Writing Boots

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Before you watch this commercial, please consider four consecutive facts:

1. My late father was an advertising creative director in Detroit, who made car commercials, often pushing his staid bosses at General Motors to make more emotional appeals.

2. The old man was also an old car nut, who built a second garage in our yard to contain obscure jalopies made by a company called Kaiser-Fraser.

3. As soon as I was old enough to afford to dabble in such foolishment myself, I bought an eccentric old car of my own—a 1964 International Harvester Scout. And wrote about it, in Car Collector Magazine … where my dad wrote regular essays on cars, and nostalgia.

4. So meaningful was all this to me that I when I had a daughter, I named her Scout. Here’s that story.

And now Volkswagen has acquired the old Scout brand, created a new version and used this ad to unveil it. The ad involves a daughter and a Scout and a dad. Its purpose is ostensibly to sell cars, but I have to believe it was really written to kill one David R. Murray—most likely by my dead adman father, who probably misses me and wants to see me again.

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You know what, Dad, I miss you too. But this one was just a little too on the nose. And the one you wrote last year didn’t kill me—it made me stronger.

Better luck next year, old man!

I’ve run this little meditation a few times in this space over the years. 

I keep coming back to it—and when I do, I’m compelled to bring you back to it, too.

Last time I ran it was December 2020, after what I described as “a hard and disorienting year” and ahead of “what will inevitably be one more.” This was a year like that—and next year will be too. But the prayer lands differently at the moment. It asks more.

It was written by my first publisher Larry Ragan, one of the most influential stylists I ever read. In a little Catholic newsletter sometime in the 1960s, Larry wrote:

There are the insiders and the outsiders. Two kinds of people. Two ways of looking at life. Two ways of making things happen.

The outsiders raise hell. they demonstrate; they organize marches. They issue reports that excoriate the establishment, challenge the status quo, appeal to all who thirst for justice.

The insiders? Often dull. The insiders speak a different language: they know the tax tables, the zoning variations, the assessment equalizers, the square-foot cost to educate the kids. You’ll find them on the school board, city government, on the village board. Ordinarily not word people, they have mastered the art of the platitude.

Outsiders are often wild. At first, they don’t seem to make sense. The first black kids who sat at a lunch counter and refused to move were outsiders. The first marchers to Selma were outsiders. Surely it was an outsider who first proposed the shocking idea that the generic “he” is a sexist word. Dorothy Kay, who in the 1950s stopped Manhattan traffic to protest atom bomb tests, was an outsider.

Please God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one. But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too. The insiders resist the first answer that comes to them: they have heard it before. They are offended when they see the world’s complexities reduced to slogans shouted into a microphone or preached at a town hall meeting. They are saddened when they hear someone argue that God is on his or her side, and they wonder why God doesn’t speak so clearly to them.

Sometimes you’ve got to feel sorry for the insiders. When they win, few know of their victory. When they go wrong, their mistakes are branded as evil. Often they share the goals of the outsider but continue to say, “things aren’t that simple.”

The world is filled with people who like to feel they are right. Insiders are not always certain they are right. They are unhappy when they must resist the simplicities of popular sloganeering. So when we tip our hats to outsiders, as so often we must, let’s not do so with such vigor that we fail to give two cheers to the insider.

Just now in American life, we can’t even agree on who the insiders and the outsiders are. At any given moment, in any given context, we don’t even know which we are, ourselves. For the most personal instance: Am I an insider or an outsider because I make my living convening and advising people who advise CEOs and university presidents and politicians? Are my customers insiders because they advise CEOs and university presidents, or outsiders because they aren’t CEOs and university presidents themselves? Are CEOs and university presidents insiders, or outsiders because they’re being buffeted by forces beyond their control and even their understanding?

In such a social spin cycle, it’s not enough to appreciate the insider and the outsider. We must each be effective insiders in areas where we have influence—and responsible outsiders where we only have a voice. This, at a moment where it feels so justified to do the weary, fearful, exasperated opposite.

So let’s say a prayer for ourselves—that we have the stamina and the wit to manipulate forces we can manipulate. And the rest of the time, the courage to use our voices well.

It’s a lot to ask. But it’s the only way forward.