Unhappily Trump's gift to America is a GOP white elephant. The party of Lincoln, the great emancipator, is now in thrall to a serial adulterer, serial bankrupt, and serial liar. His ability to infect his followers with belief in lies is only matched by Hitler's. Yes, I know comparisons to Hitler are always called out as being over the top, but how else should I interpret his constant haranguing that the last election was stolen from him? His biggest lie ever — a lie that about three-quarters of the republican electorate believe despite no credible evidence, dozens of court rulings, multiple recounts that found nothing, and onetime stalwarts of power in the GOP like William Barr and Chris Christie categorically denying that there was any widespread fraud in 2020 that would have overturned the results of the election. Hitler's "stabbed in the back" has the same resonance among those who wave Stop the Steal flags as it did among the embittered Germans of post-WWI.
 
Had Trump vociferously encouraged mask-wearing, social distancing, and getting a "Trump" vaccine as soon as possible, he would still be president. Instead, he yielded to his base, whipped up their resentment of science and "expertise," and encouraged them to do the most selfish thing they could: disregard the health and safety of their fellow Americans. And the constant drumbeat about election integrity, one whose merit has no founding or proof, has brought us to the place where retired generals are publishing Op-Eds alerting us to the likelihood of a coup in 2024. Republicans have controlled the White House for 12 of the past 20 years; only four of those years have resulted from a Republican having gotten more votes than his Democratic opponent. How this is, feels, or is democratic is beside the point. It is a fact. And now, through gerrymandering, installing "stop the steal" partisans to election boards, and the guise of "election integrity," the party of Lincoln has betrayed its founding father beyond all imagining. The thirst for power has overwhelmed the need for truth, accepted facts, and any semblance of honor, integrity, or commitment to the constitution that so many in the GOP claim to hold so dear.
 
People like Lindsey Graham insist that the party must work with Trump. The party, he seems to forget, is made up of individuals who need only follow their own judgment, integrity, and commitment to democratic means. The party's leadership has cast its lot with a charlatan who denies the truth, belittles opponents with names designed to shame them, and lies and lies and lies. Trump's enablers in the media — be it Fox pundits (none of whom are credible journalists) and the new gang of rightwing propagandists of Breitbart and One America News Network (the name itself is overtly fascistic) — have decided it is better to chase ratings rather than truth. Needing to work with Trump feels like Neville Chamberlain’s willingness to work with Hitler. How one works with a liar, grifter, and outright fraud is hard to countenance. It’s not unlike making a deal with someone robbing your home: you can take the silver but leave the heirlooms alone.
 
The growing talk of civil war has me wondering if it's time to buy a gun. Something I could do so with little more hassle than getting a library card and which I will be able to carry without permit or training if the NRA and politicians in its thrall have their way. 
 
I am a white male, soon to turn 70. I was raised an FDR democratic and remain one. The sadness that the headlines deliver to me every day since the arrival of Trump is only deepened by having family members who are part of the Trump cult. The great American experiment in truth, freedom, the rule of law, and the belief in the power of an educated citizenry has been unwound by the tribalism of social media, the loss of public truth, and the bitterness of a class of people whose anger and resentments are lodged in emotion, not fact. The Age of Reason seems so distant as to be unimaginable in today's world. 
 
How this ends, I have no idea. I fear for the worst. Hope for the best. And continue looking for reason to rise.

​Most of the words we use every day are little ones. A syllable or two, sometimes three. But for some reason, many folks confuse big words with erudition, aka, smarts. But that’s just not the case. Winston Churchill, who knew a bit about the power of words, once said, “short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” By old words he meant the simple ones of old English origin. Mom and Dad. Love and hate. Good and bad.  Bread and milk. Fight and flee. Come and go. Rise and shine. You get the idea.
 
There’s simply nothing better than tough old English words, the ones free of French, Latin, or Spanish influences. I’m not against foreign tongues influencing ours. As our tongue grew, it was happy to grab words from other tribes. So we think nothing of saying avant-garde, carte blanche, cliché, déjà vu, diva, emoji, fiasco, macho, motto, pasta, patio, pizza, solo, typhoon, and tsunami, to name but a few. It’s a long list. Generally, we don’t care where words come from. We care about getting our points across. Or we should. And when we do grab words from other tongues, they’re often small ones.
 
Big words have their place of course. And when no other word but a big one will do, go for it. But for any other reason is foolish. It’s easy to fall into the trap of big words. It’s an easy way to show off. And it’s often used to bully or shame readers for being no nothings. But know somethings — Churchill and Hemingway, for example — know better. Stop obfuscating. Start simple. Limit the big words. Small words kick ass.
 
©2021 John Hofmeister. 

Want a simple way to make your writing more vigorous, readable, and actionable?

Get rid of all those nouns with verbs buried inside them. Just googling “smothered verbs” will give you lots of examples of how and why this writing habit gets in the way of sturdy English prose. You can easily break this habit by turning nouns like discussion, information, reduction, and conclusion into action verbs — discuss, inform, reduce, and conclude. Your prose will get sharper. Become more readable. Less likely to induce boredom, eye rolls, and yeah whatever.

And take notice of that suffix in all these nouns — -ion. If you skim your copy and find them, you’re probably smothering verbs. Bureaucracies — whether public or private — are fond of smothered verbs because active verbs force writers to clarify who’s doing what to whom. Saying something like “there will be a reduction in our salesforce” sounds less threatening than “we will be reducing our salesforce.” People get fired. Nobody seems to be doing the firing.

Smothered verbs invariably invite passive verb constructions, where stuff happens seemingly by magic, the magic being that it absolves doers of doing anything. It’s the sort of opacity week-kneed lawyers, administrators, politicians, and bureaucrats strive for. Stop giving them quarter. Free a verb today!

©2021 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved.

I’m sure there are many NRA members who aren’t idiots. Unfortunately for the organization, those members don’t make news. And regardless of one’s opinion of the NRA, the appearance of gun-toting goofballs at the protests against decrees to prevent the spread of the coronavirus makes me wonder: Why are they bringing assault weapons to these protests?  The decrees aren’t restricting the rights to bear arms, although some decrees have shuttered shooting ranges where the bored or insecure gather to enjoy themselves or feel powerful unloading on paper tigers or whatever their inert and harmless targets happen to be. Are they planning to assault the legislators? Their governors? Counter-protesters? They not only like walking about carrying a big stick, but wish to yell loudly with childish displays of their dearest possessions. “I took my AR-57 into the rotunda, baby. Boy, I showed them. No one’s gonna tell me what to do. And this mask isn’t keeping me from this overhyped virus shit — it’s keeping me from being identified by the deep state.” That would be the deep state that keeps sending their grandmas checks every month, makes hamburger edible, lakes fishable, air breathable, water drinkable, modern live livable, and yet doesn’t seem to mind if citizens stroll about in public with oversized badges of dimwittery. Like anxious grammarians who believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket with every split infinitive, they believe it’s going to hell because they can’t figure out who made them so stupid in the first place. Even that is beyond the ken of the state, however deep.
 

The Madmen series probably drove a lot of interest in careers in advertising. Its hero, if you could call him that, is Don Draper, who dons a variety of drapes to conceal his intentions and proclivities from his wives, colleagues, and himself. But he’s a cool, sharp cookie, drinking hard liquor before noon and sucking Lucky Strikes, ostensibly because they’re toasted, doing chicks on the side, and picking up a French bride because his first one was either too beautiful or called him out for being a cad and lying in general or for other reasons I can’t recall. No matter. 
 
As an advertising creative hopeful, you might be enrolled in an ad program somewhere or hoping to break your way into the business as a copywriter or art director. You peruse the awesome creative to be found in One Show Annuals or CA Ad annuals, and think, wow, I want to do that. You see ads on TV, most of which are awful, and you think, I could do better than that. And I’m sure you could with some training and a decent creative brief and a creative director and an account team who care about creative. And while many agencies do care about creative, many don’t. While they may be in the ad business but they are in the end businesses. And many of them today are part of holding companies run by people who don’t give a fig for creativity unless it brings in money. Sometimes it does, but it’s a lot easier to acquiesce to a client’s moronic ideas and bill the crap out them and call it a day. And heaven forbid you recommend that they don’t need a TV spot or paid post or whatever because those would just be a waste of their money. The account team would gag at the thought of not doing something that would earn the agency money, regardless of ridiculousness the ask. But I digress.
 
Advertising can be rewarding, fun, and very remunerative. But it can be a crashing bore, relentlessly tedious, and drain you of a personal life, especially when you’re starting out, paying your dues as they say and putting in 60 to 80 hours a week. But if you survive time in the trenches and advance or simply continue being exceedingly good at what you do, sooner or later, there will be a younger version of yourself, eager to do what you do, for half of what you worked your way to earning with practice, diligence, and the usual politicking that comes with any job. Case in point: an agency with which I am somewhat familiar just lost a big account, and through no fault of the creatives, it needed to shed some FTEs, the polite acronym for full-time equivalent, you know actual employees with salaries and benefits. You’d think the shedding would start with the newer hires, those just learning the ropes. But you’d be wrong. Since advertising and creative output are terribly subjective endeavors, no one knows what really works. It’s a big fucking guess whether that clever ad or guerilla tactic will drive sales or build brand equity, whatever the fuck that is. So, the bean counters are like, what the hell. Let those folks who’ve been around and have gotten a steady increase in salary over the years (however modest) go and keep their juniors at half the cost or more. The agency can still claim to provide what clients want, insist they are crazily creative, etc. Of course, doing this is fundamentally stupid, as the seasoned veterans can generate more ideas, more quickly, and arrive at feasible solutions to marketing problems without pursuing ideas that their experience tells them would be a waste of time. Life at the agency goes on, however miserably. Clients continue to get ideas, however mediocre. And a dozen or so people find themselves looking for work. Now you might imagine that when business picked up, those skilled practitioners who were “let go” (like they were kites or something) would be asked to return to the agency they worked hard for, some for many years. But you’d be wrong again. That never happens. Never. 
 
So, my advice is to approach this career choice carefully. The creative part of the business is being overtaken by data whoremongers, so getting products to be sold in front of people who ALREADY have an interest in buying those products. So, the need to stand out, to present attention-getting ideas recedes and just presenting the gizmo and offering a coupon will suffice. A small handful of boutique agencies will continue to do wonderful work. Then they grow, get bought, the principals retire at 50, and the whole business starts again. If you enter the business, plan your second career as you go, you know, the one to fall back on when your agency loses that big account and has to let you go, leaving you to drift in the wind. 
 
This long lament might be true for any number of careers, where older, better paid, yet seasoned professionals find themselves looking for work at age 45 or 50 or later. Somewhere along the way, the relationships between employers and employees became nothing but transactional. A company’s devotion to its people and community and citizenry at large has become a quaint and decidedly nostalgic bit of whimsy laid to rest at the altar of increasing shareholder value, delivering wealth to shareholders who don’t give a flying fart for anything but their returns. McDonald’s is always hiring.
 
©2020 John Hofmeister. Feel free to forward with appropriate recognition of the guy who wrote this: me.
 
For other articles in this vein, see https://www.jhofmeister.com/musings/considering-a-career-in-advertising-a-few-warnings