I gots me some bile I’d like to get out here, rather than spill it on the schlimazel who’s unlucky enough to be seated next to me at Thanksgiving dinner.
No, not on the fucking election, except to say that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinksi’s craven visit last Friday to Mar-a-Lago justifies a morning dream I had before the election in which I was actually trying to punch Joe in the face. (The bastard proved elusive.) Brzezinksi justified the meeting by comparing herself to her late father, the dignified, principled National Security Advisor to President Carter: “My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed.” Was Zbigniew spinning, when she dug him up?
But you know me, I don’t like to talk about politics. I’d rather talk about issues closer to home. Things I know about. Like:
• The final results are in: Men are less considerate than women. Not all men. But some men. At the conference I put on last month, I spent a lot of time standing in the back of the room, next to the glass doors that people used to come and go during sessions. Over a couple of days, I probably saw 50 people come into the room. After a couple of them insanely let the door bang behind them, I started keeping track. Of course, most folks made sure to ease the door shut, so as not to disturb the speaker and the listeners. Only about eight of them barged in and let the door slam behind them. Those eight were all men. NEXT!
• A professional windbag named Ted Gioia declared the thousands-years-old era of speeches over, on his blog, “The Honest Broker,” Gioia announced: “In the aftermath of the election, the new wisdom is that giving speeches from a teleprompter doesn’t work in today’s culture. Citizens want their leaders to sit down and talk.” One of his six suddenly immutable rules: “You gain more trust when seated, than standing.” Another: “Conversations have more influence than speeches.” And how did Gioia go about influencing his audience to believe this “now inevitable” fundamental change in human communication? With a cascade of 70 consecutive, uninterrupted, non-conversational paragraphs, of course. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Fireside chats are for when you don’t have a new idea to share, but want to be seen as personable and cool and conversant and current; speeches are for when you do have an idea, and you want to get the fucker clearly across. NEXT!
• Have you noticed? Today’s Twenty-somethings do not differentiate between the “ground,” which is outside, and the “floor,” which is inside. In fact it seems there is no “ground,” to them, there is only the “floor.” For a long time I thought it was only my daughter and her friends, but not long ago I heard an ESPN soccer announcer talk about a player who’d been knocked to “the floor.” While not a huge deal next to my new study proving once and for all that women are better people than men, this is a net loss that makes language that much less precise. NEXT!
• And finally, I recently self-spiked a piece I wrote, which called super influential college alums the root of evil in higher ed. A bit of an overreach, I decided. But surely there’s some truth in this graph:
But it’s also possible to be embarrassingly, overly attached to your alma mater. A well-launched, well-led life should involve many, many chapters; uncountable experiences and relationships with people and institutions. Many accomplishments greater than to have been accepted by and matriculated through the University of Alabama. To be intensely fixated, at 50, 60, 70 years old, on what’s happening at the college you attended 30, 40, 50 years ago—it reminds me of my WW II-veteran dad, as we drove by the American Legion in Streetsboro, Ohio, and saw lots of cars in the parking lot, on a Saturday afternoon. “The war was the most exciting thing that ever happened to those guys,” Dad would say, with a sad shake of his head.
NEXT!