Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Archives for August 2022

If you call children ‘kiddos’ instead of kids—is it because you like children more than other grownups do?

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My wife does the laundry, I do the dishes. My wife waters the flowers, I mow the lawn. My wife generally finds new Netflix shows for us to watch. And I generally decide which words and phrases we’re going to ban in this house.

We don’t go for euphemisms around here, and you’ll never hear us say under this roof that someone “passed.” It’s “died.” (When my daughter was about four, she said to me that our goldfish “passed away.” I said, “Honey, in this family, we don’t say ‘passed away.’ We say, ‘died.’” I realized she understood the concept the next morning as I lay on the couch. “What are you doing, Dad?” “I’m snoozing.” “Dad, in this house we don’t ‘snooze.’ We ‘sleep.’”)

We don’t say “bless you” when we sneeze, because it’s not the Bubonic Plague anymore and we don’t think words are for wasting. You sneezed. Let’s move on.

When we order food or booze in restaurants, we don’t say we’re going to “do the turkey club” or “do a merlot.” Why? Because it’s just unnecessarily precious, when the single-syllabic “have” works just as well. “Do” is short for “douchy,” we feel.

As I say, most of these preferences come from the linguistically sensitive ear of Writer Guy.

But there’s one other word you won’t hear out of our mouths, and this one’s on my wife: “kiddos.”

My wife is a school teacher, who is professionally attuned to the rhetoric surrounding children, most of which is bullshit. Every staff meeting of schoolteachers and administrators is a form of liar’s poker in which the winning hand is always, “It’s about the children.”

Delivered with approximately this unctuous expression:

Once you’ve claimed that moral ground, all other considerations—budget cost, logistical practicality, teachers’ mental health, intellectual integrity—are out the window. Because, after all, “It’s about the children.” Issue settled. No more need be said. It’s all over but the pouting.

And so my wife, who has taught many (many) thousands of children in her 25-year career on Chicago’s West Side, is always suspicious when anyone claims to love children more than she does. Or, more to the point, to “like” them more than she does.

And that’s her beef with “kiddo,” she says. The term is used by “people who think kids are some precious little things. They think it makes them seem like they like kids more than you.”

That’s it! Why else would you use such a term-o, if not to signal your special smarmy-cutesy-totes-adorbs-cuddly-wuddly wuv for the children you’re raising, the kindergarten class you teach, or for that matter, the entire Graduating Class of 2022.

Kids are not bunnies, folks. They are human beings—beautiful and lovable we hope, but also, self-centered, dangerous little fools, with the self-control and judgment of your average meth addict. As anyone who has had any prolonged exposure to any of them well knows. Being their parents, their teachers, even their aunts and their uncles in any kind of an authentic way means not thinking of them, and not pretending to others to think of them, as “kiddos.”

Just kids. Kids will do just fine.

(All this came up the other day when I told my wife that I saw someone on Facebook refer to a “doggo.” “Who said ‘doggo’?!” she demanded to know.)

MORE Weird Scenes Inside the Archives: ‘Stakeholder capitalism’ is not as new as you think

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Another serendipitous spelunking sortie into the cavernous archives of the 88-year-old magazine I publish, Vital Speeches of the Day—and another strangely echoey find.

Guess the year these sentiments were uttered by an investment banker named Dan Lufkin, at a meeting of fellow businesspeople:

… the generation now entering the corporate world will never swallow the line that earnings per share is the measure of all things good. Sweetening the stockholders equity is to them insufficient justification for corporate existence. Though the generation of jobs and wealth is still regarded by them as the major concern of business, a growing number of young managers feel acutely that the profit motive and social responsibility are often in conflict. They argue persuasively that moral neutrality is inevitably immoral, just as we have argued for years that profitability without growth is inevitably loss. The corporation, they say, cannot operate in an ethical vacuum, but most include social responsibility in its decision-making process. …

No corporation can measure results solely in terms of its own earnings. It will be held accountable for the larger implications of its business activities; its internal environment; its concern for employee welfare; its ecological relationship with communities in which its plants and offices are located; its responsiveness to the pressing needs of the nation; its contribution to the rebuilding of the human habitation; its willingness to help break down the social and economic barriers which still exclude large groups of Americans from full participation in the benefits of our economic system … and finally it will have to display forbearance and self-discipline in evaluating the fruits of its own technology so that socially and physically harmful products are not manufactured simply because they can be manufactured.

“Business as usual” is obsolete.

That rather premature articulation of stakeholder capitalism was delivered to the Connecticut Chapter of The New England Council, on September 22, 1970.

Of course, years between its delivery and The Business Roundtable’s redefined Purpose of a Corporation in 2019 saw, among other things: Alex P. Keaton, Gordon Gekko, Jack Welch, Chainsaw Al Dunlap and Kenneth Lay. The advent of downsizing, rightsizing and mass layoffs. Tech and banking bubbles that burst (all at once and nothing first). And a dozen other corporate programs that were going to change everything, from diversity to empowerment to Total Quality Management to Lean Management—now to stakeholder capitalism!

I suppose one may greet such a discovery with a weary French sigh: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

But we may also greet it with a gospel number: “Been runnin’ for Jesus a long time (I’m not tired yet).”

And perhaps even more usefully, CEOs’ speechwriters could quote such speeches, in new talks about stakeholder capitalism.

This is not a new idea. Long ago, many civic-minded, rock-ribbed Republican business leaders believed they had the unique ability and a fundamental responsibility to consider the total impact of the their organizations, in the societies where they operated. Consider this speech, given more than half a century ago by a rock-ribbed Republican investment banker …

As I always say about history: If you’re bound to repeat it, join it!

Brittney Griner, Francis Gary Powers, and me: If you can’t get sympathy from your fellow Americans, what are fellow Americans good for?

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The WNBA basketball player Brittney Griner has appealed her nine-year sentence in a Russian workhouse, for bringing marijuana into that country last February.

I allowed myself to get into a disgusting Facebook fight not long ago, over whether Griner should expect her government to intervene on her behalf. (A Vietnam veterans group thought Griner should have to apologize to them before she could come home because she once asked that the National Anthem not be—oh, never fucking mind.)

Halfway into this dumb donnybrook, I asked myself why I had succumbed.

  1. My wife had COVID, so our newly emptied nest was now quarantined, too. (Half the reason we’re divided in this country is for our amusement.)
  2. I once smuggled drugs across the border of a hostile superpower, too.

Almost 20 years ago, I took a three-week train-and-plane sortie across China with a big group led by a Chinese-speaking family member. One of the great adventures of a life full of them.

A relatively minor plot twist came when a couple of us decided to go for the gusto in life, and score some marijuana in the southern Chinese town of Dali. We’d been told (I think it was even in a guidebook) that it was customary and tacitly okay to get a bag—from adorable, elderly, nuns in blue dresses, if you can believe it. We located such a nun, and she offered us a choice—seeds, or no seeds. On a budget, we chose, “seeds.” The wee woman presented us with a large bag, at least a quarter ounce, of what turned out to be some of the most ineffective reefer any of us had ever smoked. The buzz was weak and somehow moody, too.

Disgusted, we ditched the stuff after one night’s toking, went back to drinking wine. A few days later, it was time to fly to Kunming for a day or two, then on to Hong Kong, and home. That morning at the hotel, I went to dispose of the bag of grass. But I couldn’t find it anywhere! My desperate hands tore my bag apart, checked all the pockets, everything. I can’t remember what I concluded must have happened to it—or whether I told my mates about the potential trouble—but I do remember being nervous, going through airport security for the flight to Kunming.

No problem there—and I think I’d forgotten about the situation by the time we checked into the airport in Hong Kong a few days later, to connect through L.A. and back home to Chicago. In fact, I didn’t think about that missing reefer again until three weeks after I was home, when I casually opened my camera case—and there that quarter ounce was! I shuddered, of course.

What a fucking idiot! I had a two-year-old daughter at the time! What if I’d have been jailed in China for her entire childhood!

Giving that seedy stuff one more college try just to calm down, I wondered what the U.S. Embassy in China would have done for me, if anything, had I been jailed for my stupidity. I wondered what the embassy should do for me. Honestly, I didn’t really know. All I knew is that I hoped they would try to get me out of there, at least to do my jail time Stateside (so my daughter could visit me in prison?). I guess all I would have expected is that any fellow American who learned about my case would sympathize (after however much head-shaking), and want me to come home.

Brittney Griner makes a similar claim, about careless packing. Though I might be more inclined to believe her than you are, I don’t even care if she’s telling the truth. I know this woman does not deserve to spend nine years in a fucking Russian workhouse for this entirely harmless, victimless “crime” she wittingly or unwittingly, carelessly or stupidly committed. And I know anyone whose instinct is to sit with a drink at their elbow, clucking about how Briner should take responsibility for her “choices,” can go to hell—if their lonely, bitter, shitty lack of empathy for their fellow human beings isn’t already hell enough.

Unless it’s in our political best interest, we don’t even do much for our military prisoners of war in this country. I once spent a weekend with the son of Francis Gary Powers, exploring the idea of writing a book about the U-2 spy plane pilot who was shot down over Russia in 1960 and remained a prisoner there for a year and a half—only to return to a hostile CIA grilling whose transcript I acquired through a FOIA request. An astonished, wounded Powers was hectored and hounded about, among other things, why he didn’t take a “suicide pill,” as he parachuted to earth, to kill himself before the Soviets could interview him. I wound up scrapping the idea of doing any kind of story about Powers, because the whole incident was just so depressing.

This Brittney Griner story is also depressing. Bad luck, bad timing, bad news, bad options. But it would be less so, if her fellow American citizens could put themselves in Griner’s unfortunate place and, rather than comb her life history looking for critical things she has said about her country (they could have found hundreds of such things that I’ve said before and after my non-arrest in China). How about you just quietly hope the State Department can work out a deal for her return?

But nobody just quietly does anything in this country anymore, even when they know sensitive negotiations are underway. Especially when they are underway! Folks want to get involved in the talks! And so we have lots of amateur Henry Kissingers debating the merits of a proposed prisoner swap, and lots more unhelpful gassing on by Fisher-Price Political Ethicists about whether we should be doing any business at all with the current Russian regime.

But as a feller who might still be senselessly, uselessly, idiotically sitting in a Chinese jail right now, I want to see our Brittney Griner come home. And I think every decent American who has ever gotten away with doing something super dumb—or has the imagination to see how she or he could—should want her to come home, too.