Writing Boots

Friday Happy Hour Video (I'm sure I don't have to spell out the metaphor)

Speechwriter, no one said you should write ONLY for the ear

I've often quoted H.L. Mencken's 1921 assessment of the prose of President Warren G. Harding:

He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.

It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

But I guess I'd never seen the whole piece from which it came, which is actually a still-bracing takedown of Harding's speeches—and of speeches in general.

Mencken, who despite his resemblance to the Our Gang character Alfalfa, was one of the very most influential American writers of his time, explains Harding's incompetence as a writer by saying he writes like a—well, like a speechwriter.

When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.

Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. As I say, they can’t understand many words of more than two syllables, but that is not saying that they do not esteem such words. On the contrary, they like them and demand them. The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them. They like phrases which thunder like salvos of artillery. Let that thunder sound, and they take all the rest on trust. If a sentence begins furiously and then peters out into fatuity, they are still satisfied. If a phrase has a punch in it, they do not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word slips off the tongue like a ship going down the ways, they are content and applaud it and wait for the next.

A stump speech set in cold type "maketh the judicious grieve," Mencken writes (13 years before the launch of Vital Speeches of the Day, which went on to set thousands of speeches in cold type). "But roared from an actual stump, with arms flying and eyes flashing and the old flag overhead, it is certainly and brilliantly effective. Read the inaugural address, and it will gag you. But hear it recited through a sound magnifier, with grand gestures to ram home its periods, and you will begin to understand it."

Now Mencken takes a single sentence from Harding's inaugural address, and workshops it:

I exhume a sentence from the latter half of the eminent orator’s discourse: “I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” I assume that you have read it. I also assume that you set it down as idiotic—a series of words without sense. You are quite right; it is. But now imagine it intoned as it were designed to be intoned. Imagine the slow tempo of a public speech. Imagine the stately unrolling of the first clause, the delicate pause upon the word then—and then the loud discharge of the phrase in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, each with its attendant glare and roll of the eyes, each with a sublime heave, each with its gesture of a blacksmith bringing down his sledge upon an egg—imagine all this, and then ask yourself where you have got. You have got, in brief, to a point where you don’t know what it is all about. You hear and applaud the phrases, but their connection has already escaped you. And so, when in violation of all sequence and logic, the final phrase, our tasks will be solved, assaults you, you do not notice its disharmony—all you notice is that, if this or that, already forgotten, is done, “our tasks will be solved.” Whereupon, glad of the assurance and thrilled by the vast gestures that drive it home, you give a cheer.

Now, I have a fundamental quarrel with Mencken here. Now less than ever is a speech—especially a stump speech—the right medium to introduce wholly "new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention," as Mencken puts it. That's for the op-ed, the white paper, the essay in the Atlantic Monthly—not the speech, as I argue in my own stump speech, on how speeches and speechwriting are essentially social and emotional devices.

And of course we all believe that FDR, JFK, LBJ, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and—well certainly, President Trump—have weaned us off of Harding's sonorous speaking style. (Though ironically Trump at times reverts to it, in teleprompter speeches in which he occasionally utters Harding-esque lines like, "freedom unifies the soul.")

Still, Mencken has a hundred-year-old point that still holds true for speechwriters:

It is not enough to tickle the ear and warm the heart; your words should also strike the eye. And if a speech does not quite stimulate the intellect of the audience, it should not insult it, either.

In short, write to the educated reader in jail rather than the stoneheads around a stand. 

***

Postscript: A wise speechwriter adds, "Can't it be, 'Write to the educated reader in jail AND the stoneheads around a stand'?"

You tell me:

Can it?

Our world "shook a little bit this week": Inside the Founders Meeting of the Executive Communication Council

I expected the Founders Meeting of the Executive Communication Council, which began two weeks ago today at the Hermosa Inn, in Phoenix, Ariz., to be a momentous gathering.

I didn't expect it to be as emotional as it was, for me. Though maybe I should have.

I've donated much of my heart's blood over the years to the rather esoteric field of leadership communication. I and my team have spent the last year trying to identify the organizations and practitioners who do exec comms best and care about it most. And now those people had finally gathered for three days of candid, tough-minded, good-humored and high-reaching talking and deep listening.

At least, that's what we hoped would happen.

Phones off, brains on, in a cozy room with a fire in the fireplace, exec comms chiefs from member organizations Verizon, UPS, United Technologies Corporation, Target, Splunk, Marathon Petroleum, Cox Automotive, AARP—as well as a special guest from Williams College—shared everything: Their personal journeys to the top of this field, the things they do that set them apart, the problems they have that hold them back, and the biggest dreams they have for their organizations and themselves.

The meeting was strictly off-the-record, so I can't tell you what was said at this table.

I think I can say:

The Executive Communication Council is an intense group. A keynote presentation by Laura Rittenhouse, who analyzes executive communications and correlates CEO candor to shareholder value, didn't make the first minute before the questions started coming. A video conference call on the new Purpose of a Corporation with The Business Roundtable's comms chief Rayna Farrell had a similar result. You don't present to the Executive Communication Council—you converse with them.

These are ambitious people. As our charter will reveal when we release it later this year, some of the ECC's goals are humble: to help serious exec comms pros help one another get better, to study trends in exec comms, and to make an amorphous and sometimes career-limiting field into a defined and respected discipline. But as a meeting-ending planning session showed us, these elite executive communication practitioners want to do far more than swap best practices and build their networks: They want to use their work to make their organizations more human—and thus more responsible to the needs of humanity. And they want to use the platform and activities of the ECC to inspire all organizations to move in this direction.

It's a warm and friendly group. There was a lot of laughing—belly laughing, the kind you can only do with people who know exactly what you're talking about. There were open expressions of admiration and appreciation for the exceptional work these organizations are already doing. There was deep listening and real concentration on helping one another solve some of the most nettlesome problems in this problematic business. And there were generous offers of hours and resources from members, who realize this is not our group, but theirs.

"I've just had a really good couple of days," said one Founding Member at the end, "and I like you all very much."

Perhaps it was those plain words that brought some tears to my eyes—and made me know for sure that this group (along with ECC member McDonald's, which was not represented at the meeting but remains committed to the group) would certainly meet again, likely with a few more member organizations.

And again and again and again, to make the work of leadership communication more meaningful for the people who practice it, more strategic for the clients who pay for it and more responsible to the stakeholders and society who receive it.

"The world of executive communication," said one Founding Member as we gathered our notes to adjourn, "shook a little bit this week."

Roll down your sleeves, Steve Kornacki, I just asked you whether you're having the roast beef or the turkey

One thing we have a surplus of in this country is poets, accountants, roofers, bailiffs, baristas, graphic designers and dog groomers with supreme self confidence in declaring exactly which Democratic presidential candidate totally is and which absolutely isn't able to beat Trump. (And whether or not Trump will or will not be re-elected.) [And whether the military will take his side when he tries to stay for a third term.]

This self-belief is pretty impressive, for people who never saw Trump's election coming in the first place, for people who never could have predicted Obama's election either, for people who were gobsmacked when Bush beat Kerry (and who never answered the question, What's the Matter With Kansas?), and for people who never knew a goddamn thing about electoral politics in the first place.

Presidential historian Rick Perlstein, a Facebook friend, has spent his entire career writing about late-20th century politics—most notably Nixonland, Reaganland and The Invisible Bridge. Last week he wrote:

My mental response to every discussion about election prognostication, after studying the history of presidential elections professionally for twenty-three years is that they are almost uniformly absurd. The majority of the elections I've studied (both primaries and general elections) embarrassed prognosticators in ways that were virtually inconceivable before they happened. Here's Ted Koppel the night after the 1980 election: " what seemed too close to call forty-eight hours ago now seems to have been inevitable all along.” I could provide a dozen examples like that ... Yes, there are always "reasons"; but ones that only become apparent afterward. Election prognostication is so much sound and fury signifying not nearly nearly nearly as much as people want to believe it does. I think it's mostly a psychological thing.

A lot of people think President Trump has dementia. You know who has dementia? Motherfuckers who can't remember all the dead-wrong guesses they have made aloud, while boring the red blood cells out of everyone at the drinking table.

I realize we're all beyond cranked-up over this election. Most of us are afraid of what will happen if Trump is reelected (or even if he isn't). 

But by responding to that fear by behaving like blustering know-it-alls, supposedly evolved men and women are behaving like stereotypical men.

And you know who stereotypical men are voting for.

Monday Morning Video: The new "stand-up philosopher"

A pitch to contribute to the Vital Speeches website began, "I'm a passionate content creator ..." and I thought of this:

Postscript: My belated attempt to introduce Muhammad Ali to Iowa

I'd like to close out this fistic week with a little story to demonstrate my love of Muhammad Ali to those who, like me, have been troubled to see his holy name in the same headline with that of the American president.

Ali died on June 3, 2016. That was a Friday night, and most of us woke up to the news on Saturday morning. My wife and I were in Des Moines, Iowa, where I was running in that city's famous Dam to Dam half-marathon. The first part of the race is run through farm fields outside the city, and as I ran with Ali on my heart, I thought of the scenes in the great documentary When We Were Kings, showing Ali running in fields outside Kinshasa, Zaire, training for his 1974 bout with George Foreman.

The handsome, charming, black-proud Ali was beloved in Africa, and as he ran, people ran with him, and on the side of the road children shouted, "Ali, bomaye!" (Ali, kill him!)

As I ran those first miles in Des Moines, "Ali bomaye" became my mantra—"Ali" breathing in, "bomaye" breathing out.

Then I got an idea. 

What if I started yelling it?

Maybe others around me would start yelling it.

And then maybe the sound of it would carry to packs of runners ahead, and they would start yelling it, too.

And maybe the whole chant would carry forward that way through all the runners, all the way to the leaders of the race.

And all of us would cross the finish line, chanting: "Ali, bomaye, Ali, bomaye!"

And that would be the banner headline on the Sunday Des Moines Register:

Ali, bomaye!

Drawing on Ali's own willingness to upset people with his mouth, I screwed up the courage to try. I embedded myself in as big a pack of runners as I could find, and I started yelling, "Ali, bomaye! Ali, bomaye! Ali, bomaye! Ali, bomaye!"

Nothing. Not even an annoyed glance. 

Humiliated and enraged—and also apparently in a little better shape than I am today—I spotted another pack of runners, a couple hundred yards up. I left my hapless group and charged up there, embedded myself again, and tried again, with the same result.

Fucking Iowa!

Eventually we came into a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, and my wife and my in-laws were there, to root me on.

With that big crowd around me and people lining the streets, I tried once more. My wife understood the scheme instantly. As I passed her, she immediately began to chant, "Ali, bomaye, Ali, bomaye, Ali, bomaye."

She was still chanting that behind me, one voice in the crowd, as I ran on, alone.

That was good enough for me.

Because it had to be.

Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali.

Donald Trump and Muhammad Ali: An Effort to Understand (Part Three)

Yesterday we established that among all the wonderful things he was, Muhammad Ali was "an exaggerating, narcissistic racist bully who thinks with his tongue and navigates with his cock," not to put too fine a point on it.

And of course a lot of people hated him for that stuff—(including his second wife Belinda, who caught him balling a prostitute hours before the first Frazier fight and rooted for him to lose it, according to Ali: A Life, by Jonathan Eig).

But a lot of people loved Ali for most of that stuff and in spite of the rest of it—even before decades of his Parkinson's-imposed silence and our historical perspective transformed Ali into a kind of American saint.

Understanding how some people loved Ali in his heyday provides a partial key to understanding how some people love Trump now. And they do love Trump. And they love one another when they're in Trump's presence. Watch them at his rallies. They're not only looking admiringly at him, they keep turning to each other and reveling in his words and laughing in happy astonishment. Covering Trump's speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, I sat in front of two guys who were gushing. "Look at them eyes!" one shouted to the other. "He looks like he's looking right at you, talking to you personally!" We were fifty rows up.

That's how I still feel about Muhammad Ali today, even at the remove of YouTube—like he's talking to me personally. When I tell people I'm an Ali nut, I tell them conspiratorially, as if I'm letting them in on a little secret—about one of the most famous people in the history of the world. Maybe, if you are very interested—and your heart is in the right place and you have a real sense of humor and just the subtle sense of morality we're looking for, I'll let you into David Murray's Official Muhammad Ali fan club.

The twinkle in those eyes shines straight at me. (And as Ali's shortest poem said, "Me, we.") 

I've shown that Ali press conference to audiences of speechwriters and other communication people all around the world, including at the United Nations, to show what it looks like when a speaker charms an audience, brings them into the joke that bonds them together.

I suppose that now, in the interest of fairness, I ought to pair it with this Trump rally clip, that demonstrates exactly the same rhetorical techniques and winking charm—to exactly the same effect.

Ali was also fun to listen to not just because of what he said, but because he spoke as rhythmically and musically as he danced. His words could be set to music.

Trump's, too.

But the real appeal of both these men is that they consistently defended people who felt downtrodden, insulted, looked down upon and ignored—in Ali's case, blacks and eventually countercultural whites; in Trump's case mostly rural and suburban whites. And they did so by scandalizing and shocking and scaring the living bejesus out of those perceived social oppressors.

And when the rebel is punished for rebuking the establishment, he becomes a martyr.

When Ali was stripped of his title for refusing indiction into the U.S. military, this is how he was portrayed.

And if you think Trump's followers don't see their man in exactly the same image, then you don't listen to those morning C-SPAN callers, each complaining more earnestly and bitterly than the last about how the Democrats and the media have hounded Trump mercilessly and not given the poor man a chance.

I am not equating Muhammad Ali with Trump; I'm relating to the feelings that I hear Trump followers expressing.

By now, my adoration of Ali is permanent and spiritual, and neither Jonathan Eig's biography nor my reflection for this essay has diminished it. I think Muhammad Ali was essentially a loving spirit with a dark side that his fans don't like to focus on. I think Trump is a dark spirit with a charming side that his enemies cannot bring ourselves to see.

Eig feels the same way, actually. This week I've been corresponding with him and he says he's enjoyed this series so far. He told me he too made the connection between Trump and Ali, especially as he was working on the book during the 2016 campaign. He forwarded to me a quote from a conversation recorded just last week by Washington University's magazine, in which Eig said: "The narcissism, the confidence that no matter what they say, it’s right, and even if it’s wrong it’ll become right because they said it. The love of attention, and yet the failure to treat the people closest to them well. But for Ali, what made it work is that he genuinely loved people. He had this warmth. You wanted to be in a room with Ali, and when you were, you felt like you were the most special person in the world."

Even putting that distinction aside, it wouldn't give the president permission to behave like a prize fighter—as Ali himself pointed out, in an interview in 1974. Asked whether he'd ever consider getting into politics, Ali said no. "If I'm sitting in a white man's office ... a White House, or city hall, with the American flag over my head, then I can't say the things I'm saying now, you understand? Then, I have to represent the people."

Alas, our president doesn't have the skills to do that even if he had the interest.

So we who don't feel represented by this president are left to better represent ourselves. And one way to do that is to stop signaling our own virtue by feigning total inability to fathom the minds and hearts of least a third of our fellow Americans.

We know exactly how they feel.

By acknowledging that, we'll communicate better with them—and contend better with their leader. 

Donald Trump and Muhammad Ali: An Effort to Understand (Part Two)

Before we discuss how Muhammad Ali might have inspired Donald Trump, let's remember who first inspired Cassius Clay.

A teenage Clay famously fashioned his act after a white professional wrestler named Gorgeous George, who taunted the crowd about how "pretty" he was, and dared his opponent to muss his precious blond curls. Later, Muhammad Ali would say he noticed how much attention Gorgeous George got from being a loudmouth villain—and how much money it made him.

Ali went darker, drumming up interest in seeing him get his block knocked off, by first describing his opponents as bums and later giving many of them more specific nicknames. Sonny Liston was the "Big Ugly Bear," Floyd Patterson was the "The Rabbit," Ernie Terrell was "Uncle Tom," George Chuvalo was "The Washerwoman," George Foreman was "The Mummy," and when it came to Joe Frazier, it was "gonna be a thrilla and a chilla when I get that gorilla in Manilla."

People who love Ali dismiss most of that as creative fight promotion, and forgive the clear excesses on account of, how do you know where the line is if you don't cross it every once in awhile? 

Ali was also a ridiculous womanizer who actually manipulated his second wife into arranging dates for him, telling her that doing so would make her greater than all other wives. She was 19 at the time. 

Ali was a narcissist who could not get enough attention. He was great to everyone he ever met on the street, after once meeting Sugar Ray Robinson in New York and being snubbed. "I was so hurt," he later said. "If Sugar Ray only knew how much I'd loved him and how long I'd followed him maybe he wouldn't have done that. I said to myself right then, 'If I ever get great and famous and people want my autograph and wait all day to see me, I'm sure goin' to treat 'em different.'"

His problem turned out to be, he could never enough of 'em. Once during Ali's exile from boxing, he showed up two hours early for a speaking appearance in Chicago. "To pass the time," writes Jonathan Eig in Ali: A Life, "he wandered along the sidewalk, trying to attract attention. 'I'm looking for a fight!' he barked to anyone in earshot. 'Who's the baddest man around here?'" An Esquire writer who was with Ali that day was saddened: "Ali seemed at a loss. A national magazine writer was accompanying him, recording his every word and every action, and it was not enough to sate his ego. With two hours to kill before his next audience could be assembled, he was incapable of enjoying a quiet moment of introspection, incapable of trying to get to know the man who'd been accompanying him around town all day."

As a talker, Ali was constant. As a thinker, he was contradictory. His stated reasons for refusing induction into the military for Vietnam were mostly admirable, but they were ever-changing. In general, Ali's arguments were more ethos and pathos than logos. And the few ideas he stuck with were understandable as a revelation of 1960s black pride, but borderline monstrous to the modern ear. For instance, he argued against racial integration in general, and interracial marriage specifically. "Every intelligent person wants his child to look like him," he said. "Listen, no woman on this whole earth, not even a black woman in Muslim countries, can please me and cook for me and socialize and talked to me like my American black woman. No woman, and last is a white woman, can really identify with my feelings and the way I act and the way I talk."

And lest you think Ali was a perfectly righteous defender of African Americans: When he moved to Philadelphia in 1970, he lived in a white neighborhood, and when he was challenged about it by some college students at a lecture, he said, "Do you want me to buy a home in the ghetto? Why do I want to live in a rat bin and have a rat bite my child?"

Though I learned some of these specifics from Eig's book, I've known these things about Ali all along. I compile this litany of shabbiness not to convince you not to admire Ali, or to explain to myself how I still do.

But rather to answer the question that so many of us find ourselves asking one another these days: What kind of person could admire an exaggerating, narcissistic racist bully who thinks with his tongue and navigates with his cock?

Let's sit with these similarities between Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump, and between us and them.

And in tomorrow's conclusion, I'll explore the hate these men have both inspired—and the also the love.

Donald Trump and Muhammad Ali: An Effort to Understand (Part One)

I didn't really know what I valued until I had a child.

Actually, not until I'd had her for a few years, and realized that while I thought I loved ideas, I spent more precious time teaching her about sports—its physical beauty, its literary history, its great heroes.

I've shown her the swings of Ted Williams and Tiger Woods. I've encouraged her to hustle on the soccer field like Pete Rose diving into second base. She's sat through documentaries on Joe Namath, Billie Jean King and the 1999 U.S. Women's World Cup championship team.

But the sports hero I taught her most—the American I taught her about most—about was by far and away, Muhammed Ali.

As in, she has seen the first Sonny Listen fight, from 1964, in black and white, at least five times—the first time, sitting on my lap.

"Oh my gosh!" my five-year-old cried, as the big bear stalked the young Cassius Clay around the ring.

"Don't worry, honey," I said, "he can't catch him."

She's seen most of the rest of his fights, too—except the 1971 bout when Frazier floored Ali with the left hook that convinced the champ he could take the most terrible punch, and still get up. I can't bring myself to watch that one myself. 

I love the way the man moves. I have a heavy bag, and I've spent hundreds of rounds dancing to my left and snapping out long jabs. Every time I visit a real boxing gym, I'm immediately reminded by the trainer that I've taught myself all of Ali's bad habits and none of his skills.

I love Ali's sense of humor, I love his voice, I love his accent, I love his face.

As I write this, Ali skips rope over my shoulder. Because he helps me feel like I'm young, fast, handsome and can't possibly be beat!

I'm reading a biography of Ali right now. It's been out a couple years; took me a while to read it because it's written by Jonathan Eig, a writer I once sat next to on Studs Terkel's couch. 

I remember feeling inferior to Eig that night. I'd spent my twenties writing for a publisher of trade newsletters; Eig had spent his writing for The Wall Street Journal. At 30, I figured Eig was off to a faster start than me, and I'd probably never catch up. About a dozen years later, it occurred to Eig (and not to me), that no one had written a proper biography of Ali. And he had thought: Why not me?

That hurts—bad enough that I wasn't going to read Eig's book, Ali: A Life. I told myself I'd spent enough time on pointless boxing scholarship. But after listening to Eig's accompanying podcast, "Chasing Ali," which made me feel more vicarious joy than jealousy—I bought the book.

It's wonderful—so good that at my most Ali-like, I don't believe I could have done any better. Which comes as a relief, really.

Meanwhile, get this: The goddamned book is giving me ideas.

Strange ones, like one I plan to explore in an episodic, experimental series here on Writing Boots over the next few days or weeks.

Are you ready for this?

Muhammad Ali—my hero and the American who I have most consistently showed my precious daughter as a beacon of human beauty, grace and charisma—has appealed to and alienated people in most of the same psychological, social and rhetorical ways, as Donald J. Trump.

Hear me out.

Starting tomorrow.

Or Thursday. Or next week—whenever I figure out exactly where to begin.

Monday Morning Video: Winter in America

Hat tip to Neil Rosen, from our Boulder, Colorado bureau.