wedge blog

Is this a party or a wake?

Six months ago I cancelled our daily delivery of the Great Falls Tribune. I’d been reading the Trib all my life and I’ve been the subject and author of a few stories over the years. I’m writing because, as a subscriber who has been missing for six months and an advertiser that’s been missing for three years, The Tribune never once noticed I was gone.

I understand it’s not totally the newspaper’s fault. The industry is suffering, the economy is lousy, technology is in transition, the home page on my computer is an Internet daily. It used to take me a half hour every morning to read the paper, then it took fifteen minutes, not long after that, ten. A dropped sentence at the bottom of a column became more common, catching a grammatical error used to be challenging; it became embarrassing.

The slow decline of the paper is akin to watching a loved one suffer. I remember my father losing all that weight before he passed away. The paper, though occasionally bloated with ads, is starved for content that resonates with me. In an odd parallel, I began to see the same person dying two or three times on the obituary page (Printing errors? Editorial issues? Paddles?) Sometimes in a senior moment of my own, I’d think “Do I know that guy? His name is familiar.”Then I’d realize I read the same obituary a day or two before.

Instead of opening the paper, I began to check headlines and obituaries online. I’m not even conscious of the sneaky Netflix ad anymore, and I understand the obituary links don’t raise the dead, but they do raise a little revenue for the Tribune.

As the Tribune’s content became less relevant, my internal equation began to weigh in favor of saving trees. I began to feel guilty, even knowing that newspapers use a high percentage of recycled waste. The Sunday New York Times:worth the trees. The Tuesday Great Falls Tribune: well, maybe not.

I have friends and acquaintances who work for newspapers. They are all more talented and experienced than I am: we knew this day would come, but I didn’t realize how much the Tribune…didn’t care.

My husband’s team loyalties and investment strategies are broad. The Tribune’s sports and financial sections are weak (unless you cheer for Dutton or the Bison). Last summer I watched my man read an editorial page, shake the paper and then shake his head. “Why do we get the paper?” he asked sadly.

To cancel, I dialed a toll-free phone number and spoke to a stranger. She never asked why, didn’t offer us a Sunday-only delivery (I suggested it), and never mentioned the Tribune online.

It’s not just the content—it’s the delivery.

Over the years we’ve hoped the neighbors didn’t notice us tiptoeing from our covered porch to the sidewalk to retrieve a snowy or soggy paper ten feet from our door, and there have been times (understandably) when news was literally scattered to the wind. Sometimes the Trib would be hidden totally under our grimy sisal doormat, or it would arrive too late for early risers.

Occasionally the Tribune would not arrive at all, and we’d have to call Gannett instead of calling our friends a few blocks away. “Please press TWO…”

As a former advertiser, I’ve wondered why, after years of buying big ads, when my latest ad rep quit, no one bothered to call. I liked my old rep. Whenever I asked him how he was, he’d reply, “Fine as frog’s hair.” Ironically, as far as I know, there’s no hair on frogs.

In the last thirty months or so, I’ve learned my demographic isn’t reading the paper anyway. As a jeweler, most of my locals are young engaged couples who get their news online. Precious metals investors seem to find me, and after 17 years in business, referral is booming. Ironically, the slower economy has created more comparison shoppers, which is great for my business model.

Out of continuity, fear of lost revenue, and loyalty to the ‘frog’s hair fellow’, I’d have spent thousands with the Trib. Now it’s just too late.

I log on to the free online paper, get the Sunday edition and I read the rest at the Peak. I hit the gym often, I don’t miss much. It takes five to ten minutes most days, and I never wrest a copy from anyone under fifty.

At forums about the future of media, no one under 35 is wringing his hands: these fellows are too busy downloading, uploading and texting. The guys at Gannett have one fist fumbling with digital media, while the other looks like it’s throwing in the towel on the Great Falls Tribune.

There’s a small-print-short-blurb in this week’s New Yorker about a middle aged artist I never heard of, some guy celebrating a retrospective in a swank gallery in the West Village.

As a person with a creative temperament, it’s disappointing to see someone celebrating a retro while I still seek a spective.

I wear butt lifting pantyhose and dime-store reading glasses. My creative output is limited to a few pithy editorials and a smattering of fluff features in regional and trade magazines.

I don’t bother to read the rest of that New Yorker review, instead I flip the page noisily, landing on a sidebar about someone with more mainstream recognition—Marianne Faithful. The singer’s voice, according to this Oracle of All Things Artsy, is “entirely busted”—another peer whose potential has been played out.

Why bother hashing out conflict on canvas or computer when the other golden oldies are exhibiting their laurels or rolling joints with them?

This question was meant to evoke pity, not a rational response. The shirttail relative I was talking at didn’t miss a bite. Ham sandwich in hand, he pulled out a slim green paperback called The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations and flopped it onto his kitchen table.

So it’s either been said, it’s too late to say it, or it’s boring.

A lot of fruit rots, overripe and uneaten, falling to rejoin the mush of the collective unconscious, and annoyingly enough, sometimes a stranger picks up the seed that was allowed to whither, plants it in his own shit, and it smells good!

I figured sooner or later my true talent would reveal itself, like a shiny new car behind a curtain in a game show. To this point, no one has even yelled “Come on down!”

At least the curse of perpetual potential has kept me looking about a decade younger than my peers: perhaps compensation for lack of a body of work is a good body.

An early journallist filled his mouth with red fruit, pressed his hand against the cave and spat out the juice. When he took away his stained hand, his story remained. Centuries later, four fingers, opposing thumb, cave wall, story told.

In the next ten weeks I am going to force some juice from drying fruit. Roll, squeeze, and spit. Don’t be alarmed if you see middle aged Montanan wandering the City with one hand in her pocket and a little red goo at the corners of her mouth.

Just outside the entrance to the old gym at Great Falls High there is a bronze plaque with a relief sculpture of a hockey player.

As a high schooler I didn’t read it but like every student at GFHS I knew it honored Terry Casey.

If I had been a few years older I’d have had a crush on Terry Casey. He was an All-Star quarterback and a fast pitch softball hero. Casey won a hockey scholarship and in 1968 he was named Captain of the U.S. Olympic Hockey team.

The whole town beamed. First John Misha Petkevitch, now Terry Casey. Great Falls was the place for ice.

In July of 1968, Terry and two buddies were killed in a head-on collision near Plentywood, where they were headed for a fast-pitch softball tournament.

Forty one years later our town still mourns the loss.

On the Casey Cup website there are two pictures of Terry. In the first picture he’s about fifteen, a thick butch shined with Brylcreem. His smile is wide enough to hold a hockey puck.

In the other picture Casey’s a few years older, his butch cut so close the scalp shows right through. This photo is impromtu, he’s in an oversized jersey with an appliqued Indian on his chest, the number twelve on his left shoulder. He might be thinking of a his lottery number in the draft, or some girl. Whatever the cause, Terry’s ‘Leave it to Beaver’ grin is long gone.

Who knows what he would have looked like at forty.

For me, my sister and three brothers, learning to skate at the Civic Center ice rink was a rite of passage. The grey rubber skate guards, the painted wood bleachers blocked off by curved plywood, the concession stand in the corner…like Terry Casey, it’s all long gone.

It’s because of Terry Casey and former Olympians Petkevitch and Scott Davis that folks like me donate to the Ice Foundation every year. Thanks to the skaters, their families, and a good dose of community pride we have a new ice arena filled with kids, pucks and blade guards.

Billings may boast sports commentator Brent Musberger, but we had the real deal with Casey, Petkevitch and Davis.

We have a tradition to uphold.

A Man Selling His Ka'ak

I know this is off-color, and I’m sure there will be comments that require deletion. Read this: it’s G-rated…the entendre is up to you.

Everyone loved my husband’s grandmother Sito. With thinning blue-white curls and a faded cotton apron stretched over her small round belly, you might think Sito was a feeble old lady, but she rolled grape leaves so tight they popped…and she played cards like a riverboat shill.

Sito was the queen of a Lebanese pastry with an unfortunate name, ka’ak (pronounced ‘cock’). Every Christmas Sito would pinch off hundreds of ka’aks with her tiny hands, branding each soft mound with a nasty metal tool just before shoving a batch in the gas oven.

We’d tear open our annual Holiday shipment of cold ka’ak and let the packing fly, unzipping successively smaller plastic bags to devour the sweet booty inside. Sito packed her ka’ak so tight sometimes we’d need to bang it on a hard surface just to separate ka’ak from box.

It is a family tradition to gorge ourselves on ka’ak to celebrate the birth of the Christ child.

Now that Sito’s gone I don’t crave ka’ak as much as I used to, which is probably a good thing. Once I start it’s hard to stop. I tell my husband that I must have acquired an unfortunate sensitivity to eating ka’ak, and I often politely decline. These days I only eat ka’ak when I can no longer resist the aroma, once or twice a year.

If you don’t eat ka’ak right away it gets too tough to chew, and it loses that faint anise scent that fills the house, letting everyone know that someone is downstairs eating ka’ak. Sito’s ka’ak was pretty big, so it was perfectly acceptable if guests wanted to split a ka’ak with a firm jerk of the wrist. It’s a shame not to try a little, and it’s always interesting to see folks acquire a taste for the stuff. Guests who initially turn up their nose have been heard to politely inquire as they enter my kitchen, “Do I smell ka’ak?”

Our daughter’s friend Jason would down two or three ka’aks in a single sitting. When Jason went away to college, I even sent him a care package with “FRAGILE: Ka’ak” written on the box.

By New Year’s Eve though, we all get sick of stuffing our faces with ka’ak and toss what’s left into the freezer. Ka’ak freezes surprisingly well. It’s naturally kind of dry, and thawed ka’ak is even worse, so I always had something juicy around the house to wash it down, especially when the kids were little. It would have been awful to rush a child to the Emergency Room after he choked on ka’ak.

Everyone in my family is kinky about ka’ak. I prefer mine in the morning, served so hot I can barely touch it, lubed up with a little butter. I’ll look at it, bulging and steaming, and I’ll tell myself to take little savoring nibbles, but I’m embarrassed–and just a little boastful–to admit that I often devour an entire ka’ak in a few bites. My husband prefers his ka’ak straight up at night. For our daughter, ka’ak smeared with just about any condiment is a meal in itself.

For our some reason our son never cared much for ka’ak. He’d toast his ka’ak until you could hear it sizzle, and then scoop ice cream on top before wolfing it down, hoping to disguise the taste.

After my husband’s grandmother Sito passed away, her only daughter became the Keeper of Ka’ak. Auntie’s ka’ak tastes like Sito’s, but there’s something about the texture that will just never be the same.

I am afraid someday when Auntie passes away, no one in our family will eat ka’ak again. It’s sad to even contemplate the Holidays without embarrassing Lebanese pastry. Perhaps to defy that day, Auntie in her later years has done Sito proud: she’s become wildly prolific, giving away so much ka’ak that by summer I break up what’s left in the back of our freezer and scatter broken ka’ak on the back deck where it’s picked at by neighborhood felines.

Poor Auntie has become self-conscious about the lore that surrounds this delicacy, so she has invented a euphemism for ka’ak. She’s in her 80’s now, and she calls it “cookies”, but you can’t fool us: we all know ka’ak when we see it.

Is Real Health Care Reform Down for the Count?

House lights dim as the Ref grabs the lowered microphone:

“Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?”

“In ‘The Cable TV Championship for Healthcare Reform’ we have, in the upper left corner, former sportscaster and liberal heavyweight Keith Olbermann.
(Keith bashes his blue boxing gloves together, grinning demonically). [

“In the FAR right corner, we have Fox News Pundit and LDS spokesperson Glenn Beck (cheers and boos as Beck, still seated, makes a futile attempt at an obscene hand gesture with a huge red glove).
\

The venue is packed, and just about everyone has a vested interest in the outcome of this Rumble in this Political Jungle. There’s Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee chair, with an affable lip-licking lisp as promoter Don King; congressional Republicans, waiting lazily with brooms to sweep up votes after the brawl; and that skinny black guy Obama with the microphone in the middle of the ring, trying to dodge premature punches as he explains the rules of a fair fight.

If you’re like me, watching the health care fight on ‘Pay per View’, try turning down the volume. It doesn’t matter who says what: like most Americans, Olbermann and Beck hit the canvas with the same obese thud.

Hey, it’s not that these guys are idiots–in my mind, only one is an idiot, and you’ll have to guess—it’s that by the time they got into the ring, it was too late to save either of them.

Like 66% of Americans (according to the CDC), Olbermann and Beck are pudgy and pasty and about to die. They can barely raise their gloves. Everyone has overlooked the big reason that health care reform will fail: it’s too late. We are so sick that our entire economy has become dysfunctionally vested in disease.

Genuine reform would gut entire industries: Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Archer Daniels Midland, Frito Lay, Coca Cola, Sonic, TV remote manufacturers, Altria (Philip Morris): bye, bye! What would plus-size clothiers and big Pharma do without the cash cows of obesity and diabetes?

We don’t have the courage to admit that we prefer to work at the ass end of health care, rolling up dollar bills and shoving them into that end of the system because real reform means we’d have to work to follow a plant-based diet and walk to work. Can’t someone just give me a friggin’ pill???

We talk about health care reform in this country as if we have a right to plant our widening hineys on the couch and suck down greasy takeout. If aliens from outer space watched prime time TV ads, they might decide to come back in a couple of generations to be spared the trouble of eradicating us from this gift of a planet. By that time our allergies, immune disorders and erectile dysfunctions might have us all down for the count.

Everyone has a right to be treated for what ails them, but many Americans want to cash in on health care without investing in a healthy lifestyle.

Keith, Glenn, are you listening? Take off the gloves, boys, skip the ‘Thrilla in Vanilla’ and make your way from the political boxing ring to the salad bar.

This editorial was published in the Great Falls Tribune on Sunday, May 8, 2005, just after a census report showed we’d declined a bit in our population base. Now that I have a ‘blog’ I thought it might be fun to re-publish it online. In the next few days I’ll fill you in on the effects this story had on the community, the Tribune, and how many people yelled at me.

It’s also a chance to see what’s changed…Read it for yourself and let me know what you think.

If you were blindfolded and dropped into the center of a midsize U.S. city, would you know where you were?

Sometimes it's hard, because cities characters are muddied by growth. Any decent size city has a similar landscape of national franchises: you could travel the nation in any direction eating only at McDonald's and sleeping only at Holiday Inns (hey, it might not be fun, but it's possible). Memories of one city melt into another, and many are forgettable.

Not in Montana. Each of our cities has that unique personality.

We have Billings, the big city wanna-be of Montana. Its downtown is crisp and boxy with a little graffiti in dimly lit alleys and on the sides of rail cars. Billings is the undisputed fossil fuel capital of Montana, the big fish.

Butte is the plucky little sister -- the kid who takes a black eye in stride (just look at the pit). Butte just picks itself up, wipes its eye with a well-worn sleeve, and claims it can take what the world dishes out.

Ever since I went to school down there, Missoula has been referred to as “Harvard on the Clark Fork”. She's the girl with the horn-rimmed glasses and a bag of granola in her purse. Every family has one -- you know, the person who can spell Sartre, reminds us about greenhouse gases and reflects a social conscience even when it's annoying.

Bozeman is in flux. She used to be the unabashed cowgirl, but she's traded in her real chaps and manure-scented cowboy boots for the Ralph Lauren Version of the Cowboy West. The change is somewhat awkward but inevitable as people from outside bring their upscale ideas of attire and property values.

Kalispell and Whitefish will, in my lifetime, become one urban area. Right now in any Montana city, you can drive for 15 minutes and be away from civilization. I predict that drive time will double or triple in the Flathead Valley.

You can't mistake Helena’s Last chance Gulch for any city center in America. Helena's cultural assets are not as overt as Missoula's. She's the polite political wife, who knows that social change must originate in the House, have at least three readings, and be accompanied by lunch at Jorgensen's.

That leaves us.

Sadly, Great Falls fills the role of the ugly stepsister of Montana cities. You want the smart one, date Missoula. You want the rowdy one, see Butte. The up-and-comer? Billings. The sister with clout, Helena. The popular girls? Try the Valley girls from Kalispell or Bozeman.

In the Electric City, we don't have an easily perceived persona, except perhaps Malmstrom Air Force Base. We’re the ag trade center, and we’re trying to capitalize on our associations with Charlie Russell and Lewis and Clark.

We do have great assets here, but let's not be too quick to compromise them for a one night stand. Let's not court environmentally unfriendly development that preclude clean alternatives. Let's not give tax advantages to companies that hire minimum-wage employees. Instead, let's decide what's great about Great Falls and do what we can to show our assets to their best advantage and grant our favors to the best suitors we can attract.

I suggest our own version of “Extreme Makeover”. Let’s help attract good dates and solid future relationships. First let’s do something about Tenth Avenue South. I don’t understand why we spent money making Central Avenue harder to navigate and easier to vandalize, while at the same time I try to avoid showing newcomers Tenth Avenue South.

Our town has lost potential professionals looking to relocate here in the ten minutes it takes to drive from the airport down Tenth. I’m tempted to set up flowerpots in the medians myself.

I would suggest that as a community we establish an identity that is easily perceived and understood and communicate this to visitors and suitors: we can’t do this without doing something about the blight of Tenth Avenue South. Our sister cities have for the most part good (or at least understandable) first impressions: we do not.

The Great Falls Tribune can be a standard bearer for a makeover. Let’s push our assets and let the Tribune do, what a classic ‘tribune’ is supposed to do: spread the word. The Tribune itself is one of our best assets. It’s Montana’s best daily by far. Let’s start by asking the Tribune to cancel its skewed “Greatest of Great Falls” contest and replace it by helping to assemble 100 reasons why Great Falls is a great place to live. From this list perhaps we can form an identity, and use it as a litmus test to see which potential development may be a true asset.

Our hundred reasons can be assembled by everyone from school kids to business executives to retirees, and used for promotion and reference lest we forget that we are the ambassadors for our own future.

At critical votes in local government the list can be removed from pockets, unfolded and flailed so our elected officials remember what’s consistent with our assets and what looks—or smells—bad.

I’ve lived in Great Falls pretty much all my life. It’s a great place to live and raise kids, but now my kids are growing up and moving away. I’d sure like to learn them home. When they come to town, I’d like to offer them more than Tenth Avenue South, and a shrinking population base.

There are nine people looking at the house next door. I don’t like any of them.

With my luck, it’s the harried-looking woman, the one dressed in pastel polyester. It would be OK to have a neighbor with angst, but this lady appears overwhelmed with classic dust-bowl fatalism. Here she is, after church, with Ma and Pa and Grandma and three kids, plus two calm-looking older folks making sweeping gestures like models on The Price is Right. Those two look like realtors.

The back yard is so small that the lady with a little kid in the crook of one arm is now standing in my yard. Great. Where are the rowdy neighbors in the alley when I need them? I’d love for one of them to pitch an oversize can of ‘Natural’ over the eight foot fence. If I had known there was going to be an “open house” I would have bought the folks in the alley a case of hootch at the gas station, just to make things lively.

Maybe I should run out there waving plans for a two-story garage that would block any sunlight from ever reaching any room in that house, Amen.

The widow lady who lived behind us for twenty one years–now there was a good neighbor– despite her yippy rodent and the occasional north wind that sucked smoke from her chimney into our family room. God bless her, she was nearly blind, so I could romp in the yard in any state of disarray or undress, plus she never listened to any music, especially ‘country’ or ‘gospel’ or (gulp) ‘white country gospel’.

That house is just the right size for one, or maybe two quiet adults, not a young family of four or five. It sits only about ten feet from my back door, since at one time it was the ‘carriage house’ for the place I’ve called home for the last two decades.

I don’t want to deal with a thirty-something divorced mother yelling at her three kids while I’m trying to weed the herb garden and listen to NPR. I don’t want her being friendly at the back door. I don’t want her asking my husband to ‘loan her a tool’, and I don’t want her ex showing up at odd hours providing vocal counterpoint to the already operatic pathos that plays out in the alley.

I fervently hope she goes somewhere else…now the adults are huddled just outside my window, and the kids are climbing my 115-year old decorative wrought iron fence (except the one in the tired lady’s arms, and I think I smell that one).

God, I hope she doesn’t have a dog. Every time I look at a dog I see an asterisk of an asshole, and envision its center dilating and depositing organic waste like a pasta extruder.

I’m in no mood for neighbors.

I am a little ‘sick in the head’ about Walter Cronkite’s passing. The literal translation of Cronkite in Yiddish, the most literal of languages, is ‘sickhead’. As a student of language, Walter had to know.

I became a sickhead for news thanks to Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and from my mom, who insisted on watching CBS and NBC news back-to-back every weeknight. Huntley was a Montana boy made good. All I can remember about David Brinkley is that he seemed to speak through clenched teeth and that he had excellent posture.

Cronkite was a curiously gutsy guy swallowed by a fleshy mustached sound box. He established the CBS tradition of the caring town crier; glee or grief didn’t have to be in the script: we felt privileged to witness the big fella fighting to maintain composure.

JFK had just visited Montana two months before his assassination; I might have only been seven years old, but I’ll never forget when Walter Cronkite took off his dark framed glasses just after telling us John F. Kennedy had died. I knew the world had changed forever: I saw it on Walter Cronkite’s face.

From Cronkite to Dan Rather to Katie Couric, CBS Evening News is still married to a simple, folksy style, for better or for worse. Network news audiences have gone from better to worse, losing an average of *one million viewers every year.

Cronkite’s competitor Chet Huntley died a few months after his return to Montana in 1974, David Brinkley died in 2003. With Cronkite’s passing Friday, network news, once a proud packed three-chimney steam liner, cast off its last anchor and is a dinghy adrift in international shipping lanes–perhaps with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart at the helm.

The Anchor & Ship

Instead of 23 minutes of news that’s pre-digested, organized and delivered at dinnertime by middle aged white males, there’s an avalanche of fact and opinion, theory and perspective at our fingertips. The wonderful, awful thing is that news and opinion aren’t filtered, boxed and labeled any more. The wrapping changes the contents to suit the specific sickhead who opens the box.

Sometimes I long just to sit down with a Swanson TV Dinner and wait for Walter Cronkite to make sense of the world for me…but that’s just not the way it is today, Saturday June 18th, Two Thousand and Nine.

* http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?media=6&cat=2

(This post is published on the InStore magazine blog)

There has been a lively discussion on Polygon in the last week about the jewelry equivalent of a catalogue showroom.

There are certain stores in Canada where customers walk up to open displays, pick out a basic engagement ring–or two or three–and wander about unsupervised with 8mm rocks in designer settings. If they run out the door, I doubt if the sales clerk would even bother to chase them.

The rings are what’s known in the jewelry trade as ‘brass and glass’– base metal cubic zirconia examples of rings that can be customized with real gems and gold when an order is made. “Want that setting in rose gold, size 4 1/2 for pear shape? No problem. Come back in three weeks and it’s yours. That’ll be $4500 please. Ka ching!”

I see the tactical advantage of this, especially in slower economic times. Instead of investing in expensive “Cinderella Rings” that often live in a showroom for years, jewelers can order a basic style and make dozens of orders from a single base metal ring. The strategy also allows clients to browse without a nosy salesclerk. Imagine how far a semi-mount budget would go if a jeweler switched to brass and glass.

One of the jewelry industry’s most respected gurus is already helping several stores convert to this marketing strategy. You may be seeing brass and glass at a competitor or near you.

A couple of years ago, Overnight Mounting started to offer $20 brass and glass examples, so I delved in with a few hundred bucks. It was a dismal failure. Clients can get those rings off their fingers fast enough, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was not compatible with my business strategy.

First, I think it’s a mistake to mix fakes with the real McCoy. Customers expect the shopping experience, not a split personality. What’s real and what isn’t? Second, in a small town, you don’t want to sell too many versions of the same ring. Third, I think my attitude rubbed off on my clients: they could tell I just wasn’t that enthusiastic. Fourth, since I was leveraged and real goods and customers usually want things right away, I had little incentive to push the ersatz rings.
I can’t help thinking of a television ad for cellular networks where everything needs to go like clockwork. The stagehands kill the rain on command. The wedding planner locates the misplaced flowers, but suddenly the groom has cold feet. “Cue the stand-in groom!” A smiling substitute waits for the I-do’s.

I wonder if her two-carat ring was late, if that bride would accept brass & glass along with a cardboard groom.

Joe Rosetti owns a multimillion dollar company. He has impeccable taste in Western art and an impressive collection of motorcycles. He walks with a swagger and has played the markets for years. In the midst of tough times he built a new headquarters. Joe Rosetti is nobody’s fool.

I’ve been trying for months to convince Joe to put a small percentage of his net worth into some hard assets. I sent what I thought was a very convincing e-mail about using gold and silver as a hedge against possible inflationary times. I thought he’d understand the logic of holding a fistful of private tax-free assets.

Instead, I received a stinging response that gold bugs are basically idiots who are betting on the downfall of western civilization. A tax-free investment that goes from $400 to $900 in 5 to 7 years? So what. “Can that compare to a stock that I bought at $18 a share cashed out at $300 in 18 months?” he almost spit back at me.

I agree with Joe that gold might not be a good investment. And I’d rather not envision the unraveling of our economy, thanks. I just believe that a small amount of precious metals offsets a large portfolio of paper. I presented what I believe to be a logical argument, and Joe responded in kind. We had a simple disagreement, and I stopped trying to pitch him for a lousy 3% commission.

I was surprised when I got an e-mail from Joe recently asking about gold and silver. It was a short message. “I’m looking at precious metals. Now that I’ve seen this You Tube video, I understand the urgency of the situation.”

What did the You Tube guy say that finally swayed my client? After Joe ’s blistering response to my benign inquiry, it must be darn convincing.

It’s worse than convincing. It’s embarrassing. It’s frightening…and just plain weird.

The video, by a discredited Internet radio host, claimed that the US dollar faced extinction and imminent replacement by something he called the ‘Amero’. To prove this point, he claimed personal persecution by the U.S. government as he tapped a poorly made brownish coin on a desktop to prove it was real. “Do you see this tiny letter D?”he asked. “That proves this coin was secretly made by the Denver mint.”

Yeah, right. And the JLo swimsuit I wear means that my girls are as nice as hers.

It was odd that other YouTube videos visible on the website’s sidebar featured different versions of the same conspiracy, often showing entirely different coins. At least these conspirators should get together to decide what the damn thing looks like.
Hal Turner’s YouTube video claims the US government, Canada and Mexico have been conspiring behind everyone’s backs to dismantle currencies in favor of the North American version of the Euro, the Amero. This merger is the first step toward the US, Canada and Mexico erasing our borders: step one to a New World Order.

Can I Order fries with that?

According to Turner, there are 8 hundred million Ameros waiting in China, ostensibly waiting to offset some of our national debt. How were all these coins minted? On the night shift? Assuming each metal coin weighs 1 ounce, how were 27,428,571 tons trucked to waiting cargo ships and secretly loaded and transported, without a peep? Why on earth would a Chinese bank accept them? This insults the nation that invented the abacus (no worries, later Hal Turner insults Jews, too).

Turner forecast that by February 2009 (Note to Hal: revise ticking clock of fiscal doom), the U.S. Treasury secretary would de-monetize the dollar, making it worthless. Your savings, checking, IRA, stocks, bonds, retirement: poof. The commies who run the U.S., Canada, Mexico (and China) will take it away with the stroke of a pen. The only way Americans will get any value, perhaps two cents on the dollar, is if we line up at the bank with wheelbarrows of dollars to exchange for…you guessed it: Ameros.

This solution to our economic woes (explain again how that solves all our problems without creating bigger ones, please?) is aimed squarely at the working class, Turner extolls.

Even more incredible than the Amero is Turner’s advice to Americans. Not only should we buy gold and silver (duh!) but “more importantly, we should transfer whatever funds we have to FOREIGN BANKS and denominate them in British, French or Swiss funds.” Turner never mentions that these currencies are economically tied to the U.S. Dollar and they are also fiat currencies, not backed by precious metals. In an odd caveat, Turner says the Euro is a bad choice, “because it is not backed by anything.” (?)

It frightens me that rational arguments about hedging failed to convince Joe, a man I respect and admire, but a dangerously flawed home movie posted by a discredited reactionary did the trick. When sloppy slogans and scare tactics lure guys like Joe, we are poised for a worse fate than the Amero.

*I changed the name of my client to protect his privacy–his sanity is already in question.