Red, white & blues

A friend of mine helps to raise my blood pressure every week by sending me links to Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout these past months she has been consistent in her constant carping about the Democratic presidential campaigns. It’s like a nightmarish endless loop, with no Escape key.

Her primary target has been Hillary Clinton—God forbid that a week should pass without Noonan flaunting her mean-spirited, bloody-minded streak, blowing poison darts at Clinton. Now, of course, she’s retooling for Obama.

So when my friend sent me today’s piece, his comment was, “Not the usual column.”

Well, not “usual” in the sense that she’s not grousing about a Democrat. That is rather a nice change.

On the other hand, her chosen “hero” is definitely a Republican—not surprising she couldn’t find anyone among the D-Day survivors who didn’t serve in the Reagan administration worthy enough to focus on. Those years were her high-water mark & it’s been hard for her to adjust to the post-Ronnie world ever since.

But frankly, her “opinion” is nothing out of the ordinary with respect to Omaha Beach. She’s about 576,344th in line to laud the boys of Omaha & use them as examples of Americans at their best. Her encomium is well within the range of “usual”, & pretty far down the scale of insightful or elegiac.

What, then, is really the point?

Oh, right—that she gets it. The point is, as always, her.

& that is indeed “usual”.

Sign of THEM times...

Okay, I appear to be in a somewhat facetious mood, but here’s another forward I got this week.

This doesn’t happen very often, but words just fail me.

Sign of the times

I came across this in one of my listservs. The part I like is that a bit of the scalloping along the edge had to be scraped off to accommodate the code.

Now, if the product manager had provided proper functional requirements, that wouldn’t have happened…

Biz-speak 2.0

Last month the BBC ran an online story about biz-speak. It really hit home; I think there’s a wide-spread nausea caused by the kind of bastardization of English in the name of business trendiness. The language that is graced by the works of Churchill, Fitzgerald—even, God help me, Hemingway—now suffers from the 50 phrases inventoried by the BBC, as well as innumerable others.

I’m sure your teeth will ache in sympathy as you go through the list. But you know I’m not going to let it go without commentary.

This catalog doesn’t include one of my pain points (which phrase is one of my pain points: one’s customers never seem to have business problems; you must discover their pain points): proactive. Being “proactive” is meant to denote someone who isn’t reactive; it describes someone who takes initiative.

Folks, the opposite of reactive is active. Why dress it up with an extraneous syllable?

There’s also a phrase I’ve heard that just brings the weirdest pictures to mind: “open the kimono”. It means (I think) to give someone (typically a customer or partner) a look into the inner workings of an organization or a project. I’ve only ever heard it in the context of sales & business development, where it does seem to carry that meaning. But—why “kimono”? Why not “bespoke tailored Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs”? Or “bathrobe”?

I suppose "trench coat" is out because of that whole flasher imagery. But it’s probably more apt than the kimono.

Another word du jour that is spreading like flu in January is “viral”. Your marketing campaign ain’t worth spit if it’s not viral. Meaning it’s turbo-charged by word-of-mouth; or, more specifically, word-of-blog. Interesting that the reference is to something that’s generally considered a scourge: the root word “virus” comes from the Latin for poison or toxin. In the world outside of business, viruses include influenza, diarrhea, Ebola, herpes &, of course, HIV. How did the adjective associated with diseases that even in the 21^st Century have no cures morph into high praise for business practices?

The most recent to appear in my experience is “socialize”, as in the usage of a former manager: “Socialize this new requirement with Development; make sure they get on board.” This subverts an intransitive verb into a transitive one, which just gets up my grammatical nose. It also brings to mind images of one throwing a party with cocktails & canapés, celebrating the new requirement as guest of honor.

More importantly, to the manager, it meant that his staff had the unpleasant task of informing colleagues of the various directives that will trespass on their functional authority, while he remained above the fray.

I suspect he used the phrase “plausible deniability” to senior management in the event that a specific ukase collapsed under its own weight.

Now—as to the BBC’s list:

I think #19 is legit, but only if you spell it “git”. “From the git-go” has been in long-standing standard use in the south & west of the US. Someone in Gucci loafers transliterated a perfectly acceptable frontier/down-home expression.

The comment on #23 cracks me up: “I can't help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation.” The submitter doesn’t appear to be so articulate as to be entitled to denigrate the expressions of others. Plus, the misuse isn’t so much a failure to articulate as it is a basic lack of a disciplined thinking process. People blather to fill the space, hoping that some of their gush will cover the point or points they thought they intended to make…

Now, I’m guilty of #24. But lately I’d settle for getting my ducks all on a single pond. (I remember the first time I heard the expression—working for a tech company in Durham, NC. I had to ask what it meant, because I didn’t understand why it would be important to anyone to have ducks in a row. &, while I’m at it, would getting ducks in a row be similar to herding cats?)

The submitter of #30 claims the UK as the originator & sole exponent of “at the end of the day”. I beg to differ: back more than ten years ago our VP of Product Marketing used to sprinkle his exhortations with that phrase. & he got his MBA from the University of Texas. (Some of us had a pool going to guess when one of the more passionate sycophants in the department would start using that phrase in her speech.)

As for #31, the “110%” crowd are complete pikers. Ms. Suck-up (mentioned in the comment on #30) went on record as being behind Mr. Longhorn “a thousand percent”. & you have to hear the nasal tone on the drawn-out thousand to get the full effect.

I picked up #32 while working in telecoms. I knew I’d been assimilated into the collective when I heard myself berating a friend by saying, “You’re dropping data. & not just bits; you’re dropping entire data streams.”

In my defense, it was only that one time, & I’ve been clean for 11 years now.

Feel free to add your own pet peeves. It won’t stop your colleagues from continuing to use them, but you’ll feel better for it.

Remembering...the Great War

At this writing we’re in that twilight period between 28 June and 1 July that weighs down on me as a few of the most cataclysmic days in history. That’s because the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was shot by Bosnian nationalists (badly equipped but thoroughly propagandized by the early-20^th Century Serbian equivalent of the CIA) on 28 June 1914. And 1 July marks the 92^nd anniversary of the opening of the Battle of the Somme—when the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties on that first day (of a battle that would run through November) in a completely futile attack ordered by generals who never got close to the actual front lines.

World War I is an interesting phenomenon in American cultural memory: it pretty much doesn’t exist. It’s been overwritten on our data bases by World War II, by Vietnam and by the Middle East adventures of the Bush family in the past two decades.

For some reason, Americans pretty much blow off this particular war. Perhaps because mass media didn’t keep it roiling through society in the 20s and 30s the way it did World War II in the 50s. A few novels, a movie or two, and that’s it. By the time the Bonus Army marched on Washington to be routed by Douglas MacArthur on orders of Herbert Hoover (Republican presidents really don’t like being reminded of societal obligations) in 1932, it was safe to send in current soldiers with fixed bayonets to storm the camps of the veterans of that war.

This historical amnesia was brought home to me by a friend a few years ago: an educated man, BS, double masters’ degrees in education and computer science, and a dissertation short of a Ph.D. all from William & Mary. But when I mentioned that conflict as the 1914-1918 war, he got this puzzled look on his face, like I’d got my facts wrong. Then his face cleared and he reassured himself, “Oh, that’s right—the war started before we got into it.”

Well, duh…

What interests me is that we’ve collectively obscured the fact that we’re still suffering the aftershocks of what was known at the time as the Great War. (People came to understand the magnitude of it; they didn’t realize they would have to start numbering them.) The war was one of those turning points in history—civilization was marching in one direction, empires clashed and humankind took a 90-degree turn.

World War I reverberated throughout the 20^th Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the presumptive ruling youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued from 1939-1945 (again, the Euros were involved for two years before we entered; actually, if you want to count the Japanese aggression in mainland Asia, which was also made easier by the obvious reluctance of the major powers to draw a line in the sand of any quadrant, then that war dates from 1932).

But we’re even now feeling the effects of that catastrophe. It was an imperial war, fought for gains of empire. Russian, Turkish, British, German; even the French republic was concerned with flexing imperial muscles. The nearly farcical assassination (only succeeding after a series of Keystone Kops-like attempts by the Bosnian-Serbian team) of the Austrian archduke led directly to the collapse of the Russian government and the Communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and 70+ years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous reparations from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that victory.

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade.

The treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire, with Britain and France slavering to pick up pieces of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those policies are still reverberating. Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

The British empire’s death knell was struck as well; it didn’t survive the second war. And France—well, a steady retreat as well.

For the United States it marked our emergence as a major player on the world stage. Despite our best efforts to turn back the clock in the 20s and 30s (possibly one of the reasons for blocking the memories of our 18 months’ involvement in the carnage) and pretend that those dissipated Euros’ problems were no concern of ours, by the time we got through World War I, Part 2 (1941-1945, for us), it was clear that there was no turning back.

Our involvement did have some positive effects on our society, however; although most people are unaware of the connection. In a pattern that was followed more fully in the second war, the US government had to call on all its citizens to mount the effort, even for that period of months. That included women and blacks. Turns out that once you’ve demanded that all your people step up to the plate for a total war, it’s hard to pat them on the shoulder and  send them back to the kitchen or the rear of the bus forevermore.

The 19^th Amendment, granting women the vote, was ratified in 1920. Equal rights for African Americans took longer. But a major step forward came in 1948 when Harry S. Truman, God bless him, issued Executive Order 9981, ordering the desegregation of US armed forces.

Truman had been an artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Force, serving in the Vosges in 1918.

The Washington Post ran two stories on Memorial Day about the last known US veteran of the AEF, Frank Buckles, 107, of Charlestown, West Virginia. One, written by a professor at UVA, opened with Buckles being wheeled around the derelict World War I memorial in DC.

It’s an apt metaphor for our national denial of that war. But, really, we neglect it and its lessons at our own peril. In the words of Santayana, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Witness our current mire in the Mid-East, and consider how things might have been different had our leaders remembered the First World War and learnt from it.