Writing Boots

One of the most smartest folks on rhetoric—and I know some smart folks on rhetoric!—is Guy Doza, with whom I’ve appeared at several speechwriting conferences, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. The author of his own big-selling book on communication, How to Apolgise for Killing a Cat, Doza recently reread my book, An Effort to Understand, and published an essay about it yesterday on his blog, The Cambridge Speechwriter.

In which he appreciates my unpopular insistence that my fellow citizens refrain from questionably motivated online self-righteousness. To illustrate the extent of that harm, he offers what he calls “a silly example”:

If I open my window and shout, I BELIEVE IN PEACE AND JUSTICE every single morning at 8am, we shouldn’t conclude that I believe in peace and justice any more than my neighbour who doesn’t shout out of their window. But it gets worse. Imagine that I shout every morning at 8am, feel great about myself, and then accuse my neighbour of being a violent oppressor for not joining me. Not only does shouting out of my window do literally nothing for peace and justice, but it happens to piss off all of my neighbours who are more likely to hate what is ultimately a good cause because they associate it with antisocial behaviour (this is sometimes called the fallacy fallacy: the idea that something is untrue because it has been badly argued). One of my neighbours is actually lawyer who does a lot more for justice than I do. They don’t shout about it out of their window or on Facebook, so I sometimes question their commitment to the cause… 

I don’t think that’s such a silly example at all. A neighbor who did that would be more than a nuisance, he’d be a real menace to the peace and goodwill and ultimately the social stability of the community. And the thing is, we’re beset by neighbors like that every time we go on social media—all our hundreds of family and friends, colleagues and former colleagues, acquaintances and long-ago schoolmates.

No wonder we walk around shaking our heads all day long, and muttering under our breath.

Q. How did everything fall apart?

A. You know, I don’t remember how it started, exactly. Alls I know is that everybody got real upset and we all tore each other’s eyeballs out.

Originally published on Writing Boots in October, 2017. Fun to read again, seven years on. —DM

***

The quickest trip to obsolescence is to dismiss the young, thus giving the young all the reason they need to dismiss you back.

If you like to remain relevant, you studiously and even stubbornly reject even the most widespread criticisms of the current cohort of young adults. For instance, that they are the sorts of entitled, callow twerps about whom it would have once been said, “He was made much of by his mother.”

You deny that! In fact, you come up with your own name for “millennials”: PWOMs (People Without Mortgages). And you attribute most complaints about them to the fact that such people have always been annoying to responsibility-laden PWMs (People With Mortgages).

Sure, you listen and laugh when people your age and older decry the self-involved, coddled and incurious young people who work for them (or who they, increasingly, work for). 

But you don’t actually believe that millennials are really such thoughtless, self-centered monsters. You can’t afford to believe it. Again, you are careful to remember, you were pretty full of yourself when you were that age. You were likely to bill yourself as “creative” and brightly put yourself forth for responsibilities your elders had spent decades refining. But there were many wonderful things about you at that age, too—that made putting up with your hubris worthwhile for a number of mentors who loved you then and who love you now.

And so when you get randomly paired up on a golf course with a young kid who just graduated college and moved to Chicago, you’re glad.

And when you learn that the lad is new to Chicago, you’re even happier. You envy him the experience of getting to know this great city to which you yourself moved when you were his age. And you make it your business to help.

On the first tee, you point out the ancient tower of the Pullman Company corporate headquarters that can be seen a mile in the distance. You don’t want to be an old gaffer, but the company town that Pullman built over there is one of a thousand important things a self-respecting Chicagoan must know about. So while you’re waiting for the fairway to clear, you point out the tower.

“Looks like it needs some repairs,” the young man grunts in a way that communicates his disinterest in having a history lesson on the first tee.

Understandable. He’s focused on his tee shot. Which he hits, halfway to the Pullman headquarters, with his three-wood. This lad can play—another reason you’re glad to be with him.

Walking down the first fairway, you ask him where he grew up, where he went to college, what brought him to Chicago, what company he is working for, what he does for that company and what that work involves, specifically.

He answers all these questions thoroughly. And then never asks you a single question in return. Indeed, by the end of the day, he will not know whether you are a lawyer or a firefighter, whether you are married or single, whether you have kids or ferrets. You, on the other hand, will know his favorite (and least favorite) basketball player, how old he was on 9/11, and what golf courses he has played since he moved to Chicago four months ago (including one that he claims to have played “many times”).

Now granted, he is a serious golfer. In fact, on the second hole, he beckons you and the other two fellows in the foursome to the far-back tees to watch him hit his tee shot, because the hole is downwind. “This is going to be fun for you guys,” he tells you. (And it is. He hits it 365 yards; he’ll go on to shoot 73 in a howling wind.)

You might argue that such fine golf requires concentration, not chit-chat.

Then why does the trifling little prick look at his phone the whole time he’s walking from shot to shot? You think of things to tell him—things he really ought to know, things any young person with a worldview bigger than the curled-up bill of his golf cap would want to know—but you don’t want to interrupt him from his reverie, as he walks across these magnificent fairways with his mug buried in Instagram.

Before you dismiss this juvenile jagoff entirely as a disgrace to his generation, you notice his last name, embroidered on his golf bag. And you wait for him to look up from his Samsung long enough for you to politely tell him that someone with his name founded a famous public relations agency in Chicago about 80 years ago. 

“Yeah, there’s a bagel company, too,” he yawns, and hits a nine-iron, I shit you not, onto the green from 195 yards away. You are so annoyed, you pull out your five-wood and hit it 10 yards short.

And as you’re walking down the last hole, do you know what the entitled, narcissistic, flat-bellied fucking millennial mental marplot tells you? He tells you he’s “tired” from all the walking.

“I’m not what I used to be,” he actually adds.

“No, you’re not 22 anymore,” you actually reply.

And, drawing on all the wisdom and forbearance that this interpersonally penurious pipsqueak wouldn’t acquire in a dozen lifetimes of thoughtless and pointless and inconsiderate living, you refrain from adding, “And if you keep treating people like this, you’ll be lucky see 24.”

***

Postscript, October 2024: Assuming the lad made it, he’s 31 now. Sadder and wiser, I fervently hope. —DM