In honor of Holy Week, I want to say something about a very unusual book that I have been reading for Lent. The book is, Light Over the Scaffold: Prison Letters of Jacques Fesch.

Jacques Fesch was a 27-year-old Frenchman who was guillotined fifty years ago this October for shooting a policeman. The case was notorious in France: first, because the policeman was a widower whose little daughter was orphaned by the tragedy; and second, because Fesch was not some ignorant, underprivileged youth, driven to crime by desperation. Indeed, the newspaper accounts of his capture described him as a “well-dressed juvenile delinquent.”

He was the son of a banker. Although he did poorly in school, his father –- and, after he married, his father-in-law –- took him into their respective businesses. For various reasons, he failed at his work and at family life. He drifted, he sponged off his relatives, he had extra-marital affairs and he separated from his wife and baby girl. Eventually, he decided to chuck everything and sail off to Polynesia. When his father refused to buy him a sailboat, he turned to robbery. In this, too, he failed, injuring several people in the attempt, in addition to killing the aforementioned police officer.

And yet this selfish, dissolute young man — who told the chaplain when he arrived in prison that he “had no faith” -- underwent an extraordinary conversion in the three years leading up to his trial and execution.

Some might object to the word “extraordinary.” After all, when a man is stripped of everything he values in life and is facing eternity, wouldn’t it be natural for him to turn to God as a last resort? There are no atheists in the foxholes.

But if you think about it, it would be just as likely for a man in Jacques’ position to despair — to give up on himself, or to conclude that he had put himself forever beyond God’s mercy. Moreover, when Jacques was converted, he had not yet been tried. Because he felt he had not committed premeditated murder (he insisted that had panicked and fired blindly when his pursuers closed in on him, without intending to kill anyone), he hoped that the worst sentence he would receive would be a long term in prison. His state of mind at the time of the bungled robbery can be inferred from the fact that while committing it, he accidentally shot himself in the hand with his own gun.

To me, Jacques’ letters ring true because of the extraordinary depth of his spiritual insights. Of his conversion, he wrote: “Before that, the true God was an indifferent tradition as far as I was concerned. Now, He is all that matters. He is at the center of the world, He rises above my being. He invades me totally, and my spirit cannot escape from Him. A powerful hand has seized me … It constrains me, and yet I am free. It transforms my being, yet I do not cease to be what I am.”

Jacques was not brought to trial until three years after his crime. In the interval, public opinion had hardened rather than softened towards him. He was convicted and condemned to death. The President of France personally reviewed the case. While he was inclined to show clemency, this was at a time when French police were being killed by Algerian terrorists, and he felt that he could not commute Jacques’ sentence without endangering the lives of others.

Jacques accepted this refusal with Christian resignation. He wrote: “Jesus allows this death in order to save whoever he wills to save.” And yet, in the same letter, he speaks of his joy: “I am living through marvelous hours, and feel as if I had never lived any other life than the one I’ve been experiencing for a month now. Jesus draws me to himself, and knowing the weakness of my soul He gives me so much while asking for so little. For each small effort that I make I receive another grace, and, in view of the shortness of the time, this ascent towards God is being achieved far more quickly than it would be for someone who still had years ahead of him.”

The publication of Jacques’ letters in France made a profound impression, especially on young people. In time, he was compared to the penitent thief who was crucified with Christ at Calvary. Thirty years after his execution, the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger, signed a degree that may one day lead to his beatification and, ultimately, his being declared a saint. The Cardinal’s action was criticized for potentially creating a patron saint of cop-killers. But Lustiger declared that he wished to see Jacques beatified “to give a great hope to those who despise themselves, who see themselves as irredeemably lost.”

It was the penitent thief who said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.”

And Jesus replied: “Verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

This is the only man for whom we have the word of Christ himself that he made it into heaven.

For those who wish to read more about Jacques Fesch, there’s a web site with further information:

http://www.santificarnos.com/2006/08/jacques-fesch-saint-who-killed.html

Whenever a Louisiana-born friend of mine is feeling particularly overworked, he says he feels like “an octopus with the mange.”

Reading some of the on-line job descriptions for communicators these days, I wonder how many people in our profession feel the same way. Especially those who are trying to write.

For example, a Fortune 500 company, which shall be nameless here, recently advertised for a “Communications Specialist II.” The job description reads as follows:

“Provide strategic insight and creative input into internal and external communications strategies that respond to emerging issues, raise awareness of company initiatives and further company goals and objectives. Develop and implement communications strategies that support media spokespersons throughout the utility company; serving [sic] as company spokesperson for local issues with print and broadcast media. Develop and maintain relationships with key media contacts throughout the major media markets in the state. Monitor news media for emerging coverage and issues. Create and coordinate the design, writing and production of complex publication materials, employee communications and customer communications. Draft talking points, employee questions and answers, white papers, newsletter articles, speeches, scripts and news releases. Manage logistics for press conferences and other local events. Responsibilities include being available for off-hours events such as unplanned power outages, major storms, and major public relations events.”

The successful candidate is expected to have “significant experience as a writer with news media, public relations firm or corporation.” Further, the candidate “Must demonstrate strong oral and written communications skills, including the ability to develop speeches, marketing materials, news letters and business plans. Must have demonstrated the ability to work constructively with others toward common goals, a proactive approach to identifying communications opportunities and issues, solid time management skills, and the ability to manage crisis situations and think creatively.”

By the way, the salary for this job is between $45,200 and $67,800.

Obviously, this company needs someone with “strong written communications skills.” Note the grammatical howler in the first paragraph. But what is it likely to settle for?

Being a PR flack – which includes being a spokesperson, developing relations with the media, and managing press conferences and other events and otherwise dealing directly with corporate constituencies and the general public -- is a job in itself, requiring its own special skills. Being a writer is also a job in itself, requiring its own special skills. Because flacks tend to be extroverts and writers to be introverts, it is very rare for a single individual to be able to perform both these functions successfully – and certainly not for the salary that this company is offering for this job.

Reading this job description from a writer’s perspective, I wonder when the person who gets this position will have time to think – let alone to do the research, writing and careful editing that are essential for turning out high-quality written communications.

What will the company do? Very likely, it will hire one person who can perform the greatest number of these job functions with at least minimal competence. It will settle for mediocrity, and that is exactly what it will get.

But in the end, cutting corners may prove more expensive than hiring enough qualified specialists to perform all these communications functions properly.

A survey by Burson-Marsteller a few years ago revealed that nearly half a company’s reputation depends on the reputation of its CEO. If the company won’t pay for a full-time speechwriter, it should at least make sure that the CEO’s speeches and other messages are written by someone who is a full-time writer. Otherwise, his speeches are going to sound as if they were written by an octopus with the mange.

In 1889, a 24-year-old Rudyard Kipling, flushed with his first success as a paid author, hung a sign outside his shabby London lodgings that read, “To publishers: Classics while you wait.”

If Kipling were alive today, he would probably write a blog –- or so I assume from an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “How Blogging Can Get You a New Job” by Sarah Needleman.

According to Ms. Needleman, blogging is a tango between recruiters and job seekers. Recruiters search blogs for prospective talent, and job seekers write their blogs to get noticed by recruiters.

Apparently, it works for both. A recruiter for Wal-Mart says in the article that he has filled 125 corporate jobs simply by devoting a couple of hours a week to scanning blogs. On the other side of the dance floor, a consultant for Internet companies in Oakland, California, says that he gets about 15 inquiries a month from companies and recruiters who found him through his blog.

While most blog-related recruits are professionals in technology and media, some are writers and PR generalists who use their blogs to showcase their communications skills.

That rather makes me wonder what I’m doing wrong. I mean, I’ve been blogging at least a couple of times a week for over a year and a half now, and I still haven’t been discovered yet. Why isn’t my phone ringing off the wall? Where are my lucrative freelance assignments and six-figure job offers?

Probably, my continued obscurity is my own fault. I’m not being as shamelessly self-promoting as I should be. If I want to pop up on Internet searches, I need to mention my own speechwriter credentials more often. I should be saying things like, “When I was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House…” or, “When I wrote speeches for Colin Powell…” or perhaps, “The last CEO for whom I wrote speeches served at chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the nation’s leading business associations. I wrote all his NAM speeches, too. Several of them were published in Vital Speeches of the Day.”

Then again, if this blog were just about me, who would read it?

I don’t want to bore my readers, but I do have to make a living. So, folks, if you find me saying things like, “In my 25 years of writing speeches for CEOs and cabinet-rank federal officials…” or, “On one of the five occasions when I was a featured speaker at the Ragan Speechwriters Conference in Washington…”, please don’t judge me too harshly for my blatant advertising. Bloggers need to eat, too.

Eugene Finerman, my friend and fellow-blogger, had some fun last week with the new Showtime series, The Tudors. In a post entitled, “The Imbecile’s Guide to History” (http://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2007/04/11/213/),
Eugene quotes Irish heartthrob Jonathan Rhys-Meyers on his reasons for playing Henry VIII without the English monarch’s trademark red hair, beard and girth.

Rhys-Meyers says, “You’re trying to sell a historical period drama to a country like America, you don’t want a big, fat, 250 pounds, red-haired guy with a beard. It doesn’t let people embrace the fantastic monarch he was, because they’re not attracted to the package. Heroes do not look like Henry VIII. That is just the world we live in.”

Like so many show-business rationales, this one is as self-serving as it is untrue. In 1972, five years before Mr. Rhys-Meyers was born, the BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII garnered both critical acclaim and a significant popular following when it aired on Masterpiece Theatre. Henry VIII was played -- with red hair, beard and full figure -- by actor Keith Michell

So popular was the series that it even inspired a New Yorker cartoon. A husband and wife are watching TV as one of Henry’s wives is shown laying her neck on the block. The wife says to the husband: “There you go again! Always sticking up for Henry!”

The series –- which is available on DVD and still fascinating to watch –- made no attempt to dumb down English history for American audiences, or to make historical characters look and act like punk rockers. Indeed, the quality of the historical research and the scripts matched the quality of the acting.

The writing was very good indeed. How good? Well, not long ago, I was having coffee with a friend of mine at Starbucks, when the series came up in the course of our conversation. To my amazement, my friend started raving about the great speech that the Imperial ambassador makes at the end of the first episode, which tells the story of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Henry was devoted to Catherine, but when she could not provide him with a male heir, he resolved to put her aside in favor of Anne Boleyn. When the Pope refused to grant Henry a divorce, he broke with Rome and made himself head of the Church of England. The shock waves from that split are still being felt in the 21st Century.

Catherine could have avoided the schism, had she either permitted her marriage to be annulled, or retired to a convent, leaving Henry free to marry someone else. Instead, she insisted fiercely that she was Henry’s lawful wife and queen, and that their daughter, Mary, was the only legitimate heir to the throne. As he invariably did whenever he was crossed, Henry retaliated with anger, bluster and cruelty.

At the end of the episode, Catherine has just died –- banished from court, wretchedly poor and forsaken by nearly everyone. She has failed at all points. Henry has married Anne Boleyn; England is lost forever to the Catholic Church; and Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry and Anne, will one day humble the Spanish empire.

One of Catherine’s faithful ladies-in-waiting turns to the Imperial ambassador (sent by Catherine’s nephew, the Habsburg emperor Charles V) and asks, “Was she wrong?”

In reply, the ambassador observes that when Catherine sailed from Spain to England as a young bride-to-be, the ship was beset by fierce storms and was nearly lost.

“When a storm strikes,” he goes on to say, “it sometimes happens that everyone on board runs about from side to side, trying to save themselves. There is no hand at the wheel. The ship yaws to and fro, with every gust and every wave.

“And then some hand –- more determined than the others –- grips the wheel and turns the ship into the wind and holds it there. Perhaps this course drives it upon the rocks. But though the ship may be broken, some fragments of it remain.

“Our Queen, when danger threatened, turned her ship’s head to the wind, and held it upon the only course she knew: the course of truth. It struck upon the rocks of passion and circumstance, and all aboard perished … But they did not disappear without a trace, as they might otherwise have done. Some spars and timbers of that ship remain to show that there were human beings there –- and that they cared profoundly about the terms on which they lived and died!”

I have not seen the Showtime series, but I rather doubt that it contains any speeches as fine as that one, by the author of that Six Wives episode, Rosemary Anne Sisson.

If you want a real glimpse into early Tudor England, have a look at the 1972 BBC series. And then decide which Henry you prefer to watch.

My last post on Henry VIII and popular culture reminded me of a hit tune from the early 1960s, sung by a British rock group called, for no particular reason, Herman’s Hermits. It is said to have been the fastest-selling song in history, although it is hard to see why. It was actually an updated version of a 1910 British music hall song.

The lyrics were imbecilic:

I'm Hen-er-y the eighth I am
Hen-er-y the eighth I am, I am.
I got married to the widow next door,
She's been married seven times before.
And every one was an Hen-er-y (Hen-er-y!),
She wouldn't have a Willy or a Sam (no Sam).
I'm her eighth old man, I'm Hen-er-y
Hen-er-y the eighth I am!

But the tune was one of those infectious little ditties such as advertisers love. Once you heard it, you could never quite manage to drive it out of your head. If you saw the 1990 movie, Ghost, you may remember the scene where a spectral Patrick Swayze pummels Whoppi Goldberg into submission just by singing the silly jingle over and over again.

Somewhere around 1965, Peter Noone, the leader of Herman’s Hermits, appeared on Danny Kaye’s TV variety show. I well remember how the manic Mr. Kaye welcomed his guest in costume as the original Henry VIII –- the costume having been stuffed with enough padding to make Macy’s Santa look anorexic by comparison.

Kaye then sang his own version of the popular hit which, if memory serves, went something like this:

I’m Hen-er-y the Eighth, I am,
Hen-er-y the Eighth I am, I am.
There were Hen-er-ys One through Eight,
Every one of them was overweight.
And every one was an Hen-er-y (Hen-er-y!),
There never was a Willie or a Sam (no Sam).
I’m the eighth fat king I’m Hen-er-y,
Hen-er-y the Eighth I am!

If it wasn’t historically accurate, Kaye’s parody was at least funnier than the original.

David Murray, who blogged this site before me, is quoted in the April 16 issue of The Ragan Report as saying that he gave it up because “This blog is like a wet blanket on a long-suffering yak.”

Thank you, David, for the charming comparison. Your comment reminds me of the scene in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, where Thomas More is told that his friend Erasmus has taken to calling him, “the English Socrates.” More replies, “Presently, I must think of something to call Erasmus.”

But I’m not about to do anything so petty. On the contrary, I’m going to use this occasion to note that David has a new blog called, “Shades of Gray: A Blog on Corporate, Political and Personal Communication.”

To show that David and I are still the best of friends, I’m going to provide a link to his new blog so that interested readers can have a look at the new David –- and see how he’s changed. Check out “Shades of Gray” at http://shadesofgray.typepad.com/.

Ooooops!!!! Better make that http://blog.ragan.com/shadesofgray/. David hasn’t changed that much.

In his blog today, Andrew Sullivan recommended to his readers the full text of the speech that Sen. Barack Obama gave yesterday to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/fpccga).

So I looked it up, read the full text and was duly impressed. But 45 minutes later, I was hungry.

Sen. Obama is justly renowned for his oratorical skills. I was particularly struck by the powerful imagery on display in this paragraph, where he says that if the American people have confidence in their next President, they will be ready to see America lead the world again:

“They will be ready to show the world that we are not a country that ships prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries. That we are not a country that runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they are there or what they are charged with. That we are not a country which preaches compassion and justice to others while we allow bodies to float down the streets of a major American city.”

But for the most part, the speech was long on generalities designed to appeal to the mass of voters, and short on specific policy proposals.

For example, this section on foreign policy:

“No President should ever hesitate to use force –- unilaterally if necessary -– to protect ourselves and our vital interests when we are attacked or imminently threatened. But when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others –- the kind of burden-sharing and support President George H.W. Bush mustered before he launched Operation Desert Storm.

“And when we do send our men and women into harm’s way, we must also clearly define the mission, prescribe concrete political and military objectives, seek out advice of our military commanders, evaluate the intelligence, plan accordingly, and ensure that our troops have the resources, support, and equipment they need to protect themselves and fulfill their mission.”

Nothing new or controversial there. Remember the Powell Doctrine?

And when Sen. Obama was specific, the specifics didn’t exactly inspire my confidence –- such as when he proposed to double our spending on foreign aid. His rationale was that for the last 20 years, U.S. foreign aid has done little more than keep pace with inflation. That may be true, but it also ignores the fact that private U.S. contributors –- foundations, corporations, churches, universities and individuals –- provide nearly six times the amount of aid provided by our government.

Yet while I was skeptical of the speech as a whole, my eyes were drawn to two sentences in particular, in which I think that Sen. Obama put his finger on a profound truth regarding America’s relations with the world at large. “The disappointment that so many around the world feel toward America right now,” he said, “is only a testament to the high expectations they hold for us. We must meet those expectations again, not because being respected is an end in itself, but because the security of America and the wider world demands it.”

Amen to that.

In his own analysis of Sen, Obama’s speech, Andrew Sullivan offered the most persuasive argument I have yet read in favor of electing the gentleman from Illinois as our next President. He says, in effect, that electing Obama would be the quickest way of restoring America’s image around the world. It would amount to a “rebranding” of America.

The whole of Andrew’s commentary can be read at http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/04/the_rebranding_.html, but the nub is this:

“Obama brings something no one else does to this moment. By replacing one of the most globally despised and domestically divisive presidents in American history with a young leader half-Kansan and half-Kenyan, America would be saying something to the world: Bush-Cheney is not who we are. America is not what it has come to appear to be. This country is among the most culturally and racially and religiously diverse on the planet. America has long been a powerful and vital beacon for human rights -- not, as recently, the avatar of torture, rendition and executive tyranny. The simple existence of Obama as a new president in a new century would in itself enhance America's soft power immeasurably, just as a clear decision to leave Iraq would provide much greater leverage for diplomacy and military force in a whole variety of new ways. Obama would mean the rebranding of America, after a disastrous eight years. “

I’m not sold on Obama yet, by any means. But I have to admit that I’m intrigued by Andrew’s argument.