Good Fryday and bad times

This is not the Fryday I intended to write. Nor is it a Fryday I wanted to write. Perhaps it is not even the Fryday I should write, but you must be the judge of that.

Earlier this week I lost one of the two dogs my wife and I owned. The dog was eight years old and succumbed after a protracted battle with cancer, lasting many months. When she was diagnosed we were told that even with the best treatment, we could at most expect her to have another year with us.

Death is the domain of decisions.

Our first was not to subject her to invasive chemotherapy for the sake of a year. We instead opted to put her on medication that would for a time protect her from the worst excesses of cancer.

For many months the medication did just that and was only recently--the last few days--that her deterioration became evident and inevitable.

It was then that I took a second decision: to take her off the medication and have her die as peacefully as she could at home.

When her last day came, I think she knew it. There were a few things out of character: a slow circuit of the property boundary stopping to watch the sheep on one side and the children playing on the other. There was an attempt to get back to the house, but she never made it more than half-way. My wife and I carried her the rest of the way and put her in her bed next to ours. It was there she died that night.

I have lost dogs before, but it never gets easier. And I don't wish to single out dogs--all pet-owners feel the same range of emotions and have to deal with them and can be excused for dwelling on them.

And nor is it just pets. I spoke to a farmer about this and he said that he feels the same about every working dog he's owned.

Laila led a charmed life. Her world was one of adventure. She was a boxer, named after the most famous female boxer in the world Laila Ali. Our Laila charmed most who met her and made everybody, even those she couldn't charm, feel that they were the most important people in her life.

She loved going to the vets and being poked and prodded--even in those last days when she could barely wag her tail, her whole body shook with pleasure as we entered the vet clinic.

Yes, she had issues. Boxers tend to have a few--ask any owner.  She was never good around smaller dogs. Yes, she stole apples from our tree so frequently that we had to let it go and turn a blind eye.

And, yes, she did adopt an air of "It's all about me". And, of course, it was.  However, as long as she could also make you think it was all about you. That was okay too. You had to love Laila for that.

And we did.

For that...and a whole lot more.

Old friends and the art of Gonzo

Cecil C. Sackrider is taking me to task. So is Whetu.

They claim that Fryday has forgotten them. They accuse me of being Jann Wenner, though Reverend Sackrider thinks Mr Wenner is a pornographer and Whetu thinks he is a hamburger.

Mr Wenner is in fact the recently retired founder and executive editor of Rolling Stone magazine, a magazine that capitalized on brilliant columnists such as Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke, and Cameron Crowe, and for a variety of reasons let them go.

My correspondents feel I am doing the same. They consider me to be Jann Wenner: without the toke and the coke.

They are right. I need to have another belt of scotch and give them their space in the sun.

But, not yet.

Let me give this last lingering look at what Fryday conveys.

It conveys shit. At least in conventional journalist quarters.

You see, I finally read (in Rolling Stone) the accessible definition of Gonzo Journalism, a term coined by Hunter S. Thompson to describe his particular, peculiar and proficient form of journalism.

In a word, he described it as subjective.

Subjective means that the story is written from the writer’s point of view—his or her perception and perspective. If they wanted to report the facts, and only the facts, they would be objective.

Many readers would suggest that objective is better. And that is okay. I get that.

But, think about it. Are the facts really that interesting? And are they even facts? I interview someone and quote them. That’s their story. But is that the real story? If they are cutting a ribbon, is that interesting? Are their ceremonial and sanctimonious sentiments more interesting than the stories of the people who made the ribbon or the scissors?

Who wants to know? I do.

So where Gonzo comes in is that the writer injects themselves into the story. And you know what? In doing so, they are representing us—the reader. They are not asking us to agree with them, all they are saying is that if you were there, with them, this is what you may have felt.

There is a story behind a story.

And please do not tell me you think I am wrong in believing that is less interesting as a story.

So, we have editors who say let the subjects tell their own story. Okay. But as Cameron, P.J and in particular Hunter S. told their stories, they are a bloody-sight more interesting than the subjects themselves.

But, I succumb.
Next week, Cecil C. Sackrider has his subjective say. And after that…Whetu, if he is out by then.

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Laying down the law

I worked for an organisation where the most despised department, and one of the few never to be down-sized, Human Resources, decided that the solution to its perception problem was to change its name. It became People and Capability. Setting aside the grammatical and operational contortion that name evokes, the precept that a name change is the panacea for problems is seemingly endemic: Hamilton could become Kirikiriroa but it is still Hamilton, and insisting on calling yourself Richard doesn’t make yourself less of a Dick.

You cannot solve a problem by changing a name; you solve it by changing your culture. Strange thing about culture. Its literal definition is the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively, but in the corporate context it is the prevailing atmosphere, demeanour and attitude of the management and staff—mainly the management. It can be good and it can be bad. And it can change. I worked for one organisation, the Rodney District Council, that made such a change, from the bad to good, through the simple expedient of having a new mayor. I have worked for another council, Far North District Council, which is yet to make such a change.

But the worst corporate culture I ever came across, and one that is rightly coming under fire, is that of Russell McVeagh. It had nothing to do with alleged sexual misconduct, but it did have links to their recruitment process involving university law students. I was working for an advertising agency instructed by Russell McVeagh to create an advertising and promotional campaign to attract university graduates. I attended the campaign presentation in one of the firm’s many meeting rooms. The agency team, five of us, along with seven Russell McVeagh staff, were in that meeting room for 30 minutes waiting for the arrival of a “senior partner” who was to chair the meeting.   And believe me, advertising people and lawyers (however junior) have very little in common and even less to make small talk about. When the senior partner finally arrived with a putter but not an apology, he got right down to business. He said he was late for a round of golf (late for at least the second time that day, I thought) so rather than waste time—ignoring ours, which he had already wasted— his view was the campaign was crap and he was leaving it to his “underlings”, motioning toward his staff in the room, to sort out. He then walked out. Yes, that was the term he used: underlings. Remarkably, the only people in the room who were visibly shocked was the agency team; the young lawyers seemed to take it as the norm…as their lot. Let me make it clear, this guy was not joking; he was acting on and from a position of sheer arrogance. That told me a lot then—confirmed now—of the culture of Russell McVeagh.

Every company, except mine, has good and bad people in it. Mine is the exception only because it is only me and my wife and we are both good people. But all larger companies and organisations have a mix. However, law companies such as Russell McVeagh and now, we hear Chapman Tripp, seem to have a greater intolerance for, and missunderstanding of, basic human decency. At this time the universities seem to be boycotting them; perhaps their clients should consider doing the same; there are law firms in Kirikiriroa who would gladly accept their business.

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A Fryday Fillip

I have learnt from bitter experience that there are two things you should not do when drunk, apart from getting drunk in the first place, and those are: visit Trade Me, and send emails. The first is self-evident and the second was in my case, a lesson learnt when I wrote an email to Hell’s Angels in Oakland California criticising the quality of their website. For months, I dreaded the roar of Harley Davidsons coming up my driveway. Of course, none did (yet), but I was tempting fate.

I am doing so again today by imparting something my wife said to me. During the taxing task of boiling a couple of eggs for my breakfast (I am very particular about my eggs) she stated the view that terrorists seem to have been quiet of late. My first thought was that I failed to see the juxtaposition between terrorism and my eggs; my second thought was that for the sake of Peace—Household Peace, not World Peace—I should not reveal my first thought; and my third thought was that she is right—there has been very little in the way of reported terrorism.

The question I pose is why? The ideological divide remains and so too, I imagine, does the fanaticism. So, what has changed? If anything?

Well, in terms of umbrella groups ISIS has its problems and is now fighting for survival, and does Al-Qaeda even exist anymore? So, that may have something to do with it. But there is nothing new there---when was the last large-scale, military-style attack? Most recent attacks have been of the lone-wolf variety, involving at most four or five perpetrators. However, even they have dried up—if we don’t count the all-too-frequent and tragic school killings in the United States.

There are two approaches we could take to answering this question. The first is that the global intelligence community has got on top of terrorism and is effectively shutting it down. That is the positive view. The converse view is that someone somewhere is planning something big. I can’t subscribe to that, though. I don’t know much about global intelligence, but I do know that after the failure to detect and predict 9/11, every intelligence organisation in the world, including New Zealand’s, lifted its game and it is virtually impossible to keep anything secret these days; if something big is being planned, I think we would know about it. I also think that terrorist groups such as ISIS no longer have the resources to mount anything substantial, at least in a conventional sense. Of course, there remains the spectre of a biological attack, a cyberattack and the ever-present threat of nutcase with his finger on the nuclear button. But we have lived with those for years.

So, are we through the worst of it? At the risk of courting fate, I very much hope so. We may be at last looking at a better world. A world where Jacinda delivers her baby, if not much else; where Clarke Gayford gets propositioned by an over-amorous shark (and the Herald reports it as its lead story) Hamilton keeps doing what it does best—trying, and I am left in peace to eat my eggs.

As Satchmo said, it is a wonderful world.

Unless I hear a Harley.