During my University years, I happened to live in the same suite as the President of the Jewish Society. He was a rather handsome Orthodox Jew who wore a yamulke and had a different method of dress and use of electronics. Fascinated with a religion I never had been exposed to where I was from on the liberal West Coast, we would spend hours during the week where I would ask him questions about his religion, and he would take time to explain, in a very philosophical manner how he viewed his heritage. He told me that he considered himself an atheist, but that Judaism was about tradition and honouring that tradition. On some days, he wasn't allowed to use electronics, or shave with a razor. Other times, he was fasting, or had celebrations with certain sorts of food, while other kinds of meat weren't allowed.
My best friend at this time was also Jewish, a Boston educated comedy writer, and we would spend most of our time labouring over editing of the shows at our university TV station. Over the years, outside of California, I had made many friends of the Jewish faith, most of them reformed, others who returned to their Orthodox faith, and several who were Israeli citizens: One a politically active man with strong opinions, and another, a female friend who was a model and wanted me to visit her in Tel Aviv.
I can say with certainty that they have shaped my perception of Judaism today, and that I have been honoured to have to gotten to know them and that they are still a part of my life. What bonded us together was not religion, but friendship.
What is troubling however, is the current problem that our government has developed in our foreign relations with Israel over the years. President Reagan had been justified in supporting the UN Security Council resolutiondemanding that Israel pay reparations to Saddam Hussein. Then President Clinton resumed the peace talks between Israel and Palestine, and in 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said during the Oslo Accord, "We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears ... enough!”
Unfortunately, the following year, he was assassinated by his own government, what we thought was a faction of the Israeli government, but what we know today as the work of the Israeli Mossad, and the slaughter and genocide of the Palestinian people continued, halting the peace talks. Benjamin Netanyahu became the new Israeli Prime Minister, and he had a very different philosophy from the honourable man who preceded him. Then began the Bush Administration years, when our government depended on the Israeli Mossad for joint intelligence gathering missions. During this time, the Mossad ingratiated itself into our own government, and they fed us with planted information, often to detract us and work to their benefit. We had started to depend on them too blindly, and we did not see what was coming. What culminated in these series of plans would become known as 9/11 and the Iraq War.
It would take us a decade or so to realise that the people who we thought were our allies, the Mossad, were really our Et tu, Brutus.
We discovered that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, but the Israeli government were vengeful in publicly wanting to execute a leader, President Saddam Hussein, for having made them pay in a UN Security Council resolution during the Reagan Era. The fact of the matter was that we had executed an innocent man, a man who we had supported during the Reagan years.
The Mossad, we believed, were our counter-terrorist group, but which we later discovered were indeed the terrorist groups behind all attacks against the United States, and the attack which took us by surprise: 9/11.
“Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. … I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent. In other words, we went off course.”
The War in Iraq should've never happened. We should've never executed an innocent leader, a leader who had been our ally.
As these facts come into focus before us, more than a decade later, President Obama has rightly chosen to ignore the pleas of Prime Minister Netanyahu on his Iran resolution. However, their response was once again of violence, by killing our US ambassador in Libya on the very anniversary of 9/11, sending us a powerful message of their intelligence gathering missions; integrated into the terrorist cells of every group around the globe, we can't escape from the growing threat of the Mossad. So how do we deal with the Israel problem? What solutions are there to stop the single largest terrorist organisation in the world? It wasn't Al-queda who we had been looking for all along, but the one right next to us, the Mossad.
We, as a nation, the United States had blood on our hands.
"All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."- John Dalberg-Acton, British historian, 1887
In 2008, there were no other man who was able to capture our hearts and minds so readily than Senator Barack Obama. The power of his words, and the power of his voice created a blueprint in our minds of the inevitable path that we would be on.
Barack was, and still is, an idealist. He is one of us, yet he has never been the least bit ordinary. His extraordinary circumstances made him into the visionary leader he is today. But there is a danger when we deify politicians into Gods. When we worship politicians, we let leave their power unchecked, and when we leave their power unchecked, that power inevitably corrupts.
We live in an era of Democracy, but we don't truly live in a Democracy. We live in the illusion of a Democracy. We live in an era of Neo-Corportivism. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote that there was a necessity of "a Separation between Church and State," which would later become part of our Constitution. The Church then had influential lobbying powers; they are our contemporary equivalent (not to religious institutions, ironically) but to University institutions and Corporate lobbyists on Capitol Hill.
"The Church" today represents a compendium of our financial institutions, our health insurance companies, our oil industries, the ones who pay off our Senators and our Representatives and our "civil servants" on Capitol Hill who make decisions about legislation by buying the candidate that we vote for. We do not live in a true Democracy, not the one envisioned by our Founding Fathers, and not even the representative Democracy envisioned by Plato; but today, our Democracy is represented by lobbyists on Capitol Hill, and our Democracy is rapidly becoming a Totalitarian State.
The lobbyists on Capitol Hill assume people are stupid; that people buy into this Coke vs. Pepsi debate; that the two candidates they have chosen for us will be about the Rich vs. the Poor. The Rich vs. the Poor was the Marxist ideology to create change, the Capitalist Rich Pig vs. The Poor Factory worker that lead to communism and the eradication of the Civil Rights of the individual altogether; it was also integral to Nazi-Germany's propaganda to place blame on rich Jews for struggling working class Germans before WWII.
Our lobbyists on Capitol Hill know how to utilise this argument, because it has been done before. When the argument is Rich vs. Poor, people become riled up. They take sides. They start to demonize the other side. They start not to see things objectively anymore. The issue of class is a sensitive one, and most people will blindly follow a leader that portrays the class they are in.
However, in politics, it is never about the Rich vs. the Poor. It is always about competing corporate interests. It used to be The Church had control of the monetary power in England before we decided to separate from the Church, and England to form the United States of America.
The Tea Party had been integral to that movement and they were hated then. They were a group of crazy, radical people who refused to pay their taxes and released teas sent from England into the sea. America decided to adopt coffee instead decades later.
King's College, kicked out a student who was a member of that Tea Party, Alexander Hamilton, who would become our first Secretary of State. After America won our Independence against England, King's College changed its name to Columbia University (President Obama's alma mater) and eventually, they erected a statue of him in front of a building named after him: Hamilton Hall. However, Alexander Hamilton never graduated from Columbia. He was only there during the change, when he had been expelled for being part of the Tea Party and an open critic of the British Parliament.
The Tea Party, the contemporary version, is still hated today. They represent something radical, those crazy people who believe government power and taxation should be limited. But should we dismiss them so easily just because popular media tells us so? After all, our Founding Fathers were too, part of that original Tea Party, and all the ideals we have today in the Constitution is due to their support and influence.
Had America lost the War, all of our Founding members who signed the Declaration of Independence would've been hung, and killed by members of the British parliament, but that didn't happen. Our Founding Fathers were against the majority tyranny in America, who were pro-British government and taxation, but they still prevailed.
Let's skip to our present timeline, not 1776, but to 2012.
We have, for the first time in history, two extraordinary people as Presidential candidates. Barack moves our hearts and minds, but Mitt Romney is the one with the plan. They really both represent the same party. President Obama, respectfully speaking, has always been centrist, but made himself fit into the Democratic Party mould. He has always stood center to the left and the right. Similarly, Mitt Romney always had libertarian roots but made himself fit into the official Republican Party platform.
The lobbyist media wants you to think this Presidential race is about the Rich vs. the Poor, but it's really about competing corporate interests. Democratic Party run JP Morgan makes $500 million annually from the food stamp progamme, a programme designed to make people think it supports the poor, when really, it brings profits to certain banking institutions. And how about the Democratic Party's own finance manager, Jon Corzine who stole 1.2 billion from average Americans and says, he "doesn't know where the money went?"
It is clear that the media never portrays these Rich vs. Poor scenarios accurately because most of the time, the Democratic Party is stealing from the poor while profiting big banks, like JP Morgan.
And who supports the Democratic Party aside from those Hollywood celebrities who are part of that 1%?
It is ironic that the Presidential candidate in 2012, who actually wants to create that Change, who is for the Average American citizen, would be portrayed by the media as being part of the corporate institution that we all hate. Through sound bites, re-mixed speeches, and apt cartoons, we will never know who Mitt Romney really is.
We won't remember that he gave 30% of his income to charity. We won't remember that he donated 1 million to the Utah Olympics. We don't remember that he didn't accept his pay as MA governor, something politicians have never done before, because he didn't want to add to the state deficit. We forget all of Mitt Romney's accomplishments and instead we just believe the slander campaign against him, paid for by the 1%. So, here we are at an impasse. Is it more important to have a Presidential candidate who is publically utilising celebrities to promote his liberal social positions in lieu of forgoing our civil liberties?
Or is it more important to have a Presidential candidate we hate for having been born rich, who actually wants to strip government of its power over businesses and wants that mom-and-pop store to be able to compete with large corporations?
Perhaps if we strip away the exterior, there is actually little ideological difference between the two candidates; however during election time rhetoric, one side demonizes the other and the exaggeration of its argument ad hominem takes place over the actual issues that affect society on a larger scale. The things politicians don't talk about are because those answers often make people uncomfortable. Anytime we blindly follow a politician and idolise him, we are in danger of becoming like those very people who give away our civil liberties because we never fought for them.
In a perfectly gender neutral society, being a man or a woman would have no effect on performance in the work place, but often it does.
Women, or the kind of women that the female-dominated HR department likes to choose for positions in corporations have a certain personality type. First of all, they have impressive résumés. They are also, most likely, unassuming, quiet, and have brilliant academic achievements. However, these are the types of women who like to keep the peace, who often, as Sheryl Sandberg says in her TED presentation, stand to the side and never sit at the table along with their male peers:
The problem with women who do well academically is that they learn to copy what the professor says and to never question him nor her. This translates into a good GPA and according to HR, good candidates for the corporate world. In theory, this may be true, but in practice, women who are quiet, or bookish, who never question authority, and have little social skills outside of academic performance tend not to do well in the workplace, yet these are the same women who are chosen to work for corporations.
Sheryl Sandberg is, of course, an exception. She is openly opinionated, has high emotional intelligence along with possessing academic achievements, and probably feels comfortable joking around with the boys, and could be a bit roguish at times.
Men, however, are held by a different standard. They are iconoclasts. They question, they take leaps in logic and strategy, they try things without making sure everyone is in complete consensus. This aspect works well for them in the corporate ladder because that is the personality type that the corporate world attracts, but not in women. Women need to be submissive and have multiple Ivy League Degrees, according to female HR managers. However, men can be college dropouts and simply be innovative.
The problem is female HR managers don't like women who break the rules, who are innovative, who question instead of copying what the professor says. However, female HR managers prefer male candidates who do the same, and isn't that pure sexism at its best?...when HR is ruled by the female criterion of submissiveness and academic achievement, which they probably idealise and probably never had themselves?
But let's move onto the actual workplace.
All the jobs I got was when there were no female HR managers to review my résumé. I jumped around a lot, mainly in start-ups that lost funding, I changed careers twice in my twenties, and I decided that I would pursue my passions instead of following the money trail. I travelled abroad to learn about different cultures and becoming fluent in different languages, often in fields that had nothing to do with my current vocation. It would've been easy for me to have been a corporate lawyer, but I chose the more difficult path, to be self-educated, and I was the type of candidate female HR managers hated:
"She has an Ivy league degree, and a Masters, but not for the job that is required, and she switches jobs a lot and never stays in jobs for more than a year, is opinionated and kind of arrogant."
However, these same qualities would be considered assets if I had been a male with the same qualifications:
"He has an Ivy league degree, and a Masters in a different discipline which gives him a more well-rounded view of the job that is required, and he switched jobs due to ineffectual funding, but has coped well to changing demographics and spends 24/7 working on several different projects. He's passionate, confident, ambitious and driven."
What the corporate world doesn't like to admit in public media is that women are the most prejudiced against other women. Women hold each other back, not men.
So let's move onto sexual harrassment.
As a beautiful woman, one has advantages and disadvantages. I've never considered myself beautiful nor attractive, and I've always considered myself average looking, but I have been asked out by a number of different men, and because I understand human interaction, I know how to diffuse tension and to politely turn down men I am not interested in. If I could file a lawsuit for every man who asked me out to lunch, dinner, coffee or otherwise tried to convince me to date them, I'm certain I would be a billionaire. But I did a lot of asking myself. When my S.O. or boyfriend was out of town, I would often hang out with my male friends or colleagues, and we would talk about all the things right and wrong with our company. This would be aptly named: Happy Hour.
When I first worked for a financial firm with mainly male colleagues, the director asked me specifically if that would bother me, and I said, Hell no! Truth was, working with men I found easier than with women because men weren't catty nor gossipy. They only cared about our performance. I had been the only female in the company but that didn't bother me because we would laugh and joke and drink beer together.
There had been an instance in my career where I had been fired because my boss had been interested in dating me, and was disappointed that I had a boyfriend. I only stayed 3 months at that particular company, but I had to admit, he and I didn't have a good working chemistry. People tended to work with people they liked. I didn't like him. He didn't like me. He annoyed me to no end with his loud, obnoxious, booming phone voice, and tended to be competitive with me in areas where I had been far superior. He probably felt I was laughing behind his back, which I was. After all, he was an IT guy who couldn't connect his laptop to the printer. After 3 months, he fired me, and I said, thanks for the experience and left. There were bigger fish to fry. I did not feel bitter over the fact that he had a crush on me and was competitive with me. I thought he was dumb and incompetent. I said, Goodbye. Sometimes we still see each other at work functions and we are still friendly with each other. He's fun to talk to at parties, but I wouldn't work for him again or with him ever again. He's simply incompetent in my mind and had that personality I detested working for: a dog-eat-dog mentality. If I had been his boss, I would've fired him too, simply for having an annoying voice. Is that gender discrimination? Or it is that people tend to want to work with each other because they like each other, regardless of gender?
Later, I found out from colleagues that he told people he fired me because I was inexperienced. Truth was, I was younger than him but far more accomplished and competent than he had been. He fired me because I was too competent. I outshined him, and that was a big No-No in the corporate world. Never outshine the master. It took me a few years to understand this concept. I always thought the world was logical and efficient. It appeared that the world was illogical and inefficient and that they preferred people who had average abilities but just got along with different types of people, and liked to drink and party, especially if you had a boss with the same mentality.
I've found women in the corporate world also don't like to consider their colleagues their "friends" whereas male colleagues think of their co-workers as "my closest friends who have my back." This is a fundamental psychological difference between men and women in the workplace. Women like to go home and avoid social work functions because their friends are often, their closest childhood friends. Men look forward to social work functions because they are friends with the people they work with and like to relax with people they are in contant contact with. So it isn't surprising then, that men who ask for raises often get them; women never ask and they never socialise with their co-workers because they separate work from their personal lives. Men never do; work friends and childhood friends are still friends whereas women make a distinction between the two.
Last week, I read about one of my favourite authors, Randy Komisar being part of a lawsuit of alleged sexual harrassment at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers where he is a senior partner by former Kleiner Perkins junior investment venture capitalist Ellen Pao.
First of all, Ellen Pao claims that it was sexual harrassment that Randy Komisar gave her a book by Leonard Cohen "The Book of Longing" as a present and asked her out to dinner. I decided to check out this book for myself.
Ellen Pao alleges in her lawsuit that this book was sexual in nature, but when I read this book, I found that incredulous. I personally couldn't find any sexual material. In fact, one had to be completely delusional to think this book had explicit, sexual content. Rather, the book was a beautiful study of soul-searching through the perspective of Zen Buddhism and the healing power of music. If a senior colleague knew I was going through a hard time at the company and was unhappy in many aspects, and he or she presented this book to me, I would've been thankful at the thoughtful gesture.
Since when is giving a co-worker a book a sign of sexual harrassment? I always thought sexual harrassment entailed some sort of inappropriate touching and verbal abuse. Ellen Pao also alleges that Mr. Komisar asked her out to dinner. Well, a lot of people ask friends and colleagues out to dinner, regardless of gender. I sometimes ask my Silicon Valley friends and colleagues a catch up over dinner. Was this unusual and inappropriate? It seemed to me that because Randy Komisar was a mentor to many people, and inspirational through his unique perspectives on corporations infused with Eastern philosophies that his good will was being turned to use against him by an opportunist.
Here is a guy trying to help a colleague from a tense situation which is affecting the morale of the entire company and she accuses him of sexual harrassment as well, for simply being nice.
Ellen Pao, as academically accomplished as she may be, could be that stereotype of that awkward teenager when it came to simple human interaction. A beautiful woman will tell you that when a man shows romantic interest in her, and she wasn't interested, that she smiles and dismisses him. However, another woman who isn't used to the attention might consider it sexual harrassment and start blowing things out of proportion. It is not my intention to dismiss Ellen Pao's accusations, but however, because I too, am a woman, I have to assess her allegations from my own point of view.
We can never know what happened in her intimate relations with Mr. Ajit Nazre, one of the Kleiner Perkins junior members, but it was certain that their relationship was a mutual one that left hurt feelings on both sides. In her lawsuit, she also alleges that she "succumbed" to having sex with him. "Succumbed" sounds to me sort of "erotic and exciting." Does she mean that, or does she mean she had been raped and forced to have sex with him beyond her will? Because "succumbing" to sex is sexy, being raped, however, was criminal.
After an independent investigation, Ajit Nazre, who bore the brunt of Ellen Pao's accusations, might've been found to be a kind of Type A personality douchebag who could've been at times, vindictive or competitive and might've had a thing against women who didn't want to date him. However we do not know the full story, or even why a senior partner suggested that the two co-workers marry. It appeared everyone at the company was trying to assuage the broken lovers' relationship, however, but because Ajit had probably been quietly asked to leave, no one can know for sure exactly what happened, aside from the ensuing drama of two former lovers who had ended their relationship in a messy way, infecting the morale of the company.
It could've been that Ajit Nazre was asked to leave due to all the negative press it was attracting for Kleiner Perkins, marring its reputation. But I have to assess the likelihood that Ellen Pao's allegations of sexual harrassment against Randy Komisar were most likely grudge based, perhaps because he had been chosen as a board member for one of the companies she worked on due to his extraordinary interpersonal skills and likability. Not to mention, he tried to help her, but she had a way of turning everyone against her, thanks to the influence of her litigious husband, the infamous Buddy Fletcher, who had his own history of collecting on discrimination. But this year, the Ellen Pao-Buddy Fletcher duo had more incentive to do so since the court ordered liquidation of his hedge fund because it was ruled as being insolvent, or rather bankrupt.
I read back to my copy of Randy Komisar's The Monk and the Riddle and remember this section on the deferred life plan:
Perhaps there are those women who choose not to do what they really want in life. Perhaps there were those women who chose the path of security and safety, and think that they will be financially rewarded later. Perhaps life to them was about getting straight A's, and doing everything by the textbook of what they were supposed to do as told to them by other people. I certainly know that as a woman, I have never followed the straight and narrow path. I knew I was never perfect, and somewhere along the way, I learned to not hide my flaws but to take pleasure in them.
I think though, that only identifying with one's gender could be flawed thinking in itself. Wouldn't it be better to identify ourselves as human beings, and finding common ground instead of looking for perceived slights and injustices because of who we are? I realise though that as a society, we will never have a genderless society, but I didn't mind. I liked being a woman.
"Never trust a beautiful woman." -Anonymous Investment Banking Managing Director
When Ayn Rand first published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, she was keenly aware of the impact it would have on future generations. Her ideas permeated into the catalogue of experience, and in her mind, the protagonist of her epic novel, the heroine, Dagny Taggert would be a Vice-President.
Fifty-five years later, we are still reconciling this notion. The woman is delegated to the position of the VP in corporations and in politics. Dagny Taggert, despite being the VP, actually runs the company Taggert International and obsessed with building America's railroads and reinventing them. However, instead of "railroad," let's carefully replace that with the "internet." The internet is a kind of railroad that traverses through all pinpointed locations on an atlas. And instead of "Taggert International," let's call it "Google."
And instead of Dagny Taggert, let's call her Marissa Mayer.
Marissa Mayer announced that she would leave her VP position at Google to become the CEO of Yahoo on July 16, 2012. However, two weeks before the public announcement, the Yahoo stock showed unusual activity two weeks before on June 26:
Perhaps these turn of events caused Larry Page to mysteriously lose his voice. Most commentators on Wall Street were more interested in her $100 million pay package than how her role will affect Yahoo, a once iconic company that was slowly fading into obscurity. Journalists who have been taken in with Mayer's physical attractiveness were more interested in her clothes, hairstyle and the fact that she was pregnant rather than what her new role at Yahoo would entail. Surely, the ruling King of Google had been aware of this developing information. Would Google let one of their own, jump rank into a competing company? In the epic novel, Dagny, like Marissa, leaves Taggart International to become the head of her own company. But she does so for a specific purpose: to avoid government control of her former company. It is no secret that Google has been plagued by US anti-trust laws, and in the last year set aside $500 million to settle in a US investigation of its practices.
The heroine in the Rand novel, Dagny, does not want government control over her company, so she comes up with an idea to affront another company to avoid its rigid laws, and she calls this company: John Galt, which becomes in effect, an adjunct to the original company.
So the question is: now that Marissa is the CEO of Yahoo, will Yahoo be an adjunct of Google? Can both Google and Yahoo avoid government probe of their companies if they remain separated, but as one of "the original Google 20," Marissa is said to be forever part of the Google family?
This idea of placing executives within different organisations for collective cohesion is something that happens quite often in politics. How many times does the United States replace a nation's leader with one of our Ivy League educated leaders who is amenable to our foreign policy?
What is more intriguing however, is that all the ideals of Atlas Shrugged come clearly in focus today;
We are finally living in the era that Rand had written about:
Atlas Shrugged is set in an alternative dystopian United States at an unspecified time, in which the United States has a "National Legislature" instead of Congress and a "Head of State" instead of President. (source: Wikipedia)
What does it mean for our tech companies however? Do we want more or less government intervention? The online railroad that is our internet is rapidly changing. Will our brightest and most innovative creators become invisible to our society due to government regulation? Will our discoveries and artifacts of our time only be known when all those secret files are finally released to the public 100 years into the future? And what exactly goes on in the Google X-labs?
"You are unprepared to be on your own. Your deductive powers are a gift from God or chance or [specialized] sperm or whatever or whoever wrote your life script; a gift not earned. You do not know what I know because you have not earned those powers. You’re careless with those powers; you flaunt them and you throw them around like a brat with his trust fund you haven’t had to climb up all the greasy little rungs. You haven’t been bored blind at the fundraisers, you haven’t done the time in that first marriage to the girl with the right father; you think you can leap over all in a single bound; you haven’t had to bribe or charm or threaten your way to a seat at that table. You don’t know how to assess your competition because you haven’t competed. Don’t make me your competition. "
-Robert DeNiro's character advice to the newbie trader on how to succeed on Wall Street and in the corporate world in Limitless(2011)
Oh yes, not only do men cheat, bribe, charm and threaten their way into success, they also marry into wealth, using their wives with powerful fathers to position them in the right place, so they can be what they always wanted to be; those ambitious social climbers who are finally listed in the Forbes publication as the richest Americans in the country.
However, an ambitious woman? She's pure evil. Here is a recent excerpt from a Forbes article entitled Views From an Alpha Male that describes what he views as a problem with some ambitious women in his field. The writer of the articles writes:
“I find it unsettling. A woman who promotes herself in this way may be masking incompetence or inexperience.”
Women who are smart, ambitious and competent in the corporate world are viewed by such men as "incompetent and inexperienced" or simply "flirtatious". Who knows what flirtatious means here? A smile? Being friendly? Grabbing your penis? The author writes:
“And the moment they realize you are not the person who can help them advance, you can feel their attention drift off immediately.”
One had to wonder here, if the interviewee was just looking for a date or at a work networking event? Was this man making a commentary about women in the workplace- namely in his company, or was he talking about random wannabe models he met on the street, and they turned their attention away from him when they realised he wasn't a modeling agent? Which field did this man work in? Fashion? Porn? Who knows what the context of what "some women" he is referring to here; but the lesson seems clear, men are allowed to be "boys". They can cheat, threaten, buy that board seat, and marry his first wife just because she was well-connected, and he will never be told:
"Hey dude, you're just an incompetent douchebag!"
But God forbid, a woman with social skills, who is good at connecting people, and who loves her career and is damned good at it, is somehow, undeserved, because she might be pretty, and pretty women are always evil; yes, evil women are flirtatious, even if they are just being friendly. A smile is the sign of an evil, flirtatious woman! Damn those extraverted, socially adept women! They are evil!
On a serious note though, there is something to be said about authenticity. If you're an A-lister in Hollywood, most likely you'll never like going to a networking event because of all the sycophants in the room; similarly if you're a Venture Capitalist, you don't want to hear another pitch from someone you just met; likewise, if you're a Managing Director at one of Wall Street's largest firms, you don't want some asshole trying to sell you his latest algo. According to several friends of mine from Los Angeles who work in the film industry: You learn real quick [sic] who are the biters and the barkers. Biters are the ones who do; barkers are the ones who talk incessantly about the doing, but never do so and instead spend 10 years or so having lunch with everyone, never creating a product, or a film or executing an idea. There are a lot of barkers in LA, and everywhere else in the world. What else is new?
But, if a woman is a biter, obviously she is "masking incompetence" is "flirtatious" and a "social climber". Truth is, women are intimidating to most men. Hell, women even hate most other women. But let's face it, if a woman succeeds on Wall Street and in the corporate world, it is because she is fucking good at what she does. She didn't sleep her way to the top, she didn't marry into the right family, she didn't cheat, nor bribe, nor threaten to get that board seat. She did it because she knew the right people. She most likely had a circle of advisors. She had friends in high places. She didn't fucking prostitute herself nor sleep with the board director to get her job; she didn't marry some guy because his family owned half of California or New Jersey; she did it through her sheer ambition, her social skills, and through the support of her network of friends and family. And she got there because she was fucking competent.
For me, not attending university was never an option. I was of that generation after the 70s, 80s and 90s when women finally had the right to attend universities and it was expected that they had careers. My own alma mater only became co-ed in 1987. I came from a family of academics. My grandfather attended the top university in Tokyo, Japan and was a poet. My father himself had written travelogues in his youth, when he had been rated first in his class at Seoul National University, where only the top 1% of academic achievers were allowed to attend and then consequently ended up dropping out to join the air force. On my father's side of the family, everyone was an academic or a Professor; we all went to Ivy League universities, top public universities, went to business schools, graduated at the top our class at MIT, Princeton and UC Berkeley.
I, myself was a never really an overachiever. I liked to enjoy life, to relax, to have fun. For me, ambition was about the bigger, long term picture; not about merits on a Diploma or a résumé. Despite having graduated from Columbia University, I was one of those students who always did well without ever having to study very hard. I had a gift for memorisation and tutors always loved it when I repeated their own thoughts and opinions into all my bluebook tests and essays. Multiple tests, to me were a mathematical equation of elimination, and essay tests were about a predictable structure outlining popular opinions.
In my sophomore year, I recall one of the most brillant students in my philosophy courses, who happened to be an Orthodox Jew and wore yamulkes to class every week; that the paper he'd written full of criticism about contemporary philosophy and asking relevant questions that seemed to question the status quo, only received a C+, while my mediocre repetition of old ideas received an A. That was the year when I realised that grades did not factor into what we consider "education." Education, was rather a process of self-enlightenment- through investigation and questioning of one's source of knowledge- and the various authorities who hold this judgement. Universities provide an environment into this Socratic questioning of old vs. new, in ideal, but in reality, I found instead that it only created a population of students who were only interested in attaining good marks, re-wording a repetition of old ideas, and simply not caring about the material- but more motivated by the auspices of attaining a 6-figure job after graduation.
What the Ivy Leagues present today- as much as I, myself have benefitted from them, is that they are a kind of social club. A country club membership to be able to socialise with the people who had the connexion to the people to perhaps bring you into the world of aristocracy or to make your ideas a reality.
My father never once told me that he couldn't afford to send me to the best universities. It was expected that I would attend. Money was something I never had to worry about when I was in high school. In his mind, it was his patriarchal duty to send me to the best universities in the United States, even if he had to work holidays and weekends to fund my education; in my father's mind, it was his duty to do so. I had wondered though about the students who go into massive debt to fund their education, who didn't have a father like mine, by taking out loans and credit cards with the increasing cost of American education; and I wondered if perhaps Mark Cuban had been right in saying that the next big bubble is the institution of American education?
The figures looked dire- the tuition at a lowly rated private university such as Loyola University in Los Angeles, CA was the same as the tuition at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, the top rated university in the United States. It was becoming clear that universities in the States were really just a business and a social club. In comparison, my mates in England were going to Oxford and Cambridge for barely nothing and most of my friends in Switzerland and France went to university for free.
Is education a privilege? My answer would be yes without a doubt. But the more complex question is, is education only for the wealthy? And in the United States, that is apparently so in the current era. When my cousin attended UC Berkeley in the late 80s, she paid a total of $10K to receive her degree, compare that to the current rate of $150K for the average student.
I love my father, and certainly I was grateful for my education- but I think if I had to do it all over again- I would've travelled abroad- exploring different countries, learning different languages, and getting work experience in different fields instead of slaving away for four years writing A papers. Then again, that is precisely what my father had chosen to do, and I guess I was my father's daughter after all.
With the price of the education bubble near asphixiation, the advent of online schools, with Stanford and MIT testing out free online curricula, I could see that Mark Cuban's vision was finding its way in contemporary American society. In the future, education will be separate from the business of education, because if we thought about it, at the core, education was really about finding a community to fuel one's own interests, through one's own intellectual curiosity without having to be given a grade about what one had learned. Learning did not necessarily have a quantification. Grades and tests were only a basis of assimilation after all.
YouTube, the first start-up to sell for a over a billion dollars to Google, and the subject of numerous copyright lawsuits, is the amalgamation of nostalgic video (eg, Super8 home videos from the 50s-60s) and a library of Congress that one could access for looking up random videos and commercials from a previous era that would otherwise never be seen by the internet generation.
YouTube can also take down people's careers. It has become a political vehicle to take down competitors. Politicians caught on camera for making offhand remarks often lose their candidacy for making politically incorrect remarks. Hidden videos can elicit rage in the public eye, and often lead to dismissal. YouTube is our BigBrother. We must be careful to edit what we say- even when amongst our friends, because what we say can be taken out of context and used against us in a court of law.
This is what happened to the fashion designer John Galliano.
John Galliano is likely to be the most talented designer of the 21st century. His attention to texture, fabrics, exquisite detail and his affinity towards femininity, masculinity, and homage to certain eras are unparalleled. John Galliano was often the reason why there had been a return to haute couture. He took no short cuts, he celebrated the male and female form especially in his ready-to-wear. Fashion editors loved him for a reason.
A cross-cultural product of different nations, the Gibraltor-born John Galliano was the son of a plumber whose parents immigrated to England. He was bullied as a teenager for being gay. Still, his mother loved him dearly and she sent him to the best public schools a working class family could afford. He was awarded best British designer two years in a row (and four years total in the current span of his career). He declared bankruptcy shortly after he put all his life savings into his first collection in 1990. Six years later, he became the head designer for Christian Dior, started his own label and was known around the world for his beautiful attention to detail. Surely his rise to the top had numerous obstacles in his path, but there he was, making beautiful designs, mocking his own style, being a character in his own play, a celebration of time, ethnicity, glamour, poverty, beauty, war, peace, rock and roll, theatricality, to film, to love, to eras gone by.
I remember when I saw my first John Galliano design. It was a wedding dress in the style of Audrey Hepburn's in Roman Holiday. I was flabbergasted. This would continue into 2007 and beyond with his Spring Haute Couture collection I found simply breathtaking. At a time when most designers took short-cuts, utilised cheap fabrics and appealed to consumerism, John Galliano's clothes were made to last and to remember what it was like to be passionate about something; to remember our collective histories, to value well-made, well-thought out designs instead of regressing to factory-made, badly stitched, cheap designs that may appeal to stock holders for short-term profit. John Galliano made designs for the long-term and he changed 21st century fashion. John Galliano is to fashion what Steve Jobs was to Apple.
When I first learned of John Galliano's faux pas of anti-semitic comments in the media- I was horrified. I imagined a terrible, abusive man ranting and raving, shouting out comments- however, when I actually saw the supposed anti-semitic video of him in a café, my mind was changed.
What this 10 second video seemed like to me was a John Galliano playing contrarian to a rude Italian couple sitting next to him in a café. Perhaps they had been making obnoxious commentary about him, perhaps they didn't recognise him as being the son of a plumber who went onto become a global fashion icon- the commentators of the video seemed like Italian assholes- making fun of him, asking him if he had blond hair and blue eyes?
John Galliano- never raising his voice, is pretending to be a character to disarm his detractors- quietly, and without intent- he says- "I love Hitler" in farcical display. His designs say otherwise in the span of his career. He loved the downtrodden, the societal misfits, he often made fun of the aristocracy, not in a mean way, but in a way for the fashion world to poke fun at themselves. He loved playing roles- and when I saw this video- I only saw a man defending himself against a couple mocking him. I saw in his eyes, the boy who had been bullied in his youth, who had chosen to play war with words instead of through violence. Perhaps he had chosen the wrong words, but John Galliano was definitely not anti-semitic.
This YouTube video- which was the subject of speculation amongst tabloid media, together with Natalie Portman's statement condemning him had lead to his dismissal at the House of Dior. The coverage in tabloid media gave me a different impression of the YouTube video. I expected a loud-mouthed ranting bigot, but when seeing the video with my own eyes, I only saw a bullied man being targeted by a couple who intended to humiliate him. Perhaps if the talented, Harvard educated Miss Natalie Portman saw the actual video instead of reading the reports about the video she would've said the same. Instead the two-time Academy award winning actress whose 2010 film Black Swan borrowed significantly from the 2009 film Ne Te Retourne Pas directed by Marina de Van, and the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film Persona, had quickly taken to criticising John Galliano without perhaps seeing the entirety of YouTube video, she would've understood that he was defending himself verbally from a couple who were attempting to humiliate him. The tabloid coverage of him intended to humiliate him, like the Italian couple who sat there next to him in the café attempting to egg him on in the most rancorous fashion.
I have this to say- if John Galliano once again begins his own label and if his company ever went public, I would be an avid investor in his IPO.
