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."
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.
Last Monday, while drinking, I shared with you my musings as I watched the seventh game of the 1952 World Series.
Last night, while drinking, I watched the very first Monday Night Football game, a contest between the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns on a hot September night in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, in 1970.
Here was my live account. I interspersed it with italicized excerpts from a Huffington Post piece I wrote five years ago about why football connects me to a certain part of my childhood and comforts me so reliably, a skill that has come in handy almost nightly over the last several months.
***
I was a kid before ESPN came along and injected sports into every home.
Our Hudson, Ohio home had music, so I took piano lessons. Dad was into antique cars, so I went to car shows. Both my parents were into horseback riding, so I did that. I didn’t know about sports, beyond the cultured-sounding “human drama of athletic competition,” which we saw some Sunday afternoons on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
But when I was about 10 years old, I suddenly and totally fell in love with football. I vaguely associate this cataclysm with a “math football” competition among the homerooms in fifth grade at McDowell Elementary. Playing for Mrs. Anderson’s Dolphins, maybe I figured that if football could make math fun, it could make everything fun.
It sure made reading fun. Every afternoon I rode my bike to the Hudson Public Library until I’d read everything they had on the NFL. I don’t remember checking the books out. I remember reading them in the library, and hearing in the silence the roaring echoes of real stories about magic men with magic names. Johnny Unitas. O.J. Simpson. Bart Starr. Jim Brown. Gayle Sayers. Joe Namath.
For a boy growing up in a WASPy little Ohio town where everyone was named Murray or Sullivan or Butler or Keane, these men’s names were as strange as anything from Tolkien. Curly Lambeau. Big Daddy Lipscomb. Bambi Alworth. Roman Gabriel. Sam Huff. Ray Nitschke. Chuck Bednarek. Dick Butkus. Zeke Bratkowski!
I read about The Sneaker Game, the Heidi Game, the Ice Bowl, the Immaculate Reception, Wrong-Way Regal, Ghost to the Post, The Longest Game, the Sea of Hands, the Perfect Season and The Greatest Game Ever Played.
I gaped at the pictures of the sun-splashed September grass, the crisp-clear October air, the mud-caked men of November, the frozen granite fields of December and the Super Bowl palm trees of January.
It was all impossibly rich — and to me, impossibly beautiful.
***
We pick this game up in the middle of the first quarter with the Browns up 7-0. Play-by-play man Keith Jackson just described the crowd noise as a "cacophony." Don Meredith said, "What in the world is that?" Jackson replied, "I got that from Howard." Cosell, of course.
***
I just watched a 60-second Marlboro ad showing cowboys working with their horses at dawn, making coffee and smoking cigarettes. No words until the last 10 seconds. "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country."
***
I just watched Rod Serling narrate a commercial for the 1971 Ford LTD.
***
The 1970 Browns had a starting wide receiver named Fair Hooker. He won the job (presumably fair and square) from a receiver named Homer Jones.
***
The Jets coach is named Weeb Ewbank. What's more, Weeb Ewbank actually looks like a Weeb Ewbank.
***
The Bo Scott just scored for the Browns, putting them up 14-0. That was a very big lead in 1970. Unless, of course, you were playing against Joe Namath. Who got the ball and immediately hit on a first down pass. To Emerson Boozer.
***
I just saw a Goodyear commercial convincing men they owe it to their wives to buy the best tires. "When a woman's at the wheel, Polyglas means more than mileage." Say what you will about the sexism, I do think that's an original English sentence.
***
Boozer just scored a touchdown to make it 14-7. Speaking of that, how about one more vodka lemonade.
***
As bewildered as my parents may have been at my Fosbury flop into football history, they must have been glad to see me spending so much time at the library.
Maybe as a form of encouragement, my dad started watching Cleveland Browns games with me on the big TV, up in my parents’ bedroom. Our English Springer Spaniel had lived the first few years of his life in a civilized house, and so when Dad and I would yell and slap high-five, the dog reasoned that a fight had broken out. He would bark madly, shattering the Sunday afternoon peace and prompting shouts from my startled mother, below. “Jesus! What’s going on up there?”
Incredible things were going on up there. That year, the Browns happened to have a season seemingly made for me.
Brian Sipe was a fragile little quarterback that an undersized 11-year-old could relate to. With a black rubber sleeve protecting his weak right elbow, Sipe heaved the ball over the line like a shot put over a woodpile, and it somehow wobbled into the waiting arms of enough resourceful Browns receivers that Sipe somehow won the MVP of the American Football Conference that year.
That wonderful team was known as the Kardiac Kids, because every victory was last-minute. (And so were the losses.) I could go on about the Kardiac Kids, and their coach, Sam Rutigliano, a kind of Phil Donohue figure who said things like this, after a tough loss: “There are 800 million Chinese who didn’t even know we played today. We’ll get over this.” I could name every player on the roster, right down to Dino Hall, the short, slow, butterfingered kick returner who we loved anyway. In fact, it is very hard for me to stop writing about that team. Let’s move on, before we get to the bitter playoff loss against the Oakland Raiders, when Sipe threw a terrible interception in the back of the end zone when all we had to do was kick a short field goal to win the game and I walked out of my parents’ bedroom and sat on the stairs and sobbed.
***
Now Al Hirt, the concert trumpeter, is deep-sea fishing and swilling Miller High Life, "the champaign of beers."
***
Dandy Don Meredith is having a terrible time referring to Fair Hooker without making a crack. "There's old Fair Hooker," he said.
***
For several straight years at Christmas, I only wanted jerseys and helmets of NFL teams. I played “electric football,” a toy that was imbecilically conceived, and terribly noisy to boot, involving a motor that shook a sheet of metal. The teams my game had come with — the Cowboys and the Broncos — were forever insanely vibrating in the opposite direction, or around in circles until the ball carrier skidded out of bounds with a 30-yard loss, all over the buzzing din of a vibrating sheet of metal. Electronic football — a handheld game in which little red dashes represented football players who you wore your thumbs raw trying to avoid — was by comparison much more satisfying.
I played football during recess, of course; and still remember a touchdown run around the right end at McDowell; the kid thought he had me, but I was too fast. I played football at friends’ houses, once intercepting a pass in perfect stride and returning it all the way down the left sideline for a touchdown. Mostly, I played football by myself in the backyard, usually in full uniform including Walter Payton-style mouthpiece. I punted the ball straight up in the air and tried to judge the bounce in order to catch it, juke an invisible safety out of his invisible jock strap and dive for a touchdown, across the septic tank drainage trough.
Meanwhile, football and other sports were the way I began to expand my vocabulary and explore larger questions. I remember my parents chuckling when I directed them to watch a replay highlight that contained, as I put it, “the moment of truth.” I remember them listening patiently to my politically precocious dinner-table comparison between quarterbacks, running backs and receivers as “white-collar workers,” and offensive lineman as “blue-collar workers,” and my enthusiastic sixth-grade social studies conclusion that society needs both kinds of workers, just like a football team does!
***
I first realized the what football did for me as a grown-up the day my pregnant wife was scheduled to be induced to deliver our first and only child. My wife was on her hands and knees scrubbing the house. I had finished my work and did not know what to do with myself. I found myself—without really ever deciding to go there—at the bookstore, in the sports department, sitting at a table and turning the pages of a huge coffee table book, looking at pictures of members of the Fearsome Foursome, the Doomsday Defense, the No-Name Defense, the Steel Curtain, the Orange Crush and the Purple People Eaters.
When I need to not be an adult for a little while, I pretend I'm a little kid pretending I'm a pro football player from the 1960s or 1970s.
These days, I need to not be an adult for a little while just about every single day.
***
I just saw a commercial for Champion spark plugs. Commercials during football games in this era were all for men: car batteries, tires, beer, cigars, razors. Nothing even unisex, like AT&T.
***
"Isn't Fair Hooker a great name?" Meredith asks, rhetorically.
***
I've never admitted this before: The very first time I heard about a thing called the "Information Superhighway"—which turned out to be the Internet—maybe about 1993 or 1994?—the only personal benefit I could think getting from it was watching Super Bowl III in its entirety, with commercials. (This was Joe Namath and the Jets' preposterous upset of the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. By now I've seen that game at least four times.) I could never think of any other purpose for the Internet than that. Come to think of it, I still can't.
***
Halftime, 14-7 Cleveland. Howard Cosell offers highlights of other NFL games over weekend, a tradition that would last a dozen years at least, which tells you your first ideas are often your best ideas.
***
The unappreciated Homer Jones just returned the second-half kickoff 85 yards for a touchdown. 21-7 Browns. That was a big lead back then. Unless you were playing against Joe Namath.
***
I'm eating peanuts now. Like a motherfucker.
***
Boozer is inspired tonight. But I brag.
***
Touchdown, Boozer. "Watch this again," Keith Jackson says on the replay, "as Boozer really busts it." 21-14 Browns.
***
My parents made me go to bed at 9:30 Eastern on Monday nights. That was usually well before the first quarter was over. It's 11:30 right now, on a school night. Fuck you, Dad.
***
In 1970, Miller could claim with a straight face that High Life was "the best beer there is." Now look. There have probably been a few hot afternoons or hot nights in bowling alley/bars where I might have agreed that Miller High Life is exactly the beer I wanted to be drinking at that time. But the best beer there is! This puts me in mind of the great Seinfeld acceptance speech at the Clio Awards where he says he loves advertising because he loves lying. Me too!
***
September, 1970. Nixon was president and Vietnam was all napalm and B-52s. RFK and MLK had been assassinated two years earlier. Four students had been killed at Kent State four months earlier. The only thing that seems to matter tonight, is this.
***
Don Cockroft kicks a field goal, putting the Browns up 24-14, which was a big lead in those days ...
***
(Said Emerson Boozer about that great Jets upset of the Colts in Super Bowl III, "It was during the postgame celebration that we learned [Jets officials] must have thought we'd lose because they hadn't ordered any victory champagne. So someone went next door to the Colts' locker room and 'borrowed' their champagne.")
One of the ways I pass the time watching these old football games is to find out what became of these players. According to the Baltimore Sun, "After football, Boozer worked as a CBS commentator, owned a machine shop and then a bar/restaurant on Long Island. Eight years ago, he retired as head of his town's parks and recreation department. Married 46 years, he mentors at-risk youths at local schools, plays golf and walks as much as 1 1/2 miles daily."
***
We're in the fourth quarter now, 12:50 to play. Boozer is being treated for leg cramps, and the Browns trainers just tried to wake up their completely unconscious receiver Gary Collins with smelling salts.
Whatever happened to smelling salts?
***
Namath is moving the Jets. A pass to Richard Caster. Another to George Sauers. (Wide receivers named Richard and George!) And Sauer scores. 24-21 Browns, with 3:22 to go. No wonder Monday Night Football caught on.
***
Supposedly, Don Meredith said during this game, "Fair Hooker. I haven't met one yet." But now I've listened to the whole thing, and I can tell you, it's a myth.
***
Namath just threw a game-losing interception and looks cooler than you and I look in our finest hour.
A pal of mine and I disagree on some matters of public policy, but a common hobbyhorse of ours has for years been the appearance of the uniforms police wear and the cars they drive. We have always thought it was really important. And if it was important before, it must be more important now.
So I had to comment when the police force in the leafy little, WASPy little, preppy little white bread Ohio suburb where I grew up posted about their citizen-friendly policies over a photo of one of their menacing police cars.
To answer that last question, Beth Dominguez, the blindness of some to the symbolism of what the police look like is as clear a demonstration of the stubbornness of an us-versus-them attitude—between police and some citizens, and between some citizens and other citizens—as anything else I've seen.
Imagine if you were in a hospital, and the nurse came in dressed head to toe in black.
I think you'd have a hard time focusing on anything else.
Here's how it's felt to me more or less since the beginning of coronavirus and even more since George Floyd. Conservatives in my life (and on my Facebook feed) have split into two camps:
• BLM trolls, posting on Facebook exclusively and steadily about defaced statues, rumors of poisoned cops at Shake Shacks, stupid liberals saying stupid things, George Floyd being mostly a CNN invention and rumors that the old guy hammered to the sidewalk in Buffalo was actually some kind of riot-inciter. These people amuse me about as much as Trump Trolls on my side who pass on every orange hair meme that comes their way. B-o-r-i-n-g. I don't unfriend them, because they provide me with blog material.
• The suddenly and utterly silent. These are my fellow citizens with whom I am having imaginary conversations every day all day. Imaginary, because during one of the most profound periods in U.S. history, people who used to talk national affairs frequently or occasionally are suddenly talking about the weather. Not saying I miss their perspective, exactly. Who needs more intellectual and emotional complication at this moment? But it's eerie not to hear from them at all. And the hush seems sinister, somehow. So I have imaginary conversations with them.
The imaginary conversations mostly involve me asking them why they've been silent. Has the cat got their tongue? I suspect they think their arguments will get them ostracized socially or killed professionally. I also suspect they're finding places to talk to other conservatives about how jackbooted America's liberal mainstream has become. In my head I yell at them, "What is it that you really think about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter? Tell us, and let's talk it over! This is still America, and we can still disagree—yes, even on matters of race! Is what you really think so unpalatable to me that you fear for the result of your uttering it?"
(But then, I worry I might be wrong about that—all of that. Also, why am I yelling?!)
I had an actual conversation with a friend recently about these issues; he comes from a more conservative place on most issues, including Black Lives Matter. I actually heard and saw him trying to come toward my place, trying to find a compromise position. He looked sort of surprised and disappointed at my own quiet disinterest in engaging him, at my own seeming weariness and lack of ideas. I was so opinionated on this stuff when we were young men and argued all night long! In his eyes, I seemed so defeated now. (Humbled, is how it feels to me.)
So it turns out that even the real conversation was sort of an imaginary conversation.
Speaking of which, my old friend Steve Crescenzo—a longtime real and imaginary conversational rival of mine—wrote last week about a conversation with his wife Cindy:
A conversation from last night, as Crescenzo Communications sat around the fire pit doing now-legal things:
Steve: "You know who I am really fucking sick of?"
Cindy: "The people in your head?"
Steve: "What?"
Cindy: "The people in your head. You know, the people I always see you arguing with in your head. I can tell when you're arguing, because you make weird faces, like you are talking but you're not."
Steve: "Get the fuck out of here."
Cindy: "The hands are the giveaway. You also motion with your hands, like you are trying to convince someone of something."
Steve: "You're nuts. NO, who I am SICK of are all the stupid people who disagree with me on things that are so fucking obvious."
Cindy: "Yeah. The people in your head. You should try to make peace with them."
Yesterday I told you what I told participants in our conference last Friday: That this isn't the most crucial time in the history of exec comms; rather, it's the first.
An exec comms pro told me last week that in his virtual meetings, "I've seen more tears in the last two weeks than I've seen in the rest of my corporate career." I've heard exec comms people choke up during these weeks too. What to do about it is blurry through those tears, especially when you define "it" as something as large as American racial redemption and economic reconciliation.
In fact, I find myself squinting to see this nation's first step down that misty path.
But I can focus on my first steps, in the world I inhabit—the wee but potentially mighty world of executive communication—and suggestions are already presenting themselves:
• We'll get our own house in order. To help diversify the lily-white speechwriting field, the PSA has worked with D.C.'s historically black Howard University to start a speechwriting course there, we offer Speechwriting School scholarships to Howard students, and last year we supported the first Black Speechwriters Symposium. Every year of our existence has made us more conscious about our position as a symbolic representation of this profession, and we've been talking for the last couple years about adding more gender, race and age diversity to the Advisory Council of the Professional Speechwriters Association. As Elvis Presley might suggest, "A little less conversation, a little more action." And we know exactly who we want to add—to be discussed on our next Council call, this Thursday. More soon.
• We'll watch how eloquent statements continue to match concrete corporate reform plans. General Motors' CEO Mary Barra has promised to make the GM "the most inclusive company in the world" and declared, "It’s my responsibility as CEO of this company to make sure [diversity and inclusion] doesn’t fall off the agenda." Through our daily newsletter, we'll keep up, and keep our members up, on Barra and other CEOs—what they say, and what they do.
• We'll advise speechwriters on how to serve their current (and largely white) principals better. For instance, I think every speechwriter should sit down with every principal to hear his or her personal race journey. Every sentient American has a whole story beginning when he or she became aware of race as an issue, and an evolution of thinking on the issue from childhood to adulthood, in relation to personal experiences and national events—with everyone's story culminating in this very moment. Your leader's story might not be worth sharing with the workforce, but a speechwriter ought to know it and be able to draw from it, so the boss can participate in the conversation beyond, "I'm just a privileged white person so what do I know?" And by asking the exec to articulate her or his race story, you'll might offer a chance at self-discovery. As one of Studs Terkel's interviewees once said to his delight, "I never knew I felt that way before."
• We seek out and hear out the ideas of others. Last week a Professional Speechwriters Association member offered to convene a Zoom call to talk about how speechwriters can use their peculiar form of power to lend their voice to the Black Lives Matter cause, through the leaders they serve. Dunzo. Another speechwriter has approached me for help in forming an association of black speechwriters, perhaps affiliated in some way with the PSA. Yes, when can we talk? And next week I'm talking to someone who is looking for speechwriters to help artists deliver "national addresses" for these times. How can we help?
• We brainstorm ideas of our own. Here's one: Smart CEOs are talking to their African American executives and employees about their experiences inside and outside the company. In many cases they are shocked and edified by what they are hearing; I'm hearing this directly. Why not do some proactive shocking and edifying of the whole business world, by a black speakers bureau—called "Black Leaders Matter: Speaking from Experience," maybe—to get willing African American business leaders tell their stories and suggest reforms on the biggest conference stages, which must be willing and eager to invite them. I sure as hell know some speechwriters who could help those folks hone their message to where it's at least as compelling as this plaintive testimony, from Arthur Page president and longtime corporate comms exec Charlene Wheeless.
Obviously the Professional Speechwriters Association and the Executive Communication Council can't do all of the above by ourselves. And for many of these ideas, I'm the last person who ought to be running them. "White Guy Founds Black Speakers Bureau"? I don't think so. That's why I'm sharing all this with you, and that's why I will continue to share ideas, in case you can take the lead, or in case you know someone else who can. And that's why I want you to share ideas with me, either using the comments section below, or writing to me directly at writingboots at gmail dot com.
Yes, America's destination is unseeable at the moment. This profession's, too.
When you're driving through a thick fog, you're afraid to keep going because you don't know what's out there—but you damned well better be just as afraid to stop, for fear of being run over from behind. And it should have dawned on you by now, there's no going back.
A couple weeks ago I confessed here—and separately, in a text, to my friend and colleague Sharon McIntosh, that when it comes to changing the race equation in America—after having thrashed around on this issue around so many midnight drinking tables, having had so many hundreds of actual and imagined "conversations about race in America," as we're always told we must do—"I have faith issues."
"No you don't," she texted back. "You believe in love."
On Friday the Professional Speechwriters Association and the Executive Communication Council held our first full-on virtual conference. In my keynote remarks, I suggested that this isn't the most crucial time in the history of leadership communication.
Rather, it's the first.
Exec comms, I continued, has for most organizations for all these years been a form of window dressing. Leaders were invited to high-profile events in order to say the expected things on the usual subjects: global trade, sustainability, technology. And say the expected things, they did. And if they said those things with a little extra verve, that was called "thought leadership."
There was absolutely nothing wrong with that, in those times: Social stability through pleasing-yet-predictable language is one rarely celebrated function of rhetoric. And creating speeches like that—especially when the speeches helped the leader of an institution communicate some humanity—was an honorable pursuit.
Was.
That's over now—and for the foreseeable future.
The change began not with George Floyd or with coronavirus. It began with the Trump election and the national realization that Americans do not share a president in common. "Not my president," so many Americans declared before Trump even took the oath of office. Suddenly corporate CEOs (and university presidents) were being asked to weigh in on subjects—LGBT rights, immigration—that had never been on their radar before. At the Founders Meeting of the Executive Communication Roundtable in February, folks noted that employees had begged their CEOs to say something about the death of Kobe Bryant.
People will take their leadership where they can find it, and if the president of the nation doesn't have broad enough credibility and accountability to all Americans, then people turn to the president of the university they attend, or the CEO of the company they work for.
And then coronavirus instantly made the society emotionally and intellectually dependent on CEOs—now, not just for rhetorical comfort, but for broader economic expertise and even health guidance.
And then George Floyd made CEOs moral arbiters, and their statements nothing short of a test of how sincerely society really believed Black Lives Matter.
Remember Ferguson, six years ago? Did anyone care what the CEO of Verizon thought about that, or what he was going to do about it?
Executive communication isn't window-dressing anymore. This is leadership communication for keeps—communication to save companies, communication to save a society.
As I said Friday morning, your job is completely different now. Many of the skills you've built over the years in order to diplomatically create interesting but polite executive communications—you master the speaker's "voice," you never make the same suggestion twice, you don't push too hard and you certainly don't insert your ideas into corporate speeches—these skills will hurt you more than help you right now.
I told the story of the speechwriter who was sweating blood over a George Floyd statement for the cautious leader of an American institution. What would this person say in this situation? the speechwriter asked. Until the speechwriter crumpled up the paper and wrote what the speechwriter would say in this situation, and sent that strong statement to the leader, who signed off on it with a couple of minor changes—recognizing, of course, that it was the thing that needed to be said.
Speechwriters have to do more than dig deep—they have to listen, they have to learn, they have to read, they have to think, and they have to grow: Not just to support the leaders they serve, but to begin to behave as leaders, themselves.
I know some exec comms pros who are doing that, and I and the Professional Speechwriters Association and the Executive Communication Council aim to help.
Back here tomorrow for some ideas for how we might begin.
Lately I'm starting to feel I've been feeling like I've been giving too many people the benefit of the doubt—myself included, maybe.
For instance, I founded an Executive Communication Council this year, peopled by folks who work for CEOs. Running this organization doesn't mean I have to like CEOs, but it does make me less likely than some of my lefty friends to see all CEOs as the scourge of the universe. (And it makes me more likely to see the good, and the power of that good, in some of these people.) But I hope none of it blinds me (or mutes me) to CEOs who are the scourge of the universe. Behold this item, from the latest issue our Executive Communication Report: Coronavirus, out later today.
Pfizer CEO vows not to gouge patients on a coronavirus vaccine, when it’s available. "If we were to implement free, open-market principles in pricing the product, we could go to huge prices and sell everything we can manufacture,” Pfizer chief Albert Bourla told a Goldman Sachs conference Tuesday, according to Axios. “But it would be unethical, I think. We will not do it, because that's really taking advantage of a situation, and people will not forget if you do that." Still, Bourla said, the vaccine is still a “huge commercial opportunity” for Pfizer; and furthermore, the coronavirus in general is a chance for drug companies to restore their reputation, as its "strict critics ... are slowing down their criticism now," Bourla said. "Now is a great opportunity to reset all this."
I think all of us have given a lot of us the benefit of the doubt over the last few months, on our shared sense that: Everyone is having a hard time, and if you accuse someone of monstrousness at this moment—a colleague, a friend or a family member—they'll always remember and they'll never forgive your piling on, on the very day the music died.
Except, the music died more than three months ago, and that's an awful lot of time, as Dr. Phil would tell you, to stuff your feelings.
And it's dangerously too much time to stuff your good judgment, especially now, as we take on a social crisis where the bad guys are part of the disease. (As opposed to the last crisis, where the bad guys only exacerbated the disease.)
I'm coming out next year with a book called An Effort to Understand: Hearing One Another (and Ourselves) in a Nation Cracked In Half.
When people ask me what the book is really advocating, I spend more time telling them what the book is not advocating: bland civility, middle-of-the-road political philosophy or suspension of judgment. Because if you're just going to practice that smarmy bullshit, there's no reason to understand other people, or even yourself.
So this concept of listening to others without losing your perspective—and retaining your point of view while endeavoring to examine its sources and its limitations—it's complicated.
But it's also urgent.
So I should hasten to say: Fuck you in strongest possible terms, Albert Bourla.*
* My mother used to say that before you are 30, you have the face you were born with. After you're 30, you have the face you deserve.
After 13 weeks of using Writing Boots as a live blog called "Coronavirus and us: Let's hold it together, together," I'm going back, at least for now, to a conventional post-by-post format.
Why? Because I'm not sure, at this point, what the "it," in "hold it together" means now that we have magical-thought Covid-19 away in order to save our sanity, save our livelihoods and make room for a confrontation with a much older and more profound American disease. (And also for haircuts and brunch.)
At this point, I'm not even sure holding it together is the thing to do. Letting it blow apart might actually make more sense at this point. Have you met Kimberly Jones?
So Edward R. Murrow is going back to David R. Murray, writing not just every time it occurs to me, but at the pace that coherent and useful thoughts reluctantly come together through the fog and over the sirens.