I haven’t posted much recently about Bob Garfield because this isn’t a Bob Garfield blog, it’s an advertising blog that has occasionally reserved a scathing assessment for the bearded one…but when AdPulp’s mild-mannered David Burn started in on Bob Garfield, I knew that I could hide behind the mountain of briefs and unfinished projects no longer.
Yep, it’s time to look at Bob’s recent article and bash it:
Lost Souls?
Trying to Explain the Difference Between Commentary and Vandalism
Whenever Bob starts to talk about other peoples’ souls, he is really talking about how upset he is that other people, specifically bloggers, disagree with him.
Why do people kill themselves? Schizophrenia. Depression. Despair. Agony. Shame. Who can say?
Nobody can say, but I know that Bob is going to try.
I didn’t know Paul Tilley, the DDB creative executive who committed suicide a week ago, and I would never presume to divine what was going on in his life, much less his head, when he jumped from a Chicago hotel room to his death. But I do know this: In his last days, whatever else was tormenting him, he was also under professional and personal attack from persons unknown — most of them, presumably, subordinates — who used the shield of internet anonymity to mercilessly disparage him.
I called it. Did you see that? I totally called it.
Bob thinks that blogs were either the cause or, in some, way correlated to Paul Tilley’s suicide.
A quick thought directed to you, Bob: maybe you could just leave Paul Tilley to rest in peace and not use him to further your anti-blog agenda. It is really unseemly to do something like this. Soulless, in fact
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Skipping down past some trite phrases and adjective-laded invective against bloggers that is just too tiresome to comment on, but you can read here if you like, we get to:
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Once again, I have no insight into what motivated Paul Tilley to take his own life; correlation is not causation.
Correlation may not be causation, but there is a reason that attorneys correlate events to try to prove guilt…and there is clearly a reason that you try to correlate blog posts with Paul Tilley’s death.
Hmm, I wonder what that reason would be?
Suicide is a dark, desperate, often unknowable act, and those who believe the man was essentially blogged to death believe so knowing virtually nothing about his non-professional life, much less his inner one.
After drawing a line between blog posts and Paul Tilley’s death Bob, like a lawyer withdrawing a question after a sustained objection, has already done his damage and now pretends that he never got his hands dirty.
But it is easy to see why his suicide has triggered such a backlash, with ad blogs at pains to account for their treatment of the man. I surely can’t but wonder whether the vicious public assaults on his competence and character — assaults destined for digital immortality — did not pain his tortured self at least as much as such things have pained me.
The vanity and self-absorption it must take for a person like you, a mere critic, to compare yourself to the Executive Creative Director of DDB Chicago, and that you have tried to compare the pain that a man who committed suicide felt with your own hurt feelings…it is utterly dumbfounding.
There are not words for how sad a person you are.
The ad bloggers (after, of course, offering gushing condolences to the grieving family) have been quick to dismiss such connections as asinine — and maybe they’re right.
I am among those bloggers who has dismissed such connections as asinine…because they are, not to mention that the belittle the life of a man. As for those bloggers that commented on Mr Tilley and then offered condolences to the family, maybe they meant the gushing condolences because as humans, they were able to understand the pain that Mr Tilley’s family must have been feeling no matter what they may have felt about Mr Tilley’s business practices.
But the bloggers are still evil, right?
But as Tilley’s worst detractors continue to use these blogs to posthumously slime the departed, the lords of the flies could do worse than to think about the loss of the human soul.
After an entire article bashing bloggers and correlating their posts with a man’s suicide in a limp attempt to further his anti-blog agenda, Bob finishes up by actually blaming the commenters on blogs, internal consistency of what he is saying be damned.
The good news: we’re all off the hook!
The bad news: we’re still soulless, evil bastards who ruin people’s lives and by the way need to control the comments section better.
It could be worse.
