The ringmaster on CNN tonight was trying to make this into an important debate about political correctness and race. That's all we need in this country: Another important debate about political correctness and race. (Those have been so fruitful in the past!)

But the Houston public school police "handbook" story has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with communication—intent, and execution. And it is not particularly important.

The concept behind this little document might have been reasonable—cops need to understand all dialects spoken by people they protect and serve—but the execution simply revealed it wasn't.

The title—"Ghetto Handbook!!!!!"—betrays a gleefulness that you don't find, for instance, in the title of the Oxford English Dictionary!!!!!

A subtitle—"Whacha dun did now?"—is, shall we say, somewhat leading.

Some of the definitions are obvious. Even my 84-year-old dad knows what "crib" means.

Other definitions are suspect: "gank (g-ahnk) a. to steal from someone" An adjective? I don't think so ....

And the whole thing has the look, feel and sound of a white-supremicist flyer, which is especially galling because it's not written for undercover drug cops, but rather for cops on the schools beat.

The problem is, this handbook was compiled and distributed by a moron—he has since (somewhat belatedly) been suspended—who had neither the ability nor the desire to hide his despicable attitudes.

What have we learned: Some cops are racist morons, and other cops are slow to call them on their attitudes.

This is an open and shut case, I'd say, addng a sincere prayer that this "debate" won't last until the next news cycle.

Jack O'Dwyer and all other weirdos who think Public Relations deserves social status on par with Nuclear Physics are up in arms about a "Career Profile" that appeared on the Web site of The Princeton Review.

The mortifying phrase:

"Though some colleges offer a degree in public relations, most industry professionals agree it's unnecessary. Since public relations requires familiarity with a wide variety of topics, a broad education is the best preparation. Any major that teaches you how to read and write intelligently will lay good foundation for a career in public relations. Or, as one PR person put it 'if you can write a thesis on Dante, you should be able to write a press release.'"

The last little quote is the only one I'd quibble with in the slightest, and I'd say instead, "If you can write an INTERESTING thesis on Dante, SOMEONE OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO TEACH YOU to write a press release IN ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES."

The Princeton Review doesn't claim that a history major or a journalism major will teach you everything you need to know to be a great PR person. It simply says a major that "teaches you how to read and write intelligently will lay a good foundation" for a PR career.

A better foundation, I'd say, than a narrow major in PR. In fact, I'd say one of the biggest problems in PR and employee communications is pinheads graduating from college thinking the meaning of life is getting key messages across to core constituencies.

Some years ago, a niece of mine wanted to major in PR and asked me what I thought. I said, "Girl, don't be a goddamned idiot. Major in English. Learn about history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, language, life. Then let someone pay you to learn the ins and outs of publicity and promotion."

To this day that was the best advice I ever gave that someone actually followed. She's making a quarter of a million a year doing marketing for a movie studio Hollywood.

How can you argue with that?

August 14, after a big recall of China-made toys, Mattel CEO Robert Eckert gave one of the all-time grotesque crisis PR interviews, dry-mouthedly refusing to answer basic questions from Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo. (Click on link to see train wreck.)

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported that Eckert doesn't agree with the Consumer Product Safety Commision's law requiring product hazards to be reported to the agency within 24 hours. Mattel, Eckert said, likes to do its own investigations first.

Earlier today USA Today reported that Mattel was recalling almost another million lead-tainted toys from China.

And an hour ago it came across the wires that "Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) is pleased to announce that Robert Eckert, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Mattel, Inc., will speak at the 2007 BSR Conference, Oct. 23-26, in San Francisco."

My wife and I used to believe that there was no reason to solicit anyone's advice: Everybody's different, every situation is different, every moment is different. Ask for advice and all you do is obligate yourself to follow it or make excuses to the advice-giver for why you didn't.

But now that we have a child and thus are constantly in over our heads—I received a list of organic snack foods I have to take once a month to Scout's new preschool and realized I wouldn't know where to find any of the items—we ask people for advice. All the time.

Now we're mad when something happens and it occurs to us: No one ever warned us.

When she was about one, Scout fell down the stairs. We freaked. When we told others, every single parent we knew said, "Oh yeah, Paige fell down the stairs when she was a baby. So did Madison!"

Where were these know-it-alls when we were deciding whether or not to have children? "On the one hand, babies are very cute. On the other hand, they all fall down the stairs ...." (And, we learned a little later, they all get head lice, too.)

A couple months after Cristie got pregnant, I was on the golf course, playing with a stranger. He was talking about his daughter, who was struggling in her first post-college job and very unhappy. "You'll never be happy unless your kids are happy," he said, casually.

WHAT?!

Not that we would have believed any of this stuff had we heard it in advance. We sure don't believe warnings from some of our parent friends that no matter what we do, our little bundle of I-love-you-Dad magic will be a tattoo-covered, parent-hating freak in a few years.

Which is the real problem with advice: It usually requires us to worry about something more than we're already worrying about, and on any given Friday morning, that seems impossible.

P.S. This is also exciting. Headline from the Associated Press today: "Suicide rate for young girls jumps 76%—Why the 'dramatic and huge increase'? No one really knows."

During the usual Sunday night routine—if I stay up late enough, Monday will never come!—I saw a George Carlin show from 1977.

In two lines, 30 years old, he made me realize how many hours I have wasted listening to branding experts.

He said: You won't eat Goodyear pancakes and you don't want to drive on Aunt Jemima tires.

For veracity and usefulness, contrast Carlin with Procter & Gamble marketing chief James Stengel, on the same subject, in interview with Fortune.

Asked about the biggest trend in branding, Stengel said:

"The biggest thing going on with U.S. consumers is that they want to trust something. They want to be understood, they want to be respected, they want to be listened to. They don't want to be talked to. It's trust in the largest sense of the word. People really do care what's behind the brand, what's behind the business. They care about the values of a brand and the values of a company. We can never forget that. We can never be complacent about that."

In other words, you won't eat Goodyear pancakes.

I'm off the smokes, and one emotional consequence of this unnatural status is that I spend parts of my work days in a gathering rage, looking for someone who deserves the ventilation of my internal pressure cooker.

Usually I find a worthy target. (There are lots of assholes in this world who are going around blissfully and deserve a surprisingly harsh assessment of their work or their personalities.)

But never have I managed to get off something as pithy as this rejection letter, sent by Alfred Knopf to a prominent Columbia University historian in the 1950s (this comes from last Sunday's New York Times Book Review piece on the Knopf archive):

"This time there's no point in trying to be kind," Knopf wrote. "Your manuscript is utterly hopeless as a candidate for our list. I never thought the subject worth a damn to begin with and I don't think it's worth a damn now. Lay off, MacDuff."

Friends, do you have favorite bits of written nastiness, written by you or by others? As the lovingly needlepointed pillow on my Aunt Zodie's couch used to say, if you don't have anything nice to say, sit next to me ....

I've watched a pretty good chunk of the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, on the military situation in Iraq.

At times during the testimony, I've been persuaded by the sheer intelligence and nobility and honesty of this man, who is explaining in a molecular way how the U.S. is going about fighting, and in some cases, co-opting the insurgency. You almost want to say: With a man this broadly competent in charge, how could we not give this thing one more year to work?

But as the dust settles, I find myself seeing in Petraeus many business colleagues I've worked with: Good people who have known they were up against an impossible project but were putting forth their very best human effort anyway—focusing on the little progress they could make, necessarily ignoring the miles between the doable and the goal.

I admire Petraeus more than I admire any of the senators who grilled him this week—most of whom couldn't help but express their own admiration.

This morning I am sure of one thing: If only all American politicians and our citizens had as much intellectual integrity and operated with as much sobriety and communicated with as much clarity as David Petraeus, this brilliant leader and his fine soldiers would not be ensnared in this unbelievable situation in the first place.

My dad once wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal making fun of people who declare, in the smug belief they are the only people in the world who feel this way, "You know, my favorite season is fall!"

Everybody's favorite season is fall, he said.

Well it's fall in Chicago—crisp, clear air has come a week and a half before the official start of the season—and I am feeling incredibly good. So good, in fact, that I don't care who knows it:

The onset of fall makes me feel there is a chance that Everything Might Work Out. Life might not, after all, be merely a kaleidescope of scary, happy, boring, confusing, absurd, awkward, hilarious unjust, lucky and messy moments.

Life, it seems to me on the first day I trade my shorts for blue jeans and boots, might be comfortable, might be pretty, might be pleasant, might be beautiful, might make sense.

Here, before the leaves begin to turn, is hoping.

This is what it looks like when the president consults with his speechwriters.

For some reason, the White House decided to release this gripping photo today, after spending the whole week leaking the gist of the speech.

The only strategy I can imagine for the advance speech-leaking and this iconic image of groupthink seems to me to be to convince even America's most earnest, civic-minded mopes that it's okay to watch the Cubs game tonight instead.

Does anybody have a better theory?

I got this e-mail recently from a colleague in the U.K. It was a curiously disjointed essay, about—among other things—a vacation, the nature of e-mail itself, the extent to which my colleague's employer felt responsible for computer viruses and personal opinions, and the employer's relationship with regulatory bodies.

The e-mail covered a lot of ground:

***

I am out of the office until Monday 3 September. If the matter is urgent,
please contact [my assistant] on [phone number]. Thank you.

This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and intended solely for the addressee and may also be privileged or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you are not the addressee, or have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately, delete it from your system and do not copy, disclose or otherwise act upon any part of this e-mail or its attachments.

Internet communications are not guaranteed to be secure or virus-free.
The Company does not accept responsibility for any loss arising from unauthorised access to, or interference with, any Internet communications by any third party, or from the transmission of any viruses. Replies to this e-mail may be monitored by the Company for operational or business reasons.

Any opinion or other information in this e-mail or its attachments that does not relate to the business of the Company is personal to the sender and is not given or endorsed by the Company. ...

The Company is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.

***

Has anybody seen a legal e-mail disclaimer that's longer or more far-reaching than this?

More useful: Has anybody succeeded in lobbying the legal beagles to shorten or drop these dumb things that nobody except me ever reads?

Okay, everybody, the experiment is over. Transparency is dead. I'll never hear the word again without thinking of it as anything more than spin—and I can't believe my inner-undergraduate let me fall for it in the first place.

This post by Lee Hopkins says it all, but if you don't feel like reading it all, know this:

A half dozen of the most zealous advocates of social media and a new age of transparency went into business together, forming a company pretentiously called "crayon." They posted a complete basket case of a Web site—http://www.crayonville.com/—a pretty thing that violated every communication tenet (but what did that matter? they were doing something entirely NEW!!!), and they set up an meeting place in Second Life where they had insane and pointless virtual meetings (I attended one).

Crayon was going to be an incredible, wonderful, virtual consultancy—"a mash-up if you will of the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds—that specializes in new marketing."

In less than a year, all the principals but one have fallen away, and none has said publicly why.

The founder, Joe Jaffe is left mumbling incoherently: "Crayon is relaunching itself as a conversational marketing company, specializing in helping its clients engage advertising-weary consumers through the power of community, dialogue and partnership. To achieve this objective, crayon will focus its efforts on transforming prolific thought leadership and vision into cutting-edge, differentiated and prescriptive strategic solutions."

Original principals Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson left months ago and have said not a candid public word about why.

And the most recently departed "crayonista," as these fellers were so excitingly called, co-founder C.C. Chapman commented on Hopkins' blog:

"I’ve had numerous people ask for my side of the story and I’ve politely declined to them all. Burning bridges and being professional are two very core beliefs of mine. It is tough being such an open and honest guy and NOT saying anything about all this. Not commenting anywhere but watching the conversation happen is a very strange feeling to me, but I know it is the right decision."

I'll presume Chapman mispoke here when he said "burning bridges" is one of his "very core beliefs." But I don't think he realizes how silly he sounds when he says how tough it is being such an open guy and not saying a word about how his transparent consultancy unravelled over 11 months.

The answer is, C.C.: The only thing transparent about your consultancy was its clothes.

P.S. Transparency is dead, but the Cubs are still in it

Me: Come on. I've been off cigarettes five weeks and I’ve only been a flaming, self-pitying, nasty asshole a few times, really. Maybe a few bad days, a few bad moments.

My wife: But we never know when it’s going to be, so it might as well be all the time.

Here in Chicago, one of our collective local fetishes is verbal stumbles and maniacal outbursts.

King Richard Daley the first was famous for misspeaking so much his press person finally demanded that reporters stop reporting what the mayor said and start reporting "what he meant."

One of our favorite all-time moments is this long-ago tirade, from an otherwise forgettable Cubs manager named Lee Elia.

Of course there was WGN's Cubs announcer Harry Caray, who kept 10-1 games interesting because he always offered the tantalizing possibility he would say something terrifically off-the-wall.

One of the reasons we keep voting for the current Mayor Daley is that during his nearly two-decade tenure, he has been rhetorically reliable.

Like the time a reporter questioned whether the the mayor's office had been sufficiently scrutinized on corruption charges.

"You guys scrooten me every day," he said.

When they scrootened him a couple of years ago—it was alleged that the Chicago Skyway tollway was open and flowing nicely whenever the mayor was returning from his vacation home in Michigan—the mayor thought it was silly. Really silly:

“Everybody’s caught in traffic every day. I don’t know where they got that. Don’t worry. I’m caught in traffic as much as anyone else. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. It really is silly. It’s silly, silly, silly. It is just silly. Silliness. It is silly. Completely silly…You’ve been on [the Skyway]. Come on. It’s silly…You know me. That is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

And just this week, Mayor Daley uncharacteristically played the race card in order to win a fight over whether to put a new children's museum downtown. But he played the card with such clumsiness that the oppressed were too confused to be outraged:

"You mean you don't want children from the city in Grant Park? Why? Are they black? Are they white? Are they Hispanic? Are they poor? You don't want children? We have children in Grant Park all the time. This is a park for the entire city. What do you mean no one wants children down there? Why not? Wouldn't you want children down there?"

On the off-chance that Shades of Gray readers are half as delighted by this sort of thing as its writer, I'll toss precious Daley quotes into posts at the same rate that he produces them.

I hadn't known that until I saw this clown try to explain Second Life in this speech.

My favorite quote:

"What's the point? What's the point of this whole thing? ... Well I understand Craig Sherman was here yesterday talking about a kid buying a hat in the real world and saying that it wasn't the real hat. The cotton hat was somehow the knock-off for the one that came from the real world, which was the virtual world. So I think that point is an important one ...."

It's high time for my avatar, a clumsy but well-meaning (and, may I say, strapping) feller named Doraff Moraff, to have another Second Life adventure. Stay tuned.

Isn't it sad that the gleaming best-case study of crisis PR is from 1982?

But whereas we have to go back 25 years to the Tylenol tampering scare find an ideal example of corporate communication, for an example of the imbecilic and amoral, we have only to look back to ... Friday, when Mattel apologized for about the 15th time about lead paint found in toys sourced from China. This time, to Mattel apologized to China.

A few weeks ago, I teased Mattel CEO Robert Eckert for his dry-mouthed refusal to answer an oh-so-difficult question from those investigative houndogs at Good Morning America. The question was, essentially: How much dough do you save by sourcing your products from China?

Apparently the answer was, a hell of a lot, because on Friday the company's worldwide operations VP Thomas Debrowski apologized again—this time, to China.

He went to Beijing to personaly apologize to China's product safety chief Li Changjang in front of reporters and company lawywers. He said the "vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel's design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China's manufacturers."

He also said the recalls were "overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead paint in excess of U.S. standards."

"I really hope that Mattel can learn lessons and gain experience from these incidents," said Li (which rhymes with glee). He added that Mattel should "improve their control measures."

And today, the Chinese media is crowing. The main English Language newspaper, China Daily, gets out the violins for its editorial:

"The apology, though delayed, should help dispel suspicion that American consumers harbor against Chinese-made products and clean up the stain the recalls left on innocent Chinese workers who make a living doing honest labor."

Mattel, when you've given China sufficient high road to straight-facedly defend its poor innocent masses, you have really done something.

The only way this thoroughly humiliated company will ever regain its credibility is by sacking a huge portion of its management team, replacing them with people known for their integrity, restructuring the whole outfit and announcing a brand new trade philosophy.

Or—in the ADD culture we live in—waiting six months for everyone to forget this whole snafu and rolling on, business-as-usual.

Seriously, readers: Which of the two tactics is more likely?

Love (incoming and outgoing).

Onrushing death.

The need to belong (to something that's doing more than just making people rich).

Personal problems that are huge, or that seem so some days.

Music.

Uncertainty about God (and almost everything else).

Assholes, and dear hearts.

Sleepovers, picnics and basement-flooding somewhere.

Leaders who feel sorry for themselves because their followers "just don't get it."

Followers who follow sheeplike even though their leaders "just don't get it."

Wind.

Stars.

Ideas.

Moods.

Emerson and Thoreau.

In fact, almost everything is constant, isn't it?

(Everything except for this age, which will be remembered through constant history as the Time When Big Organizations Philosophized, and People Listened.)

Some time ago I was carping here about something or other, and I referenced a magazine story I was working on. That piece, for the October issue of Chicago Magazine, is now available online, for free.

I'm proud of the piece, but very much interested in any and all feedback from the people with whom I share my less objective, journalistic moments.

See article here.

You'll have to scroll down a bit to a piece, on the right-hand column, called "Bolingbrook, C'est Moi," with my byline.

A press release informs us that PRSA has lined up Karen Hughes to speak at its International Conference on Oct. 22.

"The U.S. State Department official charged with communicating the image of the United States around the world, Ambassador Hughes will speak on 'Waging Peace -- The New Paradigm for Public Diplomacy' ... Ambassador Hughes has been tasked by the president with leading efforts to engage American diplomacy to counter ideological support for terrorism around the world. In that role, she is leading the development and implementation of a comprehensive public diplomacy plan built on three strategic objectives: to present a positive vision of hope and opportunity rooted in American ideals; confront ideological extremism by empowering mainstream voices to exhibit respect for Muslim cultures and contributions; and foster commonality of values and interest between Americans and other cultures throughout the world."

Hughes has been "tasked" with this diplomacy gig for a couple years now, and I haven't heard anything like a success story. I have heard only horror stories, like the one reported earlier this year by Joshua Kurlatzick in The New Republic:

"On her first 'listening tour,' in autumn 2005, Hughes offered rote responses to questions about U.S. foreign policy, often descending into platitudes emphasizing herself as a mother and a caring listener without engaging her audiences. 'I look forward to shaking each of your hands and having you give me a hug!' Hughes enthused in Turkey ...."

Perhaps she's done something more impressive on the diplomacy front since then that the American public hasn't heard about, but her talk had better be good, and it had better be good right off the bat.

I was at a conference in Seattle about a dozen years ago where PRSA invited the then-super-divisive figure Newt Gingrich to speak over video-conference. Newt was booed so loudly and for so long that red-faced conference organizers pulled the plug before the talk was over.

I wonder if PRSA's operatives remember that. I wonder if they warned Karen Hughes that communicators can be a tough crowd when they perceive they're being lectured to by propagandists. In any case: This could be good.

So I'm at Ragan's "Un-Conference" yesterday—some impressions of that event will appear in The Ragan Report soon—and sitting next to this little pink hospital communicator, just as innocent-looking as she could be.

We were discussing something innocuous—workload issues, I think—and she says with a shrug, "I just stopped doing the newsletter."

What did she mean, she "just stopped" doing the newsletter?

She explained that the newsletter had been around for years, but lately the CEO was taking forever to approve it. She kept writing and designing an issue, sending it to the CEO, and getting it back three weeks later with everything out of date. So she'd write and design another issue, send it to him again, wait three weeks again and have to throw it out again. Several consecutive issues never saw the light of day.

"So I just stopped," she said with a another shrug that turned into a smile when I offered my hand to shake.

She's doing a communication survey soon, and she'll find out whether employees miss the newsletter. But she doesn't think they will.

Readers: Have you ever ... just stopped?