By John Y. Brown III, on Mon May 27, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
How grown-ups behave. When they have to.
My business partners and I last week sat down to make a presentation to a potential client. As we were getting started I began thinking what would be a nice topic to open the meeting on as I excitedly gave in to my nervous habit of twisting back and forth in my chair (when I am sitting in a chair that allows twisting).
It’s a nervous energy thing.
I was doing some supporting commentary on a news show about a year ago and one of my daughter’s teachers saw me. Her comment to Maggie the next day was something along the lines of, “I saw your father last night on television. He did a nice job but I almost got woozy watching him twist back and forth in his chair the entire show. He must have Attention Deficit Disorder.” They both laughed.
And I was up to my old ways again as our business meeting opened. But not for long. I hit a snag or brake of sorts–but wasn’t sure what it was. I turned and saw my partner’s hand steadying the chair. She whispered to me, “You are twisting.” I didn’t understand at first but then thanked her for the heads up. Of course, I was thinking to myself, “I kinda like to twist in my chair.” It helps calm my nervousness in some odd distracting way. But it also appears a little sophomoric to others and can have even more severe effects on those prone to motion sickness. So I did the mature thing and stopped.
Until it was my turn to speak.
I figured since I had the floor it would be more difficult for Laura (see post below) subtly to subdue my nervous movements. So I twisted just enough to satisfy the little boy in me that wanted to have his way and calm himself down —but not enough for Laura to feel it necessary to steady me from seeming childlike.
We make a good team in that way.
We made a nice presentation even though I forgot to wear a tie, which Laura reminded me of in the parking lot. I joked I used to keep a tie in the car but hate tying them and just wish they still sold clip-ons, which are a lot less complicated to figure out.
Right now I’m twisting back and forth in my chair at home as I type. And am making bigger swings than usual since it’s the weekend and no one can see me. And on Monday I’ll have to start acting more like a grown-up again.
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Laura Emberton Owens is an extraordinary Kentuckian committed to serving her state in a variety of ways.
She’s a lady who has an abundance of charm, intelligence, and beauty (both inside and out) who is devoted to her family and community and who I have the great good fortune to call my business partner.
Here’s a wonderful piece posted about her on a national blog last week that captures beautifully her personality and love of life–and her knack for leaving everyone she meets a little better off than she found them.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon May 27, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET
A Memorial Day reflection
Memorial Day is a special time we set aside each year to thank those men and women of our military who fought and died so we could have freedom and a better way of life.
The freedom and “better way of life” these brave and dedicated Americans fought to protect and preserve for each of us living today provide the political, social and economic structure—the preconditions, if you will— for our way of life. They don’t provide “happiness” but rather ensure that we have the life and liberty to pursue happiness.
And that is a lot. In fact, it’s one hell of a gift.
Thank you for that…and thanks to the families who lost their loved ones so we can live a richer life today.
And so today we take a quiet and reverent moment to show our appreciation. But perhaps more important than the day we offer in recognition for those who died for our country’s way of life, is what we do the remaining 364 days of each year.
Are we just in possession of the pre-conditions for a free and full and happy life? Or are we fulfilling that uniquely American opportunity we’ve each been given by how we live our lives each day the remainder of the year?
To truly honor those we seek to recognize today, I believe, is to do more than just possess the freedoms they secured for us. It is to live more fully in our daily lives “because” of these freedoms.
We can still take Memorial Day each year to say thank you for the opportunity to be free and pursue happiness. But the way we live our lives –and extent to which we fulfill our individual American dream—will be our greatest gift back to those soldiers who sacrificed so much so we could be play our part in fulfilling the promise of the American dream.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri May 24, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
A form of intellectual creative destruction. Or the iconoclasts role in developing authenticity.
As a college student in 1985, after much research and questioning, I found this recording and ordered it from the back of a magazine.
It’s the only known recording of American essayist and celebrated cynic, Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken.
I read Mencken voraciously as a young college student and think I am the better because of it. Much of what Mencken says in this interview comes from his writings.
Mencken, in my view, is a purely American concoction of ill-tempered irreverence, agitated playfulness, omnivorous erudition and literary elegance. He is perhaps our nation’s greatest iconoclast.
As a college student I used to think a course in Mencken should be required of all college freshmen. Why? Because Mencken served the role of the great destroyer of convention and institutions –of all things status quo. Do I think that is a good thing? By itself, of course not. But as part of a learning process where young people are forced to let go of old assumptions to eventually, on their own terms and for their own personal reasons, come to their own beliefs about the world we live in, I think the iconoclast plays a most integral role.
Mencken, for me, was a catalyst for me releasing the second-hand ideas I adopted as a child and cleared the way for me to come to my own conclusions. Most interestingly, many of my “own conclusions” turned out to be consistent with the “second hand ideas” took on in my youth. But now they were mine and I understood them at my core….not just repeated them from rote memory and pretended they were my beliefs.
In that sense, the HL Menckens of the world serve as intermediaries to our most sacred beliefs.
Of course, Mencken wold probably chafe at such a compliment and dismiss it with hilarious and savage sarcasm. And force me to rethink the proclamation and make a more subtle, accurate, and personally compelling description of Mencken’s impact. Just as he forced me to do with so many other of my beliefs.
I’m thankful I had the “Mencken threshold” as part of my mental and moral development—that opinions and viewpoints I was developing had to overcome before I would settle on them.
I wish the same for any college freshman or curious person who is not afraid of stripping down completely intellectually and seeing where the truth leads them.
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
To no one’s surprise, a few feverish days of the unprecedented—establishment media organizations beating up on Barack Obama’s leadership—are already giving way to a series of smart, nicely reasoned analyses of why the IRS/DOJ/Benghazi revelations are not genuinely scandal-worthy. (See Ezra Klein and Noam Scheiber for some of the best representative samples, and Charles Blow for one of the more in-the-tank ones). And the early revisionists are right, as I acknowledged in my previous posting, that these fiascoes have little in common with the substance of Watergate, and its nest of garden variety obstructions of justice, as well as the obviously critical distinction that Richard Nixon was caught directing those obstructions from his presidential desk, while Obama is by every account a sidelines bystander.
But it’s worth making several rejoinders to the budding “much ado about nothing” narrative. The first is that if the standard for comparison is not the most discredited president in my lifetime, but a random Fortune 500 company, that Obama’s administration struggles mightily with the threshold concept of accountability.
Three examples: (1) how does a Department of Justice with any measure of historical memory sign off on such a sweeping dragnet of reporter phone records, especially with nothing more at stake than ferreting out how the AP learned an obscure detail that compromised no ongoing investigations? Even allowing for the obvious, that Attorney Generals have no business discussing with presidents the content of secret subpoenas, the presidentially selected leadership at DOJ seemed weirdly clueless about the depth of the breach into reportorial work product. In fact, so clueless that it reflected an indifference to the axiom of any investigation that what is on paper will inevitably surface and have to be defended in a public or judicial context.
(2) When the hierarchy of the IRS learned that lower level bureaucrats were mixing political criteria with scrutiny of tax returns, what is it about the culture of this executive branch that kept that information from filtering up to Congress or to more senior officials at the Treasury Department or the White House? Why didn’t evidence of political censorship by tax officials stand out as the kind of thing Obama, or at least his senior staff or his Attorney General, might want to know?
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Obama’s Weak “I’m No Nixon” Defense
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed May 22, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Life advice.
Never do anything that you can’t successfully apologize your way out of
If you aren’t a good apologizer, don’t even think about it.
If you are a good apologizer, make sure you are assessing yourself accurately.
Ask a friend beforehand if they think you are a good enough apologizer to apologize your way out of doing something bold (or daring….or reckless, depending on hindsight).
If your friend tells you “No. You aren’t a good enough apologizer.” ask two more friends. If those two friends agree with the first, ask four more friends.
And so on.
Eventually, if it is truly a bad idea, you will spend so much time trying to get a majority of your friends to support you that you will forget what it was you were thinking of doing in the first place.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue May 21, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Me and all the things I can do with my second phone
I have a second phone. I use it as my back-up phone. For situations like when I lose my primary phone. I have my back-up, or secondary phone, to call my first phone and help me find it by hearing the ring.
Sometimes my main phone has fallen under my car seat. Sometimes I’ve slipped it into my laptop bag and forgotten where I put it. Other tim…es, I’ve placed it in my pocket or in the holster for my back-up phone. But the great thing about my back-up phone is that I don’t lose my main phone for long.
It helps me save time that way.
This past Sunday I lost my phone that morning. And found it quickly, of course. Just how I always do.
But later in the day, after a few phone calls, I noticed an unusual number that I had tried to call me earlier in the day. Not once, but twice!
Technology is great. I didn’t have to wonder “Who called me?” I could simply Google the number. After Google turned up no results, I went to a service called Spokeo. Spokeo helps you identify people based on a strange phone number. They don’t always get it right but they do have a pretty impressive record of past owners of that phone number.
I plugged in the strange number than had called me and up came a name I wasn’t familiar with —but it was a name. I had what appeared to be the current (or previous but recent) owner of the number.
After Googling the name and coming up empty handed, I went to Facebook and typed in the name. Bingo! There he was. Looking right at me. And we had 4 mutual friends. I looked at his business but didn’t recognize it. Then on the mutual friends to try to solve the purpose of this mystery caller. I sort of knew them but not well. I knew a little about one of their businesses but couldn’t figure out why they would be calling me.
I then looked at some of the mutual friends of the mutual friends for more clues, but nothing was jumping out at me. I looked through some pictures of their Facebook pages and finally realized I was going to have to cave in to my curiosity—and just call back the unrecognized number. I decided I would call and whoever answered, I would explain that I saw they had tried to call me earlier in the day and I am sorry I missed their call –and was calling now to see how I could help them. And ask, “And whom do I have the pleasure of talking to?”
I dialed the number, fearlessly, and waited for the ring.
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 21, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
No, the Obama Administration’s disaster of a week is not Watergate. Not unless Barack Obama is found scheming with his aides about how to pay “hush money” to witnesses. Not unless the foraging of journalists’ phone logs included eavesdropping with wiretaps. No unless revelations surface that Obama ordered a federal agency to shut down a criminal investigation, or that he skimmed campaign funds to build his own private network of thieves and vandals.
But this appalling seven days need not be Watergate to be something lethal and destructive of the public trust, a cascade of events that has hardened and validated the worst characterizations of this White House. The axiom on the political right that Obama’s presidency threatens constitutional freedom could seem overwrought when it was confined to insurance mandates and gun background checks. But from now on, the brief has just gotten appallingly straightforward: it sweeps in elements that are at the core of the First Amendment, in the form of the IRS digging into filers with the wrong politics, and into groups with an unapproved ideological agenda. The case that liberties are being violated—pirating the links between certain reporters and their sources for over two months, and in such an indiscriminate manner that close to a 100 working reporters might have been compromised—no longer seems to the media the stuff of right-wing paranoia.
The supposedly partisan charge that the Obama Administration was covering up details in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi takes on more plausible colors when a diplomat describes the way he was beaten down by political appointees for asking hard questions. And the vague but toxic insinuation that high level negligence contributed to their deaths now has chilling specific details: one official’s account of a special operations rescue team being bluntly shut down when it was poised to strike, another’s description of an inter-office climate that minimized safety concerns about the American consulate as unseemly griping.
Obama has maddened his adversaries by only repeating his routine for handling public storms: indignation that his White House’s motives are questioned, and an implication that parts of the executive branch, in this case the IRS, are an island beyond his ability to influence. For his political acolytes, the effect is good righteous theater. Never mind the inconvenience that the IRS’ presidentially appointed leadership knew of political targeting, failed to stop it, and may have implicitly blessed it. Forget that the ugliness of his subordinates’ response to Benghazi is a picture supplied by members of his own government, not by his opponents but by professionals, people who until these events were trusted comrades of the appointees who ended up sacking or maligning them.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Obama’s Scandalous Seven Days in May
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon May 20, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
I just failed to prove I am not a bot trying and failing repeatedly to sign in to LinkedIn after forgetting my password yet again.
I typed about 15 random combination of made up words and failed each time to read these sign-in word forms correctly. 15! This was not something I took lightly.
Which means….I suppose, that I am a bot!
Which does explain a few things about me I’ve never understood like being drawn to HAL’s voice in 2001 A Space Odyssey when I was just a child.
But doesn’t explain why I would be so eager to sign in to LinkedIn at this hour.
Maybe I’m a bot with a heart.
Or at least a bot with a networking gene that lives on despite my automaton ways.
It’s my own way of railing against the machine. I suppose. ; )
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri May 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Watching great flick, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
Thank goodness we only have to go through high school once.
We need the 50 years after high school to work through all the illusions we leave high school with.
And also need 50 years to let go of the delusions we take from high school
High school is where we come to misunderstand ourselves and the world we live in–while simultaneously learning to navigate the world we so confidently misapprehend. And after the glorious misadventure of high school only slowly and inadequately begin to see life a little more clearly and a little less confidently.
And the wallflowers of high school, the quiet ones, may say the least…. but they feel the most and see things most deeply and clearly. And make the truest friends and best all around human beings.
Until it was my turn to speak.
