It was almost a week ago that I posted here about Keith Olbermann's naming of Wal-Mart as "Worst Person in the World," and his threat to continue to do so until Wal-Mart "atones."

After a week of bludgeoning, Wal-Mart apparently had enough yesterday, dropped its claim against the brain-damaged former employee and changed its policy.

How do I know? I wrote the story this morning.

My ultimate take on this one, from an e-mail to Mark Ragan upon turning the story in: "No heroes in this story, and not a lot of subtleties in it either. Just a clumsy company and the clumsy media getting it on, and watching to see how it all shakes out."

Roger D'Aprix pointed me toward a thought-provoking piece about the decline of newspapers and the rise of—well, of a million-zillion know-nothing blabbermouths, not to put too fine a point on it. It's called "Out of Print," it's by Eric Alterman and it's in the March 31 New Yorker.

(For some reason it won't let me embed a link, but you can paste this one in if you want to read: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman)

Lots of food for thought for communicators who would get carried away with social media to the point where they'd completely throw off their role as a central collector, collator and editor.

Facilitators of online communities though we may be, editors we must stay. We owe our readers—and our organizations—at least once central, authoritative communication vehicle:

"In 'Imagined Communities' (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: 'Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.' It is at least partially through the 'imagined community' of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged."

To many employees and in many ways, the employee newsletter—or the intranet home page if it's understood to be a center of activity—is the organization. Without it, all is abstraction.

Roger many have much more insight—he often does—but this is what I took away from the piece.

You?

Apropos of absolutely nothing at all but that I just came across it in a book I'm reading on presidential speechwriting for a review for Ragan.com, here's what H.L. Mencken famously said of the writing, "the worst English that I have ever encountered," of President Warren Harding:

"It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm ... of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Wheeee!

Sunday I embark on a truly whimsical three-day trip helping a friend help his brother get elected as selectman in their Massachusetts hometown, then golfing and oystering on Martha's Vineyard.

I'm told the oysterman with whom we're staying doesn't have the Internet.

Something I'll be thinking about while I'm gone:

The other night four-year-old daughter Scout began making proclamations:

"I don’t realize the world. I don’t understand the world."

"I think about bad things and I can't help it."

"I don’t know about this world."

At our prompting, she ticked off, as if alphabetically, a number of things that seemed to her bad, or confusing: a scary scene in The Lion King ... the story of Matilda, where the parents send their kid to live with a teacher ... people putting chairs out in the street (in Chicago, we do this to save parking spots we’ve shoveled out after blizzards).

And the neighbor Sharon’s dog Sally.

"Sally eats poop!" Scout said. "Frozen poop."

“Why do dogs eat poop?”

Still reeling from a somewhat mind blowing 24 hours with a genius fisherman philosopher at Martha's Vineyard—when I figure out what to write about him I'll write some of it here—I return to another chapter in what seems to be Wal-Mart's return to the hot seat.

According to the AP story, it seems a video production company that worked for Wal-Mart got mad when Wal-Mart dumped it, so they dumped a bunch of footage they'd taken into a searchable database and made it available for Wal-Mart's enemies to comb through for $250 an hour.

The company also has a YouTube site to tease the videos.

And what are Wal-Mart's enemies making of these video clips? Quick work.

This is just another downhill crumble in an avalanche of bad PR that might have been avoided had some smart communicators convinced some smart executives about eight years ago when the bloom was beginning to come off Wal-Mart's rose, that you can't be the biggest company in the world (or even your industry, or your city) without considering and being sensitive to how your actions are going down with the general public.

UPDATE, 4/11: The AP reports that the video production creeps want $145 million from Wal-Mart for these videos; Wal-Mart's best offer so far is $500,000.

What a game of chicken. Wal-Mart execs can't possibly pretend to know everything that's on those tapes. If the execs in drag are the worst thing on there, the company is right to refuse to pay the extortion. (Maybe it's right to refuse to pay the extortion no matter what.) But what else is on that searchable database that Wal-Mart's enemies are hoarding their pennies to afford? One thing looks sure: We will find out.

"Sustainability" is on our lips but the economy is in shambles, desperation nips little chunks out of our hearts, and the champagne, as General Petraeus put it, is in the back of the refrigerator. Our airplanes are grounded and our gas prices are soaring.

And yet I reenter the world knowing that there is a man who lives in a rabbit warren of a house on Martha's Vineyard, heated by a wood stove.

Tom Osmers does a lot of things for dough—he fishes for cod and striped bass, lobsters and oysters and sometimes he moves houses—but never so much at once that he's ever been compelled to open a bank account.

He knows his trade, he knows the politics surrounding it and works to influence them. He knows his mind and his proper role in his community. He knows the change he wants to see in the world, and he does exemplify that change. And all with grace, wit and humor.

I culled oysters on Osmers' boat and stayed a night in that warren. I ate his oysters and I ate his venison, cooked in that stove. And I'm not too eager to wash the smoky smell out of my clothes.

Thanks, Tom.

(As if he'll ever see this.)

This morning I wrote a quick e-mail to Ragan marketer Kasia Chalko asking for contact information for a couple of customers who I wanted to call for a story.

"As the assholes say," I concluded my note, "thanks in advance." (I've always hated "thanks in advance," because it's pretty much the definition of presumptuousness.)

Old Kasia wrote back with the names—but five hours later.

"You shouldn't have thanked me in advance," she said by way of apology. "Made me feel I'd already taken care of it."

No matter how fervently you believe it to be true, no matter how many times your observations have shown its veracity, you simply cannot get away with saying out loud that a person's political or social or religious beliefs are the result of their circumstances.

(Or, as Pat Buchanan put it, "This is very demeaning to simple working-class folks.")

Whether working stiff or elitist stiff, we each believe that our ideas are our ideas because we have climbed Truth Mountain and retrieved them from the very summit. Not only do we believe these ideas, we must, else we die from doubt and indecision.

What other types of honest and correct observations is it simply impossible to make without catching one's pants on fire?

Last year I blogged about companies that insist on putting trademark symbols whenever they name their products in prose, and some readers thought I was making a Mountain® out of a Molehill (TM).

Then today I stumbled, then bumbled, then fell headlong on this press release on BusinessWire:

"HaloSource(®), a global antimicrobial and clean technologies solutions company, has broadened the reach of its HaloShield(®) ingredient brand, with the introduction of Clorox(®) FreshCare(TM) Towels, now available in Wal-Mart stores nationwide.

"Clorox(®) FreshCare(TM) Towels, powered by HaloShield, are protected against the growth of odor-causing bacteria. HaloShield(®) is a patented coating that binds chlorine-based bleach to household textiles made of cotton. The HaloShield coating, combined with the power of Clorox(®) Regular-Bleach inhibits the growth of odor-causing bacteria on the towel or dishcloth. Antimicrobial protection of the towel is reactivated every time the product is washed with Clorox(®) Regular-Bleach and lasts the lifetime of the product.

“'With FreshCare(TM) Towels, you don’t need to worry about foul smelling dishcloths or hand towels,' says HaloSource CEO John Kaestle. 'We are excited to be able to bring this technology to market and offer a solution to this everyday problem.'"

Obviously those symbols aren't the only porcupine quills in that prose (what marble-mouthed marketer came up with calling HaloSource "a global antimicrobial and clean technologies solutions company"?), but they do their part to defend keep readers from approaching, do they not?

A friend of mine says of someone who cries easily, "She cries at card tricks."

When I was in my twenties I cried about once a year. This has increased gradually and steadily over the years to the point where now I mist up an average of, I'd say, four times a week.

A smart YouTube video. A touching song. A good line in a speech. I'm an instant and pathetic puddle.

This started happening to a friend of mine some years ago and I thought he had wet brain. Now I'm the guy with the hankie in the speed holster.

What in God's name is the matter with me? And is the same thing the matter with you?

Are you crying at card tricks too?

... but Merck may have managed.

See here.

We must think positive, we must be team players, we must compromise, we must not let the great be the enemy of the good. But as e.e. cummings' Olaf (upon what were once knees) used to ceaselessly repeat, "there is some shit I will not eat."

Ad man Albert Jay Rosenthal died last week in Chicago and the Sun-Times obit said he believed his greatest accomplishment wasn't the clients he served but the one he turned down.

"If something was legal and profitable, most advertisers would take it," said his son Michael in the obit. "But he turned down Richard Nixon's Illinois advertising campaign [for president in 1968]. He turned down Remington Arms. He had a connection with a big tobacco company, and he said he didn't want it. ... My father was a liberal."

You don't have to be liberal to take a stand. I'm trying to think of stands I've taken, and the most concrete one I can remember seems like such a moral no-brainer now that I hesitate to offer it.

I was doing a focus group, on behalf of Ragan Consulting, for a local utility company. Out at a nuclear power plant near Moline, Ill. I was sitting in a big room with an unwieldy group of about 25 rough-looking fellows who quietly seemed to regard me, as I took attendance with quavering voice, as a bit of a novelty. (And in this case, by "novelty," I mean "gay city slicker.")

Just as I got through with the roll call, cleared my throat and began the session a man walked through the door and made his glowering way toward a seat in the back of the room. A hush fell upon the hush.

"Excuse me, sir," I said unsurely. "I think everyone is accounted for here. Are you on this list?"

"No. I'm the supervisor. Go ahead, it's fine."

I explained that employee focus groups must be held with only one organizational strata at a time, so workers will feels safe to share the truth.

He sat, unmoved, with his arms crossed.

"I said it's fine. Go ahead!"

There was a moment. When I actually considered. Going ahead. Because the boss said it was fine.

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't go forward with this focus group with you in the room," I said, preparing myself to bask in his glare, to soak in the silence for the whole 60 minutes.

He abruptly got up and stalked out of the room. The split second the door closed behind him the room erupted, Capra-like, in applause and cheers.

Well, my boys were pretty open with me after that .....

It doesn't feel so dramatic when identify a strain of shit you will not eat. Nor does it always seem heroic in hindsight. But it does make a good yarn—and just the kind of yarn that your kid might share in your obit one day.

You got one?

Some people—though rarely our bosses—are impressed and amazed to hear we are writers. The job has a kind of mystique.

But to those of us whose parents were writers, writing is a trade, no more and no less. We are proud of it, but proud in the way that a family of boilermakers or iron workers or firefighters would be.

We're also under lots of pressure when a writer dies, to deliver a good eulogy.

Henry Ehrlich is a speechwriter I've known for 15 years. His brother Dick is a writer too. Their dad Eugene was a writer. He died April 5.

Henry gave Eugene's eulogy. Here's the beginning, and the end:

***

Jews don’t believe in open caskets, but we do believe in open books. And before you are dozens of books. Eugene’s books.

My father used to say, and he may have been quoting someone, if you write 500 words a day, you will leave behind a shelf of books. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what he did.

But of course, there’s more. My father loved the people he loved, although he sometimes had funny ways of showing it. He liked the people he liked, most of them. He ridiculed the people he didn’t like, with conviction and style. And as a rule, he hated Republicans, even the one who very kindly wrote an introduction for [his book] Amo, Amas, Amat--William Buckley.

Last fall when Eugene was in the emergency room, the neurologist asked him who the president was. He couldn’t remember his name, but he smiled at me and said, “That dumb son of a bitch.” ...

When my father’s first book How to Study Better and Get Higher Marks came out in 1961, there was one review. And I still remember one phrase from it. “Written with authority and humor.” That has stayed with me. It is the standard for everything I do, no matter how technical. I think it is the standard for [my brother] Dick.

“Authority and Humor.” Film at eleven. Gone to seek a great perhaps. Stay tuned.

***

Authority and humor, indeed.

(Some blog items need only headlines.)

Communication veteran and Shades of Gray correspondent Barry Nelson has been on the same hobbyhorse for more than a quarter century.

His basic rant, first published in The Ragan Report in the late 1980s, gets better with age:

Recently he couldn't help himself from responding to a query on Melcrum's listserve. First, the query, from an employee communicator in India:

"We've launched a company wide drive to encourage employees to think end-to-end to create business impact for our customers. While we've tried all the usual comm channels - posters, blog, fun quizzes, leadership floorwalks, storytelling etc., employees are not excited and we are not seeing enough traction/buzz. Any ideas cost effective or otherwise are welcome!"

And Nelson's pithy answer:

"... it's been my observation that in this age of 'strategic' communication, employees are simply getting tired of hearing over and over what they're supposed to do next to help their poor dear employer win in the marketplace.

"Often, their lack of response grows out of distrust that the company, institutionally, has the same interest in their well-being and success that it keeps asking them to show in behalf of the enterprise."

A longer and more detailed version of Nelson's argument will appear in the May/June issue of Ragan's Journal of Employee Communication Management.

Meanwhile: Do you agree with Nelson's long-held opinion that much less communication volume should directly about the organization's progress in the "game" of business, and much more should be on subjects in which employees share a healthy self-interest? Or do you, like some corporate communicators, dismiss Nelson as a dangerous socialist?

So my birthday's coming up April 30—I'll be 39—and every year around my birthday my pal and old college roommate Tommy comes, for a round of golf with me and some of my Chicago mates. Usually there's a fair amount of drinking, too—not on the golf course, but on either side. So the golf is played with a giddy hang over, which leads immediately to the heavenly post-round "lather buzz."

For weeks I've been dreading this weekend. Work has been kind of rough lately, and I need to protect myself from the kind of mental instability that these sophomoric booze frenzies tend to create, especially in a man with a child and a mortgage.

But Tommy's the guy with whom I've:

• Driven from Chicago to Las Vegas with—without stopping.

• Smashed up a truck in a West Virginia strip mine one morning, and camped in a 20-foot gap between a railroad track and the Ohio River that evening.

• Ridden motorcycles with along the north rim of the Grand Canyon, without a license (or any experience on a motorcycle).

• Driven to Chicago from Albuquerque with—just the two of us delivered two ancient International Harvester Scouts, a pick-up truck and two motorcycles. (A free drink at the Corporate Communicators Conference to the first guesser who figures out how we did that.)

In short, we are assholes, and at our most ass-holeish when we are together. So I was just buckling my seatbelt (and hoping Tommy wouldn't notice), when I got a call yesterday. Tommy was hemming and hawing.

Well. Hey. You know what? It might be good to just shoot a couple of games of pool on Friday. Maybe some golf on Saturday. And then, you know, maybe take it kind of easy Saturday night, because I've got to babysit the kid when I get home Sunday and I can't be totally wrecked. ...

Yeah, okay, Tommy. Whatever, man. Yeah, I understand. It'll just be good to see you, okay man? Let me know when you've got an ETA ....

(Whew.)

[And: We'll see.]

* Postscript: 4:00 a.m. Friday night, 3:30 a.m. Saturday night, Scout's soccer game, motorcycle adventure, political palaver, golf, billiards and beers in between. Boy oh boy.

No, I don't mean me, I mean my 84-year-old dad, who sent an e-mail to his four children this afternoon:

"We're heading out Thursday morning for Waynesboro and then Richmond and then Asheville and back here on duty Monday or Tuesday. If you have any trouble during that time ... call the police."

A story from today's Chicago Sun-Times made me remember some wisdom of Ragan's late founder, Larry Ragan.

We've all read this kind of story before:

***

Cook County now spends more than $1 million for 15 salaried public relations employees.

So why is Cook County Board President Todd Stroger looking to hire an outside consultant to help handle public relations for the county hospital system?

"We're looking for expertise, to let people know what's going on," says Stroger, who's looking at proposals from nine firms. "We do good things. If you don't tell people, they won't know.''

And what about the three PR people at Stroger Hospital, the one at Provident Hospital and the one at the health department?

"Maybe they need a little help,'' says Stroger. "Is there something wrong with that? This isn't a Mickey Mouse operation. This is a large organization.''

***

To laugh quite as hard as we in Chicago laughed at this item, you have to know how incredibly repulsive Cook County government is now, was during Stroger's father's long tenure as board president, and was millions of years before that, when the place was run by actual political dinosaurs. (Scientists have demonstrated that the Strogers are direct descendants from Triceratops.)

But the notion that the problem is that the county is doing a bounty of good things but their 15 PR people are hiding all that light under a bushel—this is really something.

PR people, in whatever numbers, don't transform the reputations of organizations. To my mind come words I haven't seen in a long time but that I remember by rote, simply because they are true. In a Ragan Report column from 1974, Larry Ragan wrote about Watergate, and why the best PR men government money could buy couldn't save the administration.

Larry said the PR an organization gets is, no matter how fancy PR techniques get, very much related to the PR an organization deserves.

To the Nixon administration, Larry wrote in his hard-ass style:

"Boys, you weren't good. Bad PR."

Mark Twain said that if you ever miss anything, just go to Cincinnati, because everything there happens 10 years later.

An account of a human resources conference this week by Shades regular Kristen Ridley on her MyRagan blog reminds us that in our world, the same might be said of HR.

(How in heaven's name could these HR consulting creeps sill be dining out on the same dog-eared diversity demographics bulletins they were delivering 15 years ago?)

Twenty five years ago today, Cubs manager Lee Elia had had just about enough. And it was still ****ing April.

Have a listen here.

* In answer to a request, here's an uncensored version. Do not play this at work.

Doesn't it seem like we're hearing an awful lot of lamentation these days about institutions and people dropping "even the pretense" of:

• accountability to the American people?

• objectivity in news reporting?

• holding educators accountable?

• transparency in public relations?

• rhetorical fairness?

• caring about the poor?

• driving to the hoop without traveling?

So many pretenses are being dropped, in fact, that there may be an upside: Can we at least hope, when all is said and done, to live in a less pretentious society?

There's a story in the Chicago Tribune today about a flap at Northwestern University Law School.

Apparently a number of asshole students on a committee selected asshole talk show host Jerry Springer to be the commencement speaker this year. Naturally, a number of students objected to the choice, including one smarmy asshole, who said, apparently with a straight face, "I honestly feel like the purpose of a graduation speaker is to inspire you to make the world a better place."

(Inspire yourself, asshole.)

To mollify the smarmy assholes, the asshole committee invited a beloved Northwestern Law professor to speak along with Springer.

But it turns out he is an asshole, too. He defended Springer by saying that Springer is a nice liberal.

"His TV renders him a complex individual," said Dr. Asshole, who admitted he has never seen the Springer Show. "To the extent that students or anyone equates him with completely with that show is just wrong."

When this commencement is inevitably marred by booing and other asshole behavior (and Jerry Springer no doubt dolefully talks about the decline in civility in our society), I won't feel sorry for anyone: These assholes had it coming.

I'm not at the top of my game this morning. It was a long weekend, okay? So I sent an e-mail to my friend Tony, about a fine golf course we played over the weekend.

"I'm still kind of obsessing" about the golf course, I wrote.

My man writes back, "You can live with a verb form of obsess if you like, but keep it away from me, please."

I thanked him for the gentle correction, and wondered if this is how language gets corroded, bit by bit: One tired writer senselessly verbs a noun and a tired reader lets it go.

Thanks, Tony, for being both vigilant and assertive.

A friend of mine has a son in a baseball league in a leafy neighborhood in far-north Chicago. My friend is a coach.

The league's co-commissioner—since when couldn't one commissioner handle a knothole baseball league—sends an e-mail to the coaches suggesting they provide "game notes" on the Web site used to record league action. (Already getting on my nerves.)

In the e-mail, the co-commish writes, "Teams that use [the game] notes feature will find it a huge morale-booster for their team and individual players. By the way, you can file game notes even if you're the losing team: often it helps to find a silver lining in the cloud of a loss. ..."

It seriously freaks me out to read this. Since when do kids need a "morale-booster" beyond playing little league baseball in the first place?

And "the cloud of a loss"?

What on earth could that possibly be? What is going on here? What is this co-commissioner thinking of? What cosmic shift have I missed?