UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

I’m laying on a chaise, broiling in the July sun, listening to the thunderstorm called Bad Romance.

Gaga is blasting through, out of her surreal world, wailing into my headphones, reminding me with every verse, line, lyric, riff what naked talent sounds like when it takes off its top, bares its breasts and goes on
a music rampage that makes average rockers look and sound like the timid copycats and also-rans that they are.

On our voyage back in time, we are free to rectify mistakes, wipe the slate clean, change decisions, mend broken hearts, place bets we failed to make, walk on water, recognize the genius we wrote off as weird, untie the knots that bound us up in our own deceit.

It’s all due to the Cancer Of Power. Take someone, nearly anyone, and put them on a throne, and those who pass by will tell you they are a genius. How many men and women worship every word Prince Charles utters even though this man, this entire family, its centuries of power notwithstanding, has never accomplished a single thing.

I have come to realize that Kissinger is a figment of a marketing machine: identified as a “wise” Harvard academic by Nelson Rockefeller, brought to full Technicolor fame by President Nixon, Kissinger was identified as a diplomatic genius due to where he worked, who he worked with, and the way he spoke. A virtual Chance, the character in the classic Peter Sellers film, where a dunce of a gardener is perceived through a weird set of circumstances to be a wealthy captain of industry, whose every word is doted on.

Everyone knows Bernie Madoff is a putrid excuse for a human being.
But as we are hurling verbal stones at him, we should stop and see that what he did and how he did it, is ingenious.
More than anything else, Madoff was a marketing whiz. He wasn’t a financial engineer, he was a mastermind of perception.
And [...]