From Kushner to Kamala, “Bake” to Bush, they all did: emphasizing the positives and erasing the negatives. Hire a ghost writer, parade the best edited bio in alphabetical display at a library near you. Voila, the 4 th L ( legacy).
Once I worked in the International Telecom field. Oh my! Customer data dump, on an Excel spreadsheet, showed long and winding last names: from Croatian to Pakistan, from Chinese to Vietnamese. Had it not been for Customer ID, we would have gotten all the LD phone charges mix up.
Yet these folks got along fine with their children’s education first themselves last.
My Mom and Dad did. For us, three children. Then grandchildren. Hardly can you find less than a Bachelor degree in our “funny” last names (even taking on Ecuadorian one for a change. Talking about self-reinvention).
America’s last names in Exhibit A at the 9/11 Memorial, in contrast to the Vietnam Wall rosters. That’s how fast-changing our demographics are. (Just look at world population numbers in hockey-stick graph).
Our neighbours and co-workers are called P.J. or J.B. Faster that way at the Starbucks line.
Or Lady Ruby, at J6 commission testimony. Go girl!
May your brand endure and your only daughter go on to bigger and better things.After all she survived threat and harassment thrown at her in Fulton County.
America always bought in one version of dream (mostly Ponzi if not cultic) or another to reinvent itself: J.P. Morgan and other “too big to fail” names.
Those small and beautiful folks who came (of course from somewhere else) later?
“Too small to count!” (until it’s time for them to think “white” like Clarence Thomas and cohorts).
Bottom of the totem pole, opioid and vape addicts, with sign-up bonus for an “essential” worker shift while exempted “knowledge workers” clear out the last coffee cup, banter around the water cooler to be in office gossips (talk shop). It’s time to pour out and put back big rocks back in first.
That is, if the machine doesn’t take work away from both.
Bezos, Musk and Gates anticipated all that. What do you think? They don’t sit around vaping. Bezos bought the Post (stopped short of a name change to Bezos Graham), Musk wanted to tweet like Trump and Gates refused to pick up a lucky penny (I still do) time otherwise to read stacks of futuristic books (so as not to miss another “internet” next time around).
Divorce costs more when you are a Tech Titan. Be careful with self-reinvention and associated price-tag. You might get what you wished for.
Meanwhile, not only personal history but History itself got rewritten e.g. Roe put on a new robe last week. Poor young black LA women. Where are they gonna go? New Orleans back alleys?
History’s detour intertwined with our personal contour. All amounts to graveyards and grave markers, a lot more unknown than known.
Let’s make the best of our set of alterable and unalterable givens (I wished they had gene sequencing and editing to preempt biographical revisionism). Do no harm (or like Google’s Do No Evil). Earn that marker’s byline: “Here lays a good and grateful man.” (I once walked around a park, on a bench inscribed ” so and so, lover of Guinness).
My parents, my mom in particular, weren’t much into alcohol. Neither did they know much about self-rebranding (like DJT, an x-Democrat, now calling others RINOs to be hunted down – BTW, it’s a misspell) and narcissism. All they did was trying to survive hand-to-mouth in an upside-down world, itself in the process of re-drawing – reinventing its Colonial map.
R.I.P. dear Mom and Dad. Just wait. Don’t roll over just yet in your marked graves. Given my “unalterable” i.e. potential 90+ living, I do have some time learning from all those masters of self-reinvention at local library’s Biography aisle, from “Bake” to Bush, Kushner to Kamala.
Thang Nguyen 555 