Insularity.

By Gonzalo López Martí  – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Last Tuesday, my friend, benefactor, mentor, partner in crime, founder & editor of this prestigious publication, Eugenio “Gene” Bryan, plus yours truly attended a great show at Downtown Miami’s Knight Concert Hall, headlined by Cuban living legend Omara Portuondo, she of Buena Vista Social Club fame, who at 85 years of age still has the uncanny ability to bewitch audiences with her soulful voice.
• The fact that she’s accompanied by a band of world-class musicians doesn’t hurt either.
• It just so happens that simultaneously across the street at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, there was another concert by another living legend of popular music, in this case from France, 92 year-old Charles Aznavour (aka the French Frank Sinatra).
• On top of that, at the same exact time a few blocks south of where Mrs Portuondo & Mr Aznavour were performing, none other than British diva Adele was slated to sing at the American Airlines Arena.
• You can imagine the massive, nightmarish bumper-to-bumper traffic in the area.
• But wait, to add insult to injury, at the last minute, the police decided to halt circulation in all directions in a perimeter of five blocks because none other than Secretary Clinton was attending the Adele show.
• Her motorcade drove by a hundred or so feet from where Gene and I were standing, a stone’s throw from our destination yet unable to move a single inch.
• I kid you not: I counted 50 law enforcement vehicles -cars and motorcycles- escorting Hillary’s fleet of no less than six full-size black armored SUVs, dashing past us mortals at pretty high speed, sirens and all, with the entire road for themselves for a stretch of, I’d say, at least two miles.
• My question is: how can someone who spent the last 30 years of her life in such surroundings have any grasp whatsoever of the everyday lives of regular folks?
• To her credit, the soon-to-be leader of the free world has visited every single state of the Union and dozens of dozens of countries during her career.
• Still, if this is what her security detail looks like on US soil (assuming we consider Miami to be US soil), can you imagine the level of paranoid isolation she lives in when she spends time in, say, a country in the Middle East?
• I seriously doubt that she’s met or had a normal conversation with a regular person in the last half of her life.
• Mind you, by no means am I implying you should support the dude with the orange pompadour.
• Despite his man-of-the-people schtick, orange pomp divides his time between a, literally, gold plated penthouse overlooking Central Park -his home, office & campaign bunker- and a compound in a gated community in Palm Beach.
• A gated community inside a gated community.
• On an island.
• With possibly the highest per capita net worth on Earth.
• Insularity taken to 11.
• Now then, Mrs. Clinton’s woman-of-the-people idea was to place her campaign headquarters in, of all places, Brooklyn, NY, possibly the most gentrified hipsterland with the highest density of snobs per overpriced square foot outside of Manhattan.
• Welcome to the Subway Election.*
• Like the Subway Series (Yankees vs Mets, duh) only that the White House is the prize.
• Forget red states vs blue states: it is red line vs blue line now.
• New York New York.
• If you can make there you can make it anywhere.
• Really?
• Well, apart from Hillary & Donald, Pepsi’s marketing department seems to believe so too.
• To be continued.

* Pepe Beker, an Argentine adman (and avid marathoner) who’s had an outstanding professional career in México working for various multinational agencies and now runs his own wildly successful shop in CDMX told me once that, in his opinion, the countries that boast the best advertising are those in which professionals ride public transportation.
It is a soundbite, of course.
A very insightful one, lemme tell you.
Methinks it carries a gigantic truth that can be applied to most lines of business.
Countries and cities where folks from different backgrounds, socioeconomic levels and walks of life rub shoulders very day back and forth from work and play are the healthiest, in every sense of the word.
Having the latest opinion polls waiting for you on your desk every morning is not enough.
Neither big data nor big research will ever replace human touch.
Oddly enough, sometimes I feel New York is increasingly becoming an exception to the rule of the “Public Transportation Principle”.
Yes, everybody rides the subway in New York but they are all so immersed in their own realities (and their mobile devices) that they don´t seem to acknowledge what´s going on around them.