Cute, Slick, and Trendy. And the Big Problem With a Lot of EMR.

Tonight, The Betsy Wise Show, starring Bet-sy...Wise, took place at the log cabin.  Betsy let herself loose, in all her PR glory, to teach us about "branding."  Betsy has promised since the day she declared herself the next great BP Commissioner that she would bring the Village into the 21st, or perhaps 22nd, Century with...branding.  We need a brand.  It says who we want to be, or who we think we should be, or anything, Betsy told us, except who we are.  Who we are is so...today.  It might as well be yesterday.  And it's no good.  We need to become a future.  And Betsy walked us-- tangoed us-- to tomorrow, and a future we never dreamed could be ours.

We learned about Missions and Visions.  We found out how Coral Gables, and a few other municipalities that aren't BP, do it.  It's all about style.  It's acronyms, and slogans, and PR glitz, and it's constructed out of our imaginings.

Here are 35 traits, Betsy offered us.  Choose your favorite 10.  And a rapt audience, in the log cabin and at home, compliments, Betsy humbly-- well, no, that wouldn't be fair; there was nothing humble about it; this is a lesson in PR; it's all about Betsy-- conceded, except for the part about Dan Samaria's superior offering, which Betsy didn't think it was necessary to mention, a rapt audience of what turned out to be about 12 people who wanted to play the PR game.  Go ahead, Betsy encouraged, envision a Village characterized by your favorite 10 of the 35 permitted traits.  No, no, you can't choose any traits you like.  You have to choose from the 35 Betsy selected from somewhere or other.  And once you've selected your favorite 10 of the 35 Betsy permits to you, you can register them.  You can use your "workbook," provided by Betsy and her "team," which appeared to be some woman whose name might be Maura, or you can enter them...electronically (yay, as XXI C as it gets right now) on your mobile phone, or your tablet, or your computer at home.  Betsy was working those 12 customers, and she was working them good.

Where was this going?  This is the beauty of it.  It didn't have to go anywhere.  It was an exercise, or a game, and it allowed players to feel included, and important.  Apparently, Charlie Easton didn't feel included and important, or he just wasn't feeling it, because he asked a couple of questions, which Betsy grudgingly dismissed, and then he gave up and left.  "Not for everyone," Betsy spat at him as he left.  No, not for everyone.  There was only a certain amount of this song and dance I could take, too.  I think I was getting PTSD, either from Reggie Watts or from EMR.

I love watching Reggie Watts.  I've seen many videos of him, and I saw him in person once.  What a genius of social commentary.  Reggie Watts caricatures phony pseudo-communication, and pseudo-expertise.  He uses nonsense verbalizations where circular, aimless, and substance-lacking communication is commonly presented.  But it's presented as if it was sententious and profound.  Except it's empty and mirage-like.  Do you know about pop psych?  It's like a lot of that.  When Reggie Watts does it, it's very funny.  When Betsy Wise does it, not so much.  Maybe it's because Reggie doesn't really mean it, and Betsy wants you to think she does.

Electronic medical records (EMR) have been an increasing rage in the medical industry.  The good thing about them is that they're legible, and, because they're electronic and on computers, they're easy to transmit, like from the out-patient doctor to the hospital, or vice versa.  But the movement behind them got a lot bigger than that convenience.  It's like a whole universe just out of making medical records electronic.  There's this entire system of organizing them, and making them uniform.  What has happened is that records have turned from the productions of the authors of them into grand templates, where the author of the note has to complete "fields."  At best, you wind up with much more "information" than is applicable to the encounter.  It's superfluous, and neither pertinent nor actually helpful.  At worst, you get useless filler and dumb redundancy.  And if it's VA records, or Kaiser records (from California), there's precious little actual meaningful and relevant content in an avalanche of records.  They're all structure, and almost no content.

The Betsy Wise Show was starting to feel a lot like that, too.  We were imagining visions and missions, where we can't get agreement to fix the streets or drainage, or improve the medians.  And the reason for our inertia for the past almost 2 1/2 years is that the Commission all by itself couldn't be bothered to form a sense of vision or mission.  When a group of non-Commissioner residents took the initiative to get our neighbors (and there were more than 12 of them) to do an exercise much like the Betsy Wise song and dance, the Commission ignored the whole thing.  Now, Betsy has resurrected some of those same conclusions, and presented them as if it required her to think of the idea.  It was sad, annoying, and slightly infuriating.  The word Betsy once used with me, to describe her ambition to be on the Commission on the basis of nothing, was "arrogant."  Betsy has simply now gotten herself into a higher gear.  But it's the same vehicle.

Instead of a Commission that does its job, and listens to its constituents, and addresses the problems everyone can see, we have the New Show.  Ladies and gentlemen, Betsy entices.  Step right this way.  You'll see things that will shock and amaze you.  Just $10, and my capable assistant will escort you to your seat.

Yuck.  What a waste of time and emotional energy.  But thanks to Dan Samaria, and Chuck Ross, and Cesar Hernandez, for bothering to try to include more people.  At least someone on the Commission cares about the Village residents who aren't.