Writing Boots

If we're going to talk ourselves into a change, we have to change the way we talk. For instance ...

Emory University psychology professor and political science author Drew Westen has made an academic career out of criticizing his fellow Democrats for shooting themselves in their two left feet with the rhetoric they choose to describe the causes they're promoting. They appropriated the enemy's label, "Obamacare." They mincingly propose "campaign finance reform" instead of demanding "fair elections." Instead of talking about pollution, liberals gas on about "CO2 emissions."

"Defund the police" is Westen's latest target, and he destroys it completely in a column today in The Washington Post.

At times like this, terms must be descriptive and socially useful, and however important the concept behind it, "defund the police" has been neither, beyond its initial contribution, of jarringly drawing attention. It's time to settle on a better term before it's too late. "Reimagine the police" works well enough for me.

Two other terms, I've wanted to erase from the public conversation of late. Again, both terms describe a thing that's real; but the terms are less descriptive and useful than they are unnecessarily and gratuitously insulting and alienating, on either side of the vicious political tetherball game that passes for national dialogue at the moment.

One is "virtue signaling." This is a term usually used by Republicans, who accuse liberals of taking easy stands in favor of politically correct causes in order to show how woke we are. Which is exactly what we are doing, of course. But in many cases our motive for wanting to appear woke is wanting to publicly declare ourselves allies to endangered or grieving or powerless fellow citizens in a time of trouble. "Virtue-signaling" implies that our motive for "liking" a gay wedding or a Black Lives Matter rally is preening vanity. That's an unfounded accusation to which we will not often cop, even private.

Another is "white privilege," which as far as I can tell is used most frequently by white people to shame other white people (sometimes with the motive of "virtue-signaling"). That white privilege exists is not refutable. But putting energy toward getting white people to make a long catalogue the endless social advantages they have over African Americans—I don't have to worry about getting shot at the Wendy's drive through even if I'm a little tipsy, I get to go through my day without making six hundred judgements about the racial and emotional motives of the people I'm doing business with, I can walk off the street into the Palmer House hotel and use the men's room without being questioned ... I really could go on all day. But what good would that do?

At the end of the day—and I don't mean that as a cliché, I mean it literally at the end of the day—no one feels privileged, no matter how sincerely they say they realize how privileged they are, as I wrote here three years ago:

Why? Because no matter how privileged a person may be thanks to his or her class, race, gender, physique, nation of origin, region of origin, city of origin, neighborhood of origin or block of origin—no one ever feels privileged.

That's because even the most privileged person had an alcoholic mother, teenage acne, adult psoriasis, a permanent case of impostor syndrome, panic attacks, weight issues, relationship issues, gambling issues—or all of the above.

And everyone—even the most gifted of us—feels from day to day that he or she has fought like a dog to get to cocktail hour: Has climbed out of a warm bed in the cold dark, beaten traffic, tolerated crazy co-workers, sated bottomless customers, and slogged through more traffic home while on the phone with a narcissistic relative only to be told upon walking in the back door that the fucking dishwasher is leaking.

"Privilege" is real and must be acknowledged by intelligent people as a socially negotiable fact of life; but "privileged" is a term for the academy, not for useful political conversation.

Not too long ago, the idea was to do things to empower people who were known as the "underprivileged," and as old-fashioned as that word sounds, that's more the idea here, isn't it? To see that all American citizens have all the privileges that everyone ought to enjoy? If I'm walking down Wabash and I need to go, I'm not going to shit my pants in solidarity with you. How can we make it so that you can stroll blithely into the Palmer House, too?

It's very easy to overstate the importance of this argument relative to everything that's going on right now.

And maybe it's even too early in what I hope is a real profound social movement—and I've seen evidence of said profundity, in communications with others, and with myself—to be quibbling about the terms of the debate.

But I don't play guitar.

And I think if we're going to change the world we're going to have to change our words, too.

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.

The Golden Globe Awards: Calm down, folks, it's just a movie

"Speak it, Ricky," spake a professional communicator friend on Facebook. 

She was praising Golden Globes Awards' hired badboy emcee Ricky Gervais for having directed honorees, "If you win, come up, accept your little award tonight, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off. No one cares about your views on politics or culture."

Questioning actors' intellects is an old sport. "Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality," wrote H.L. Mencken about a hundred years ago. "No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor." I read that when I was young, and ever since, I've been looking for exceptions. Over a quarter century, I've identified Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Lily Tomlin and Bryan Cranston. Take that, Mencken!

But you know whose intellects I have an even lower estimate of than actors'? People who watch Hollywood awards shows for any reason other than an ironic laugh, aided by a giggly strain of sativa. To anyone who takes the Golden Globes the least bit seriously as an Important Cultural Event—well, the actors's speeches might actually bring them news that the continent of Australia is on fire or that there's a political movement to severely limit abortion laws in America.

So good for Dicky Ricky for publicly afflicting the smug. And good for the actors for "defying" him with all the pathos they've got. And best of all for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for manufacturing the whole melodrama.

It's all part of the show.

How many times are you going to fall for it?

We never know when we're privileged

In yesterday's post I used a term you rarely see here on Writing Boots, because as I've written before: 

No person should ever call another person privileged—at least, if the person is trying to communicate.

Why? Because no matter how privileged a person may be thanks to his or her class, race, gender, physique, nation of origin, region of origin, city of origin, neighborhood of origin or block of origin—no one ever feels privileged.

I'm a runner, and the repetitive boredom of this hobby gives me a chance to think about privilege daily, in terms of the best metaphor I know:

When I'm running against the wind, I curse every gust. Occasionally, I'll turn for home and the goddamn wind will somehow still be in my face. And I'll be outraged at the God that made the glaciers that plowed this twisted frozen Chicago prairie by a lake.

You'd think that, running with the wind, I'd feel pushed along, and grateful for it. Nope. You know what it feels like to run with the wind? It feels like no wind at all. And no gratitude, either, because I'm still having to run, still getting tired, still sweating, still drooling snot out my nose and still bored out of my middle-aged mind.

If I ever wheezed into the back door bragging about the eight miles I just covered and my no-account wife said, "yeah, but the prevailing wind was at your back"—that meteorological observation would not be welcomed.

Privilege is real. But don't expect anybody to be grateful for it—or gracious to you, when you point it out.

Or as I said two years ago:

Let us be clear: There is white privilege, there is male privilege, there is class privilege.

But it's sociological term, not a psychological one.

It's for essays, not for communication.

And yes, I know: By so blithely saying so, I'm showing my privilege.

The problem with bubbles is, you can see through them and hear through them, and they're always bursting

The other day a Facebook friend was waxing wet-faced about his love for Love Actually. He said he watches the 2003 rom-com medley every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which seems excessive even to a fellow who goes rheumy-eyed anytime he hears "Both Sides Now" because God damn you, Alan Rickman (may you rest in peace)!

And on this poor sap's Facebook thread some critical thinker decided to comment, "So do you have an impassioned rebuttal to all the recent Love Actually backlash?"

What recent Love Actually backlash?! Don't tell me, I don't want to hear it.

For a people that's characterized as a bunch of cowards cocooned our own social media bubbles or silos or echo chambers or whatever, we sure do get precious little political peace anymore.

Is it just me?

I have friends to the left of me who can't believe I have so many friends on the right, and friends on the right who can't believe anyone could possibly be to the left of me. I can't believe it either. With a nod to Paul Simon: When I think back on all the crap I've heard on C-SPAN, it's a wonder I can think at all. (Which is part of the problem, of course. All this news-gaping has turned us into pundits rather than people. If you ask a ditch digger who she wants to win the Democratic primary, she'll give you an analysis of how each candidate will fare with the suburban moms in fucking swing states. I asked you who you wanted!)

My political influences—people with whose political opinions I have to regularly rassle—include:

A retired midwestern school teacher who convinced me years ago that, however exciting it might be economically, global capitalism will destroy the environment.

A southern preacher's son who believes sincerely that many liberals are out to silence and destroy everyone who doesn't embrace their progressively politically correct ideology.

A friend who urged me to vote against Chicago mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot last spring because she was "weaponizing" her black skin and her homosexuality to promote a monstrous conservative agenda.

A grown-up South Side Chicago police detective's son who hated President Obama so much I had to turn away in disgust, but who hates President Trump—and "Trump humpers"—with sufficient heat to keep my hands warm.

Not long ago, an old lefty pal invited me to an event on the anniversary of the police murder of Fred Hampton, but I couldn't go because I was interviewing a former speechwriter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Just in the last week:

An artist pal used Facebook to encourage holiday card makers to stop using glitter, because it's "the herpes of the crafting world," made of mylar plastic that winds up in the oceans.

Another Facebook friend posted an article titled, "Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?" adding the comment, "Leading in spite of chaos."

I drank over the weekend with a woman who runs a writing program in a prison and feels ambivalent about visiting lectures from prominent white authors who have written famous books about African Americans in the prison system. Because why do privileged white people always get to tell poor black people's stories—and make money in the process? And lest you dismiss my friend as a one-eyed pipsqueak liberal, her godfather was actually William F. Buckley.

(She reminded us that Trump is pretty popular among prisoners and their families because his First Step Act is letting thousands of people out of jail.)

Over the weekend I ran across a famous video of the virulent anti-gay activist Anita Bryant getting a pie in the face at a Des Moines press conference in 1977 from a gay activist. Bryant's husband, sitting next to her, told her to pray for the man, which she did, before breaking into tears. I sent the thing to my gay feminist sister-in-law, who then became the first gay person I've ever heard take Bryant's side. "Anita should have first punched the guy who threw the pie," Sis wrote, "then punched the guy sitting next to her." 

As the editor of Vital Speeches of the Day and author of the forthcoming book, An Effort to Understand, it's part of my work to seek out a variety of opinions. But reading the above, I bet you relate to reeling from dueling opinions from people you respect. The circumstance isn't new,  of course: F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

But these days it feels like a dozen new opposed ideas a day, and it's overwhelming and exhausting, even to distance runners like you and me.

Last week, I had a phone chat with a close speechwriting colleague who wrote a masters thesis on Bobby Kennedy when he was young in the early 1970s, then went to work in Republican politics and has devoted most of his career to a Washington lobbying organization of great importance and with strong bipartisan ties. "I can't watch the cable news shows before work in the morning," he confessed with a sense of sad astonishment. "I find myself watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond."

Or as it's called now, Some Folks Find Raymond Problematic. 

If we're going to live in bubbles, for godsakes let's build them out of sterner stuff. 

Don't call yourself a communicator, and then write like a troll

I felt an increasingly familiar annoyance yesterday when a speechwriter posted a link to an article in my Vital Speeches of the Day LinkedIn group under his own headline: "Buried beneath the Ukraine hysteria, news of real consequence."

Because I'm working on a book titled, An Effort to Understand, lots of people seem to think I'm one of these mincing "civility" twerps no one can stand. I find myself spending a lot of time convincing you (and reminding myself) of the difference between surface "civility" and honest communication.

But we do need a modicum of the former to facilitate the beginning of the latter.

If you call yourself a communicator—because you're a professional writer, or the head of an association of professional speechwriters, or just a person who was told as a kid, "united we stand, divided we fall"—I think you shouldn't indulge in purposely insulting, dismissive language these days. Not casually, anyway.

This is rich, coming from a writer who spent his 20s falling in love with H.L. Mencken, who purposely, bombastically and hilariously dismissed whole swaths of the country—the South, for example—merely in order to "stir up the animals," as he put it. And the same guy who delighted in reading—and to an embarrassing extent aping—Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote that the nation was largely populated and ruled by greedy "waterheads" and "pigfuckers."

My first boss Larry Ragan followed the P.T. Barnum dictate: "If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight." He once made an offhand remark in his newsletter that drew letters from one third of the readership. I still don't mind a healthy argument. And a healthy argument still puts butts in seats; witness the effect on Writing Boots readership of my analysis of Greta Thunberg's speech a couple weeks ago.

But it seems more and more important to incite one's battles carefully.

For instance, these days I cringe when communicators on my Facebook feed (and thus in my political tribe) call all Trump supporters idiots. Do they think they're doing more good (perhaps giving their friends the courage of their convictions) than harm (making it just that much harder for American reconciliation after Trump is gone)?

And what was the speechwriter who posted in my forum attempting to achieve by offhandedly referring to "the Ukraine hysteria"? Does he incorrectly assume all our readers think the Ukraine story is hysteria? Or is he aiming at those of us who take the Ukraine story seriously, and starting his persuasive appeal with a backhanded slap across our mouth? Or is he in Social Media Magical Thinking Mode, where you post stuff and picture only friendly followers seeing it, and the rest of the people not seeing it?

In any three of those scenarios, the speechwriter is not thinking like a communicator. If he's thinking at all, it's like an instigator.

And boy, have I loved me some instigators in my day.

Not these days, though.

These days, we need communicators. Careful communicators, who seek more constructive results than "stirring up the animals."

Because the animals are already stirred up.

Another effort to understand

Onetime Reagan White House (and Gen. Colin Powell) speechwriter Hal Gordon shared this post last week, at the beginning of the Ukraine shit show:

In his post today, conservative commentator Rod Dreher perfectly captured what it's like to be conservative under Donald Trump. I quote: “Last weekend I wrote about a situation in my neighborhood, in which a beleaguered 60-year-old woman lives with her mentally ill, violent, abusive son, a 6’5″ man in his twenties. It’s a nightmare for her, but she persists in it, because she’s too afraid of the alternatives .... That poor woman is a symbol of conservatives under Trump.”

As a liberal, I could imagine being in that situation, if the Democratic president was corrupt and yet a Republican alternative seemed to me more dangerous still.

During the 2016 election, I contemplated how long so many Republicans had despised the Clintons, and tried to imagine how horrible the Democratic candidate would have to be to drive me to vote for a Republican who I'd loathed for two decades—Newt Gingrich, say. When I couldn't conjure a Democrat that bad, I started to worry that Trump might win.

I'm not saying we should renounce our tribes. But at the very least, we should recognize their power in our own lives.

A profession, and a people, on eggshells

I posted a version of this a couple years ago. Last week, when the owner of a professional online forum lamented a dearth of intellectual debate these days, it occurred to me to run an update. —DM

***

It's said that in an unhappy marriage, loud arguments frequently erupt or cold silences commence because in an unhappy marriage, everything is about everything. "Pass the salt" means, "You think I'm a terrible cook." "I'd rather not go until Christmas Eve" means, "You hate my family." "Let's wait til next month to buy the duvet cover" means, "You don't trust me with money!"

These days, all of society feels like that unhappy marriage. We are reading serious articles advising us on safe topics of conversation at family dinners. And professionally, we focus our human imaginations on the art of being amusing, yet sufficiently banal that no one could object.

The most reliable way I can witness this change is from my own little world, of corporate communication. For the first 10 or 15 years that I hung around in this business—roughly the early 1990s to the mid 2000s—professional arguments were robust, common, and often fun. These civilized wars took place first in the opinion columns and letters-to-the-editor sections of our communication trade newsletters and at industry conferences, then on rudimentary Internet forums with names like PRSIG, and eventually in the comments sections of blogs written by professional communicators.

Some of the hot-button issues at the time may sound esoteric to people outside the profession, but they seemed high-stakes inside it. Who does an employee want to hear from first: his or her direct supervisor, or the CEO? Should employee publications continue to publish personal stories about employees and their hobbies, or should strategic communicators put away childish things? Is the news release dead? Is print dead? Is upward communication dead? Is face-to-face communication dead? Is it possible to quantify the bottom-line impact of communication? Is a particular communication ethics principle worth quitting your job over?

These and dozens of other topics regularly generated sometimes noisy debates, and occasionally deafening donnybrooks characterized by accusations like, "You just set employee communication back 30 years." There were bruised feelings. There were participants so stubborn and tunnel-visioned that they might now be called "trolls." And there was seldom resolution.

But there was something that amounted to an ongoing and slowly evolving philosophical dialogue on the nature and purpose of organizational communication.

Now, unless in my own tunnel-vision, I fail to know its location, there is little such debate.

Why?

I think people had more job security when those debates were taking place, and so were less fearful of burning a bridge and thus more willing to risk rubbing a colleague the wrong way or expressing an unpopular opinion. They had a professional reputation to maintain, but not a precious "personal brand" to protect.

A related reality: Because they had a stronger, longer, deeper connection to their employers, I think people cared more—about their institutions, and about the profession they worked in—and were more inclined to the spend time and spill blood on these kinds of disputes, because they mattered more.

But maybe more importantly, arguing about communication, back then, wasn't arguing about everything. For instance, I could (and frequently did) have a public argument with technology guru Shel Holtz about our widely differing degrees of belief in the information superhighway as a solution to age-old communication ills.

(This is what Shel and I looked like at the time—he Bud Cort from Harold & Maude, me Lee Harvey Oswald.)

Anyway—in those days, Shel and I could go at it hook and tong without either of us even thinking of broadening the argument to something like, "Well of course you would think that, because [your politics, your virtue-signaling, your function as an unthinking tool of the great oligarchy]." No. An argument about communication was an argument about communication, and it had to be won, lost or tied on its own merits. And it didn't risk the whole relationship.

The boundaries! The manners! The seriousness!

Doesn't it sound like I'm describing the peculiar cultural mores of the Edwardians? But it was only 15 years ago that these debates began to dwindle in the number and diversity of debaters. They were engaged by fewer working practitioners and left mostly to pundits like me and consultants whose public engagement is a natural part of our practice.

When did the professional debate begin to blink out entirely? Maybe it was about the time that the 2008 recession scared the professional bejeezus out of everyone and left us huddled together on LinkedIn right in the middle of a U.S. presidential election that polarized the country in new ways.

In any case, I can't remember the last time I had—on this blog, or on any other—a really lively exchange of ideas about communication.

Did we stop caring?

Or did we stop daring to bring anything up, for fear that we might bring everything up?

Seriously, my friends: Let's talk about it.