Eschew Obfuscation

When I was first amused by this bumper sticker, years ago now, I thought it was directed at the pompously educated, those who think big-worded, convoluted language equals profundity. It fit my idea that the worst writers were educators.

Recently, I have gained another view. Management has perfected the art of obfuscation. And I mean to include the kind of management we call politics.

To hear spokesperson after spokesperson (that would be "talking mouth" after "tm") projectile-vomiting obviously predigested "talking points" as answers to any questions, any civic concerns, any evidence to the contrary is to hear obfuscation at the very highest and most dangerous levels.

Recently, I sat in a meeting with an academic manager who kept repeating his experiences fr0m twenty years before instead of directly facing and answering questions about the very specific welfare of students and faculty.

We used to describe such verbal whirlings-about as "tornadic," but I have gone beyond, now. Not even "hurricanic" seems apt, but I think "Katrinic" might work--with its connotations of windy destruction and collapsed-levee onslaught of Biblical proportions.

Now that I think more of it, it's just fine to link the disaster that was and is Katrina with the breakdown of logic and good will among managers who scramble among shards of learning and word-trinkets to advocate for some narrow bottom-linedness, some fundamentallly CYA motives.

Well, it seems apt to me, to visualize politicians screwing with the language and managers pettifogging for their infantile rewards, to preserve their name-plates, big desks, high-floor offices, secret alliances beyond the comprehension of mere (non-managerial) mortals, and legacy.

Oh, yeah. Legacy. And power.

Institutional Racism

In a large Southern city, he was an earnest, honest, smart young white man who told me he had never encountered "institutional racism." He wanted to consult with me, whom he trusted to be earnest, honest, smart, and white with him.

Possessed of no special wisdom, I realized two things immediately:

1. that I didn't trust the comfortable public postures, sociological cant and categories that we hear so often about the subject, and
   
2. that I had to say something because he was on the cusp of changing, had begun perhaps to suspect that his world was tainted by our contemporary version of white resentment--the sort that's niggled like a worm under his skin by moral claims proceeding from oppressed minorities and the bone-deep conviction that he and his people, cultural privilege aside, have "earned" and "chosen" responsibly in this "greatest country in the world."

EHSWYM said he had never seen anything about IR that he couldn't ascribe to merit, level of competence, work ethic, etc.

But when I told about construction workplace practices I knew about, where work teams were divided into ethnic groups (partly for language reasons, we know) and where the white bosses' spite and condescension--in full-blown racial epithets--toward Blacks and Latinos, sometimes pitting one group against another, EHSWYM recalled his own simiar experiences, especially the feeling that he, white, was implicated in the bad talk and high-handed preferencing.

Like EHSWYM in that discriminatory workplace, we often whitewash systemic discrimination by declaring it the individual actions of the ignorant, the bigoted individual at fault, not the organization, nor the larger culture.

It's cowardly, isn't it?

There's a parallel here, somewhere, between

• catching the tiny few identifiable bad guys in huge corporate fraud and
• configuring corporate culture in which the so-called bottom line is understood to be arbitrary, driven by what used to be shameful aspirations that we used to call greed.
  

There's also a parallel here, somewhere, between

• jerking around and jailing a few vulnerable non-coms and
• configuring a national political culture that doesn't have to wait for John McCain to bludgeon our highest leaders into agreeing that torture/inhumane treatment is simply wrong.

We are all culpable. God willing, we are able to fix a lot of our culp.

Advent across Cultures

It hasn't been so long ago that I was sure to go to Christmas Eve services every year. Lately, though, not going so often, I've been watching with occasional surprise at the slippage of deep reverence--in myself, as well as in others.

Something hit me wrong today when I heard the PBS announcer carefully avoid "Christmas" and say "Advent," as though it would distance him and us from too explicit an association with that overtly Christian thing that troubles us today.

To announce "Advent across Cultures" and rather too quickly describe what he meant--How Advent is celebrated in Portugal and Japan (he might have said Morocco, too--more odd, I thought, not knowing why, except for all that sand and Paul Bowles . . .). The intention he was stoking, to celebrate with all hands and feet, all possible intonations, all songs and trinkets, all--yes--incarnations should not have felt so alien, so thunkingly leaden.

Not sure why that seems wrong . . . maybe he just has a bad voice for reverence . . .

. . . one missing at three o'clock (?) . . .

Handmade in northern Indiana, the best chocolate-covered cherries I've ever had!

To begin with . . .

. . . it's likely that you and I could spend our time doing something more for humankind than this.

Or we could figure that doing this will get us--or, at least, me--ready to do more than this tomorrow morning.

Like taking fifteen minutes away from deskwork to watch Hardball, work up a sweat about sanctimonious politicians (and political holy-speakers), and then--having got warmed up--curl a few more dumbbell repetitions in honor of . . . those dumbbells.

Even arthritis can give way in the heat of in-my-house outrage over the unPatriot Acts.

So, this blog thing seems to tempt me toward politics--that topic that poetry usually sinks under the weight of. But that's a blog for another time.

Back to the dumbbells now, while my dogs are snoring and less likely to look disdainfully at the old guy trying to work up a body sweat on top of his rankled mind-sweat from watching the news.