long shadows and such

The FBI wouldn't tail *this* guy on a Russian tip.

Now that the alleged perp has been captured we can start our favourite sport, the blame game. It seems that the FBI will be the primary finger-ee for having had a tip on Tamerlan and dropped it. Yeah well, where did that tip come from? The long shadow of the Cold War guarantees that the FBI, of all agencies, wouldn't take a tip from the Russian government seriously enough to keep an eye on Boris Badenov, let alone a Chechen nobody.  Nor would any Republican in Congress now lining up to lynch the agency and its director.

Whatever the facts,  we seem to have given Russia two things. First, Putin can now say "We told you so" very loudly. Second, he now has a licence to go in and take the Caucasus apart whether there is an active rebellion or not. When he's done, he can smile and say how he'd done it to show friendship with the US. Blech.

On other matters, I'm glad Dave Henneberry, who whose boat was literally in the line of fire in the capture of DzhokharTsarnaev, is getting more than a little online help. Had he not been so dedicated to his boat that his first act, aside from lighting up, on being allowed to step out of the house, was to check up on it, this drama would probably still be going on, and there might have been more innocent casualties. I'm sure many of the half-wit internet comment mob are condemning this generosity, but it wouldn't be necessary if he could expect institutional help. First, if his boat or homeowner's insurance company had immediately manned up to cover the damage or loss, there would be no need for support. As for government? I still remember the comment of one of my junior high history teachers, over 50 years ago, that there were then, still,  government Civil War claims that had not been paid. So, good luck with that source.

Having dumped on the legitimate media over the last few days, let's not spare the wannabe media of the social networks. These would be the ones whose Reddit crowdsourced "news" identified two or more innocent people as Marathon bombing suspects, people whose lives are likely to carry this stain forever. Not, you say? Imagine these people being Googled by some HR person as stupid as the Redditors in five or ten years. What do you suppose the results might be?

Some of the crowdsourcers have defended their actions with equal parts of vigour and stupidity. If you don't yet believe in the widespread idiocy of this news source, remember that this lot can't tell the Czech Republic from Chechnya: more proof that the education of Americans in geography is the worst in the world. Even though this sort of thing can be fact-checked with a couple of keystrokes, these journalistic wannabes are too lazy to do so.

If you rely on social media for information, these are the people giving it to you, about the only ones who can manage to make the American mainstream media look good.

And finally, one thing that most red-blooded Americans don't understand is why a Tamerlan Tsarnaev could turn against a country that "had taken him in," rescued him from the perpetual conflict of the Caucasus.

I do. My studies taught me that the older an immigrant is, the less likely he or she is to fully assimilate. It's most evident in language. Children under ten still have very fluid speech patterns, and adapt readily. After that, adaptation becomes progressively more difficult on every front.

In my young adulthood, I learnt a dirty little secret. My grandparents, especially my grandmother, never fully assimilated to the United States. During the Depression, with my grandfather unemployed and my grandmother only working part-time, they were angry, resentful, and not careful to keep their opinions away from their children. My father and aunt, by then in their teens, were just as angry with their parents. They were assimilated and more American than my grandparents. Sorry, red-bloods: failure to assimilate is more common than you may think.

Cooks who spoil the broth

This topic came up a couple of days ago in a networking group I visit regularly. (OK, I brought it up.) A thread in a certain social networking group highlighted one of the problems that has surfaced when one blends 50-year-old job-hunting practices with a culture of privilege and entitlement.

The first "networking" was more or less learning to use and love the old-boy (or good-ol-boy) network. It seems to have worked very well in those days gone by when most people looking for a job already had one. It has steadily eroded over the past 40 years as the so-called social compact between the employers and employed has eroded. Now, most people looking for a job don't have one. Many haven't had one for some time. Although the era of the social compact and lifetime employment was dying or was dead before many of these people entered the work force, most of them still believe they have a right to—not just a job, but to all the money and perquisites they had enjoyed before the HR person with the empty box arrived at their cubicle.

When earnest employment pundits trot out their Haldane-era advice, especially about networking, that advice gets as garbled as the kids' game of gossip. What comes out is not the idea that you will actually try to meet a friend of a friend, in a place or field of interest, and make them your friend. Oh no: the output is too often that you will get the name of that someone, whether you have mutual connections or not, and demand that they give you an interview (i.e., give you a job). When that someone, very understandably, either ignores you or tells you to sod off, you then throw a tantrum. This has happened more and more often over the last 15 years or so, to the point where the artificial networking structure built on the old-boy example is pretty much dead.

And yet, the job search experts still bang on this drum all day.

Entitlement shows itself in unusual ways, even amongst the formerly entitled. The 1950s were a wonderful, gilded age in the USA: if you happened to be a white Protestant male. It was solid gold if you were a rich, white, Protestant male.It seems that a great deal of the loud social angst of the present is coming from people who resent the social changes of the last 40 years or so, which amount to a message to please share. They did not want to and they do not want to: a characteristic reaction of the terminally spoilt.

As I've been poking around the topic of age bigotry, I've had the unsettling experience of discovering just how many of these spoilt brats still remain in the corporate world and in the ranks of the unemployed. Many—but not all—of them are over 50. Many are obstinate in their refusal to start their job search with a look in the psychological mirror*. To them, their loss of privilege must always be someone else's fault. People who actually have done nothing more to employers than have the gall to get older may very well be collateral damage in a conflict between the fools who did the sacking and the fools who got sacked. Possibly bigotry enters into the business only because bigotry of any sort is a symptom of stupidity.


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*A look in an actual mirror is irrelevant. Any job search pundit who advocates a physical makeover as a solution to unemployment has never taken a look at online background checks, in which age is the first data point. Perhaps dispensing online job search advice is the one field available today in which stupidity is a positive virtue.

Tried patience

For about two months my various job-hunting resources have inundated me, and every unemployed person within reach, with fearful advice on the proper care and feeding of social networking sites.

Most of the advice is chyme.

I was thinking about this the other day whilst going over the Facebook entries of various friends and relations who are either employed or legitimately retired. They are easy, relaxed, natural, unaffected, without being the least likely to set off the sensitivities of an uber-hypersensitive age. In short, they are social.

None of this will do for the employment gurus. In their view, one must purge these products of one's hours of social activity of the slightest trace of humanity, and turn one's image into that of an asocial, Orwellian automaton. This, says I after many job hunts, may get the interview. It won't get one the job, because any sane HR person looking at the flesh-and-blood person, rather than the sanitised social networking profile the job gurus advised you to present online, will be convinced that the interviewee just showed up from a parallel universe. If you are a match for your sanitised profile—for example, if you walk the beach in wingtips and wear a tie to bed—there may not be such a great disconnect.

A Web site is in the works here, and after some thought it will link to this blog. When I mentioned that intention at a networking meeting, I said that the blog contained sometimes candid opinions. My well-indoctrinated meeting mates rose up as one and said, "be careful! You can't do that!" I said nothing to them but it made my mind up, and formed an obvious rejoinder to such over-anxious caution.

I'm a writer. When I'm not expressing my (hopefully) informed opinions in public, I'm collecting the opinions of others or, as an editor, I'm giving shape to the opinions of others. A writer who would do none of these things is of no use to anyone.

The job gods need to reconsider this approach, along with many others. Not everyone they advise is in sales or marketing, or bean-counters or in some other role where they have no right or interest in giving an opinion. Many job-seekers are in occupations which demand that they give, or present, informed opinions. By my observation, much that the authorities say about social networking simply increases the anxiety level of people who are already too anxious to make good decisions. Perhaps I'm alone in thinking that is unhelpful.

Are you worried about either your past remarks or the boisterous remarks of your friends and relations? These sites have privacy functions: use them. It costs nothing. An inquisitive HR type can discover that your name is on this site or that (which proves that you live in the 21st century) but that you choose not to share your personal information with the universe. If they have a problem with that, you're better off not working for them. Wiser heads might conclude that if you do not want to hand out free passes to your own personal data, you might be just as discreet with theirs.

There will be more on this directly.

Now I know why my eyes hurt

It's because I roll them so much in response to the advice of employment experts.

The latest item, which has come at me twice in networking meetings, is a rather sinister expansion of an obvious observation about social networking sites. The obvious observation is aimed, naturally, at twentysomethings, since of course no old people would ever use social networking sites*: "keep your toga party pictures private**." The favourite cute saying is to put nothing on the Internet that you wouldn't want to see on page one of the New York Times the next day.

The sinister expansion is the suggestion that you avoid saying or posting any words or images that could possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, offend anyone in any HR department anywhere in the solar system. When last I looked, the word for this was censorship and I'll have no part of it, thank you very much. What put me over the top, I think, was the fear one person in the group had about putting family cookout pictures on the family Facebook profile.

I remarked earlier that I have no anxiety about seeing anything I write on page one of the New York Times, provided I get the byline and the cheque. I have made just about all of my living putting my name on my words, or making other people's signed words look their best, for 25 years. My education and my experience have given me both a theoretical and a practical appreciation of the limits of free speech, libel, and copyright law. This is a background that few employment pundits enjoy. Perhaps—no, certainly—most people looking for work don't have these advantages. However, some do, and people who seek to tell me how to find work ought to have the flexibility to recognise that. The credibility of career advice columnists is low enough without them trying to shove everyone into the same tent of timidity.

Kindly remember that the key term on most social networking sites is social. LinkedIn reverses the equation, giving priority to networking of the professional variety. Facebook keeps me in touch with my relations, while LinkedIn keeps me in touch with my professional relationships (or would if I gave it due diligence). Perhaps the distinction is unclear to some people. I guess they are the same ones who think that one cover letter suits all possible occasions. Who am I to disabuse competing job seekers? However, I have some right to expect better of anyone who presumes to offer me expert advice.

The reductio ad absurdum of this panicked reasoning is to imagine what Twitter would look like if every tweet had to be vetted by an attorney. To paraphrase Bobby Day:

All the little lawyers on Federal Street
Love to hear their clients go tweet tweet tweet.

New times always require new thinking, but the people making money from advice to the unemployed seem unable to grasp that. The play 1776 archly portrays the timidity of a Continental Congress overwhelmed by its undertaking until, in frustration, John Adams shouts:

It's a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend somebody!

As writers, we probably will.


*Note to the age-biased: you may want to check your prejudices against the demographics. Older users are Facebook's fastest-growing segment, and we'll be taking over Twitter next, mwahahaha!

**Note to the job advice pundits: "toga party" is so 1963.