Rise and Shine; Destroy Broadcast Device

In a better world, I still might need to wake at 6:20 a.m.

But in that better world, I would not be waking to hear Tina Brown—

... I just thought this interview in Foreign Affairs was absolutely riveting, because it really gives an insight into the clarity of mind - the brilliant organizational, conceptual notion of how to run a war - which is what you get from Stanley McChrystal. And I have to say it also made me feel incredibly regretful that this guy was, you know, hounded from his post by a misdemeanor that was blown up by social media, something we've really seen again with General Allen's exit from commanding NATO.

It's tragic.

I will give her this: she has immense talent for gushing through an over 7-minute segment, without apparent need to draw breath.

The gushing was, in fact, so frenetic—and the combo groan-guffaws bursting from me was so loud—that, until NPR posted a transcript this afternoon, I completely missed catching just what she finds tragic.

Luis Bunuel in My Last Sigh, described how "Dali had an enormous fear of pain and death, yet he once wrote about how titillated he'd been at the sight of a third-class compartment filled with workers who'd been crushed to death in an accident. On the other hand, he claimed to have discovered death the day that Prince Mdivani... was killed in an automobile accident.... For Dali, the death of a prince was a reality and had nothing whatever to do with a carriage full of working-class corpses."

But, back to T.B.—

... people hear most about the targeting cycle, which we called F3EA: Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit and Analyze. You understand who or what is the target, locate it, capture and kill it, or kill it. And you take what intelligence you can from that raid and go back for more.

Target, locate, capture, kill: it also serves as Tina's secret formula for destroying magazines?

A printed transcript does not—cannot—adequately represent the 7+ minutes; the full audio is needed to appreciate Ms. Brown on the "Post September 11 World." A brave world, it truly is, in the carefree tone-deafness our elite feel free to exhibit. But a world not so new, insofar as the opportunities for profit continue to be as unlimited as they have been for years.

"Very necessary and profitable," indeed—

—though I must say, by the standards of The Book of the Courtier, I wonder that Tina would have made the cut during the Renaissance. One suspects she has few of the talents recorded under the heading, BREEF REHERSALL OF THE CHIEFE CONDITIONS AND QUALITIES IN A COURTIER. It's actually a rather long list, and includes the expectation of a courtier "Not to be a babbler... or chatter, nor lavish of his tunge."

The only good thing about the misuse of airtime: the mainly anti-Brown comments on NPR's site. These include some from Guy Montag, who has written quite extensively on McChrystal's role in covering up the death of Pat Tillman.

Brown's mooning over McChrystal, as well as her other military-security-media crushes of the moment, were soon followed by the daily opener to my weekday mornings: The Customer Service Excellence Huddle.This week's theme: Trust.

I know only too well how much I can trust management—to make my life worse.

A mere difference in scale between that small milieu and what we can trust the larger management, and its Tina Browns, to do for us all.