Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere have their own special breed of thugs and vandals.  Personas that exist solely for the purpose of intimidating, ridiculing, and generally tearing down anybody who dares to step into the spotlight.  I’m sure that, privately, these people fancy themselves as some sort of guerilla fighters, striking out from the underground to save the common people from an oppressive elite.  They see the Jasmine Stars and Dane Sanders of the world as egomaniacal parasites that feed on the naive.  These self-styled warriors of freedom and truth spend their time taking pot-shots from behind anonymous online personas, sparing no opportunity to ridicule and slander industry leaders.

Sure, at first, the pointed barbs and cynical jabs were funny, and maybe even on point.  We all could use a bit of sarcasm to blow off steam now and again.  Anyone that knows me well knows that I can rant and bitch about the world as well as anyone.  But at a certain point it begins to represent the kind of negative worldview that makes you, literally, a loser.  If all you see are problems, and all our heroes are your villains, it has a tendency to drag you down.  Devoting an entire website or Twitter account to burning shit down isn’t just depressing, it’s dysfunctional.  Time you spend wallowing in bitterness, anger, and self-pity is time that you’re NOT spending doing something productive.

To be more succinct – toddlers cry and hit things when they don’t like the way the world is working (trust me, I have one).  Adults, by contrast, figure out how to fix it.  They get up off their asses and work at making the world a better place.  If all you do is bitch and moan, you’re basically a two-year-old.

Of course, no REAL people spend 100% of their time complaining, or they wouldn’t have any friends.  The fact that people don’t want to hang out with adults that are emotional children is what keeps us from saying everything that pops into our heads.  That filter is an important social construct.  But online, with relative anonymity, that social pressure is removed.  Most of us still behave like adults, but some of us let our inner toddler out, and start peeing in the pool and biting other people’s ears, knowing that there won’t be any consequences.  It’s kinda cute the first time your kid throws a fit.  After that, it’s grating and exhausting.  For me, endless stream of cynicism is long past the point of being cute.

Furthermore, the real way to build a better world is not to concentrate all your energy on tearing it down.  If you’re angry, channel that anger into something positive.  If you don’t like the way the photo industry looks, take positive steps to make it better.  Shine the spotlight on people who you think deserve it, instead of trying to break the damned spotlight.  Tell us how things should be, instead of focusing on how they shouldn’t be.  Champion things that work, instead of ridiculing the things that don’t.  That’s how our leaders got to where they are.  If you don’t like them, then be better at showing us how to do it.  There’s no use talking about the problem unless you talk about the solution.

Yes, dialog needs to happen.  When industry leaders step out of line, we DO have a responsibility to call them on it.  When the emperor is naked, we should absolutely tell them so.  Someone needs to be checking the kool-aid before we all drink it.  But it’s a slippery slope to do so anonymously because it’s too easy to turn into a negative asshole.  No one is there to give you a time-out when you take it too far.  But if you have something to say, if you’re truly a champion of The Truth™, then you should be proud to own your words and thoughts.  If you have to say it anonymously, then you probably know you shouldn’t be saying it.  And if someone can’t be bothered to stand behind what they’re saying, I can’t imagine why anyone would give them any credibility.

So I’m officially calling out all the anonymous cynics on the interwebs, both in and out of the photo world.  Stop behaving like children.  If you have something important to say, then say it and stand behind it.  Otherwise, STFU and GTFO.  And by the way, your diaper could use a change.

Let me relate a story to you about an experience I had today, which highlighted this point for me in a painfully frustrating way.  For Mother’s Day this year, I decided that I would schedule a family portrait with one of Chenin’s favorite photographers.  Someone she nearly idolizes, who’s hot shit right now.  Since it entailed a bit of travel, I figured we’d turn it into a couple nights away, where she could hang at the spa, and we could do vacation stuff with little Max.  So I surprised her with the news on Mother’s Day, and we were all stoked about it, even though the earliest available date was nearly a month away.  I booked two nights at one of the nicest hotels in the area.  We rescheduled meetings, rearranged Max’s childcare, and worked extra before leaving so we’d be caught up.  Chenin spent the better part of a day shopping for just the right outfit, plus a new shirt for Max and sweater for me.  We fretted and worried about the shoot, even having a little tiff about it.  This morning, we packed everything up (which is no small deal when you’re packing for a photoshoot and a one-year-old as well) hopped in the car, and headed out.

After getting nearly halfway to the hotel, Chenin gets a text from the photographer saying, basically “I don’t feel well, and I don’t like the weather, so I’d like to cancel.”  We asked if we could do the shoot tomorrow.  Nope, because the photographer “had meetings in the afternoon.”  At that point, the damage was basically done.  We could have said “suck it up, we’re still shooting today,” but there’s no point in making a photographer shoot something they don’t want to shoot, because they’ll just half-ass it (or at least we’ll be convinced that they are).  Once you ask to cancel, we KNOW you don’t want to shoot it, so how can we put our trust in you, as subjects?  You wouldn’t say to your wife, “hey, mind if I fuck your sister?”  It doesn’t matter if you actually DO fuck her sister, because once you ask, the damage is basically done.  She knows you’re thinking about it.  If it were me, I would have made every effort to reschedule (maybe at least ASK the people you’re meeting with the next day to bump their appointment up an hour?) or somehow make it up to the client.  Canceling a shoot with a client who lives 4 hours away and has driven half the distance isn’t like canceling lunch plans.  Our photographer made us feel like they didn’t really want to shoot US.  (as a sidebar, I could be mis-reading all this, but it’s hard to tell with text messaging.  If you are going to give someone disappointing news, pick up the phone).

So we basically said “nevermind, we’re going home.”  The main reason we were going out of town was for this one hot shit photographer to shoot us, and if that couldn’t happen, then spending tons of money for two nights in a fancy hotel just didn’t seem like a good 2nd prize.  Besides which, we were at a fast food restaurant in a nasty suburb off the freeway, nearly a hundred miles from home, and were more than a little disillusioned.  We kinda felt upset about the whole thing, and the trip didn’t sound fun anymore.  So we said goodbye to the $300 deposit on the hotel.  We wasted an entire day packing and driving and sitting in traffic and eating fast food in crappy neighborhoods only to turn around and come back home.  Chenin basically doesn’t get the Mother’s Day present I promised her.  All because our photographer didn’t really stop to think about what WE had invested in the shoot.

I know photographers that have gone to shoots while practically going into labor, and others that have gone to shoots while bleeding from having a miscarriage.  Some have shown up to a shoot right after getting the news that their father had a heartattack, or that their husband just committed suicide.  Broken bones, sprained rib, fucking EYE INFECTIONS that cause puss to run out of your eyeballs and crust over your camera eye so you have to shoot with the other one – none of that deterred these shooters from showing up and getting the job done.  If you’re going to cancel a shoot, it better damned well be more than a tummyache or a hangover (not to say that our photographer wasn’t stricken with swine flu or leprosy or whatever, just making a point)  This isn’t to say that you have to make superhuman sacrifices for your clients.  The point is that when you commit to doing something for someone else, they’re counting on you to deliver.  They’ve put time, effort, money, and emotional energy into getting ready.  Just because your job only entails picking up 20 lbs of camera gear, driving across town, and frolicing through golden pastures at sunset, that doesn’t mean it’s not a commitment.  It might not feel like a job, on the good days, but people are counting on you to do it.

Your clients have probably devoted at least a couple days of their life to making their shoot happen.  They rearrange their schedules, buy new clothes, and sometimes even get professional hair and makeup done.  They’re basically doing all the pre-production on the shoot at their own expense, and counting on you to help them document something important in their lives.  They’ve put a lot of trust in you, so be sure to show them a little respect in return, because to them, it’s a big f***ing deal.

Fortunately, the show continues to be both entertaining, and relentless in its muckraking.  The March 12 episode with Jim Cramer (host of CNBC’s Mad Money) was a beacon example of why we need Jon Stewart.  Spend 21 minutes of your life and watch Jon tear Jim a new asshole like you’ve never seen before – I guarantee that it’s not a waste of your time.

Watch the episode on Comedy Central’s website

Have fun at the tradeshow, everyone! Wish I could be there, but Chenin’s about to pop any minute now, and I wouldn’t miss baby Max’s 0th birthday for all the photo-blankets and Fong-Dongs in the world. So go out and buy some photo shit that you don’t need and will regret buying later. It’s good for the economy, and good for a laugh!

Hugs,

-db

Check it out over at F-Stop Beyond.

Quoting John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:

“Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. ……Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”

Don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

• Taxes, by their very nature, are designed to “spread the wealth around”.  Any tax structure that you could devise would, by definition, be taking money from some people to give to other people.  Even if we eliminated every federal program except the military, we’d still be taking money from everyone to give to soldiers and arms manufacturers.  The question at hand isn’t one of whether we should “spread the wealth around” or not – it’s one of who that wealth should be spread TO.

• Socialism is not a four-letter-word.  We have a history of treating socialism just like facism or terrorism – as something to be feared as an oppressive form of government.  People confuse socialism with Stalinism.  They aren’t the same.  Most other industrialized nations have political parties with openly socialist platforms, and most of those same nations also have elements of socialist policies at work in their governments.  They get along just fine.  Most people are afraid of the word without even knowing what it entails, because it conjures up images of and aggressive USSR.  They’re not the same.

• Adam Smith-style capitalism doesn’t work in modern, global economies.  The system works fine in the pre-corporation era where competition was ensured because no one could establish an oppressive hegemony over their market and then start buying congressmen to advance their interests.  But blind faith in the market as some irrebukable gospel has proven dangerous, and even destructive in the past month.  The fundamental underpinning of the US ideology, as framed by the founders, is that you can’t trust people with power.  Yet we’ve allowed a situation to develop where unfathomable amounts of power (money) are concentrated in the hands of increasingly few people (witness the flurry of corporate mergers and buyouts post-2000), and where we simultaneously trust those people to play by the rules and look after our interests.  It goes against everything we believe as Americans to think that system could work, but we’ve got an emotional attachment to the idea that unregulated free markets are somehow congruent with the American ethos.  The founding fathers would turn in their graves if they knew the extent to which we allowed power to concentrate, unchecked, into the hands of the wealthy.  Ironically, the medicine prescribed to fix the mess amounts to socialism.  Funny that – a massive, government-ordered redistribution of wealth is the only way to fix our broken markets, yet we still cling like scared children to the simple equations of socialism = bad and capitalism = good.  Things aren’t that simple in the world we live in.

• You can’t fix something you don’t understand.  You wouldn’t trust someone who can’t tell you what a cylinder head is to fix your breaks, would you?  Same applies for elected officials.  Having a deep-seated, earnest desire to fix a broken Washington does you no good if you’re completely ignorant of how it would look if it DID work.

• “Elite” is not the same as “elitist”.  One implies a high station in life, whether economically, socially, or intellectually.  The other means condescention on the basis of your status.  They don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.  People need to stop inferring one from the other.

• The mortgage / foreclosure crisis in this county is not the fault of “predatory lenders.”  That’s like saying you cheated on your wife because of a hot girl.  Or that you got a DUI because of the bartender.  Yes, those things all contribute to making it easier to do the wrong thing, but for a nation that prides itself on individual responsibility, blaming foreclosures on lenders is quite a cop-out.  Our credit crisis has a lot to do with the fact that most Americans are very comfortable buying things they can’t afford with money they don’t have.  We wouldn’t be in this mess if people at every level of society were living within their means.  We might have eventually been screwed by over-leveraged banks and rampant speculation anyway, but the current mess we’re in… it’s not Wall Street that got us here, at this moment in time.  It’s the millions of people out there who bought houses they couldn’t pay for.  Until we can own up, as a society, to the fact that WE screwed up, and stop pinning the blame on everyone else, we’re just doomed to repeat the same lessons.  We might be the most prosperous nation on Earth, at this moment, but it’s all been bought with borrowed money, and that money DOES eventually have to be paid back, one way or the other.  (Edited to add – just read an article on CNN, a partial interview with Fareed Zakaria, who makes basically the same point.  Most people consider Fareed a pretty smart guy.  Check out the article here.)

• You can support the troops without supporting the war.  I’m offended by the notion that wanting to bring our men and women in uniform home is somehow doing a disservice to them, while asking them to do 3 or 4 back-to-back tours of duty is supporting them.  I’m proud of our armed forces, and they are honorable people doing heroic things.  Which is why I’d rather have them back here, where they’re not getting shot at.  Most people who oppose the war in Iraq feel the same way.  They’re good men and women, and they shouldn’t be fighting a war that shouldn’t have been started anyway.  The decision to send them there wasn’t made by the troops on the ground, therefore they don’t really bear the blame.  Honor them by bringing them home, not asking them to keep dying because we’re too proud to admit we’re wrong to have gone there to begin with.

• The “Iraq War” is not a war, it’s an occupation.  Wars end when you have defeated the enemy’s military and toppled their government, or else agreed to stop fighting.  Wars have to be authorized by Congress, and this one wasn’t.  This was an executive branch-led invasion of a soverign nation which, as it turns out, posessed no threat to us whatsoever.  Our troops in Iraq are a police force, overseeing the installment of a US-sanctioned government.  Continuing to talk about it like it’s a war is a dangerous mischaracterization of the reality of the situation.  “War” implies immediate and present danger to our survival.  Iraq presents no such threats, despite what apologists say about its implications for the war on terror (not a war, either).  Viewing it through the distorted prism of a “war” scares people into supporting things that they wouldn’t support during peacetime.  We need to stop calling it a war, because it’s not, and it never was.

• Finally, and this is unrelated to the election-year arguments we’ve heard this year, but I’ll say it anyway – Ike was right.  If there’s one thing that concerns me about the US of A at this moment, it’s not national security, and it’s not the economy.  It’s the military-industrial complex.  Nearly half – HALF! – of our tax dollars goes to the military.  That’s about 1.5 TRILLION dollars in 2009.  Our paranoid obsession with perfect national security, stoked by neverending doom and gloom from the White House, and reinforced by an entrenched bureaucracy that is built to grow indefinitely, has resulted in a situation where we spend as much on national security than the next 15 highest spenders… COMBINED!  And for all of that, our oil supply is in more peril than anytime in the last 30 years, and no one can say with any certainty that we’re any more safe than we have been since the end of the Cold War.  We’re spending for the sake of spending, borrowing nearly a trillion dollars next year to do it, and it WILL bankrupt our nation.  My kids will be paying the bill, but I’m reasonably certain that they won’t be any safer for it.  They will, however, be worse off for the money we’re NOT spending on education, healthcare, and infrastructure.  I can only imagine how much better off our country would be with even a fraction of that money spent on building things instead of blowing them up.  We are a warlike nation, and we endlessly glorify combat and violence.  We talk endlessly and self-righteously about a “culture of life,” while spending obscene sums of money sending our sons and daughters to kill and die.  Anyone who sees fault in that situation is tarred and feathered as unpatriotic.  If there’s any reason that our country is morally bankrupt, it has nothing to do with whether we let gays get married or whether you can say “shit” on TV – it has EVERYTHING to do with our obsession with war, and our constant glorification of death and violence.

Edited to add: On second though, I’ve disabled comments on this post… I have mixed feeling about combining politics and business, and since this is a quasi-related arm of the TRA family of sites, I don’t want this turning into a shitstorm. I should have known better. I’m keeping the videos up because I’m still entertained/fascinated/disgusted by the whole thing. I wish I had the balls to just stand up for what I believed in, and for what I think is important in this country, and indeed I think that a little more indignity over the current state of things could do us all some good. But I’m toeing a fine line, and probably should have never gone there anyway. My job is to make actions. Other people get paid plenty to make fun of Sarah Palin. So I’ll keep my scathing comments to myself, and just let the “evidence” speak for itself. Mucho love and respect… even though I continually find myself scratching my head when I look around me sometimes. Peace. -db

What follows is the (R-rated) letter I just sent via the feedback form on their website, expressing my, ahem, discontent.  If you are offended by profanity, please just skip reading this next part.  If not, and you’re among the (very few) people who feel the same way… perhaps a similarly worded letter to the powers that be will make you feel better too?

Just wanted to let you know that I think replacing Fungus with AC/DC is a big, steaming load of horse shit, and the pinheaded, cheap-suit-wearing, limp-dick executive who came up with the idea will be cursed with a decade of horrible diarrhea if there’s any God in this universe (and by the way, God just killed a million kittens as punishment for you knuckle-dragging whorebags taking his favorite station off the air).  You guys have just proved to the nation that you don’t know the difference between the hand gesture for “heavy metal” and the sign-language for “love”, and as soon as baseball season is over and the Cubs have won the series, I’m canceling my service, and maybe even burning the radio and mailing the smoldering remains to your think-tank driven shithole of a headquarters.  I can listen to AC/DC on the radio for free, in any radio market in the free world, every 10 minutes, like clockwork.  So take your aging rocker corporate kissass deal and shove it up your collective hemorrhoidal assholes.  You’ve really pissed me off, I’m done with you all, fuckoff and goodbye.

I don’t usually write emails expressing my discontent, so I guess this is what years and years of keeping my mouth shut has done to me… so learn from my experience – vent at regular intervals so you don’t end up blowing up like a steam kettle!