A fine how-do-you-do, and a punch in the face

I've got to be honest with you. There are only a few things I do every single day, and they're all private.

I feel sorry for bloggers who post their ideas, however thin, every single day, and I feel sorry for the families of those bloggers.

I plan to post my ideas, however thin, about as often as I put aside all my writing work and family responsibilities to play golf: Less than once a day, but more than once a week.

I will, on the other hand, check my blog every single day洋aybe several times per day. Why? Henry David Thoreau said that the man who eagerly checks his mail hasn't heard from himself in a long time.

Does anybody else want to punch Thoreau in the face?

Okay: Push in clutch, move stick up and to the left:

Speaking of people wanting to punch people in the face, Don Rumsfeld must want to clobber whichever touchy-feely information officer it was who got the bright idea to put the Secretary in front of a town hall-style meeting with all those dogface GIs in Iraq.

Maybe Rumsfeld had been reading too many Douglas MacArthur quotes like this one, about American soldiers in the South Pacific during WWII: "They plod and drone, sweat and toil, they growl and curse, and at the end, they die; unknown, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts and on their lips a prayer for victory."

You know why they died uncomplaining? Because they were never invited to town hall meetings! You think they wouldn't have had some seriously open and honest feedback for their leaders? These are the grunts, after all, who invented at least two new words to describe the idiocy of their leadership. (FUBAR meant "fucked up beyond all recognition, and SNAFU meant, "situation normal: all fucked up.")

How do you think Secretary of War Henry Stimson would have fared in front of these guys? (Call me Hank, everyone!) I don't think he, or Eisenhower, or MacArthur would have been foolish enough to find out. (Ah, yes, Major Boyington, in the front row �.)

Shouldn't Rumsfeld get credit for having the guts to go in front of the troops? Sure, I'm a communication guy. I'll give him credit. But John McCain didn't, and history won't.

Rumsfeld was badly, overwhelmingly, shockingly out of touch with the mind of the men and women "on the ground," as the obnoxious abstraction goes. And somebody should have either briefed him, with a hammer, if necessary, about the festering frustration of those troops and the potential for an angry question, or advised him not to do the town hall.

And if he's forced out of his job, the glib nonsense about going into war with the army you have rather than the army you want will be cited, simplistically but not altogether incorrectly, as the screw-up that did him in.

Did I say "screw-up"? I meant, "snafu."

When a company gets a black eye, do you titter,
or pray, 'There but for the Grace of God go I'?

In my experience, there are two kinds of speechwriters in the world:

1. Those who will begin to smile and giggle as soon as they come across a story like the one below. They'll begin to chortle before they get to the details of the story.

2. Those who will become angry and begin to grumble預lso, before they get to the details.

Last week the London Guardian reported on a stunt pulled by a political protester who represented himself as the spokesman for Union Carbide parent company Dow Chemicals, on an interview with BBC World.

The gist of the story: On the 20th anniversary of the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, a chemical leak that killed 15,000 people, the BBC interviewed a "spokesman" named "Jude Finisterra," from "Dow," who said the company was going to liquidate Union Carbide and pay out $12 billion in compensation to Bhopal's victims. "Today is a great day for all of us at Dow and I think for millions of people around the world as well," Finisterra said. "Today I am very happy to announce that for the first time Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe."

In the two hours it took the BBC to discover and announce that Finisterra was actually Andy Bichlbaum and that Dow Chemical was not liquidating Union Carbide, taking responsibility for Bhopal or, most importantly, paying $12 billion in compensation. Meanwhile, the company had lost some $2 billion in value from its share price, an amount it regained after the hoax was revealed.

"Tee hee!" says the former journalist who can't shake his distrust of and contempt for big institutions even though he is working for one.

"Goddamn!" says the professional communicator who knows how vulnerable a company is to biased reporters and publicity-seeking protesters.

It may have been a Dow speechwriter of the latter ilk who included, in a keynote speech last week by Dow director general Mark Thompson, a reference to the importance of "the trustworthiness and accuracy of our journalism ... which is why we take last week's Bhopal hoax so seriously."

On the other hand, what about the importance of clever dissenters who know how to use the elaborate institutional structures of business and media against to make important points? That's another reason to take the hoax seriously, yes?

Gigglers and grumblers: Let us learn to appreciate one another.

Our organizations need us both.

Happy 'time off work in the winter to be with
your family and do various ritualistic stuff'

Just having started my blog, it's already time for me to go on hiatus … for the holidays.

The "holidays."

By now, how many times I have been told to have a happy holiday! Just as many times I have wanted to say: "May I have a happy Fourth of July?"

I'm glad that we, in the ever-diversifying United States still agree on the universal use of the word, "weekend." Otherwise, we'd constantly be answering the question, "How were your two consecutive days of non-accountability?'"

The other day I found myself in an e-mail work discussion with three colleagues. As we were wrapping up, somebody in the group expressed his or her desire for the rest of us to have a "happy holiday."

The thing was, everyone in this e-mail daisy chain was a Christian.

Well, depends how you define Christians. We were sort of City Christians.

One grew up Catholic and hates the Catholic Church. Another grew up Catholic and doesn't talk much about the Church. A third doesn't talk about religion at all, but I'm 99 percent sure she's not Jewish or Muslim or anything else, so I assume she is, as my less urbane pals from Cleveland would say, "regular."

And I am an agnostic, a position I take in rebellion to my strict atheist upbringing. But because I grew up in a WASPy suburb, it's Jesus who I'm not sure whether I believe in. And so I am also "regular." And being regular, I celebrate Christmas.

I have no quarrel with the pumping up of Chanukah, a minor Jewish holiday, to make Jewish kids in America not so jealous. And I know people who take joy in celebrating Kwanzaa; you'd never know it was invented in the 1960s by a college professor.

I am so liberal, I would accept a Gay Winter Holiday. (Though, what would you wish them? I suggest, "May your Gay Winter Holiday live up to its title.")

People ought to celebrate just what their family and other immediate social pressures force them to celebrate. Because of course it is mindless ritual and tradition that gives holidays their meaning. (For Christians, that happens to be going into debt in order to give our friends and family things they do not particularly want. Yes, I can see how some people might want to do something different.)

But somehow, I am offended by this "happy holidays" crap, however much a modern social necessity it may happen to be. It seems prissy. It seems bland. It seems cowardly. It eats away at me, happy holiday by happy holiday, until … until … until I snap.

And so I composed an e-mail to my little group of Christian colleagues.

I wrote, "Screw 'Happy Holidays.'"

I wrote, "Merry Christmas."

I pushed "send."

It felt great. It also felt wrong. That's a shame.

But now I'm on a rampage.

Merry Christmas.

Happy Chanukah.

Happy Kwanzaa.

Happy New Year's.

But as for "holidays"? You can have them.

Peace to all and back at you Jan. 3,

DM