Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (18 page)

Conversation involves an exchange of ideas, and hiya-how-you-doin'-
today-fine-thanks-how-about-you does not involve exchanging any ideas.

There's a place for pleasantries like “Good Morning. Nice day, isn't it?” but not if the small talk drives out serious conversation. When we talk, we use our mouths. In conversation, we ought to use our brains.

People are often reluctant to talk about anything serious. It's probably because they don't want anyone arguing them out of the things they believe for no good reason.

Two subjects that often are considered out of bounds are politics and religion. It's difficult to exclude those two important topics if we're going to have many genuine conversations. Why shouldn't we talk about politics and religion? Why shouldn't we argue about those subjects and expose ourselves to other opinions?

People are somewhat more willing to argue about politics because they can argue personalities, not issues. Personalities are easy. If a person dislikes the President, he or she can rant and rave about what an idiot Bush is without ever making any sense. This is not a political conversation, and most of us avoid serious political conversations for the same reason we avoid religious conversations. For the most part, we know what we believe but we don't know much more than that.

In the case of religion, most people have known since they were young what they are expected to believe by their parents and friends. They are Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Christian Scientist, Muslim, Jew. They don't want to talk about it.

No subject is more interesting to discuss than religion but people are so uncertain about the details of their beliefs that they'd rather not have the subject brought up.

We like to talk to each other so we keep finding new substitutes for real conversation. These days sports have driven out the weather as the number-1 topic when we don't want to think much about what we're saying.

“Hey, how about those Dodgers!” has temporarily replaced “Is it cold enough for you?”

A real conversation takes too long for most of us. We greet each other on the street, in an elevator or pushing a shopping cart. This is no time to talk politics, the economy or whether we're spending too much on arms.

There are several other reasons why conversation may be a dying art. First, good talk takes time and we aren't willing to spend it on something that seems like doing nothing. Second, the best conversations are between two people, not among three, four or ten. The best conversations are those in which the participants can't wait to say what they
have to say and, if there are more than two conversationalists, they don't get a turn often enough.

There's a third reason for the deterioration of good conversation. We're all more aware of how careful we have to be about what we say. We're nervous about being quoted in the newspaper or having our friends tell other friends, and enemies, what we've said. We can't be careful in a good conversation. We have to let the thought pop out of our mouths before we've finished having it. Good conversation is often a little irresponsible. We say things we don't really mean. We can't have the feeling it's being recorded because that makes a conversationalist careful and care kills conversation.

I'd like to have a serious talk with you about this sometime.

I like the nuts. We owe them a lot.

The nuts are the people who know everything about one thing and almost nothing about anything else. There are art nuts, wine nuts, stamp nuts, car nuts, baseball nuts and there are political nuts. You name it and there are people who are nuts about it.

Marty was a political nut. Marty lived in Albany, New York, and we were related but I don't want to talk about how. All during the forties, fifties and sixties, Marty got half a dozen newspapers from all over the country. He liked the
Chicago Tribune
best. It was indisputably the worst major newspaper printed in the United States during those years, but Marty loved it because no other newspaper was right wing enough to suit his political taste. We always hoped Marty was kidding but I don't think he was.

There wasn't any sense getting into an argument with Marty about politics anywhere in the country because he knew more about it than you did. His politics were never the same as mine but I had to admit he knew and I didn't. Marty was the kind of guy who could prove that Hitler was kind to dogs.

I'm not really a very political person. Most Americans aren't. Like people who watch baseball games only when the World Series is being played, most people pay attention to politics only during the last days before an election. That's me.

For better or for worse, average citizens leave the nitty-gritty of
politics to those few people, like Marty, who are fascinated with the process. Fortunately for all of us, wherever there was a Marty reading the
Chicago Tribune
back in those days, there was some other nut reading
The Daily Worker
, and they canceled each other out.

While it may be the ambitious men or women who decide to run for office in the first place, it is the people who follow politics closely who pass on the candidates' potential for success, and they let the rest of us know who the promising people are.

Those political nuts among us who read everything and know everything have served us well. They're the people who walk door-to-door with the petitions and attend endless council meetings and neighborhood planning sessions. They know. The rest of us are guessing.

It's the people who are nuts about anything that bring the obscure things in their specialty to our attention. The art nuts recognize a good new artist whom the rest of us would live our whole lives without appreciating. If it weren't for the handful of people who know what they're talking about when they talk about art, Picasso would never have been discovered. He certainly never would have been discovered by me if he'd lived next door.

It doesn't matter what the subject is, it has to have some nuts of its own. Most of us don't know how to dress until the fashion nuts let us know.

Everyone would still be doing the minuet or the waltz if the dance nuts hadn't taken dance in a new direction that no ordinary dancer would ever have thought of or dared do.

We wouldn't know who to vote for in the Heisman Trophy competition if the sports nuts didn't give us some choices.

The wine nuts tell us '83 was a good year and we believe them and they're right.

I'll take a nut's advice on what he's nuts about every time.

You have to feel sorry for the traditional little neighborhood churches across America.

The pope gallivants around the world attracting attention and money for the Vatican but very little of either for the local churches;
the preachers on television skim the cream off the top of the Protestant collection plate. In both cases, the Little Church Around the Corner has to take the leftovers.

The good, solid small-church Protestant ministers and Catholic parish priests must detest the neon evangelism of the TV hucksters. If these ministers and priests believe what they preach, they must worry about the perverse pleasure they take from the scandals in which so many of the big-money television pray-for-pay preachers have been involved.

It seems so unfair and yet inevitable that the most ignorant and the poorest people in America pay the most for nothing. It is, for the most part, the ignorant and uneducated who respond to the appeals from the television ministers. They are the same people who buy lottery tickets.

There is a correlation between buying a lottery ticket and sending $10 to Oral Roberts or Pat Robertson, because the results are the same. There are none. In each case the person putting up the money is looking for some disproportionately wonderful return on the money.

In the case of the lottery ticket, the person hopes to win $1 million a year for life. In the case of the money sent to the television ministry, the sender hopes to get back in return life everlasting or, at the very least, forgiveness for his sins. I'd give $10 to Oral Roberts myself for a little of that.

The television evangelists are good at what they do. Words flow from their throats like sugar from a bag. They never seem to be at a loss for words, and when they are, they say, “Praise Jesus.”

Their talent is like that of the vaudeville performers who can juggle eight balls in the air or draw two rabbits out of a size 6 hat. Preaching is a trick they've mastered. It's sleight-of-mouth.

I was in the audience during the performance of a faith-healing minister in Philadelphia several years ago. Some kind of mass hypnosis took place. Many in the largely black audience actually fainted when he pressed his hand to their foreheads and shouted, “Heal this woman, God!”

He sent an assistant, who traveled with him, through the audience with a collection plate, which was actually a plastic bucket, while he told people to give. The assistant came back with the bucket brimming with bills—fives, tens and twenties. While his congregation waited, the preacher dumped the money in a suitcase. He made a hasty estimate of the amount in it, decided it wasn't enough and sent the assistant back into the audience for more.

Jesse Jackson, who is smart enough so he shouldn't have to resort to
it, can do this vaudeville trick. Once on
Nightline
he appeared along with Jerry Falwell. Falwell has an appealing way about him if you don't listen to what he says but Jackson out-double-talked him that night.

When Jackson was backed into a corner by Falwell or host Ted Koppel, he turned on his invisible preacher-switch. His mouth started going while Falwell, Koppel and presumably the whole television audience tried to make out what he was saying. The words were all familiar. He sounded as though he were making sense but you realized that, like those double-talk nightclub comedians, it was an illusion of sense. He wasn't saying anything. It was his vaudeville act.

May I just say, in conclusion, that if I do not receive at least $1 million in the mail by two weeks from Tuesday, God told me He'd strike me dead!

Praise Jesus!

Please do what you can.

When the president or chief executive officer of a big company issues a statement saying how well the company is doing, you can bet the company is in big trouble or he wouldn't have bothered.

The first thing these memos try to do is establish the chief as Mr. Nice Guy. He'll say, “I'd like to take this occasion to share some thoughts with you.” Or possibly he'll say, “I welcome this opportunity to speak to you.”

The literature of the company memos is a genre all its own. Memos are often written for the president by a minor executive who also works on writing rosy prose for the stockholders' report at the end of the year and they reflect some of the style of those masterpieces of sleight-of-word.

To understand one, you have to be able to translate what's actually said into what's actually meant.

“In the past year, our company has undergone significant restructuring.”

This usually means a lot of people got fired and one of the company's divisions lost so much money they got rid of it.

“We are confident that with your help we will be able to overcome the formidable obstacles …”

This translates as we'll be asking you to take a cut in pay.

“We have made great strides in recent months …” the memos always say. Then they go on to say, “While we have made great progress, there is still a long way to go.”

What the head of the company is usually trying to tell employees is that they better brace themselves for a salary cut or some layoffs.

“Difficult times” always “lie ahead” in company memos.

“As you know,” the company memo continues, obviously not believing that you know at all or it wouldn't be telling you, “the economy makes us particularly vulnerable to competition from outside interests.”

“We can no longer count on” something. It doesn't matter what but they always say they can't count on something.

“In the future, as in the past, we will continue to” do something. It doesn't matter what, either. They always say they'll continue to do it.

The single most popular word in the memo from the company president is “challenge.” The company faces “an unusual challenge this coming year,” or it has already “faced a series of unusual challenges” in the year just past.

The president, nonetheless, looks forward “to a year of expanding growth and productivity.”

The times are never just ordinary, everyday times in a company memo. “As we face the future,” times can be “demanding times,” “troubled times,” or “the difficult times in which we live.” Sometimes they are “turbulent times.”

Even though it looks as though the company is going to fire people, cut salaries and reduce the quality of its product, “Our commitment is to excellence.” Or “We are committed to a program of excellence.”

If the rumor is already out that the company is going to lay people off, one of the first things the president says is “There is no truth to the rumor …”

There is never any truth to rumors in memos from company heads to employees. The company may go belly up three weeks later but at the time the president speaks, you can be sure “there's no truth to the rumor WHATSOEVER.”

“Nothing could be further from the truth.”

If the rumor of bad news has already proven to be true, the company head wants to “put the whole matter into perspective.”

“Our greatest asset is you, our employees.”

If you are one of the employees, BEWARE THE COMPANY MEMO.

Why is it that everything always costs more than we think it's going to? How come we never get used to that fact and figure it in when we take money out of our pockets to pay for something?