A reader of the thrice-weekly newsletter I write, Executive Communication Report—to which you would be crazy not to subscribe because it is both useful and free—remarked on this item, this morning.
“Geez! Despair, hopelessness, extinction. WTF!”
Brian Jenner is my counterpart in Europe. His views on many things are as different from mine as his personal style. (Re. style: Jenner lives in Bournemouth, England near the Isle of Wight. And he occasionally makes a little promotional music—rapping in the style of white.)
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Our philosophical and political differences aside, it’s our temperamental divergence that I find so amusing. When I try to draw people to an event at the Professional Speechwriters Association, I often remember Napoleon, who is said to have said, “A leader is a dealer in hope.”
Despite the demonstrably dark times we seem to be living in, and my own occasional expressions of despair, when I’m trying to lead others, I try to keep on the sunny side of life. It’s I have a dream today, not I had a nightmare last night.
But Jenner? Last year he invited people to the same conference with the headline, “Experience Cultured Europe While It Lasts.” Even in promo mode, he’s more in rhetorical line with his late countryman Winston Churchill, who said in 1940 in England’s darkest hour, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
P.S. Jenner’s conference itself is a delight—and in some ways more lighthearted than the one my organization convenes in D.C. As I chronicled after speaking there in 2023.
