Why share now?
Liberation Day was a classic vertical shock or system perturbation. Some of the things I describe here in this brief regarding worst-case Y2K will reappear in this manufactured crisis — just like so many of them unfolded following the 9/11 terror strikes.
Remember USAID? I do.
I spent a couple of years working with Africa Bureau in the mid-1990s as a contract consultant on management change as part of Vice President Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative — a very different government-slimming process, a very different time, and a very different America.
You know, back when we were a functioning democracy.
I also remember good, caring, conscientious, and hard-working people throughout … aka, the Deep State we so vilify today.
Remember the fuss about Y2K? That does seem like a different era, does it not?
This presentation is the one taping of the full-up brief in existence. USAID taped it so it could be viewed asynchronously (that was a new term then) by its offices around the world as the great date approached.
It is weird to watch now, 26 years later. I was the married father of merely two kids at that point!
So much hair, so thin, so much of a higher register voice (pre-several throat, sinus, nasal, and ear surgeries that brought me down a notch or two).
Also a very fast delivery, which I tend to eschew nowadays, opting for less volume and more deliberate emphasis.
At one hour and 54 minutes, it is a monster, encyclopedic brief. My God! What and whom do I not mention in this brief?
Lotsa of movie references and the PPT itself is mocked up like a movie in many places (opening credits [Mission Impossible], clips of famous bits [Ghost Busters], closing credits [REM’s song you-know-what] and a grand finale that spoofs 2001: A Space Odyssey [on which I spent way too much time creating]).
No Star Trek, though.
Sound effects galore.
Way too many toss-away lines, a bit too slickly delivered for my taste today.
You can almost hear me waiting for the rim shot from my drummer off-stage.
Still, fun to remember all that stuff and how on top of it all I was in that moment. Probably about the 75th time I gave that show. One hour and 54 with no notes, just visual cues. I deserved an off-Broadway shot!
As I get farther away from such events in my life, I worry about these things disappearing from the web and my own memory. Today I spent two hours, along with my spouse, visiting with my mother-in-law, whom I have known for 43 years. She couldn’t remember my name (couldn’t even offer a guess), but thought I was handsome and figured I might be her only daughter’s husband.
So I repost it here for safekeeping. I will be doing that in the future with a number of things, but only on Saturdays.
Enjoy.
It is fascinating — for me at least — to revisit that time … and that version of me.
Both are long since gone, never to return, but once they were very real and of some consequence in their own strange ways.
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