Wall Street is nervous this morning. True, there was a positive report on Gross Domestic Product. But the employment and manufacturing has its panties in a twist. It’s like Yogi Berra said. Half the game is all mental.

For a while, we were in a pleasant trough. Not every story was about how the market was reacting to its latest bout of gas. But I can feel the whole big machine rolling back into the comfy groove where it sat before the fall of 2008. There is truly a dearth of interesting business news right now, unless you think the demotion of the G8 in favor of the G20 is big news. If there’s no news, what else is there to do but follow the market. 

Following the market means explaining why it does what it does on any given day. That’s nonsense, of course. Nobody knows why the demented, greedy beast does what it does on any given day. So folks look at some of the numbers and try to sound authoritative. GDP news is positive.  That’s good, right? So why isn’t the market up? Because of unemployment, naturally. But doesn’t the market sort of LIKE unemployment? Sure it does. So why isn’t it up? Could it be … manufacturing? Sure!

It could also be that Sasquatch was rumored to be at a Starbucks in Tacoma.

Take it easy, Street! Feel better fast! You can do it! You don’t even need a reason! And that, my friends, is a proven fact.

1. They have a serious legal or ethical concern about some activity of their company, and feel it can only be redressed with the help of the media. Karen Silkwood comes to mind.

2. They are happy people who want to share their happiness with the world. They think something is funny and want to enjoy it with the rest of the blogosphere, because they believe it will do no harm.

3. They don’t really feel like they belong to the company that issues their paycheck, but are rather members of a larger community they like much better. This is particularly true of journalists who leak to other journalists to demonstrate that they are all part of the same great Big J team.

4. They are about to leave the company and are looking to suck up to the guys who are going to be covering their departure or their arrival at their next career pit stop.

5. They are powerless little weenies who want to appear more important than they are for the five minutes they are at the center of the information transaction.

6. They are has-beens or wannabees who don’t want to admit to the blogger/journalist/aggregator that they don’t know anything about the topic under discussion. Since virtually anything, no matter how blind or unsourced, is now fit for distribution to the Twitterati, this is a glorious new day for such people.

7. They are malevolent sabateurs who hate the company, hate management, hate anybody who is doing better than they are at the corporation. They are always looking to skewer their enemies and make them look bad in the public eye.  They view leakage as a way to undermine everybody who they despise. A day without a leak that hurts somebody is a day without sunshine to them. They sit in their little den afterwards and cackle at the malicious carnage they have wrought.  If you think I exaggerate, come live in my world sometime.

8. They are to be forgiven, for they know not what they do.

9. Who knows? Do you?

Sometimes you just don’t know what to think.

On the one hand, there’s Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, which takes an outraged look at the havoc that the financial crisis has caused on your basic, working (or now non-working) American citizen. Yeah, I know, a lot of you folks would drop Mr. Moore off a mountain made of his own money if you had the chance. But the guy can make a case.

His point is that our economic system is controlled by idiots, con-men and selfish, greedy SOBs who don’t give a damn about us and run the system for their own benefit. I don’t think you have to be a flag-waving leftie like Mr. Moore to agree with that one. I think a lot of Glenn Beck people would sign on to that premise.

The fat man in the hat is also righteously peeved that the Government bailed out all those big banks and insurance companies that nearly brought us all down. And again, there’s a fair chunk of right-thinking America that’s hopping mad about that, too. So maybe Moore’s anti-capitalist screed is actually an interesting nexus at the point where right and left converge in hatred of the system that rewards failure and lets the bad guys run the next iteration of the machine. Nobody ever lost money at this point underestimating the anger of the American people.

And of course we all have plenty to be angry about. We could spend the next decade yelling at, prosecuting and punishing the moral morons and stupid geniuses who gave us our recession.

But then there’s James B. Stewart’s exhaustive, exhausting look at the “Eight Days” that shook the world back in September of 2008, in the September 21st, 2009, issue of The New Yorker. It’s a tick-tock about the week that the guys who run global capitalism bumbled their way toward the decision to go socialist for a while and bail out the system that pays for their limos.  

What you see is how close we all came to losing pretty much everything — our collective life savings, our homes, the insurance that protects us from disaster (subject to acts of God and any other consideration they can think of to avoid paying you).  We get a worm’s-eye view of familiar figures like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, Lehman’s clueless Dick Fuld, pre-bonus John Thain of Merrill, the gang from AIG, thrashing around trying to figure out how to prevent the entire mess from going down the drain it was circling.

If you haven’t looked it up, you should. If it shows nothing else, it demonstrates how in a crisis the false divisions that separate one global behemoth from another, and private enterprise from Government, dissolve, leaving a management team all working for the same big corporation. You know it. You work for it too.

So that’s where I’m stuck, another year older and deeper in debt, as the old song goes. On the one hand, you’ve got to hate the fact that the miscreants wriggled off the hook, and that in many ways — just like after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe — the same creeps who screwed things up are back running the store, the new boss same as the old boss. All those big bailouts make a lot of people want to scream, and truly, there are so many things to despise about Wall Street. On the other hand, where would we be if the so-called free-marketplace had been allowed to go down, to be righteously allowed to fail? Every single person now reading this, and even those losers who aren’t, would be up the creek.

I don’t know where I come out. I’m confused. So I guess I’ll just handle that like everybody else these days. I’ll get mad! Ah, that feels better!

My friend Max is a student of the market, among other things, and is always looking for good investments, so I wasn’t surprised when he sent me an article a day or two ago about the newest thing in swine flu prevention. According to Reuters:

The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC, relate to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses, and biological threats such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, VeriChip (CHIP.O) said in a statement.

The technology will combine with VeriChip’s implantable radio frequency identification devices to develop virus triage detection systems.

Shares of VeriChip Corp (CHIP.O) tripled after the company said it had been granted an exclusive license to two patents, which will help it to develop implantable virus detection systems in humans.

This fascinated me immediately. As you know, I have for quite some time posited the inevitability that a host of products and services will one day be implanted in human wetware for purposes of convenience and efficiency. Included in this category of human improvement are, naturally, all cell phones, personal digital assistants and video/audio screens. The jawbone, for instance, would make a terrific antenna for any cellular or G3 transmissions if the proper filiment were subtly inserted beneath the skin there, and the mastoid bone behind the ear could hide a multitude of hardware-related objects and is naturally convenient to touch-based control.

In the near future, then, we are already seeing technology designed to detect and alert health care officials to the presence of swine flu in our midst. It’s only a matter of time before every young MBA will be strolling down the street, hands free, chatting with his peers in the ether, reading tweets or screening home-made video on a little, implanted screen designed to pop down out of a fleshy skin above the eyebrow. How much more convenient life will be for those future digital pseudopods! Will the first volunteers for elective surgery please line up?

The New York Times comes out strongly today for limiting the Constitutional rights of corporations. “What constitutional rights should corporations have?” the editors ask, and then, as editors will, they answer their own question: “To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.”

I think this is kind of unfair. Yes, extending the rights of corporate entities to encompass all that we possess as Americans would probably further engorge the status and coffers of the entities for which we labor. But isn’t your corporation a lot like somebody you know?

When I was younger, I worked for a corporation that was a very old man with liver spots. He was grouchy and, like Chronos, often ate some of his children.

Later on, my corporation was a younger, bullet-headed sales dude from the midwest, obsessed with excellence, with very short hair and a serious drinking problem.

I won’t comment on the personality and appearance of the corporate body I work for now. It might get mad.

The Times makes a lot of good points. And certainly, in the case of Merrill and BOA, the question of whether corporations, like people, have the right to legal privilege is not a trivial one. At the same time, the idea that a corporation is NOT a person seems, well… kind of wrong, doesn’t it?

Isn’t Microsoft (MSFT) a person that looks and acts a lot like Steve Ballmer?

Don’t you know a lot of people who use Macs who sort of look a lot like them?

How about the people you know who work for, say, Bank of America (BAC)? Haven’t most of them incorporated the physical and personal aspects of their corporation?

How about you? What person is your corporation? Don’t you think of him/her/it that way? What’s he/she like? Are his/her feelings hurt that the Supreme Court may decide to limit his/her rights? Or is he/she excited about the possibility that the conservative judges may vote to grant her/him true personhood?

I thought I would let you know that Otto, whose reprehensible hold-up of corporate resources I told you about last week, got pretty much everything he was looking for. As you recall, Otto is a good employee whose job skills and function are not easily replaceable, particularly in Petaluma. He hit his boss up for a massive raise, which produced two reactions: the desire to give the fellow what he wanted, and the desire to kill him. It also made the boss consider something he had never contemplated before — life without Otto. After due consideration, his superiors decided that as galling as it was to grant Otto’s requests, it was even more odious to have to find his replacement. So after a little dickering, Otto achieved just about everything he had been seeking. And life goes on at the corporation, even in Petaluma.

This little lesson shows us several things:

1. When your bosses tell you that there are no raises right now, they are lying. There are raises, if you make them give you one.

2. If you want something bad enough and are willing to piss everybody off in order to get it, you may actually get it.

3. If you do go for it, you’d better have an accurate assessment of your worth.

4. Non-fungible people are worth more than fungible ones.

5. You’d better goddamn well express appropriate gratitude afterwards.

You’d be amazed how many people don’t. I gave a person a raise once that brought them over the $100,000 mark. When I told her, she took it in and then said, “Thanks. I realize that’s probably the best you can do right now.” Can you believe that?

It’s interesting how some people can take chicken spit and turn it into chicken salad, and how others can do just the opposite. Short story:

There’s this guy I know. Call him Otto. He works in one of our satellite offices in Petaluma. He does a very good job and even though he got a substantial raise last year — in a year in which there were supposed to be no raises — he’s perpetually dissatisfied. I won’t bore you with what he does, what his duties are. Suffice it to say that he’s relatively unique and non-fungible, which gives him the right to expect some more money if he can wangle it.

So last week he goes to his boss in Sacramento and pulls up a chair, gives him a full dose of his baby brown eyes, and says, “I’ve been offered a job by Blatt Industries. I don’t want to take it. But if you want me to stay, you have to help me feel okay about doing so.” The boss thinks about it and decides, yeah, Otto is an important player, he should be better compensated, and the fact that he’s holding the company’s feet to the fire is fair enough. So he goes to HR.

“I want to give Otto a 25% raise immediately and put him under a two-year deal,” he tells the HR guy. “Okay,” says the HR guy. “It won’t be easy, but we can do it.”  He then goes into all the malarkey that HR people talk about when they discuss the details of compensation. It’s about as interesting as listening to a lepidopterist discuss the gestation of pupae.

The boss goes back to Otto, and Otto takes in the information. Then he says, “Actually, I was hoping for 50%.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really heard of anybody getting a 50% increase, ever, unless, you know, they’re a huge investment banker and have so totally screwed up that they have to be bought out.

“50%!” says the boss, and then, “Well, Otto. I understand you have another offer…”

“I love it here,” says Otto. “I don’t want to leave, you know.”

“… I’ll see what I can do,” the boss replies, but in a slightly different tone.

That’s when he called me, just to kick it around a little. “Otto has succeeded in doing one thing,” he said darkly. “He’s made it necessary for me to think about life without him. Once I started thinking that way, I realized it was possible. Now I’m thinking, what do I need this aggravation for… to pay this much for the job that cost me so much less last year? Sure, it’ll be hard to replace him. But nobody is irreplaceable. Sometimes I have to remember that.”

So look at what Otto has done. By the way he has handled this opportunity, he has done the exact opposite of what he intended. He has moved, in the mind of his boss, from a non-fungible, ambitious player to a greedy, slightly obnoxious employee whose presence might not be as essential as he previously thought. I don’t think that’s what he intended, do you?

The news is full of pundits, analysts, and even a President opining on the state of the finance business one year after the big plotz. Consensus is that we’ve all learned nothing. The big banks are getting bigger. Risky instruments are reappearing. The Street is once again getting on its high horse about over-regulation. Thinking people, quite naturally, are worried. We’re not even out of the woods yet and here come the same old players starting to sing the same crazy tune.

The critics just don’t get it. Wall Street isn’t a rational, thinking creature. Oh sure, it’s got charts and graphs and metrics and fetrics. But if you want to know the way things really operate, you have to look at a creature that isn’t driven by its brain but by its heart… and by any other organ that responds to that beat.

In short, Wall Street has all the sentience, maturity, and emotional self-control of a teenager… or maybe of a 50-year-old guy with a tiny ponytail and a red BMW Z4.

Last year, before the break-up, he was so excited. Love was in the air, and with it lots of money. Love involves risk, of course. But that’s at the core of what’s so exciting! No risk? No passion. Particularly for an entity whose emotions are quite immature, who needs daily stimulation to remain engaged, who requires the tang of danger to feel fully alive. Those were great days! Ah, to be rich and in love!

Then… the unthinkable happened. The big break-up. Poor Street’s heart was broken and what was worse, his belief that the risk was worth taking ever again was smashed to pieces. Poor guy. He languished for months, afraid to grant credit, terrified of incurring debt, sleeping much of the day away, waiting for nighttime when it was permissible to drown his sorrows.

And yet, the heart of the crazy, irrational Street is strong. He can’t live without that rush of endorphins that comes with the high-wire act!  So now he’s coming back, ready to love again, to make the plunge, to take those risks, even the stupid ones he knows will lead to his destruction again.

It this wise? Is this the behavior of a thoughtful, mature person? Certainly not. He’s a mad, impetuous fool! He can’t live without the thrill of the chase, the agony of anticipation, the ache, the yearning, the oasis of glory, and the satisfaction in the dessert of life! He won’t! Step aside, world! Love is in the air! He’s apt to do just about anything!

Can’t anybody keep an eye on him, for his own good?

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

I’m sorry if I’m a little late today. I was in an all-morning meeting talking about how the economy is improving. But I didn’t want to let today go without bringing to your notice, if you haven’t seen them already, two of the most contrasting quotes I have ever seen appear in public on the same issue. One displays the righteous indignation of the public about the depredations of bonus-happy Finance, the other comes from the other side of that great divide.

Quote #1: ““The S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger… and the Bank’s management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators.” Judge Jed S. Rakoff, rejecting the SEC-BOA settlement on Merrill Lynch bonuses, which he said, “does not comport with the most elementary notions of justice and morality.”

Quote #2: “I’m having a difficult time understanding who was harmed here. Why is this company being put into court over a series of events that benefited the nation, its economy, its financial system, the shareholders of Bank of America and the bank itself.” Richard X. Bove, a banking analyst with Rochdale Securities, as quoted in the New York Times.

So it’s either a moral question that goes to the heart of our justice and financial systems… or it’s nothing at all. What do you think?

A little quiz to brighten your Monday morning. Since we all have the attention span of insects at this point, I’ll make it just one question.

Q: It’s one year after Wall Street teetered on the brink and just about fell off into the abyss. At the time, it was recognized that there were significant, systemic problems in the banking business that had led to the collapse.

Today Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the U.S. has failed to fix these underlying problems. “In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” he told Bloomberg. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.” President Obama is making a speech calling for new rules to prevent another meltdown in the economy. Will he prevail, with new regulations and rules that limit the size of banks and the exposure of our economy to another, perhaps worse, catastrophic failure? Select one:

a. Of course. We’ve learned a lot and many responsible people in the financial sector will put self-interest behind the welfare of our nation. Ha ha ha.

b. It’s all a bunch of hooey. Free markets that benefit those in charge of them are the way to go.

c. Leave me alone. I’m too busy reading reports from security analysts on how I’m going to invest my money for the next six minutes.

d. I think they should take all gloomy economists and make them go to Pittsburgh. No, wait! They’re doing that already!

e. Badges? We don’t want no stinking badges.

f. All of the above.

There are no right answers. Just tell me what you think. Hurry. And make it inspiring, willya? I tend to believe the last thing I read.

Hello, sir. I know you don’t start until January, and I’m sure there are a lot of people giving you guidance today, but I thought I’d offer a few tips as you prepare to ascend to the top slot at Morgan Stanley.

1. Say hi to people: Many guys suddenly get a big head on them when they become CEO, and forget all the little people who were their colleagues on the way up.  Don’t be one of those. A nice “Hi, Bob!” in the elevator can make an executive vice president’s day.

2. Don’t make any sudden moves: Everybody’s going to be watching you very carefully as you try to steer Morgan Stanley out of whatever incipient mess your predecessor created with all the help of his good advisors, yourself included. Don’t satisfy your urge to shake things up right away.  Listen to people. Then you can chop their ears off.

3. Eat a good breakfast: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Too many busy CEOs gobble a muffin before their 5:30 AM conference call and wash it down with a pot of scalding coffee. That’s no way to set up a successful 16-hour day!

4. Get a new wardrobe: True, you were already a co-President of the operation before this bump to ultimate power. But Presidential suits are not appropriate for a CEO. When you enter a room, the first thing people should say is, “Whoa. Nice suit.” I’m pretty sure they don’t say that now, because you had a boss who probably wanted that distinction for himself. That’s you now, sir!

5. DON’T give any interviews: Too many guys come in and start bloviating about what they intend to do. Then they have to do it. That’s most unfortunate, because people in business seldom do what they think they’re going to do even in the best of circumstances, and we’re not in those. Be quiet. If you must talk, talk to your hometown newspaper about your love of hamsters and go-carts.

6. Be inclusive: At the start of your term, people are going to be wondering who your “inner circle” is going to be. Don’t tip your hand. Of course, you’ll eventually execute a fair chunk of the remora who hung off the pelt of Mr. Mack. But you don’t want people to be too sure of where you stand for a while. This will make the entire executive team perky and nervous, which is a good thing during any transition.

7.  Don’t say anything bad about the prior Administration: This may be difficult, since you’ve probably been seething one level below for two years, waiting for your opportunity to do something different. But people hate to see their leader questioning the actions of the guy who use to be in his chair. It makes them nervous about the whole lines of authority thing, and doubt the solidity of their reporting structure.

8. Don’t say anything GOOD about the prior Administration, either: Beyond everyday lip service. You’ve been put in there because it was time for a change. So stately recognition of the greatness of the past is fine. Enthusiastic embracing of the days of yore (i.e. last week) is not.

9. Be kind to small life forms: They may take a thorn out of your paw one day.

10. Have fun! It will all be over before you know it, you know. Make the most of it while it lasts. And stay away from those risky financial instruments! I mean it!

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog

You know what I’m sick of? People trashing their own businesses. You can’t go out of doors these days without bumping into somebody lying on a grate moaning about how whatever it is they do is doomed.

Talk to anybody in the magazine business. You think they’ll tell you, “Hey, things are bleak right now but when the economy turns magazines are the greatest way for advertisers to reach targeted audiences”?  No, they’re much more likely to tell you that the best days are come and gone and that the entire sector is going to melt away in the face of digital technology that has yet to turn even 10% of the revenue the core business still does.

People in the television business are a little more upbeat because they’re used to people saying their medium is dead. It’s been dead since the mid-1950’s, you know, when it was going to be replaced by one toy or another. But still you find people talking about the imminent demise of their own business model. True, most of them aren’t really doing very well at what they’re supposed to be doing. But there they are, scratching and moaning about death, dying, and the rise of everything that has yet to make a nickel for them.

Maybe the worst are the book publishing people. Wherever they gather with their bottomless glasses of impudent Cabernet, they talk about the death of books, and yeah, how the great days are over, and blah blah blah. Their job is to sell books! Instead, they’re in the forefront of the army of gloom and doomsayers talking about how the heart and soul of their business — the book, which has been around since Gutenberg — is kaput. What’s going to take its place? Words on a screen. When? They don’t know. But they do know one thing. The medium they love, the medium by which they make their living, is dead.

Phooey, I say! Phooey!

Our mental space is filled with people who want to see things dead. I don’t know why they feel that way, but they’re certainly verbose about it. Things that are dead, have been dead and are soon to be dead, all pretty much at the same time, include:

• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Television
• Radio
• Advertising
• Music
• Theater
• Theatrical motion pictures
• Any form of paid content

Have I left anything out?

Businesses die when people have no more ideas on what to do with them, or when something superior in quality and economic potential surfaces. Sure, stuff changes. And there will be losers. But to be the harbingers of doom about your own business? Aren’t there plenty of others around to do that job? Shouldn’t you be up there defending what you do? People are making business decisions based on what you say, you fools! And at this time? With the economy still basically in the tank? Is this the moment you want people thinking you’re about the breathe your last?

You guys are like depressed teenagers sitting around moping because one day you’re going to be dead. I had friends like that in college. They wore black and wrote a lot of poetry and they were boring then, too.

If I ran the world, which I do not, I would assemble all the people in all these industries — and any other that keeps spreading rumors of its own demise — and find out which of them are still excited about the business they are in, who feel there is still life in what they do. I would collect all the nice people who have 100 reasons why they’re doomed… and fire every single one of them. I would then replace them with naive, hopeful young people who couldn’t be more thrilled to be publishing magazines and newspapers, producing television programs and publishing books.

Of course, I would also assemble a nice, slightly crazy cadre of gunslingers to develop the digital realm. By 2020, that stuff could possibly be producing 15% of the bottom line. You certainly don’t want to ignore that kind of incremental action.

To follow Stanley Bing on Twitter, go to twitter.com/thebingblog.

There are increasing signs that this puny little recovery of ours is gaining strength, sitting up, and looking with interest at the nurses. Most pertinent is the current unfriendly pursuit of sweet little Cadbury by those aggressive cheese movers, Kraft.

Do you know how long it’s been since a rapacious, unfriendly takeover has been mounted? I can’t think of the last one that caught my notice. Its existence signals a certain kind of belligerent confidence that can only take place in a healthy capitalist economy. It shows that the big machine that actually runs this place is feeling its oats.

In order to mount an unfriendly takeover, phalanxes of lawyers, bankers, consultants and executives must line up, confer, and pile up billable hours in pursuit of a goal that almost always ends in one kind of disaster or another. As has been demonstrated by thousands of years of evidence — beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and extending all the way to the collapse of assorted 20th-century conglomerates, most takeovers don’t work. The only ones that have a shot at success happen when two organizations decide they truly can’t live without each other. Even then, small life forms and most of the underbrush gets trampled.

A hostile takeover is even less fun, except for the upper tier of capital and a small cadre of visionaries inside the conquering army. But let’s not be party poopers. Where there is no M&A activity of this kind, all we have is day to day business grinding along without dreams of glory. Haven’t we had just about enough of that?

So… go Kraft! And bring on the next wave of irrational enthusiasm for deals that make all kinds of strategic sense! If destructive mergers make a comeback, can new investment instruments be far behind?

I’m trying to think about business, but the fact is, the three day weekend yawns before me like a pleasant garden with no bugs in it. Lots of people I know are developing important meetings out of the office for tomorrow. In fact, a suspicious number seem to have stepped away this afternoon already from their New York digs.

So good luck to you all for the next few days. Unless something happens, I’ll be on phone and BlackBerry, as they say. Sometime during the weekend, let’s have a little thought about the fact that this extra day of summer was won for us by the great American Labor movement that so many readers of this website spend so much time detesting. We’ll take the day, though, won’t we.

The bad news is that Tuesday will come soon enough. In fact, I actually have to travel on Monday, which is a bummer, to get where I need to be bright and early on the 8th. See you then, campers. Make sure to show up that morning with pencils sharpened, a new eraser and the kind of calculator specified by Mrs. Kolodny for your level of Math. Attendance will be taken.

I’m in LA today. Uh-huh. That’s right. The air is a quiet, eerie yellow, and our entire office smells like nicely roasted marshmallows. Plumes of creepy smoke tower into the sky just a few miles from where I’m writing this right now. I have a meeting in about an hour. I plan to make it.

That’s how we function in this particular cornice of the world we call Business. On 9/11, I was with thousands of people in the streets as the world rearranged itself, and I watched the Twin Towers fall on the television in my office, surrounded by colleagues. Then we all went home for the day. And were back on 9/12, because, you know, we had meetings.

I was here for the riots, too. We were sitting in a ground-floor conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny. A guy came in and whispered in our CEO’s ear. “We’ve got to clear out of here,” he announced shortly thereafter. “There are riots downtown, and they’re getting close.” We could already smell the burning rubber. “Hey,” said the President of Sales to me as I was collecting my stuff and preparing to head upstairs to relative safety. “A couple of us figure we can get nine holes in at Belair if we really hoof it. Wanna join us?” I declined, with thanks. I don’t play much golf even in the best of conditions. I went up to the roof instead and watched the city burn alongside Harvey Keitel. We didn’t speak. There was nothing much to say. The next day I flew out pretty much on schedule. There were citizens firing guns at departing aircraft, but I had to risk it. I had meetings in New York the following day.

Today kind of feels like that. I could get out of town, I suppose, but I have things to do here and there are no explicit instructions to abandon this area of Los Angeles. True, I’m having a little trouble breathing, and my eyes are smarting. But sometimes you have to suck it up to get the job done. And if I take off now, what next? Am I going to get out of Dodge every time there’s an earthquake, mudslide, flood, fire or man-made disaster?

Follow Stanley Bing on Twitter at twitter.com/thebingblog.