Writing Boots

Earlier this week I wrote about how I’ve been morally instructed and civically inspired by Robert F. Kennedy’s speeches. None more than this excerpt from a campaign speech in 1968—as remembered word-for-word by his speechwriter, Adam Walinski*, half a century later. I’ve played this for rooms full of pin-drop silent speechwriters. I’m hoping you’ll give it a quiet listen today. And maybe share it with someone else.

* Walinski also helped write RFK’s most famous speech, delivered in apartheid South Africa in 1966: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice. He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”

Editor’s note: I’ve rerun this 2011 column here a few times, because the disingenuousness of calling flawed things “broken” is both insidious and consequential. For instance, the Trump administration justifies slashing, reckless layoffs by using absolute terms for relative problems: Government is corrupt. Government is a sinister “deep state.” Government is broken. “I alone can fix it!” Or just burn the motherfucker down. —DM

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When did “broken” become the adjective by which we describe public education, the financial regulatory system, the tax code, The Culture in Washington or American politics in general?

When, and why?

I just read 700 pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters about how fucked up American politcs were in the late 1960s and 1970s, and not once did I see the system described as “broken.”

The trouble with this “broken” term—aside from its overuse by the same sorts of hacks who also write horrible things like, “speaking truth to power”—is that it’s purposely simplistic.

What if you went to the doctor and after some tests, he said, “You’re broken”? You’d say, “What is broken? A bone? A blood vessel? My heart?” Or if your car mechanic called and said he’d found the trouble: “The car is broken.”

Yet we accept it when a columnist describes the free enterprise system—everything happening in an economy of hundreds of millions of people and dozens of nations—as “broken.”

It’s also a misapplication of a mechanical diagnosis to an organic or social problem.

And using the word “broken” to describe a social system can have a practical consequence:

The only way to deal with something that is “broken” is to “fix” it. So if you and I think the American government is “broken,” the only remedy we’ll accept is from someone who promises to “fix” it. Now who are you and I both going to trust to do that? Sure, I might listen to your candidate’s bright idea to improve one or another area of the system. But I’m nervous even about my candidate’s plan to fix the whole “broken” thing. Maybe it’s just the carburetor and a the piston rings!

Obviously, we need terms to make broad statements about complex social systems.

But “broken” is just about the worst word I can think of.

Then why is it the best word anyone else can think of?

My old pal Steve Crescenzo was on a Zoom call with a prospect the other day, a young woman. “About ten minutes into the 30-minute call, she appeared to wipe her mouth. But it LOOKED like she was hitting off a joint,” Steve wrote on LinkedIn. “I ALMOST made a joke. Something like: ‘Ha ha. For a second it looked like you were vaping or smoking a pot pen or something! Ha ha ha!’ Thank GOD that for once I kept my mouth shut (a rare occasion). Because about six minutes later, she did it again! She WAS vaping! I’ll be damned! I have read all the articles about how insidiously addicting these vape pens are. And just about EVERYONE of a certain age does it. But how do we feel about doing it on a business call?”

On behalf of exactly everyone over the age of that young woman I can say: We don’t dig it.

Nor, I’ll add while I have you here, do we dig people reading a speech off a cellular telephone. My wife and I found ourselves at Chicago’s great Gene Siskel Film Center one night last month, to see a documentary by Frederick Wiseman. As you might predict, our 55-year-old asses were among the youngest in the room—except for the stripling Siskel Center staffer, who introduced the film with a 10-minute lecture delivered with a series of frequent glances at his phone.

Young man, I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with reading from notes on your phone. And if you’re conservation-minded, a lot that’s right with it. Still, lad: Know that your audience cannot accept this. We have lived many long years in a world where, if you had something important to say to a large group of people, you either memorized it because you were a genius or you wrote it down on a piece of paper, and referred to that. None of us will live long enough to learn to happily receive a lecture that’s read off a fucking phone.

Luckily, you and your generation will outlive us, and for the latter part of your professional careers you will be able to read speeches with a phone in one hand and a vape pen in another. But by then, you’ll have your own bugbears, and your own vague yet strong sense that no one takes anything seriously enough any goddamn more.