Modest Proposal," he didn't say, "Hey, folks, I'm only kidding, I don't really mean that we can solve both the famine and overpopulation by eating newborn babies." It wouldn't have had the same impact.

In the following issue of The Realist, Krassner wrote "Case history of the Manchester Caper." After recounting his thought processes, his writing technique, his troubles trying to find a printer that would touch it and many of the uniformly violent reactions from every segment of the population—including many people who should have known better—Krassner wrote:

So, a reader sees the headline on that issue of The Realist and says: "The parts that were left out of the Kennedy book. Oh, boy!" Then reads it. Voluntarily. And says: "The parts that were left out of the Kennedy book. Arrrggh!"

What did you expect?

Hamas

The population of Palestine has been living in squalor with rampant unemployment and fury directed at Israel for 40 years. Meanwhile, the late leader, Nobel Laureate Yassir Arafat, plundered $1 billion of international aid every year in order to pay his enforcers, set up a $50,000 per month annuity for his mother-in-law, and enable his wife to receive more than $7 million from a bank account in Tunisia during 2002-2003.

So the Palestinians are given the opportunity to participate in a democratic election and they vote the rascals out in a landslide. Arrrggh!

What did you expect?

GM

For years, the management of General Motors ignored the warning signs of oil price increases and not only greedily ground out gas-guzzling SUV's and pick-ups, but also gave huge discounts and rebates to hype sales. Horrifyingly, built into the cost of each vehicle was $1,200 in health benefits for workers and retirees. Suddenly, with the price of oil hitting $70 a barrel and the cost of filling the tank of one of these monsters reaching $70, retail and second-hand markets went dead while dealers' lots were jammed with unsold vehicles.

GM announces a loss of $4.8 billion. Arrrggh!

What did you expect?

Ford Announces Layoffs of 30,000 and 14 Plants to Be Closed

Arrrggh!

See above.

Jill Carroll Kidnapped in Iraq

It may be the most dangerous place on earth. From the 2003 invasion until now, a total of 37 journalists have been abducted and 79 have been killed.

Hundreds more non-journalists have been kidnapped, frequently not for ideological reasons, but rather for ransom. The media refer to these abductors as insurgents. Anywhere else in the world they would be dubbed criminals.

In this explosive part of the world, where the U.S. military wears heavy protective equipment and travels in armed and armored caravans. Are they safe with helmets, body armor and gun-toting escorts? Ask ABC's Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, who were wounded by a roadside bomb on Sunday. According to ABC News, 10,600 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) went off in 2005. Last week, 220 were detonated.

So a 28-year-old American reporter for the Christian Science Monitor tootles around Baghdad with just a driver and bodyguard. Her vehicle is assaulted. The driver escapes. The bodyguard is killed. Carroll is abducted. Arrrggh!

What did you expect?

Takeaway Points to Consider

• In 1666, Isaac Newton formulated his Third Law of Motion: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." This is true in physics and in life.

• The Hamas election itself was peaceful and, according to poll watchers and outside observers (including the ubiquitous Jimmy Carter), it was completely honest. The landslide result was a violent reaction to the thuggery, incompetence and corruption of the prior government. The reasons for the surprise and shock was yet another appalling failure of U.S. intelligence and its inability to get knowledgeable operatives in the Arab Street to take its pulse and report back accurately.

• In business, it's imperative to be "out there" in your market place, sucking up information and taking the pulse of the economy, your industry and the people. Companies that think they are saving money by not sending people on the road, attending trade shows and talking to customers face-to-face, will be losers in the long term.

• Listen to your people who have been out there.

• GM had a serious failure in leadership. A true leader (and listener) would have seen the future and taken the chance of persuading stockholders that it was a good thing to sacrifice some profits in order to start making sensible vehicles. Alas, publicly held companies are at the mercy of Wall Street analysts. In order to keep stock prices high—and executive stock options and bonuses viable—management allows itself to operate on what Seattle guru Bob Hacker calls "long-term plans de jour."

• Reporter Jill Carroll was asking for trouble. Drive around in circles at 200 miles an hour like Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500 and you are liable to get hurt—or killed. Get behind the wheel of a car drunk—as Philadelphia restaurateur Susanna Goihman allegedly did—and it's likely that you're going to kill someone. Drive around Baghdad and chances are good you're going to get abducted.

• What the GM management and Jill Carroll had in common is that neither of them knew when—or how—to take chances.

Letters to the Editor

Note: Denny personally replies to all correspondence.

A reader responds to "Is Black the Color of My True Love's BlackBerry?" which was published Jan. 24, 2006:

From a couple issues back: "As Canadian writer-designer Ted Kikoler suggested, anything that looks like a human hand touched the letter (e.g., a live stamp affixed slightly crooked) should help." Not to toot my father's own horn, but when he was circulation manager of LOOK, he was allowed to test just about anything under the sun. He said it was the greatest testing laboratory in the world. In any event, when he couldn't come up with anything else to test, he set his sights on the indicia. Fifty thousand outer envelopes were printed with the indicia slightly tilted to the left, 50,000 with the indicia printed straight, and 50,000 with the indicia slightly tilted to the right. And the winner? To the right! Stupid test? Probably. But when I joined The Cowen Group in 1975, it was one of the many "rules" he recited.

—David Cowen