Writing Boots

On the other side of the newspaper from the Sunday football games, I’ve been getting vaguely irritated for a couple months now by this ad where actor Matt Damon tries to convince us that we’re history’s lamest cowards if we don’t invest our money in cryptocurrency. Alternatively, if we do invest in cryptocurrency, we are like Sir Edmund Hillary, the Wright Brothers and the Apollo 11 astronauts! Have you seen this?

Finally, when I thought directly about the ad, I found that it and Damon had already been well and thoroughly roasted over it (though the commercial runs on, almost on a loop).

The essence of the beating Damon takes is: Who is this rich actor to tell you and me about any of the things he’s talking about: cryptocurrency, financial prudence or human courage? As far as we’re concerned, this guy has had it easy since we first met him in his twenties, all he’s done beyond starring in blockbuster films, is spout political attitudes so smug, he has managed to annoy just about everybody.

But then, who are any celebrity spokespeople to tell us about anything, really?

And then I struck the nerve of my ire: My late adman dad, who once hired a famous actor to help convince people that Firestone’s 721 tire was a safe, quality product. It was in the late 1970s, and Firestone had just recalled 14.5 million steel-belted radial tires.

They had a credibility problem, and Tom Murray, the creative director at their advertising firm, had a creativity solution: Jimmy Stewart, then an actor beloved and culturally trusted in ways that only perhaps a Tom Hanks could approach these days.

Except, Jimmy Stewart had never done a commercial before—had turned down all the cigarette ads and all the other shitty endorsements that people like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne had made part of their living on for years.

Maybe that’s one reason Stewart had such credibility; another was, surely, that he joined the army during WWII at the height of his acting career, and flew many missions over Germany as the pilot of a B-24 Liberator bomber.

I don’t know how my dad talked Stewart into coming to Akron, Ohio, and talking to the corporate managers and engineers and watching the tires be manufactured. But he did, and Stewart agreed to do the commercial.

Stewart also supervised the writing of the commercials, sharing with my dad a keen understanding of how his particular brand of credibility would best be use: Not to tell people about the science of tire manufacturing, or to discuss tire safety specifically. But to connect Firestone’s long track record with 20th century history and integrity itself. Here were the commercials they did.

Does it seem quaint to sell tires today based on a dead company founder’s supposed attitudes about quality in “nineteen six”? Yes, but that’s partly because we live in the United States of Alzheimer’s, and companies refuse to draw on their heritage, because their leaders don’t want to be accountable to old-fashioned values.

But in 1970, people who saw that commercial realized that the great Jimmy Stewart, who they knew or at least sensed hadn’t hawked anything in a 50-year-career including himself, was symbolically vouching for this product by vouching for the American institution that manufactured it, and its founder, somewhat magically, named Harvey. And people thought: That had to mean something.

Now, could Tom Hanks trade on his credibility to sell cryptocurrency? I think the point is, he wouldn’t—because he would understand (I think) why he’s liked and trusted: Mostly, because he doesn’t talk jive about things he doesn’t know a durn thing about.

Besides, he’s more into typewriters.

Eight hours for work, eight hours for play, eight hours for sleep—in free Americay! —Old labor song

Back in 2015 I wrote here that “the email auto-reply is a political act,” explaining that: “When it comes to … weekends or weeks away, each of us must cultivate his or her own sense of confidence—that we’re worth waiting a week for, that the work will be there when we return, that we deserve time away because we are not 24-hour, seven-day-a-week air traffic controllers or 911 operators.”

That was seven years ago, and pre-pandemic. After two consecutive years of being screen-faced round the clock—first in sheer panic, then operational necessity and finally bovine habit—at least one communication exec I know is establishing some serious email boundaries.

This isn’t an associate manager of community relations, either. This is a chief communication officer at a well-known institution, putting an auto-reply on his daily email that says:

I regularly check and reply to work emails between 8 AM and 6 PM Eastern time on weekdays. While I sometimes read incoming mail after hours and on weekends, I rarely reply during those times, in order to give myself and others a break. 

So right now my Inbox is paused. I’ll read your message and reply to it as needed during working hours.

In the event of a real emergency, please contact me by phone or text.

My favorite line is “to give myself and others a break.” Imagine how happy that made this person’s direct reports feel! And contemplate the example this sets, for so many others around the institution, including other top brass. If this place isn’t careful, it could become a sane place to work.

You could never get away with that, you say?

Why not? I ask.

The Great Resignation doesn’t have to be the whole story of the lingering aftermath of COVID. Because what good does it do, resigning from one mad organization just to join up with another? How about The Great Reassertion—claiming your right to work a sane schedule where you already work and have established your value, and daring someone, in this labor market, to make something of it.