lensesvideo - The Monday Morning Memo

From: Dustin Ebaugh
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 9:36 PM
To: corrine@wizardofads.com
Subject: A YouTube video for Indy and Roy

Hi Corrine,

I’m an avid MMM reader and love the rabbit hole. I have never e-mailed y’all except for a contest or two. Tonight, I have to.

My assistant, who’s in her mid-20’s, turned me on to this video today. She said it touched her more than anything she’s ever seen or heard. So, I watched it. It’s pretty damn good. I got to thinking about last week’s MMM and Roy’s take on Facebook versus YouTube. This reinforces it. 173K views in less than 24 hours. I hope you can/will share this with The Wizard. I hope he then makes time to watch it. He may well find a use for it.

All the best,

Dustin

Dustin, you saw it the first day at 173,000 views. By the time Wizzo and I saw your email on the third day, it was at nearly 2,000,000 views. Great writing. Great delivery. Great artwork. And an amazing narrative arc. The credits at the end reveal a large number of talented people who put a lot of effort into this. Those folks deserve to see those numbers. I wish them well. Thanks for sending this to the wizard and me. – Indy

“It happened this way: some troubled governmental bigwig hit upon the idea that the United States was going astray. Surveying our internal turmoil and strife he concluded that America’s many eruptions of discontent were interconnected and symptomatic of a single pervasive illness… He decided that the U.S. had broken with the Protestant ethic that nurtured it; that we as a nation had ‘fallen from grace,’ as he put it. He detected political, economic and cultural degeneration. And at back of degeneration he saw a bankruptcy of traditional Christian values. This gentleman convinced several other well-placed figures in government of the validity of his critique… Half the people who consider themselves Christians are dissatisfied with the church because it’s too big, too impersonal and too commercial: it doesn’t penetrate their lives as deeply as it does their pocketbooks. They’re impatient because it isn’t changing fast enough. The other half are uptight because it’s changed too much already…. The Christian establishment, no longer in touch with real life, was quaking and shaking in a crisis situation.”

- Another Roadside Attraction, p. 153, p. 156, p. 157, a purely fictional novel written by Tom Robbins in 1971. Nixon was President of the United States that year and Ted Cruz had only just been born. It would be 8 more years before Jerry Falwell would launch his Moral Majority and Pat Robertson wouldn't run for President until 1988, fully 17 years after this book was written. It was during that same window that Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart would be caught with their pants down. Weirdly prescient, huh?