Month: March 2003

Made a couple of additions to the blog, over to the left. I’ll add more links, plus more books, later on. Right now, Rey Mysterio, Jr. has a match on Smackdown…

(Of the Millennium Dome, Talk, Enron, and the culture of arrogance)

I’ve long been fascinated by failure. Not the run-of-the-mill, never-been, B-list sort of failure that Howard Stern used to trot out so masterfully on the glory days of his radio show. No, the failure I appreciate most is the can’t-miss, blue-chip variety, the one that has everything going for it, but still manages to miss the mark.

The most obvious of these failures is the Titanic, of course. Not the Leonardo Di Caprio version, which was quite the commercial success, but the luxury liner herself. Almost as highly touted as the “Dan vs. Dave” ad campaign (you remember: the decathlon rivalry manufactured by Reebok for the 1992 Olympics, in which one of the decathletes (Dan) actually failed to qualify for the Olympics), the unsinkable (in theory) Titanic came across an iceberg (in practice), and that was all she wrote.

As the media have come to dominate our lives, the expectations they generate makes failure all the sweeter (especially when it doesn’t involve massive loss of life).

Take the Millennium Dome in London. Its principals made such grandiose claims for the tourism it would attract that they failed to notice the Dome was a cement monstrosity located near the old gas-works. Meant to stand for a century, it closed down 18 months later.

Take Long Term Capital Management, the scientifically designed hedge fund that placed so many investments (read: bets) that it could not fail. Except that it did, requiring a Congressional bailout to keep the world economy from convulsing.

Take Talk magazine. Positioned as an unstoppable combination of magazine savvy (editrix Tina Brown) and movie-making bravado (Harvey Weinstein of Miramax) set to turn publishing on its ear, it turned out no one listened to what Talk was saying. The magazine shut down three years after its inception.

Take Matthew McConaughey. Before his first major movie (A Time to Kill) was ever released, Vanity Fair did a cover profile on him, explaining why he was going to be The Next Big Thing. The rest of the mainstream media was also on the bandwagon, offering up carefully placed tidbits about the guy’s social life, family history, and movie-making aspirations. But a funny thing happened: McConaughey didn’t happen. His career never really took off, the public never took a serious liking to him, and he never became the superstar that the media machine insisted he would become.

I could go on in my sour-grapes way about these can’t-miss failures (Kurt Andersen’s novel Turn of the Century; the #1 pick of Joe Smith in the 1995 NBA draft; almost the entirety of the dot.com boom; that by-the-numbers disaster that was Pearl Harbor, the Movie), but I suppose there’s a point here, about how arrogance precedes a fall. To me, the truly grand failures are the ones in which the possibility of failure is never even imagined.

For months now, we’ve all been witness to the blame game being played by every single entity connected to Enron. No matter how close any executive, accounting firm, lobbyist or politician was to the collapse of the energy-trading company, their fingers all point to someone else. Like Long Term Capital Management, Enron could not have gone wrong. After all, it had paid off our country’s legislators to relax regulatory rules and allow it to build a commodities trade in businesses that weren’t mature enough to support such a model.

Belief in the commidification of everything (or the culture of arrogance, depending on how you look at it) led company executives to create shady partnerships to hide company debt of more than $1 billion, likely with the complicity of its auditors. One executive cursed out an investment analyst in a teleconference for asking what turned out to be the right questions. Then the death-spiral started, as investments tanked, debtors welshed on payments, executives lied about debt while dumping overvalued shares, and the rank-and-file were barred from selling company stock from their retirement plans. Add it all up, and you have one of the grandest failures in the history of American business.

In our own industry, some are drawing parallels between Enron and ImClone, the biotech company that watched its stock collapse after the FDA refused to review its NDA for Erbitux, a colorectal cancer drug that, by anecdotal evidence, did wonders for patients. The facts are still out on the ImClone case, but the media has pounced on the president and CEO, who allegedly made quite a killing in company stock while sitting on information about the inadequacies in the Erbitux NDA. Since the main investor to get hammered is Bristol-Myers Squibb ($1 billion in stock purchase last fall, another $1 billion to come in milestone payments, if Erbitux gets back on track), the public outcry hasn’t been as severe. We’ll have to watch how it shakes out, to see if ImClone joins Mr. McConaughey, the Dome, Tina Brown, et alia on my special list.

As I mentioned earlier, I edit a pharmaceutical trade magazine by day. Every issue (9, plus a supplement) I write “From the Editor,” a page that’s at least ostensibly supposed to be about the pharma & biopharma industry and the contract services and outsourcing arena that we cover.

Since the book launched in 1999, I’ve gone pretty far afield in subjects for that page. Sometimes, I used the page as an excuse to let my liberal arts brain out, which I don’t get to do enough of on a regular basis. Early columns at least tangentially had something to do with the magazine: compare & contrast Gilgamesh and the Human Genome Project; use A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale to discuss the impossibility of getting the Top Companies issue 100% right; explain my editorial guidelines (no use of the phrase “win-win relationship”) by citing George Orwell’s “Politics & the English Language” essay.

At times, I went too far from my mission. Like the time I discussed how the Talking Heads’ induction into the rock & roll hall of fame was just another sign that I was aging faster than the general populace. That one caught the attention of the owner of my company, unfortunately.

At other times, I managed to flat-out nail a pertinent subject, with humor and concision. The best example of that, “On the Couch with Dr. Schadenfreude,” will go up next week.

And then the was 9.11. The magazine was in production week (which means massive deadline crunch) for its biggest issue of the year (October, when we go to the AAPS Annual Conference). Below, I’ve enclosed my editorials from October 2001, composed a few days after the attacks, and October 2002, when I took the anniversary day (9.11.02) off from work and wandered NYC with Ari Scott, a friend of mine. Go here to read her account of the day.

9.11.01
Never Forget

I have struggled for days to write this page. There are no words that can sum up the horror that has overtaken our lives after the deadly attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The most fitting comment I heard was on the day of the attack, when New York’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, was asked for an approximate body count. The mayor replied, “I don’t think we want to speculate about that–it will be more than any of us can bear.”

It is more than any of us can bear.

During the Civil War, dedicating a cemetery on the battlefield where one of the bloodiest events in American history took place, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. On the night of September 11th, I found myself reading”deeply reading”his words, as I tried to understand what it is to be an American. I enclose it here, because I hope some of you will do the same.

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

God bless America,

Gil Roth

9.11.02
I Love New York

It’s been a year since the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked by radical Islamist terrorists. The days following were a blur, each of us trying as best we could to cope with the practical matters of our lives, while history unfolded around us. At the time, we were finishing up the October 2001 issue of this magazine, and how we managed to focus on that task, I don’t know.

The events of that day will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Contract Pharma’s offices are 25 miles away from the WTC site, close enough to watch a plume of smoke hovering above Manhattan that day, close enough to see that haunting “towers of light” memorial in the evenings, far enough, perhaps, to feel like an outsider. A new world was born on that day, in violence and heroism, hatred and charity. Still in its infancy, it touches every aspect of our lives, challenging us to keep up with a new geopolitical mythology; challenging us to debate the worthiness of the Constitution in dangerous times; challenging us to do more; challenging us, ultimately, to see ourselves the way others see us.

Our industry has faced its own set of challenges after 9.11.01, and the ensuing biowarfare scare. The public (through the voices of Congress) demanded access to Cipro, and the Health and Human Services secretary threatened to remove Bayer’s patent protection as leverage to get the antibiotic at low prices. Several pharmaceutical manufacturers have been working around the clock to build supplies of smallpox vaccine. Others are filling atropine injectors for the military, to protect against nerve gas attacks. Recently, the government announced plans to inoculate the entire U.S. population against smallpox, within five days of a sign of an outbreak. A new world.

As the anniversary approached, my friends and co-workers pondered how to spend that day. Some felt that going to work, doing “business as usual” was a way to show that terrorism hadn’t changed our lives. Others took the day off, kept their kids home from school, and spent the day mourning. Some watched the “circle of life” ceremony and the naming of the dead on television. Some friends in Brooklyn wanted to gather on the Brooklyn Bridge at 8:53 a.m. and make a toast to the city. I chose to spend the day walking in NYC with a friend of mine and a camera. The accompanying photos are from that day.

My friend Aimee told me she wants to come down from her home in Massachusetts to see the WTC site sometime, but is afraid of feeling “like a tourist.” I didn’t go to the site until nine months after the attack, with my own set of excuses to keep me away.

By the time I went, the rubble was removed, and the pit was all that remained. The pit: absence in our lives; urban Grand Canyon; the paradox of an empty grave containing thousands of souls. The immensity of it daunted me, as did the claustrophobic intimacy of the buildings stretching skyward, right beside this uncharnel house, in which the dead are dust before their time.

I reflected on that first visit, and told her, “Your preconceptions don’t mean anything there. You might feel like a tourist on your way in, but once you get there, you’ll see how much bigger it is than you. That’s when you become something else: a pilgrim.” This is our Mecca, where we make our American hajj.

Spent the early afternoon at a big, outdoor outlet mall up in New York state, where I spent money I probably shouldn’t have (since I’m supposed to be salting everything away for a number of reasons), on a variety of things:

$20 on books (The September 11 Photo Project, The Muse Asylum, and Baby, I Don’t Care);
$35 on t-shirts, underwear and a three-quarter-sleeve shirt at Jockey;
$60 on a sportcoat at Claiborne for Men (so I’m a homo, alright?);
$25 on a hooded fleece overshirt at The North Face.

None of these purchases made me feel too guilty. The problem was at the end of the line, when I walked into the Hugo Boss outlet. Now, I told myself I was going in just to browse around, maybe gawk at the Russians and Japanese who were filling up the place, get some ideas for neat looks (because my current one probably isn’t that appealing).

After all, I couldn’t possibly buy clothing from a company whose founder was renowned for designing dress uniforms for the SS, and using slave labor to manufacture it, could I? Why, just a few days ago, walking through Garden State Plaza, I saw some suits in the window of the Hugo Boss store, and thought, “Nice look. If only it wasn’t named after a guy who made the SS look so snappy.”

And that got me reflecting on the intersection of fashion and fascism, which I really don’t need to get into right now.

Why not? Because I found a sharp, $800 suit marked down to $100, that’s why. I tried it on. It fit wonderfully, looked great, and made me feel pretty bad. Until I thought, “Y’know, Gil, at this price, it’s actually hurting them more than if you boycott the place.”

Not much blogging going on this past week. It’s been yet another case of Lifetime Piling Up, as the Talking Heads posthumously put it. There are a number of themes I’d like to write about in the next few weeks, including the retirement of Patrick Ewing’s jersey at Madison Square Garden, Ron Rosenbaum’s recent NY Observer article on the legacy of James Jesus Angleton, the ongoing process of publishing Paul West’s new book, and the inadequacies of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (I said I’d give it a shot, but I can’t imagine how I’ll make it through the thing; and I actually read Infinite Jest!). I hope to write up a bunch of these themes soon. So check back. At the very least, I’ll try to write up my embarrassing celebrity encounter stories . . .