Coronavirus and us: Let’s hold it together, together (week five)

Friday, 4:00 p.m.

Among the many important concepts introduced at the World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association over the years: Participants in the 2018 confabulation learned a concept that's coming in far handier than we ever expected, as we seek to normalize our slow descent into mass madness, now in the fifth weekend of the coronavirus siege.

Tonight you will get … pantsdrunk.

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November 02, 2018: Friday Happy Hour Vocabulary Lesson (Finnish Edition)

Thursday, 6:08 p.m.

Deejay Paul Engleman sent me this one, which just seems so right, right now.

Thursday, 10:30 a.m.

On Monday, I wrote:

Remember how, before coronavirus, you would realize a friend or a family member or a colleague was having just the worst fucking day ever, and this was not the day to fuck with them?

Well now, everybody you deal with is that person.

Oh, and you're also having the worst day ever, too.

Every straw is everyone's last.

Tuesday, I said most of us were feeling "brittle."

Here's what's also true:

I think most of us believe in our hearts that we ought to receive a ticker-tape parade for how well we've handled ourselves during this crisis, all things considered.

But we aren't holding our breath, because who would throw the parade, but a bunch of other people who feel they deserve a ticker tape parade of their own? 

Thursday, 9:02 a.m.

Her alarm will go off in a half hour. I sense by the fact that she hasn't smiled since Saturday that she needs a pep talk today. I'm going with this.

Wednesday, 1:40 p.m.

She recorded this last night, after everyone was asleep (and she should have been, too).

Wednesday, 1:30 p.m.

Daughter and I rode motorcycle three miles south on Western Avenue, dropped it at the shop for maintenance, and ran back, mostly in silence. Washing hands at the sink together, she turns to me and asks, "Will this be in the history books?"

"Yes," I said, and it seemed to cheer her just a little.

Wednesday, 10:55 a.m.

Posted at the Vital Speeches website, my speculation on the future of speechwriting: "Your Audience is Bored Already: More virtual conferences mean major changes in the nature of speeches—and the speechwriters who are hired to write them."

It's been a relatively good week for speeches and speechwriters!

On Sunday, Queen Elizabeth gave a widely appreciated televised speech calling on British citizens to show "the quiet, good-humored resolve" they've been known for going back to her first radio address, in 1940. On Tuesday, American Medical Association President Patrice Harris delivered a major speech through the National Press Club's livestream, on "COVID-19: The Importance of Science in an Era of Distrust and Disinformation." And perhaps most starkly highlighting the need for good judgment and the speechwriters who provide it was Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly's disastrous Monday morning speech to the crew of the U.S.S Theodore Roosevelt, that led to Modly's resignation the very next day.

So: Speeches are still taking place, and speechwriters still matter—as they always have and always will.

But conference speeches, the bread and butter of workaday speechwriters, are on ice for the moment. One Fortune 100 exec comms chief we know says his CEO's in-person speaking calendar is blank until July. Another says, “Technically an event is still on the calendar for June, but with a high probability of canceling. Then nothing until August … but even that’s iffy.” 

To the extent that we have the insight and the emotional wherewithal to peer beyond that, the question is: How many speeches will be taking place in the future? And what kinds of speeches will they be?

Surely some will be conventional. In whatever "80 percent economy" we find ourselves in this fall or next spring or next fall, conferences will surely convene again. Professional communities need to meet in person, and Zoom won't replace all business gatherings any more than it will replace all corner taverns.

But likely for the fore-guess-able future, a significant percentage of conferences will go by the boards because attending them won't be worth taking any lingering personal risk, or spending any remaining budget dollars. So exec comms folks are envisioning a rise in virtual conferences, and thinking about how to help their speakers stand out at those.

They'd better think very, very hard.

Because the kinds of speeches that most speakers have long given at in-person conferences, are not the kinds of speeches people will listen to in virtual conferences.

Because 95% of the speeches you happily endure in a ballroom, you wouldn't sit through in your bedroom. I've written and spoken for many years about why people attend speeches. It's not, primarily, to hear new ideas. It's mostly to hear familiar ideas, artfully articulated, in the bosom of the community the leader leads. And to experience, cheek to jowl with members of that community, what the leader sounds like, what the leader looks like, and what it feels like, to hear those words spoken out loud with everybody present.

And if the answer is (and it often is) "pleasant enough, but a little boring," that's no problem at all. In fact, it's a comfort, for the audience to experience that together. The speaker said the expected thing and everyone listened politely and clapped at the end. What could be more reassuring than that? (In fact, at a conference, almost anyshared experience is a good thing. Once, after truly terrible session at a speechwriting conference, I heard two audience members praising the speaker for having galvanized the crowd against his loathsome self!)

But when you're listening to a speech by yourself, its criteria for success is entirely different, and much more demanding. If you're watching a dull speech at home alone, you won't give it 30 seconds before you start realizing you have a half hour you didn't know you had, to do whatever you want! We're middle-aged people. We've heard it all before. We're not easily scintillated.

However rhetorically powerful, however intellectually informative and however emotionally charged, speeches are and always have been largely social phenomena that depend on the vibrations of people, gathered in a room. A tech guy I was talking with the other day is doing online conferences. "We're putting a lot of shit on the screen," to remind the audience that many others are watching the speech, that they are not alone with this talking head.

At last year's World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association, I delivered the closing keynote address, in which I quoted Australian speechwriter Lucinda Holdforth on the reason people attend speeches, "We come together to breathe in tandem, to experience our own responses and feelings alongside each other."

In a world where we don't want to breathe in tandem, speeches will be fewer. They'll need to be more purposeful, more novel, and probably more emotional. And if they're going to sing in the wire sufficiently to make us feel connected spiritually despite being distant physically, they'll have to be much, much better.

For some speechwriters (and some leaders) that order will be far too tall.

For others, it's the moment they've been waiting their whole careers for: Finally, the time to bring rhetorical and intellectual and emotional power to bear (not to mention blood, toil, tears and sweat) to unite human beings around better ideas.

It's the leaders and the speechwriters in the middle who I'm worried about—and the people the Professional Speechwriters Association will dedicate itself to serving in the very best way we know how—not just for the sake of their survival, but for the sake of society's, too. —DM

Tuesday, 8:29 p.m.

Enjoy that cigarette, John Prine. I'm gonna have a cocktail …

Tuesday, 3:20 p.m.

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly apparently agrees with my assessment of his shockingly asinine speech to the crew of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt (see below): Modly offered his resignation this afternoon. At this moment it's unclear whether Secretary of Defense Mark Esper will accept his resignation, according to Politico.

(Which puts me playfully in mind of—remember when Vice President Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face while hunting in Texas, and then said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him? And then his friend apologized to him, for causing such anguish by being shot by him in the face?

I remember Jon Stewart said something like, "At press time, it was not known whether Cheney had accepted the apology.")

Tuesday, 3:14 p.m.

Brittle.

If I had to mass-project my feelings to the feelings of everyone else at this moment in the coronavirus—and because I am a writer, that's exactly what I have to do—that's the word I'd use.

Brittle.

Tuesday, 10:25 a.m.

From this morning's Executive Communication Report: Coronavirus newsletter, which comes out in a half hour.

After a profane address Monday to the crew of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt in which he suggested their captain, who he ousted, may have been “naive and stupid” for circulating an email about a COVID-19 outbreak on his ship, the Acting Secretary of the Navy has apologized. "Let me be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naive nor stupid,” said Thomas Modly in a statement Monday night. “I think, and always believed him to be the opposite. We pick our carrier commanding officers with great care. Captain Crozier is smart and passionate. I believe, precisely because he is not naive and stupid, that he sent his alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship. I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused." Modly also apologized directly to Crozier for "any pain my remarks may have caused."

Speeches, no matter what the truth surrounding them, are supposed to "be clear" in the first place, their "choice of words" carefully made, so as not to cause "confusion."

Read the transcript; Modly's "address" was more a public outburst, and all my experience with military speechwriters and leadership communications makes this failure of emotional and rhetorical discipline astounding—and if you ask me, dismissible in and of itself.

Monday, 5:20 p.m.

Yesterday on CBS's Sunday Morning, the wonderful Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner suggested a can-do patriotic anthem for this time was "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again."

… but I think this one—Woody Guthrie's war version of his song, "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You," might be more appropriate yet. "We'll get back together again."

Monday, 1:47 p.m.

I just finally did the social math.

Remember how, before coronavirus, you would realize a friend or a family member or a colleague was having just the worst fucking day ever, and this was not the day to fuck with them?

Well now, everybody you deal with is that person.

Oh, and you're also having the worst day ever, too.

Every straw is everyone's last.

One more thing: You'll all be having a terrible day tomorrow, too—so do not pop off today, because there's absolutely no room to repair any damage you do.

Feelings: I'll stuff them, for as long as I have to. Like Gary Cooper. "That was an American," says Tony Soprano. "He wasn't in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do."

But when this is all over? Boy, am I gonna be mad.

Monday, 7:27 a.m.

Saturday was a legit happy day in this house. Pancakes and sausage for breakfast, and a huge box of pictures like these. ("Oh my GOD," a college friend said, "you're scrapbooking!")

We moved the cars out of the garage and played some ping pong.

We ordered Chinese and watched an episode of the Sopranos.

And there was the weekly Monopoly game, this time with Bill Withers.

But the key to the day was the pictures, which reminded us—and the kid needs reminding of this more than adults, I think—there is a big rich past, and there will be a big rich future.

And the day itself reminded us that there is still a present, full of horrors and fears and sadnesses, but also joys, not to be overlooked. In the middle of the afternoon I read aloud my favorite passage from my dad's book, A Child to Change Your Life:

It seems to me that I must tell my children that the happiness of human beings is too often measured or referred to in unrealistic lengths of time—in happy years, or a happy life. I want them to realize that life is not lived in lifetimes or even in seasons, but in sunny mornings and snowy afternoons, in picnics in the yard and on Tuesdays with the flu and in hours and minutes and in waiting for a child's fever to break and sitting quietly with your husband or wife on a Wednesday night or picking up her dress or his suit at the cleaner's. That if they can't find happiness here they won't find it next week or next month somewhere over the horizon, in the excitement of flying an airplane or climbing a mountain or accepting the honors of their fellow men or of kissing a strange new mouth.

I am going to tell any child of mine what I believe—that the clearest indication of a happy life are happy days and happy nights, that the clock, and not the calendar, will always tell her truthfully whether happiness is truly hers.

I didn't get through that without crying when I read it at Dad's funeral. And I didn't get through it without crying when I read it on Saturday afternoon.