Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

And so we beat on: me, Mitt Romney, our dads and my mom

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I'm having a lively private dialogue with a big-company speechwriter about, the quality of Mitt Romney's rhetoric. Essentially, he thinks it's passable, I think it's shit. He suspects that's because I'm a Democrat, I think it's because I'm a communication expert. And so on. The conversation is in good faith and is engerizing rather than energy-sapping so far, so I'm keeping it up.

But I had to send him a footnote:

A funny footnote to this whole discussion: My Republican dad was an adman—creative director at Campbell-Ewald, in Detroit. My Democrat mother was a writer—a novelist, but also a copywriter, working for my dad in the late sixties. George Romney was a friend of the agency’s president, and as a favor, the creatives worked on some speeches for him for his [1968] presidential campaign, and helped him with his delivery. Guess who my Republican dad tapped to help? My Democrat mom.

How did she like that? I asked him once (after she died, alas). “How do you think she liked it?”

She was a little too blunt with George, and they took her off the job ….

And here we are—the Republican pragmatist and Democrat idealist inside me, talking to you about a presidential candidate named Romney—44 years later.

… boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, etc.

My mother is still alive

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I had my late mom's old advertising portfolio out yesterday to check that Detroit police headline, and came across another ad she wrote on behalf of the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency, for Boeing Jetliners in 1964. The ad attempted to squash five myths about flying, so more people would do it. (And Boeing could make more planes.)

The myths included, "Only the rich fly," "Flying is complicated," "You can't take enough luggage," "Flying hurts your ears" and "It's hard to fly with kids."

Mom dispelled that last one by writing, "Kids fly very well—even the very first time they try it. Partly because airline hostesses are notorious push-overs for kids. Even the restless kind. Airline hostesses are such softies, in fact, they will usually get you on board first—just so you and the youngsters can all sit together."

In contrast to that rosy portrait was the copy for another police recruiting ad. Brace for a flood of 1967 attitudes and realities:

When Are There Ever Enough Big Men to Go Around?

It's a job too big for most men.

It's lonely. You pull one woman off the ledge of some hotel—only to have another call you Copper, Fuzz or Flatfoot.

It's dangerous. If somebody chooses to drive off in a stolen car at 110 miles an hour, that's the speed you chase it at.

It's cold and wet. Thieves and thugs and pushers don't stop thieving and thugging and pushing just because it's January.

It's depressing. For every person's life you save after a bad accident, you get to watch another ebb away because the ambulance got stuck in five o'clock traffic.

It's tedious. Giving people tickets for missing headlights and ducking their flak isn't the big party it's cracked up to be.

It's frustrating. You sweat to keep a paroled kid going straight, and he turns toes up in jail again, because the slum depresses him and he fights back by smashing in school windows with bricks.

It's a big job all right.

But for men big enough to fill that job, the returns are big, too.

There is the kick big men get out of the fraternity and friendship of other big men.

A cop never gets bored.

Nobody ever laid off a policeman because the economy got a little tight.

Finally, the bigger the job a man does, the bigger he feels at the end of the day. The prouder he walks. The taller he sits at the end of his table.

And that's what makes the loneliness and the danger and the inevitable sadness worth it.

If you feel there is a bigness in you, and if you feel you're how wasting it on a way of life that isn't worty of that bigness, stop in at your local police precinct and ask for more information about becoming a policeman.

We need you.

Detroiters not so big as you need you.

There are never enough big men to go around.

To this loving son's mind, that copy comes off as crass, presumptuous and flip—and simultaneously idealistic, direct and irresistible.

It makes me long for the more cohesive society that seemed to exist on very trembling eve of the 1967 riots that destroyed Detroit and exploded from depressing slums all over the country.

It gives me a tinge of shame—ad agency lady with fancy University of Michigan English degree writing to working class "big men" about how tall they sit at their dinner tables.

Ultimately, I guess it inspires me to write and speak in my own voice in my own time, in the secure knowledge that some of my readers and friends will find my ideas or attitudes wanting, or even laughable.

As my mother would say: "Fuck them if they can't take a joke."

I’m not sure about God, but I believe in Suzanne

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My wife is an atheist. I wish I had that kind of faith.

My mother was an atheist until she joined A.A. and took up with a mushy, new-agey God and called her former atheism—the belief she brought me up with—"a bunch of intellectual bullshit."

My dad was a quiet believer who didn't believe in talking about God with children much because, as he wrote his parenting book A Child to Change Your Life:

"I think if you try to paint God too vividly in the mind of a child you only confuse him and create irrelevant questions about whether He wears a hat or not.

"I think a child of mine will have a better understanding about God if I reverse the order in which religion is usually taught. Rather than begin with God and work down to people, I'm going to start with people and go the other way."

When Scout first asked me what a church was, I told her: "It's a place where people go to talk about their feelings."

But I do like church—and I will take Scout to church sometimes—because church is where you are supposed to think about real stuff, instead of Twitter, New Jersey housewives or Rod Blagojevich. And as long as the minister is also interested in talking about real stuff (and not just reading Bible passages and spouting platitudes), I figure that, especially for non-golfers, church is a smart place to spend a Sunday morning.

That's why I'm happy that my old friend Suzanne Ecklund is becoming a minister. Because Suzanne has a hard time talking for more than five minutes about anything that isn't real. And she talks really well.

Here's the opening of her first sermon, the Sunday before last:

In the early morning of April 18, 2008, the bed on which I was sleeping shook me awake.

Having never had the experience of being awoken in this way before, I crawled through the rafters of my brain searching for an explanation for this bizarre bed behavior.

My first thought? Demon possession.

I remember thinking, "The movies make this look so bad. I mean, Linda Blair didn't appear to be having a good time during her possession. But I feel great."

Then I thought, "No. This is not possible. You are imagining this. The bed is not shaking."

And then the bed would stop.

And then it would start again.

I went back to the possession thing. Again: pleasantly surprised at how good I felt in my demonic state.

And then, I had my a-ha moment.

Someone had broken in.

Someone had broken in. And instead of ransacking my apartment and robbing me, he or she had crawled underneath the bed and was lying down there shaking it.

Then I thought, "OK. That makes no sense. This is clearly Satan."

And then came my second a-ha moment.

"It's the CATS. My cats are BIG. I've got 40 lbs of cat. And they're running around or they're clawing the bottom of the bed and that's causing everything to shake."

But it wasn't the cats.

My next thought was that maybe I was hallucinating.

I volleyed these ideas back and forth until I'd exhausted myself saying, "OK. I can't figure this out. No one needs to know what happened here tonight. I'm going back to bed."

It wasn't until I turned on the news the next morning that I learned that Illinois had just had one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded in state history.

* * *

After this experience, I was amazed that not once in my confusion did I entertain the possibility that the earth was shaking below me. I was trapped inside this bubble of limited understanding of my own experiences—and I was unable to break out of it.

Now, this particular story goes further to illustrate the depths of my own personal flakiness than it does anything of spiritual value. But I share it because I think we can sometimes relate to faith from within a kind of bubble, too. …

Last week Suzanne moved from Chicago to Atlanta to attend seminary school. I think she's going to be pretty good at this, don't you? She's got me thinking about real stuff already.