My favorite marketing philosopher, Seth Godin, asks a question, and being the kind, gentle, helpful soul that I am, the least I can do is offer an answer.  The query:

Which are you?

…competent, inspiring, passionate, obsessed, provocative, impatient, hungry, driven, adoring, inspired, an artist, a genius, someone who cares…?

With all these remarkable, powerful, important options available to each of us, why do so many of us default to competent?

He raises one of my pecadilloes of internet marketing, the use of the word “passionate” that has become an epidemic online.  Powerful words indeed, but they have a problem.  None of them refers to a person’s education, experience or skill in performing a particular task.  None of them are quantifiable.  None of them mean much of anything.  They’re the crap, throwaway words that scammers use to convey the sense of qualifications without ever saying anyting real.

Competence isn’t as good as expertise or excellence in the performance of a particular task, but it beats the hell out of saying that “I am passionate about golf. I have a 32 handicap.”  One can take any of the words Godin uses and pair it with the word “competent” and begin to offer something approaching a meaningful expression of skill.  But without competence, as a minimum, it’s all meaningless crap. 

Do you want someone passionate but incompetent defending you?  There are plenty of young lawyers who are hungry and drive, but incompetent.  And anybody who calls himself a genius, well, run away fast.  Nobody gets to call himself a genius. Not even Godin.

Last Wednesday, having cleared the calendar so that I could be present when KitchenAid was supposed to have someone come and fix my fridge (even though no one did), a spate of telephone calls came into the house from various purported cop charities.  As an aside, I wonder why the callers all speak with a Texas drawl?

You know these guys, calling for the state troopers, highway patrol, anybody with a gun and shield protecting your wimmenfolk from rape, who imply that they know where you live and expect you to shell out some cash for their benefit.  Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast was interviewed for a  San Antonio Express News article about these scams, and provides some charts showing how much they scam off unsuspecting kindly homeowners and how much they actually turn over to cops.

Here are the organization’s revenues for recent years (amounts in dollars):

And here’s how much they actually spent on “death benefits” for families of dead troopers over the same period:

Assholes. How is it that the IRS, the Department of Justice or the Texas Attorney General hasn’t pulled the plug on this scam and others like it long ago? As, Grits wrote in August “This group is about as much about helping troopers as buzzards are about helping roadkill.”

But they’re driven and passionate, even if they took in $2.4 million in 2005 and didn’t pay out a dime.  It can be expensive to be driven and passionate, you know.

Today is Columbus Day, when courts and markets are closed.  While I have no horse in the Columbus Day debate, closed courts and markets are always a good thing.  They may not be able to do any good when closed, but they can’t do any bad either. 

I was reminded of the controversy when I saw Jon Katz’s  Underdog post that his office will be open today because “Columbus did not discover America.”

We will be open today, October 11. I do not agree with the holiday, particularly when no federal holiday exists to remember the Native Americans who suffered tremendously from the lengthy brutal and unjust treatment that followed over the years and centuries after Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere.  

Well, he’s got a point.  It’s pretty clear that Columbus didn’t “discovery” America, a holiday characterized as going to somebody else’s house and telling them that you’re moving in.  And there is no Native American Day, although I’m not sure that lumping all the tribes into one holiday makes any more sense than Columbus Day.

But then, Marco Randazza at  The Legal Satyricon has staked out a different view.

This is COLUMBUS DAY.

I’d like to invite anyone whose name ends with a vowel (Persians excluded) to raise their hands, extend their middle fingers, and flip off the Native Americans, the hippies, and everyone else in the International Association of Crybabies who has a piss and a moan about Christopher Columbus.

This is not “indigenous people’s day,” it is not “la dia de la raza” and it isn’t frigging “wear a beret, listen to Joni Mitchell, and wear patchoulli day.”

It’s unclear to me how Joni Mitchell got into this mess, but Randazza isn’t about to let anyone take away this day.  It’s not that he’s entirely unsympathetic to the Native American’s plight.

You want a holiday? Be my guest. Pick any day on the calendar except October 31, February 14, March 17, January 1, or July 4. I don’t even care if you want Christmas, but picking THAT will be a marketing nightmare.

You know which day would be an awesome Indigenous People’s Day? How about the Friday after Thanksgiving? Most of us have the day off anyhow. The pilgrims wouldn’t have survived without your help. So, the day after Thanksgiving, as we’re all resting up and glad that we have four days in a row off, we can thank you. Thank you for saving the Pilgrims’ asses.

Just not today.  And in honor of Columbus Day, Randazza-style, a song.