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You sure told me

I thought I was so clever. My analogy about how I approach conversations with people who disagree with me seemed so perfect. The assumption I have about most everyone who is active in politics is that we have the same ultimate goal; to make the country a better place. My analogy is that we both want to get to the same place — say we need to get to Safeway. I want to take one road and you want to take another, well, that doesn’t make either of evil, right?

So last week, I was feeling all good about my theory and approach and I tried to explain it to a Republican friend. She looked at me like I had eight heads and a tail — but people like you, she said, want to turn America socialist. You hate democracy. I tried to tell her that socialism is an economic system, that most of the democracies in the world (including ours) are capitalistic/socialist hybrids, that most of Europe, which is more socialist but anyone’s standard has more fluidity and upward mobility that we have (and higher standards of living) and that not all of us view democracy and some socialism as being mutually exclusive ideas. And, at he end of the day, don’t we seriously both want to make the US the best country it can be?

When Paul Ryan released his plan to overhaul Medicare and Social Security, I read it and hated it. Merely shifting the costs of healthcare from the government to the elderly will not impact the actual costs at all — we need real health care reform for that. That doesn’t mean I question his sincerity or his patriotism. I don’t blame Grover Norquist for anything the GOP Congresspeople do — and let me be as clear on this point as I can be, any member of Congress that voted for a tax hike, even after signing the pledge, would still be able to go back to their district and win re-election. Talk about paper tigers.

But I don’t have an ideological litmus test for my friends. I wish some of them had the same point of view.

I am a Democrat because I think out government exists to do for all of us collectively what we cannot do individually. I think a single payer health care system would be more cost effective than the system we have now. I think it would lead to more preventative care and the individual mandate is absolutely necessary for the system to work. I like the idea that my tax dollars go to help people who need it, pay for quality education, build a strong infrastructure and first rate military. And I think if we shifted the burden of health care costs from companies — with the additional step of streamlining costs — to all of us, we would make our businesses more competitive. How is that anti-capitalist? It’s not.

Moreover, I like regulations that keep my air and water clean, make sure the transportation I take is safe and my food is free of toxins and infectious agents. I don’t look back on movies like “Boys’ Town” or the novels of Charles Dickens and think — wow, we had it so good then.

And I like NASA. When President Kennedy reached for the stars, we did more than send men to the moon, we inspired generations of kids to go into sciences. The technological advancements achieved through the space program can be seen everywhere.

And I am an optimist. I don’t think we need a civil war to fix our country because I agree with Bill Clinton when he said “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed with what’s right with America.”

These are not the opinions of someone who wants us to lose our freedoms or change to a totalitarian state. If I am going to try to see your point, I wish you would make even the smallest effort to see mine.

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World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day.  There is a big event in DC planned to pay lip service to ending this horrible disease.  Bono will be there.  President Obama will be there.  Former Presidents Clinton and Bush will be there.  It’s too bad that this comes on the heels of the announcement that for the first time since it was founded ten years ago, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria has cut funding to poor countries.  This funding is essential for programs in these countries and its absence will have devastating consequences for millions of people.  This is literally a question of life or death for millions of people.

The Global Fund now directly keeps alive 3.2 million people on anti-retroviral treatment.  (Together with other funders that means that around 6.6 million people are now on these life-saving drugs.) It has financed 8.2 million courses of TB treatment and the distribution of 190 million insecticide-treated nets to fight malaria.  We are seeing a historic turn in the progression of these pandemics.  — Jeffrey Sachs, Politicians just don’t care enough to tackle this scourge.

Health care is a basic human right.  That’s just my opinion.  That’s part of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

This is not the time to withhold funding vital to programs that are working.  Malaria prevention efforts are starting to have a real impact in places like Africa.  We tend to think of certain infectious diseases as being other people’s problems.  They strike in poor countries, far away from us.  The problem with that thinking — other that the callous nature with which we view the world through the prism of how does this impact me personally? — is that is is just wrong and shortsighted.  Infectious diseases, for instance, that kill people over there, are just as deadly when they strike here.  These are often diseases of poverty, we have that here.

Over the past year, I have been working with a nonprofit health organization — they develop and deliver medicines for infectious diseases such as visceral leishmaniasis, which is nearly 100 percent fatal when left untreated.  Like AIDS, it destroys its victims immune system.  Our military personnel are being infected because they are fighting in areas where it is endemic.  New studies also show an increasing number of co-infections – -VL & AIDS.

TB is a scourge in the US, too.  Washington, DC has one of the highest rates of infection in the nation.  What’s worse is that many cases are of the drug resistant variety, a side effect of a treatment that can take up to two years is that people don’t follow through with the full treatment.  (Topic for another day is how our antibiotic abuse is making them less effective. short version, if your doctor doesn’t give you one for the sniffles, don’t demand one.)

Other, less famous diseases such as Dengue Fever are making a comeback in the US as well.  The mosquito that carries the potentially deadly illness has been found as far north as North Carolina.  Mosquitoes don’t care about borders.

The bottom line is that if a disease can strike anywhere, it can strike anywhere.  We risk losing important ground gained over the past decade because we lack the political will to do the right thing.

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Crash and burn and survive to tell the tale

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I took a job with a BMG Classics.  This is one of my favorite stories from that job and my career.

It all started in 1998.  I was looking for a job and sent my resume to every person I had ever met.  I received a call from an acquaintance in New York who wanted to know if I would be interested in doing PR for a record label.  “Sure, why not?” said I and off I went to NYC to interview.  I had no confidence that this was going to pan out — had NO record company or music experience AT ALL. The upside of this was that I could not have been more relaxed.  It just seemed like an adventure.

Several weeks later, my phone rang again.  I hadn’t even gotten around to sending a thank you letter, card or email but the woman who interviewed me wanted to get information about my knowledge of jazz, which was about as much as my record label knowledge.  I was honest about it and told her I like jazz but could never find the time to look into it, what with all the work I was doing.  She offered me the job.  Two weeks later I started work as the Press and Promotions Manager for RCA Victor and Distributed Labels.  That’s a long title that really just means “publicist.”

How little did I know about the music industry?  I had never heard of A & R or liner notes.  “A & R” stands for artists and repertoire.  You probably knew that.

My roster included jazz and world music bands and artists such as the Chieftains, Andy Summers and Ravi Coltrane.  I was essentially the QB of the PR team.  I oversaw publicity for CD releases, tours, proper radio play, etc.  I learned early that my knowledge deficit could be used as an asset.  I called journalists and asked their opinion.  I am new at this but you are the expert, what do you think about …?  It was not unusual for me to be on the phone for HOURS with the same journalist, they love to talk about their opinion.  It was a win-win-win.  They got to pontificate on their favorite topic, I learned a lot and we ended up friends.  I think they found my honesty refreshing, too.  There were months when we weren’t releasing anything great and I would tell them that.  I don’t mean our new releases but RCA Victor has a pretty large repertoire and it was not uncommon to release compilations of older stuff.  One joke a colleague used to tell was that we were going to put a sticker on that read Never before released in this order.

One other thing about the industry that I did not know was how cut throat it is.  About three weeks after I started, most of my department was fired.  The woman who hired me? Gone.  The person above her? Ditto.  The structure went from being: me — my boss — her boss — the president of the company to being: me — president of the company.  And he couldn’t help me because he was new to the business, too — his background was in wine.

For the next six months, I had no real supervision.  That doesn’t mean my projects suffered.  Ravi Coltrane was in a piece in Rolling Stone (a first for my department).  Others did interviews with AP, Washington Post, New York Times, CBS/ABC & NBC News, NPR and others.  I kept the artists happy with updates about their coverage.  I planned record release parties, interviews, photo shoots, tour coverage, etc.  I worked my butt off.

After six months, they hired a new person who would become my boss.  When he started, he seemed nice enough.  He met with everyone in the department to ask what we did and assess our performance.  About a month later, he conducted reviews.  I remember thinking, as I walked in, that I had no reason to be nervous, I had performed well.  My job performance should speak for itself, I thought.  I did tell them — from the start — that I had no prior experience in music.

Famous. Last. Words.

The review started with This is going to be hard on you.  That was the bright spot of the meeting.  Truthfully, the only analogy that pops out from that was that it felt like that sentence was a diving board.  I leapt from that into a pool of hellishness.  The new boss, in keeping with the grand tradition of new bosses, wanted to bring his own people in. He didn’t want to fire me, he wanted me to quit.  I walked to my office, shut the door and spent easily a half hour putting my face back together after the monster cry I had.  My morning that day was spent working on a Hillary Clinton trip to NYC and my afternoon was spent being told that everything that had ever gone wrong at RCA Victor was caused by my time there.

Once home, I thought about the year I had and the work I had done.  I took the next day off to really sort through my thoughts.  By the time I got back, I was resolved to stay.  I had done a good job.  My boss wasn’t thrilled by this.  He said we had to go to human resources and work out how we could monitor my work better.  During our first meeting I told them both, Look, you hired me to be a passing QB, if you want me to run the ball, I will but you cannot change the rules without telling me and expect me to know.  I am not clairvoyant. Surprisingly, my boss agreed.  He thought I was going to fail.  I didn’t.

We had meetings with HR for the next few months.  Every week, he told us that he was impressed with my work ethic, the results I was getting and asked How are you so nice to me when I was so bad to you?  I didn’t admit that I used a Kids in the Hall trick — whenever I saw him from behind in the hallway, I would pinch my fingers together and say I crush your head, crush, crush!  I just told him I am a professional.

Funny side story:  On more than one occasion, he tried to sabotage me.  One staff meeting turned into the “Alyson Show” and I went through the status of all my projects — without notes — I knew what I was working on.  Another time we went out to dinner with two key journalists, he thought they would eat me alive.  They loved me.  We all went to the Village Vanguard after and in a stroke of awesomeness — Diana Krall, the president of the company and our group arrived at the same time.  I pulled the president aside and said “You know Diana, right?” (I had spent time with her in Canada that year).  When I looked over at my boss, the glare on his face almost melted my contact lenses.  It. Was. Amazing.

Eventually, I left RCA Victor.  When I did, I sent the following email to my coworkers, I had always heard Istanbul was an exciting place.  When I got the chance to go, I did and met great, fun and wonderful people, experienced new things and learned a ton.  But at the end of the day, I am not fron Istanbul and it is time for me to go home.  Thank you for everything.

The record industry did teach me a lot.  The lesson that my belief in myself should trump whatever others think has been a challenge sometimes but well worth it and has shaped how I view myself ever since.

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Reality TV 2.0

Just when I was starting to get worried that season five of Jersey Shore is still a full six months away — how will I get through this rough time? — the GOP presidential candidates have come through.  I am not sure if this qualifies as a real progression from reality TV 1.0 to 2.0 but we have entered a new phase, that’s for sure.

The Cain TrainFor instance, Herman Cain is the newest gift that keeps on giving.  My personal issue with him isn’t his 13 year affair, the allegations of sexual harassment — although they are deplorable, or even his positions on policy.  Granted, the last in that list disqualified him immediately from being someone who would get my vote but he already knew that (did everyone catch him tell a reporter than he “doesn’t need 100 percent of the vote” ???). My real problem with Cain is that he thought he was qualified to run for president without doing even the slightest real prep for  it.  If he cannot read enough to know the issues — or even be able to accurately describe his own ideas, how could he ever govern?  I find it beyond arrogant that he thinks he can govern solely on the strength of his personality.  I met a candidate for the US Senate a few years ago who had never worked on a campaign or in government.  He volunteered on one in college.  He called the move to the US Senate a “lateral move.”  No, sir, it is not.

Campaigns are long job interviews.  If a job applicant answered any interview question with “I will listen to my advisors on that,” they would be laughed out of the interview.  Worse, they would have wasted the interviewers time.  That’s what bothers me about Herman Cain.  The farce of his campaign has hurt the level of discourse and wasted all of our time.

Having said all of that, I have found his train wreck campaign to be as delicious as any of Snooki’s adventures.  And I kind of love it that he is the last person in America to realize his campaign is over.  Love it.

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The Cain Train goes off the rails

Herman Cain, we hardly knew yeI predict by the end of the week we will see a statement like this from the Cain Train:

“As you know, from my repeated and vociferous denials of every doing anything wrong, inappropriate or even less than brilliant — at any point, ever — that my candidacy for president has rattled some people.  They remain desperately afraid of a black, businessman moving into the White House.  They know I can win, and neither the Democratic machine, nor some of the other GOP campaign, can let that happen.  

“Both my wife, Gloria, and I remain convinced that Herman Cain is exactly what the doctor ordered to lead this great country at this time in history.  While the persistent rumors and allegations about me don’t bother me at all, as I know they are not true, the toll they are taking on my wife is another story.  I don’t want to give in to these fear mongerers and mud slingers but after meeting with the joint chiefs of my campaign, we determined these attacks will keep coming so I am ending my current campaign for the GOP nomination.

“Herman Cain will be back.  Maybe as soon as next year — I will base my decision to run as an Independent on whether I can get Donald Trump to run with me.  If that doesn’t work out, he is unpredictable and not nearly the handsome rascal Rick Perry is — or that I am — this is not the last presidential run for the Cain Train.

“Thank you for your support, God bless you, God bless America and God bless Godfather’s Pizza.”