Monuments and Moby Dick


There are a slew of metaphors in these border wall prototypes and the proposal to designate them a singular national monument, which one could argue they already are. And I don’t know quite what is the best of the ‘elegance from idiocy’ interpretations… or how many… oh, it’s America, we can choose all of them:

Which fittingly brings us back to Trump. As with much minimalism, these prototypes are hard-edged geometry and impervious materials brought into the American landscape of the West and arranged to impose order, inspire awe, and try to manage and align mystic political forces — and to make something that while instantly obsolete, like some useless Stalin Gulag project, meant to last forever. Trump has made something that evokes a real monument — one that may correctly be said to stand for everything he believes in. And I think mustn’t be forgotten. The structures represent a menacing presence that imparts brutal cruelty, fear, contempt, and coldhearted malice — something nihilistic and destructive that doesn’t believe in the substance of the American creed but only in the appearance of being cocksure, in theatricality, and manipulative statecraft.

It’s horribly unjust – to them – how each U.S. preznit seems to symbolize the country during his(!) time in office, and though at times it is beautiful, usually the truth only hurts. But this time it’s just stupid, ignorant, fearful, racist and depraved.

Great D.H. Lawrence quote at the end of the article. Nice going.

Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.

Triple Bottom Line

There’s a backdoor reference to this in next week’s Hustle, so I thought it might bear out some explication.

Sometimes written as ‘TBL’ or ‘3BL’, triple bottom line simply stands for

People

Planet

Profit

In the language of sustainability, triple bottom line describes the environmental and social impact of an organization’s activities. The profit, therefore, is seen not in the usual context of being maximized no matter what – the lone and ultimate measure – but in harmony with the other two. Exactly. Sounds antithetical to what we’ve been slipped. The phrase was coined by John Elkington, co-founder of the business consultancy SustainAbility, in his 1998 book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business.

Triple Bottom Line is the acknolwedgement of a very natural limitation to the way business has been “done” for the last couple of hundred years. Absent people and planet there’s really little profit to be realized. How we’ve gotten so far removed from this speaks to many factors but there is little doubt about the institutional contempt in which corporations have held simple traits like honesty, which are fundamental to TBL. It speaks to the way the words are supposedly elevated, eptomized in the way that advertisers tout words like ‘sincerity’, ‘honesty’ or, my favorite, ‘trust’ in their ads like these are some kinds of freakish overlay concepts that come with an embedded voice over. It’s understood that if the business is solid and cutthroat as it should be, these will be nowhere else found.

And yet TBL is all about an honest profit, taking into account the effect of your endeavor on the human and natural capital required by it. In this context, the ‘single bottom line’ is nonsensical, like applying a balance sheet to a landscape. To have a net anything, discounting all transactional and opportunity costs, itself reeks of the finality that is the flipside of sustainable activity.

TBL is not a greenwash, but an accounting practice underpinning how a green business operates and, by extension, how society becomes sustainable.

So, with apologies to Howe Gelb, several cheers for Madame Triple Bottom Line.