You might have been so busy catching up on old Cohen columns that you missed an interesting slice of life a few weeks ago at Fenway Park.
Baseball teaches us important lessons, be they how to “get to second base,” if you are a young guy on a date; or why investment bankers who want to “strike out or hit a home run,” should be assigned to a small community savings and loan, where they can learn how to hit singles.
Anyway, there is Mike Lowell, sitting there daydreaming in the Red Sox dugout, when a big fight breaks out on the field and Kevin Youkilis gets ejected from the game.
Youkilis is gone. Lowell replaces him. This is presumed to be not such a great thing for the home team. It would be sort of like if Cohen went on vacation, and someone else tried to write his column. Nightmare.
Except, Lowell rubs his sleepy eyes, rumbles on up to the plate a few times, and hits two home runs, leading the Sox to a win over the Detroit Tigers. Two homers. One game.
Isn’t that the dream of every sub, of every assistant junior vice president in charge of not very much, of every newspaper columnist who knows he should be publisher?
A brawl in the conference room, an outbreak of swine flu, a pregnancy – those of us with our noses pressed up against the glass are just waiting for the day when we can take over and hit a couple of home runs.
Dream Jobs
Gov. Patrick is lost in western Massachusetts, where his staff sent him by mistake. Cohen is called in to take over, until the governor finds his way home.
Cohen calls together all the legislative Democrats, reminds them that “we” (that is, the governor and the legislative Democrats) are all one, big, happy family – and we should play nice and not be mad and cranky at each other until such time as the last, elected Republican in the state is sent into exile in New Hampshire or somewhere else with no taxes.
There. A home run.
Or, Gov. Patrick pushes the MBTA general manager in front of an oncoming train, creating a temporary vacancy for someone such as Cohen. Cohen orders up club cars on every commuter run, with half-price chicken wings and beer from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Within days, the MBTA is running a surplus – and the Fidelity guys are coming home with barbeque sauce on their ties.
Or, when Gov. Patrick, by executive order, shuts down every economic development slush fund, every speculative government office park, every incubator/stimulator/private-public venture capital experiment, he appoints Cohen the Temporary Technology Innovation Czar.
Cohen charges out of the dugout, declares Route 128 a “state entertainment zone,” and encourages an “industry cluster” of strip joints, massage parlors, 24-hour bars, and technology labs to improve the quality and delivery systems for porno films. The “brain drain” of young, cool guys comes to a halt – and Silicon Valley sulks, because Cohen has hit a Massachusetts economic development home run.
Similarly, since the senior executives at Wang Laboratories went out for a long lunch one day and never came back, Cohen should be recruited from the dugout to reinvent the brand, which he will label “Wang is the Thang,” and manufacture computers with the look and feel of Royal manual typewriters, to be marketed through AARP, with the promise that the user will never be asked about the HTML object or the system preferences. Another home run by Cohen.
And then, of course, there was the appointment in June of a Massachusetts “creative economy” director, because, after all, Massachusetts is awash with artists and authors and stuff. If, in fact, Gov. Patrick rectifies this mistake, makes the new guy go away, and appoints Cohen on an interim basis, Cohen will teach all the painters how to paint houses, which is much more satisfying and lucrative, with a bigger multiplier effect on the economy, than yet another series of watercolors of sailboats off Cape Cod. Again, a home run.
Do you need a temp to get you through the day? You know whom to call. It’s a home run.
