Leaders

We are looking for great.

I spent all day in the cancer ward at Cedars getting an infusion of IVIG for my pemphigus foliaceus. As the fourth doctor I saw in eighteen months who finally diagnosed it said... Don't Google it.

In any event, IVIG cleans out the toxins from the blood so you itch less...

And there's nothing like a pemphigus itch. Along with the sores. If you see me in the next few days and notice the spots on my bald pate...you'll know what I mean.

Not that it's contagious, but when it's really bad, people are fearful of touching me.

But with treatment it's under control. Well, continued treatment. Could go away, they don't know, it hasn't yet.

And the only thing that speaks to the underlying condition is the drug Rituxan. But you can't get Rituxan until your B-cells have telomeres and mine didn't so I got IVIG in November but now the B-cells have a few, so I'm going to get Rituxan next week. Not that it works instantly. In addition, Rituxan wipes out your B-cells, which are what fight infection... But I'm left with T-cells, which it turns out the Covid vaccine works on...

And I was out to dinner a week ago with a household name musician and he told me he never got the flu vaccine, never mind the Covid vaccine. He didn't think they worked. Well, let me just put it this way, when you're on the medical edge, you're willing to believe, you want to believe, you hope the drug works. It's all fine when you're healthy, but the human body is going to crap out on you sometime.

And they treat you like gold.

There's a separate entrance at Cedars with valet parking. And the nurses! This is the medical treatment of your dreams. Since most people are coming in for cancer treatment, some on their last legs, they're always nice, never brusque, will bring you blankets, snacks...

But still... The infusion itself takes 4 1/2 hours. But there's the pre-game, with the Benadryl and the steroid...ensuring that you're f*cked up the whole time and can't accomplish anything. You're not in a complete fog, but it's hard to concentrate. Kinda like being on an airplane. Ever notice it's harder to concentration on a jet? I think it's the pressurization, or lack thereof (they don't pressurize to sea level).

So you're sitting there long enough that you get restless in your seat, even though it's a recliner, you end up like a first grader, twisting and turning. But there is WiFi, so you bring your devices...

And I usually just end up surfing the net, wasting time.

But today, the third day, after doing a bit of research, I decided I was going to break the spell, I was going to watch a movie, and I pulled up "Civil War" on MAX.

There was scuttlebutt when this came out last year, there was discussion of the potential public response, but there wasn't much of one, because almost nobody went to see it. Well, that's untrue, it grossed $68+ million in the U.S. and $126 million worldwide, but no one I know talked to me about it, sent me an e-mail, and that means there's a specialized audience and now that it's streaming...

I was thinking it might have been better if the film had gone direct to streaming, so the publicity was timed with its availability to many as part of their subscription.

But the bottom line is this is not a great movie. Not what you think it's going to be. It's ultimately a road trip. The future battle between the states is just background. But I'm writing about the flick primarily to mention Jesse Plemons.

He's only in the film briefly. But the way he talks, it's so understated, to the degree he speaks at all. And this is striking in a world where everybody is in your face 24/7 saying LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!

Now you've seen him before. Maybe in "Friday Night Lights," which I haven't seen, but I noticed him in the overrated, ultra-slow, "The Master," and he delivered his role in this same hesitant fashion in "Killers of the Flower Moon." Not that Plemons cannot be more dynamic. He's more alive in that "Black Mirror" episode "USS Callister," which I tried to watch after "The Civil War," but sci-fi is not my thing.

But Plemons.

And Kirsten Dunst, who turns out to be Plemons's wife. She's not an ingenue here, she's mature, and wizened and brittle-edged, underplaying like her husband, and that was endearing too.

But Wagner Moura's accent seemed phony from the get-go, and went in and out, and Cailee Spaeny as the young photographer was a two dimensional cliché, predictable to the point I winced. But Stephen McKinley Henderson...

He's always great. You may not know his name, but you'd recognize him on sight. And he was just in that Netflix series "The Madness"... God, I wish that was better. A fine ride, but ultimately just good network fare. What else would you expect from Peter Chernin who splashes his name before every episode, as if we care, seems self-congratulatory, positively narcissistic.

And when they finally took the needle out of my arm and I had to enter rush hour traffic it was just before six and...

I tuned in Rachel Maddow.

Same as it ever was. But I can still listen to that Talking Heads song, unlike Ms. Maddow. It's still fresh. You should hear it in hi-res.

So Rachel is busy delineating the behavior of Trump and I'm sitting there thinking WE GET IT! And this strategy didn't work for the Democrats, trying to label Trump as bad. You need an agenda, you need to look forward.

Actually, the thing that has stuck most with me this past week is from David Brooks...who once wrote that the most important thing in life was who you married, which I embraced, but then he went up and got a divorce. So your mileage may differ, but this is what he said in the "Times':

"Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book 'The Age of Reform,' Richard Hofstadter writes, 'Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.' In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered 'over the border between reality and impossibility.' Sound familiar?"

And the reason Brooks can quote Hofstadter is because he's a graduate of the University of Chicago, which has a reading-based curriculum. You read and analyze. We keep minting business graduates, but it's those who study the liberal arts who truly have a handle on the world.

Brooks goes on to say:

"Here's how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem."

Free link: https://rb.gy/k9v640

By pointing to Trump's errors, Maddow is missing the point, which is why so many Democrats are demoralized. We KNOW what is going on, we just want to be led out of the wilderness, ENOUGH WITH THE COMPLAINING!

It's like a classic rock band going on the road to play their ancient hits again and again and again. The reason people don't want their new music is usually because it's not as good as it was the first time around. Also you've got to change for the marketplace, today you just don't drop an album and wait for your label to do press, you personally have to work it, and that's too much of an effort.

But the young and hungry...

Then again, the Democrats are a Boomer and Gen-X-based party too often out of touch with today's digital reality who think they know better and refuse to remove their hands from the wheel.

We need the new. We need solutions, not complaints. So we had a bump in the road, a big bump...but we can recover. Just like me and my treatment for pemphigus. It's depressing sitting in the chair, but I won't even think about it a few weeks down the line.

Then again, there are some people who are invested in being ill.

And credibility is key. If you're doing it for your brand, you might get rich, but we'll never truly believe in you.

And we need to believe.


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