Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

How communication teams can make an effort to understand … one another

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Yesterday I had the best time, talking with about 30 communication pros at the software firm Splunk, about what people like us can bring to bear in our work relationships, in our communities, in our troubled country. It is always freshly moving to share these ideas with other writers, and thrilling to hope that my being there is helping them remember the highest purposes of their work—as individuals, and as a group.

I’ve had a number of these conversations this summer, and I expect to be having more of them in the foreseeable future, as leaders of communication teams seek to rally their folks—whether for a return to the office, a new post-COVID refresh or a whole rethinking of the communication mission.

Here’s the discussion guide that I provide. If you think your team could benefit from a shared reading, and a discussion like this, I’ll make the time to do it. And if past is prologue, I’ll enjoy every minute. Email Benjamine Knight about honorarium and availability: psacoo@vsotd.com.

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From: David Murray

To: Team Leader

Re. How Can You Use An Effort to Understand to Find a Shared Communication Philosophy?

I wrote my book based on a life surrounded by professional communicators. 

How can your team draw on all that wisdom—and combine it with their own collected wisdom—to create a shared understanding, about what communication is, what it isn’t, how it works and what it might achieve?

You’ll know that much better than I. After reading the book with your team in mind, you should ask me any question you think we ought to discuss, up to and including any points of contention! I do not consider my book gospel—especially in a group of thoughtful communicators in their own right.

So the questions I put down here are meant only to be a loose guide to the sort of communication we mighthave. You and your team should absolutely determine the conversation we will have. The more the questions come from you and your people and the fewer from my own fevered brain, the better the conversation will be.

The most obviously relevant sections to your folks—and the sections from which you might select all or some essays to assign—are sections Two and Three, which focus specifically on leadership communication.

Possible questions:

1. Authenticity and storytelling are sacred concepts in corporate communications these days. You claim corporate communicators have sometimes misused them. Can we talk about that?

2. At one point on the book, you question the concept of “strategic communication,” and you question whether communication can lead to measurable results. What can you possibly mean by that?

3. In an essay on internal communication, you take us back to a 19th century furniture shop, and suggest that we should help our employees understand our business and marketplace, and our leadership, the way those ancient workers knew theirs. Do you think modern employees truly want that kind of understanding, even if we could manage to give it to them?

4. You question the assumption that what audiences of our communication are mostly concerned with is, “What’s in It for Me.” Well, what are they mostly concerned with?

5. At one point in the book, you say that a person (or a company) communicates not, primarily, by words, but by consistent actions and consistent inactions. Another section is titled, “Communication Is Action!” Let’s talk about the relationship between words and deeds, in leadership communication.

6. In the media interviews about the book, you’ve talked about this concept of “imaginative listening.” Your book is called An Effort to Understand. Are you trying to tell us we don’t listen to each other carefully enough? Because we sure feel like we do.

7. In the introduction you ask your readers to join you on a “near-spiritual” movement in communication in our society. What is the highest purpose of communication, and what could happen if we all came to share it? 

Jessie Owens, “Raydolph” Hitler and Critical Race Theory: The case of the hysterical historian

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Goddamn if I didn’t get into it last week on Facebook about Critical Race Theory with Hal Gordon, the former Reagan White House speechwriter and also speechwriter to General Colin Powell. I’ve been trying to avoid CRT altogether, just as I managed to not bore you by adding my two cents about “cancel culture” or the 1619 Project. I like to bore my readers on my terms, not on Tucker Carlson’s.

But I’ve known Hal for 30 years. He attended the first conference I ever put on. I’ve put him on stage to talk at many speechwriting conferences over that time. And what he has always talked about is history. One of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, Hal can recite long passages from history’s speeches from memory. In terms of raw historical knowledge, he’s spilled more on his tie than I ever drank.

Hal is a little too much of a Great Man Theory guy for the taste I’ve developed as a Studs Terkel acolyte, and a lot more concerned about Marxism than me and he does love the British royalty. Still, when it comes to American history and rhetoric, Hal is pretty compelling, at the lectern or in print.

So when he became increasingly hysterical about the 1619 Project and then Critical Race Theory over the last couple of months, I found it particularly troubling. In a typical post last week, he said that public school teachers “are brainwashing children to become the Red Guards of today’s Cultural Revolution.” And when I questioned that, he replied, “I’m convinced that if present trends continue, five years from now we will be living in the People’s State of America. The government, the academy, the media, the corporations, the military and even the churches have all been infected with the Critical Race Theory virus. It’s the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

As my teenager would say: Wait, what?

Does Hal Gordon really equate Mao Zedong’s mad domination of China with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ influence on America?

Or is he just fighting fire with foaming at the mouth?

Depending on the answer, a guy known for historical perspective has either lost his, or is willfully throwing it away.

In either case—seems like a bad sign!

Because of course a common historical perspective is what we desperately need in America—and it’s what we’re all fighting about—so we can figure out what in hell to teach our kids. And even in the most constructive spirit, it’s a hard thing to do, to tell a nation’s children a fair version of centuries of truth, in blood and water and metal and flesh. Any nation’s children, let alone the rescue mutts that make up America’s children.

So how do you go about doing it?

I’ve been struggling with this one since my own daughter Scout was in first grade, 11 years ago. For Black History Month, she was assigned a profile of Jesse Owens. It was supposed to be a family project. So her mother and I taught her about Owens’ victory at the 1936 Olympics, at the famous displeasure of the man Scout kept referring to as “Rayolph Hitler.” We took her to Owens’ grave, on the South Side of Chicago. And over lunch at Army & Lou’s Soul Food restaurant, we tested her knowledge. Her take on white supremacy was totes adorbs. Her Black teacher’s aid cried at the video we made.

I was frustrated at the prospect of starting Scout’s education with a tidy, inspirational American myth and then gradually adding further complexities and come-downs, as she got older. At the time, I wrote here on Writing Boots: “I reckon we’ll wait until next Black History Month to tell Scout that Owens actually felt more egregiously snubbed by President Roosevelt, who ‘didn’t even send me a telegram.’ Third grade? That’ll be the time we talk about how Owens was unfairly stripped of his amateur status and had to scrape together a living hustling for black exploitation films, racing against horses and running from IRS agents.” Is that what history is going to continue to be in this country? Happy myth, spoiled?

So when Hal Gordon complained that history teaching is becoming political, that seemed like the least of the problems, and the most obvious:

Wasn’t teaching political, I wrote, when I grew up, “learning how George Washington could not tell a lie. It seemed like we spent three years on Helen Keller and four minutes on Harriet Tubman, let alone the Tulsa massacre, etc, etc. I agree that the re-‘centering’ of history teaching in America that the 1619 Project insists on is a difficult problem, intellectually and even logistically. I also agree that America, as much as it is an ‘idea,’ is also a ‘story.’ And if this particular nation can’t agree on a common narrative (or at least acknowledge the truth of parallel narratives), then it strains to find a common civic ideal to hold it together. I agree these are things to be concerned about. But WORKED ON, not screamed at or wished away in hopes we can go back the that old saw about the cherry tree. Come on, man. Dig deep.”

And those were going to be the last words of this post. Until, after a pause in our conversation, Hal wrote back: “I have been giving some sober thought to what you said about making a good-faith effort to teach American history in a way that gives young people ‘a properly profound sense of the complexity of this nation’s story.’ I think that that is a noble sentiment—one with which I can agree. In fact, I think I already have. When I read what you said, I found myself thinking about a post that I wrote exactly one year ago about a way to resolve the controversy over the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.”

In this post, Hal brings his old scholarly rigor to bear to come up with “Frederick Douglass’s Solution to the Emancipation Memorial Controversy.” Read it for yourself, but it strikes me as an absolutely perfect example of the kind of honest history revision—and narrative integration—that a thousand historians of all backgrounds and perspectives need to set about doing, the best way they know how.

And I told Hal so.

And Hal replied, “You and I certainly do agree that a society like ours needs a shared sense of history. I think that a shared sense of history is one of the few things that holds us together as a nation. If you think about it, we have no monarchy, no national church, and no common racial or ethnic identity. It is our commitment to our shared ideals and our common experience that makes us one. As I said in my post, what thrilled me about the proposals to modify the Emancipation Memorial is that if implemented, these proposals would give us a memorial that would go a long way towards ‘telling the whole truth’ and would be one in which all Americans could take pride. Surely that would be a helpful step in bringing us together.”

There is much for the helpful to do, as long as helpful, we are willing to consistently be.

“A very eventful night,” indeed: A regular jamoke’s view of Disco Demolition Night, 42 years ago tonight

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YouTube, if we have the patience, lets us experience some televised historical events not as they’ve been packaged for us in two-minute retrospectives, but as they went down in real time. It’s often disorienting. A bulletin interrupts a soap opera to announce a shooting involving the presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas—and then goes back to the soap opera! After a different assassination attempt—on Ronald Reagan, in 1981—news anchors spend a couple hours passing on the false news that Reagan has not been hit.

But let’s get to the important stuff.

The moment I learned about the Information Superhighway—the popular name for the Internet in the early 1990s—the first use I could think of was, Maybe this will let me watch Super Bowl III in its entirety, with commercials and everything. It was another 20 years before I did see that on YouTube, and the greatest upset in football history was astounding in its play-by-play dreariness. Three hours, and a cloud of dust. By the tone of the announcers and the body language of the players, you’d have thought it was just another football game.

More exciting to watch in real-time retrospect is the famous, ignominious, absurd travesty known to all Chicago baseball fans as Disco Demolition Night. It also begins like any other baseball game, but starts getting weird really soon.

As the Thursday, July 12, 1979 Channel 44 WSNS TV broadcast opens, White Sox color analyst Jimmy Piersall gets confused while reading the starting lineup for the Tigers, then complains, “Between the fireworks, the music, the disco music, the burning [inaudible] you know, you’re lucky you don’t go nuts here. You know, I wanna tell you, there’s a big chance of going nuts, how can you even read the lineup when you can’t even think? Right now there’s 30,000 kids and they got dirty signs all over this park. I wanna tell ya. Unbelievable! … But let’s get back to the lineup. Whitaker to bat second and be at second base, Kemp will be in left …”

Piersall goes to commercial, and urges viewers to rejoin him at Comiskey Park, “where the fans will be going wild all night.”

This is slated to be the first game of a twi-night doubleheader that would come to be known in Chicago as “Disco Demolition Night,” because of a between-game promotion that went all the way bad. There’s a lot of history on that, which I won’t review here. I’m sitting here drinking glasses of vodka lemonade, just trying to enjoy the ballgame on TV, with the frame of reference of a 1979 52-year-old South Sider born in 1927 who doesn’t have any particular beef against disco music, except that it sounds to me just like rock, which I can’t stand either. What was the matter with Perry Como?

I’m getting the sense sense that it could be an odd night: Piersall’s play-by-play partner Harry Caray just came on and described an usher confiscating a homemade banner that said, “Disco Sucks.” But I’m mostly interested in the ballgame, even though both teams are mired in fifth place in their divisions and the White Sox are playing so badly even their uniforms are slouching. Go Sox.

A streamer lands in the outfield in the top of the second inning, and has to be removed.

Not long after this, Caray says, “Long, hot … I think it’s going to be a very eventful night.”

A little later, he talks about the radio station that’s putting on Disco Demolition Night, which let teenagers in for half price—(98 cents!)—and invited them to bring disco records to be blown up on the field between games. “I never heard of this station,” Carey says. “but my respect and regard for them is soaring to new heights. They filled the ballpark!”

“What kind of music do they play?” Piersall asks.

“Rock ‘n roll.”

Time is called to remove another streamer from left field. We’re in the bottom of the second now. Tigers lead 2-1.

Another delay, as streamers are coming out of centerfield seats now. What’s the matter with these jagoffs?

Piersall, a former player who suffered from major mental illness and wrote a book about it, usually has Caray on edge. Caray sounds relaxed on this night, maybe because it’s starting to seem crazy enough to make Piersall appear sensible in the context, even useful.

The crowd is chanting, “Disco sucks.” We’re in the third.

Caray: “As I understand this promotion, this Steve Dahl—or Doll—was a disc jockey on a station here that played rock ‘n roll, and they switched to disco music—there’s a pitch smashed, one hop—right at Bannister, he better hurry, he can’t. … Well anyway, this Steve Dahl, because the station changed their format to disco, was fired. So as I hear it, he got a new job on this WNUP, The Loop. And so he’s hated disco music ever since, cuz it cost him a job. There’s a line drive, may drive in both runs … Boy, we’re gonna have a full house here. And what an outstanding promotion by this rock and roll station. You know other teenage nights, they’d have dancing out in center field, and hardly anybody out there. But tonight, they filled this ballpark.”

Jesus Christ, can we get back to the game? Yeah, the Tigers lead 3-1.

Caray notes the crowd now looks like it’s up to 40,000.

Piersall and Caray leave the TV booth to announce the middle three innings on radio. Lorn Brown comes on as the TV announcer in the fourth. Brown seems more focused on the baseball, and the White Sox seem to respond, with “an easy 1, 2, 3 inning” in the top of the fourth.

“Place really abuzz tonight, on anti-Disco Demolition Night,” Brown says in the bottom of the fourth, observing that the center field seats seem full.

And then Brown engages in a little casual, consensual, public sexual harassment.

Lots of stuff is raining down on the field, including some music records, presumably of the disco persuasion. I don’t know who’s doing color commentary with Lorn Brown, but he just admonished the teenagers to wait until game’s end for their antics, sternly adding the old show business maxim, “Where there’s one clown, there’s always another.”

Tigers’ base hit, a run scores, Tigers lead 4-1 in the top of the sixth. Sox right-hander Ed Farmer is coming on, in relief.

Now the Comiskey PA announcer comes in, on behalf of the Chicago White Sox: “Please don’t destroy the fun of the evening for people, or cause injury, and get yourself arrested and taken out of the park. Please don’t do that. Thank you.”

Somebody pass me a Falstaff.

Carey and Piersall are back for the seventh.

Caray: “I can’t get over how jammed these aisles are. Must be the biggest crowd of the season! … Boy it’s going to be a wild scene in the centerfield bleachers.”

Now in the top of the eighth, the crowd is now in a constant, senseless roar. “Well there are a lot of guys stoned out here tonight,” Caray says. “I don’t know if it’s the beer or what they’re doing.”

A Tigers bullpen catcher just almost got hit by a firecracker, and is refusing to catch the relievers. “It ceases to be funny when someone might get hurt,” Piersall says, severely. Caray says he’s worried about what might happen between games, with nothing else happening on the field. “But they don’t hear us, and they’re in another world,” Piersall says. I can’t tell if he’s mad, or scared. He might not know the difference either. That book he wrote? It was called, Fear Strikes Out.

Still down 4-1, now the Sox have two guys on with two outs in the bottom of the eighth, and the Tigers bring in a reliever, Aurelio Lopez. Lamar Johnson is up, a big slugger who could tie up the game with one swing. Nope, a chopper to short, easy force at second, and we go to the ninth.

“There’ll be about a half hour between games,” Caray says, ominously.

One out, bottom of the ninth. Two out. “Saturday night will be Irish night,” Caray points out. Then, White Sox third-baseman Jim Morrison strikes out to end the ball game.

Steve Dahl comes out and tells the crowd they’ve taken all the records donated and they’ve put them in a box, “And we’re going to blow them up, real good! … It’s because of you this is happening tonight, not because of us. We’re merely a vehicle for your thoughts. Disco sucks! Disco sucks! Disco sucks!”

The box is green, and looks about the size of a dumpster.

After the explosion, we’re looking at scores from around the majors and everything seems all right. Music playing, Do you think I’m disco, am I superficial? A White Sox pitcher is warming up for game two, seemingly oblivious to fans in the outfield. When fans storm the infield, his obliviousness disappears, shortly before he does.

“One of the saddest scenes I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Jimmy Piersall, adding that he hopes the fans don’t “demolish the field,” because “we’re still in the race.”

There’s talk of the White Sox needing to forfeit the game. (Which they eventually would be forced to do.)

Piersall becomes philosophical. “You know what’s amazing, we have the greatest country in the world. We have become followers. So many people, insecure, don’t know what to do with themselves, don’t know how to have a good time, and they follow someone who’s a jerk.”

Piersall and Bill Gleason are trying to recap the game over this scene.

“RIOT AT SOX PARK” is the title of the local ABC affiliate Channel 7 report.

I don’t think they’re playing the second game.

“All right that’s it,” Caray says. “That just about wraps it up, now with Jimmy Piersall, Harry Carey, wishing you all a very pleasant good evening, from Comiskey Park, where an unannounced, very large total of baseball fans saw the White Sox drop the first game of the doubleheader to a very good-looking Detroit Tiger team under Sparky Anderson, by the score of 4-1, and where they had the second game called … So long, everybody!”