Burning Israeli flags. Bombing Iran. Protests outside of a U.S. Embassy.

No, it’s not the latest headlines ripped off the Internet, but art (in this case Showtime’s “Homeland”) holding up a mirror (a little too close for comfort) revealing worry lines like tripwires—hard to see, never mind cross.

By far one of the most tense and dramatic shows to appear on the screen in the last 10-years, “Homeland” takes on the anxiety, fear and yes, paranoia of a post-9/11 world and ratchets it up to heart stopping, brain bifurcating migraine levels.

As David Zurawik aptly pointed out in The Baltimore Sun this past Sunday, this notion of duality is at the core of the show’s intense, spy-vs-spy yarn which is based on the Israeli series “Prisoners of War” or Hatufim that aired on Channel 2 in 2010, winning the Israeli Academy Award for Best Drama Series.

In the American show (which swept the Emmy’s last month), we also have a spy-vs-spy yarn starring protaganist Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison (a bi-polar CIA Agent) on leave due to her mental state and antagonist Damien Lewis as Nicholas Brody (a U.S. Marine held prisoner by al-Qaeda for eight-years.) Adding to their own internal cracks, in season one, the two had an affair, even though Carrie suspected Nick of being a terrorist. So just as Carrie is pulled between her duty to her country and her affection for Brody, Nick wrestles with his family, homelife and political life and his religious transformation into a Muslim terrorist.

On the microcosmic level, these two lead characters showcase what’s going on in our macro-world as the U.S. election draws closer, further making manifest an already divided country split into red states and blue. It also peers into the split-open gash of war wounds still unhealed from the past 10-years. But rather than alleviate it, it’s like salt in it. The show doesn’t ease the pain, but intensifies it with scenes that seem too close to reality; like the current Arab Spring gone haywire, a looming existential threat from Iran and the attack in Benghazi, Libya on the U.S. Embassy—we wonder if what we’re seeing on Showtime is live or Memorex.

In fact, just as the first season had scenes shot in Israel, so too does season two which had its debut last night on Showtime. Moreover, as a fall cover story for The New York Times Style Magazine, “Off Duty In Israel” pointed out while on the set of “Homeland” in of all places Tel Aviv, “nothing was quite as it seemed.” While it was Lebanon in the show, it was being shot in Israel and the location of a terminal at Ben-Gurion Airport was standing in for Beirut.

As Howard Gordon one of the producers told the Times, “We had taken an Israeli show, adapted it for American television on the basis really of reading just the pilot episode and then taken it back to Israel to be filmed using the same crew that had done the Israeli version.”

This is more than a TV show. It’s a McLuhanesque medium mirroring the many twists and turns of the molelike message.

Tune in. Part of you will be glad you did. The other will surely be a bit on edge.

Imagine this: It’s Wednesday, Nov. 7th 2012 and Mitt Romney just lost the election. Since he ain’t goin’ to Disneyworld, what should he be thinking? What went wrong?

One big word jumps to mind — branding. Brands stand for something and Mr. Romney never gave a clear, consistent brand message. He was, from the outset, defined as being inconsistent.

This week President Obama launched a new 7:17 minute video entitled, “Forward.” It is to be the word now associated with his re-election campaign. It’s very smart for a number of reasons. First, it is a one-word idea, like “Change” was in 2008, which encapsulated the country’s feeling after 8-years of President Bush.

Second, you can do a lot in a 7+ minute video that you can’t do in a traditional thirty-second ad. A thirty-second ad, is like flying a plane from Baltimore to D.C. – as soon as you take off, it’s time to land. It’s good for one message and that’s it. By putting a lengthier ad on the web, the Obama team has highlighted the one “Forward” message as the headline, under which all of the various supporting ideas can be rattled off. Moreover, without having to air it on television at an enormous cost, it went viral and was picked up on several news site and viewed on Youtube 584,201 times as of this writing. Clips of it will also be lifted and shown on the news, prompting voters to seek it out, without the campaign having to buy airtime.

After a long fought out primary season, Governor Romney never fully won the hearts and minds of the electorate. According to a Real Clear Politics average, in the most recent Favorable/Unfavorable poll, Romney’s Favorable rating is 36.6 vs. 41.4 Unfavorable.

One might surmise and project into November, that the Republicans and Independents who did end up voting for him, did so begrudgingly with the idea, “Anyone but Obama.”

Hmm…now imagine if a brand like Pepsi’s tagline was, “Anything but Coke.” Or BMW claimed, “We’re not Mercedes.” It doesn’t happen for good reason.

Rather, when you first think of BMW you think performance. With Pepsi, you think youth. Clear. Simple.

When you think Romney what first comes to mind? What is the one word?

You see…this is what good branding is all about. Owning a word in the mind.

It should be obvious, therefore, that most political consultants who make most political ads don’t really understand branding. They move and shift daily, depending on the issue of that day that they need to address in order to move poll numbers on that one issue, overlooking what harm it might do to the longer term, overarching strategy. This then results in an inconsistent message – the nail in the coffin for any brand.

Romney’s campaign slogan is “Believe in America.” Well, if you are running for President of the United States, shouldn’t that simply be a point of entry? What makes him different than millions of other Americans?

Leaving his poor choice of motto aside, which is already like using a broken compass on a long voyage, the makers of political ads need to steer away from the cheap, next-day attack ad and that ubiquitous mentality rife among “strategists” and embrace the longer-lasting effects of developing and building up their candidates with a clear, storied message from the outset.

Then, under such a larger, strategic umbrella, they can hang all of the poll-tested, communication points they want. They can even shift, ever so slightly, but remain on course. Consequently, in the end, a tack right, or left will still support the overarching message the candidate stands for. To borrow a Led Zepplin title, “The song remains the same.”

Romney’s course has been all over the map.

Because unfortunately, many political wonks who make ads, claim a politician can’t be branded. I’m told they are not Pepsi or BMW and branding can’t work for a person as it does for some silly consumer product. Bunk.

For clearly everything today is branded. Look at how you dress. You stand for something. Look at the music on your iPod. It says something about you. It brands you. Look at what you drive.

In today’s pop-culture, pols are celebrities and celebrities are brands. From Oprah and Steve Jobs to Obama and Bibi.

Just judging from today, Mr. Romney’s problem was never being properly launched. He was never introduced in a way that voters would say, “Oh yeah, Romney. He’s…”

In fact, his latest campaign video (released and posted alongside Obama’s “Forward” on several sites) was incredibly dark, with storm clouds and a headline, “Broken Promises.”

Now if you are a challenger brand, it’s not a bad strategy to go after the leading brand, (think Pepsi taste tests), but it’s even better to first carve out your own niche and own it. In this short 1-minute video, Romney doesn’t do that. Nor does he provide a solution to Obama. It just ends with the ominous line and website, “Obama isn’t working.”

It actually does more to brand Romney as some dark force, than his intended target since the Romney campaign is the messenger (and you know what happens to the messenger when it’s bad news.)

When former President Bill Clinton took on then President George H.W. Bush, he built his campaign on the future — hope. Again, one word. The music filling the air at his convention was a reunited (symbolic) Fleetwood Mac, singing “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”

He was looking to the future. His story touched on the past, but didn’t wallow there. Mr. Clinton’s campaign actually had a clear direction and consistent message and, so, he won.

Likewise, Ronald Reagan’s famous Tuesday Team in 1984 is another great example of exceptional brand-builders working on an uplifting “Morning In America” campaign.

Politicians need to understand the power of branding or they will lose elections. Until they depart from used-car ads, as opposed to the great, uplifting work branding can consistently do for them, they will be lost in the trees unable to see the forest.

Branding is not a dirty word. It shouldn’t be in elections. It should be the word.

To peer back in time via AMC’s hit show “Mad Men” is like gazing into an old GAF Viewmaster. The advertising world it nostalgically depicts, often referred to as the “creative revolution,” is frozen in a Purgatorial time warp. Each cultural meme of the show – from the Brylcreemed hair to the mod clothes donned by Don Draper – is a still frame with a Technicolor tint. When held up to the light, it appears more  brilliant and unreal.

Click fast-forward to a 2012 vantage point, then turn back, and you’ll find we’ve since experienced numerous revolutions, some creative and many destructive. We’ve gone from  LPs to iPods, Super 8 to streaming and economic expansion to tsunami.

Most recently, with the economic collapse of 2008, the ad agency world took a major, seismic shift. I call it a post-apocalyptic diaspora, made manifest by talent slashed and set free to launch out on their own, hang a shingle and (in ’60s-speak) do their own thing.

While it will always be a business built on collaboration, one doesn’t need four walls and an address on Madison Avenue (or even Madison Street) any longer. You see, just as the economy was collapsing, technology, like a phoenix, was rising.

Today, because of this winged bird, handpicked teams of ex-staffers can be rounded up anywhere by anyone with an opportunity and brought together. Distinct from typical crowdsourcing, many of us are vets who once worked side-by-side in cubicled offices inside one of those skyscrapers. After the dust cleared, we reconnected via LinkedIn and now share and brainstorm via Skype, operate a virtual network via Drop Box and  thanks to smartphones are, well, always there and always on.

When we do collaborate, work gets done much faster and more efficiently, as there’s no need for artifice and bull. While on the show Don, Roger, Bert and Pete bicker about whose office is bigger, we are a SWAT team pulled into an assignment with a clear objective and an exit plan. Oh – and with less overhead and no sleek conference rooms, clients love the savings we pass on to them.

Viewed through the hazy hues of the Wayback Machine via cable TV, back there in “Mad Men” land, everybody clicked and clacked on typewriters. Today our heads are buried in iPads, sipping java at a corner Starbucks.

Back then, everyone smoked in elevators, offices and taxicabs and had three-martini lunches; today, I might work out at the gym during lunch, get a call via Skype and  cut a deal between bench sets.

Back then, women (except for a lucky few, like Peggy) were secretaries. Today, they are strategic partners and collaborators running their own show. Inverting roles further: I’m the working dad who married the doctor, who also needs to pick up and shlep my kids to karate, piano and every sort of sport in a Japanese import. There, stuffed in the backseat with them and keeping their fingers occupied and their minds entertained, are the Viewmasters of today.

Back in the rearview mirror, Don and the bunch are unaware of the social revolution about to strike. In mine, I can already see the future one developing.

Abe Novick is a writer and communications consultant living in Towson. 

While 2011 saw the proliferation of social media, blogs, Tweets and an explosion of devices to carry forth all the digitized infotainment, it also reflected the ever-existing divide that separates us.  Not unlike Google+, that was launched this year to rival Facebook and their demarcated circles, cloistering friends and acquaintences, the social divide that played out in the real world encampments—from Occupy Wall Street to squatters on the streets of Jerusalem—coalesced in cyberspace.

2011 will be remembered as the year real world, social revolutions were pulled together and formed via a grassroots, ground up effect aided by social media, then posted on social media for the purpose of being broadcast over social media.

Twitter Revolutions became the connecting fiber that captured the groundswell that were personified in real revolutions, starting with the spark lit in Tunisia last December that culminated in an election there and spread like a flame to Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Libya, Syria, etc.

Yes, Twitter and Facebook are not new. But in 2011 they became the way to gather en masse, coalesce and became mainstream. The medium was not novel, but its impact is what changed, due to their proliferation and adoption.

Following the money, one can see it in the business deals that were made.

2011 was the year Huffington Post was acquired for $315 mil. by AOL.

Interestingly, the Left leaning Huffington Post came about to counter what had been the previous go-to website for breaking news, The Drudge Report.  Yet, while Drudge remained and still remains a 90s style site offering a smorgasbord of news with a rightward slant, HP lifted the mantle left by Air America’s collapse in early 2010 to fill the vacuum it had left.   HP was also established because it saw the rise of talk radio as a medium of the Right, eight-years of Bush and a need to build up a medium to counter that brand of politics. While HP has been around since 2005, it became part of the mainstream media and helped usher in a torrent of others.

Similarly, news sites like The Daily Beast were no longer new, but qualitatively improved.  2011 was the year social media sites like TBD attracted reporters like Peter Beinert from The New Republic and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish from The Atlantic and Howard Kurtz from The Washington Post.  At the same time, while new, new media like The Huffington Post joined with just plain new media like AOL, The Daily Beast joined together with an old media outlet, Newsweek, a shell of what it had once been and a questionable alliance more in keeping with the AOL/Time Warner kind.

As sites like HP and TDB became more mainstream, traditional media had to shore up its younger audience and attempted to do so.  2011 was the year NBC hired Chelsea Clinton as a special correspondent.  Likewise, Jenna Bush Hager also works as a correspondent for NBC’s Today Show. And Meghan McCain is a contributor on MSNBC.

Not unlike the way, in a previous media era, Commentary and Dissent were bastions of oppositional polarity, today on cable television that same dynamic is illustrated no better than the rivalry between MSNBC vs. Fox News with both occupying and gaining an audience on social media as well television.

This widening divide is no accident either, but ever a reflective shift in how media is consumed.  In a June 2011 interview, MSNBC President Phil Griffin stated that “MSNBC has established a sensibility, a position, a platform” and that “MSNBC is really the place to go for progressives.”

Ironically, the MS in MSNBC that originally stood for Micrsoft (which now has no stake in MSNBC) faded back allowing for other tech titans to occupy center stage.

No one showman did that more in 2011 than Glenn Beck.  His show on Fox aired its final episode on June 30^th.  His mix of moral lessons, outrage and apocalypse captured the hearts and minds of an alienated mass of society.  While his love of Israel was also apparent, as he made a much-hyped trip to Israel in August called “Restoring Courage.”  Upon his return he launched GBTV, a new live HD Video Network, featuring his two-hour daily program, plus a full slate of original Glenn Beck Programming, news, documentaries, reality and behind-the-scenes shows.  Just this month, GBTV ordered its first reality show, “Independence USA” that follows a dad, Frank Belcastro, as he and his family learn to live “Off the grid,” for when society collapses.

Within this great divide, if there was one individual who brought us together in 2011, it was Steve Jobs.  When he died in October, it was not like the death of a CEO, but a rock star.  Indeed the outpouring one saw on social media reminded me more of John Lennon’s passing than a businessman.

Each of these individuals (and there are others) reflected a discontent with society and sought to rail against it from the very positive, creative and least political in Steve Jobs, to the more extreme ends of the spectrum of Occupy Wall Street to Tea Party movement.

The manifestation of discontent with society on the ground, was echoed in the media, finding outlets where they existed and creating them where they’d not.  Look for 2012 to bubble up ever-increasing, separated circles.

It’s a good thing Gertrude Stein never said, “A phone is a phone is a phone.” Clearly, these days, her tautology would be a disconnect, received like a dropped call. The mobile devices we’re so dependent on, attached like an extension of our brains, are so much more. Ultimately, they allow everything to be knowable.

But while the smooth, mirrored glass on an iPhone presents a funhouse from which anyone can observe all the YouTube videos, Facebook updates, Tweets and apps, ad infinitum and at an instant — when blended with the speed of driving, it’s enough to send a person careening through the glass of a car windshield onto the hard, real world pavement.

Reconciling the collision of these two worlds will take some discipline, growing pains and — if the National Transportation Safety Board has its way — regulation. Last week, the NTSB recommended that every state ban the use of mobile devices by drivers. That includes hands-free devices too. No texting, no phoning, no nothin’.

Today, nine states and D.C. prohibit all drivers from using handheld cell phones while driving. Except in Maryland, all laws are “primary enforcement” — an officer may cite a driver for using a handheld cell phone without any other traffic offense taking place. As for text messaging: 35 states and D.C. ban it for all drivers. And even if you’re thinking of reading that text message at a stoplight, don’t. Maryland’s texting-while-driving law, which took effect effect in October, prohibits all drivers in Maryland from using an electronic device to write, send, or even read a text message while operating a motor vehicle in the travel lanes of the roadway.

Clear as a lens at the Space Telescope Science Institute, these laws make sense.

It’s all too common a phenomenon to look over, behind or in front and see a fellow commuter juggling the wheel, his coffee mug and his lifeline to the Internet, and want to honk a wake-up call so he get back to reality.

Yet, he who is without fingers should cast the first PDA out the window.

The challenge is, if these apparatuses are becoming extensions of us, providing guidance on how we live, shop, work and play, then how conceivable is it that we can actually exist sans contraption?

After all, we live in a world where media cannot not be found. We’ve become so accustomed to it always there, always on, that we reference it before we even look to the reality it’s supposed to be displaying. The postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard described this brave new world as hypereality, or as a map so detailed that it ends up taking the place of that which it is referencing. (By the way, he wrote about this long before there were Garmin GPS devices loaded in every new car.)

Navigating around the obstacles all this media displays, and more than a bit ironic (just as part of the virus is needed to create the antibody), Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and an investor in Tesla Motors, has recently been on the road to achieving the vision of a driverless car. Indeed, it was reported that via artificial intelligence, deploying GPS video cameras and radar sensors, driverless cars — which have been successfully tested in California — could soon be all over our roads, with the result being fewer accidents and lighter, streamlined vehicles. Holy Knight Rider!

But until all our cars can drive themselves, we should continue to heed the advice given by the band The Doors: “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.”

Abe Novick is a writer and communications consultant living in Towson. His email is abe@abebuzz.com.

We consumers get very attached to our brands.  We bond and even form relationships.  So when a brand suddenly changes direction, without fair warning, it can be like a spouse springing some kind of big news on you.

Imagine coming home and finding your husband or wife decided to take up smoking? Or they completely altered their wardrobe and are now cross-dressing.

That may seem extreme, but now imagine if Target changed their color from red to green?  You’d be a little confused…right?

Because consumers form such strong bonds with brands, we expect consistency from them.  Brands are promises built on a trusting relationship and if they abruptly veer in another direction, we feel jilted.

So when Netflix made the announcement last month that it was going to spin off the DVD-by-mail service and name it Qwikster (yet keep the Netflix moniker for streaming video), loyal customers were confused, outraged and nixed their Netflix pact in droves.

Moreover, this announcement came on top of a July pronouncement that they were jacking up their subscription plan from $9.99 to $15.99 a month.

At a time when family budgets are looking for all sorts of ways to tighten and save a little money and frivolous entertainment is tops on the chopping block, their timing was tone-deaf to the times.

But with this news came an enormous outcry that rang throughout the land, from the web to Wall Street including a precipitous 40% drop in their stock since the September announcement.  They didn’t need a bright red envelope to get the message. As they cut their subscriber forecast by 4%, the red ink was starting to bleed. To quell it, on Monday they announced a reversal of their misfortune and will stick to one brand: Netflix.

For guidance, they could have looked to another brand that dons the bold red packaging and made a monumental branding blunder that haunts the company to this day.  It is the case study of trying to fix what’s not broken. It was back in 1985, when New Coke was announced and quickly flopped evidenced by the company receiving some 400,000 calls and letters disapproving the decision.  Now exponentially magnify that relatively antiquated, though numerically significant protest, by today’s Twittersphere and you can see why Netflix CEO Reed Hastings feared the next red he’d see would be when his head got handed to him.

Last year at this very time, Gap attempted to debut a new logo doing away with the old blue box. In this case, the outcry wasn’t over price or distribution but over something as simplistic as typeface.  Yet after only one week of brand disparagement, the company rescinded the new and went back to the previous blue.

In some of these cases, in particular Coke’s, there was plenty of consumer research and testing to back up the move to change.

Yet, what CEOs and their brand stewards need to rely on when venturing forward, especially in light of the remarkable job Steve Jobs did in predicting the predilections of consumers, are intuitive matters of the heart and not just tests of the head.

Is the product the reality, or is it the brand? Is what exists on the store shelves the brand, or is it the idea of the product that lives in the consumer’s mind?

It’s a debate as old as the ancients.

In presentations I give, I often refer to brands as software and products as hardware. Brands are the brains. Products are the arms and legs. Products you can touch and bang around. Software is like the mind. It’s ephemeral, invisible.

While a company can make many products and those products can vary (PCs, tablets, cellphones, etc.), there needs to be a CPU, a central processing unit that makes all of its parts connect, make rational sense and provide it a soul.

Given this historic dichotomy, when high-tech titan Hewlett-Packard recently announced it was getting out of the hardware business, some saw it as simply a practical economic decision. After all, the group’s profits from that business are only 13 percent.

But look closer and something else is going on. Their move follows a muddled, hurly-burly, zig/zag pattern unable to sync up mind and body.

Earlier in the decade, H-P made a monumental meal with a merger to Compaq Computer so it could get into the PC business. Then, in 2008, it ate Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and soon after swallowed Palm entering mobile and last year gobbled up 3Com Corp. Furthermore, their latest announcement comes on the heels of their recently purchased U.K. software and data analysis company, Autonomy.

In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal bluntly titled, “Hewlett-Packard to Computers: Drop Dead”, it opines that H-P, a company with a rich electronics history dating back to the Great Depression, has lost faith in the personal computer. That goes for tablets and Palm-made cellphones, too.

But with such a diet, no wonder H-P’s stock has keeled over.

What is the mind and soul of the H-P brand — hardware, software, networking, mobile? Where is its head? What’s it stand for?

With a down economy, fierce category-killing rivals like the iPad and a broader move away from PCs to cloud computing, H-P CEO Leo Apotheker, um, heaved. After such a smorgasbord, I would too.

To get over the hangover, H-P plans, like IBM did seven years earlier, to get out of the PC business and move into the more profitable world of consulting.

If it stays focused, doesn’t mix up the menu, stays true to its core, then OK.

The key here is that to succeed, the mind (the brand) has to concentrate and lead, while the body needs to stay lean and fit.

Philosophically, I’d liken it to mind over matter. Equally for business, it’s brand over product.

Abe Novick, a Baltimore brand consultant and founder of Abe Buzz, can be reached at abe@abebuzz.com.

Abe Novick
Special to the Jewish Times

This month, media reporting on media reached an all-time crescendo, with a scherzo interjecting the old canard about Jews running the show.

We had comedian Stephen Colbert, who plays a fake newscaster who is genuinely liberal but pretends to be staunchly conservative,on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” He seeks to ridicule Fox News (which claims to be “Fair and Balanced,” but alas, that’s why his irony works).

Before a congressional hearing and in character but under the guise of being legit (it sounds like an oxymoron … but it’s what we’re dealing with), Mr. Colbert, in jaw-dropping testimony, promoted some pretty horrendous shtick.

Not since Groucho Marx stood before and insulted the leaders of Freedonia in “Duck Soup” has a comedian revealed the underlying, absurd elements of a government.

The Congress sat there and naively, politely listened (while cameras rolled) as if they’re supposed to take this demonstration seriously.

The entire mockery then got tossed into the blender of banter occupying several days of otherwise worthy news and commentary. When fake news reports on real news, it makes for satire. But when real news reports on fake news, it dilutes the seriousness of the real thing.

Lending further distortion, I learned about this stunt on Facebook, which showed a clip from YouTube that lifted it off C-Span. This is a McLuhan-esque realm, where media and message collide.

While such lenses make for a hall of warped mirrors, somewhere inside them are real issues and real people in pain being affected socially, economically and politically.

Oddly, a lot of Mr.?Colbert’s viewers will be lured to witness his live Oct. 30 event in Washington, when he will lead a march titled “Keep Fear Alive.”  While real, it’s a faux cause in response to his counterpart Jon Stewart’s “Rally To Restore Sanity,” which is in reaction to Glenn Beck’s August rally to “Restore Honor To America.”

Mr. Beck’s rally was held on the same date and place where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his immortal “I Have A Dream” speech. Because of that and his close identification with the Tea Party, his construct smacked of appropriating hallowed ground.

Surely, in a never-ending cycle, these dueling real-time rallies will garner the same kind of media exposure and frenzy (only exponentially) because of the hyper-real hype.
Not enough? This comedic spectacle coincides with the Jon Stewart/ Rick Sanchez mano-a-mano.

Mr. Sanchez, fired for making comments on Pete Dominick’s satellite radio show, called Mr. Stewart a “bigot.” When told Mr. Stewart was Jewish and a minority “as much as you are,” Mr. Sanchez said, “… to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

As a country with real problems, we tumble downward into a Carollian wonderland, all because a CNN show host, mad because he was ribbed by a comedian, ended up revealing his true, ugly nature on tape.

Comedy has a way of unmasking it without us realizing it. Mr. Colbert stripped down Congress by making a mockery of it. Mr. Stewart tweaked Mr. Sanchez just enough for him to blurt out what he really thought.

Yet there is no comic relief from this ongoing agitation, only a frustrating, furious intensification.

Abe Novick writes monthly for the Jewish Times on the intersection of American and Jewish culture. His work is at abebuzz.com.

I spout this aphorism, as two seemingly unrelated articles crossed my path on the same day.

First, The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, railed against The American Humanist Society, for an ad campaign they’re running challenging Biblical morality claiming, “secular humanist values are consistent with mainstream America and that fundamentalist religion has no right to claim the moral high ground.”  Jacoby insists without G-d, there is no difference between good and evil.  In essence, without a Creator there is no one moral compass.

From a postmodern, media perspective, that message aligns with today’s medium.

Young people today who quest for truth, yet who hear the world through their iPod, see it on a flat screen TV and experience it on their Facebook page, are up against a daunting maze.  Finding and making contact simply and directly with their Creator, amongst so many chaotic obstructions is like the obstacle course on TV’s American Gladiator.

Notwithstanding the media, aesthetically there was a time when the universe was as ordered and as syncopated as the music of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, aligned with a Newtonian universe in harmony. We knew, or thought we knew, where the center was.

Second and correspondingly, as I was scrolling faster than an Acela and with one click went from Boston’s Globe to Washington’s Post, I opened Ted Kopell’s own take where he sorrowfully eulogized the once sacred “fact” as the nugget of all that was good and right in the world. “We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly…”

There was a time not so long ago he opines, when America gathered before an elderly announcer who came onto the electronic alter of popular culture and said, “And that’s the way it is.”  Walter Cronkite, once the most trusted man in America and his CBS Evening News was the source of objectivity in the world.  Today, that notion has given way to, “It’s so if you tweet it so.”

Like an enlightened guillotine, opinion has severed the head of fact.  No longer a monarchical social structure, the peasants have revolted and stormed the newsroom and overthrown the crowned source – objective truth.

As I held both windows open, it was Kopell’s use of the word, “universe” that was the glue pasting these two old city papers together for me.

Through it, I gazed at the future. We see so much of the world today dawning through the lens of media that its fractured form informs our perception of, well, everything.

Today, like so many idols of Terah (Abraham’s father) there’s a website for whatever facts you choose.  There are as many blogs as stars and the most popular television program to have been # 1 for an unprecedented six consecutive seasons this decade ironically is, American Idol.

For young people born into the world now and in the future, what are they to make of it when they perceive and understand the world to have no true north?

How does that fundamental tenet align with the multitude of facts and opinions swirling in a Wi-Fi world?

Perhaps to see into the wonderment of the Creator, one place to look is right directly in the secular history and structure of scientific revolution itself.

While he didn’t coin the term “paradigm shift”, in his seminal book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Thomas Kuhn took a step back and examined how seeing the world through one paradigm made it impossible to judge another.

But by paradoxically writing a book about the inability to see outside one’s own paradigm, he was able to in some ways accomplish what he said was impossible – by taking a broad view of it.

Whereas scientific revolutions had much longer cycles, now they transpire faster and last shorter.  From the time one enters college to the point they leave graduate school, a revolution has come and gone.

Today, with the very technology we view the rapidly changing world, whirling at an exponential pace, maybe and like Kuhn, the only way to gain a more global, far-reaching perspective, beyond the temporal lens, is to gain a better universal, philosophical idea of how scientific revolutions (which of course influence business cycles) occur from Ptolemy to Copernicus from Galileo to Newton and from Gates and Google to Zuckerberg.