The Murrmudgeon: If I Were Dead, I’d Be Rolling Over in My Grave

People say the reason people have to die is so we will appreciate life. Whereas, I think it’s just to prevent overcrowding.

One reason I look forward to dying, when I do, is the relentless repetitiveness of it all. “God,” a 50-year-old friend told me once upon hearing one more goddamned piece of news that sounded like so many other pieces of news, “I am so sick of this world!” It was the most sincere-sounding sentence I’ve ever heard.

I feel that way sometimes when I see communication experts in freshly pleated pants hawking bright new solutions to ancient problems like inattentive bosses, meddling bureaucrats and unpersuadable audiences.

Not even counting the world-weary wisdom I received from my Mad Men-era advertising-writer parents, I have watched the communication game professionally since nineteen hundred and ninety-two. That’s when I got my first job out of college, working for Ragan Communications’ founder Larry Ragan. The first month I was there, I read every back issue of his old newsletter, The Ragan Report. The second month I was there, I read every back issue of a predecessor publication, called Reporting magazine—the trade publication of the International Council of Industrial Editors.

I can tell you that ever since communicators were called “industrial editors,” they have lamented that their bosses won’t listen, that their colleagues all think they can write as well as they do, and that nobody fuckin’ reads anything anymore. And every one of those musty decades, along came a hundred outside observers who promised, for a modest fee, to resolve these issues, with a technique or a technology, a process or a program.

But H.L. Mencken wrote this, sometime in the 1920s, about people who promised to tackle what was then called “the drink problem”:

“Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. … These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world … It is the settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass. … But the fact remains that not a single and comprehensive scheme has ever come …. All such schemes come from idiots or from sharpers disguised as idiots to win public confidence. The whole discussion is based on assumptions that even the most casual reflection must reject as empty balderdash.”

I’m old enough to know who H.L. Mencken is, which means I might as well be long dead, too. And when some twerp arrives with a polished butter knife and proposes to cut a Gordian knot I’ve wrestled with my whole career, I sometimes wish I were.