In Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, that ship’s crew finally rebels over its working conditions, in particular over the food they’re given. They haul a side of beef, writhing with maggots, before the ship’s doctor:
“Dr. Smirnov’s eye peering through the doubled pince-nez fills the screen. (Cut to . . . )
“White maggots swarm over the surface of the rotted meat.
“Dr. Smirnov’s pince-nez, a blur in one corner of the screen, come into sharp focus as they are carried toward the maggots. (Cut to . . . )
“Dr. Smirnov leans back, looks up at Vakulinchuk, and gestures deprecatingly toward the hanging carcass as he pronounces his medical opinion. (Cut to . . .
“The doctor’s hand and pince-nez tap the maggoty meat to emphasize his findings. (Cut to . . .
TITLE: ‘These are not maggots.'”
It is the voice of authority, oblivious to or contemptuous of any facts which might contradict its foregone conclusions. It is the voice of all who speak for the dictator. (Thus far, the US has no dictator as such; its dictator is, rather, corporate in nature.) Few people choose to challenge the dictator or the dictator’s lackeys, preferring to join in the popular fiction that they live in a democracy. So most of us require a different voice, the voice of the bureaucrat, to keep us in subjugation.
That voice doesn’t directly assert the power behind it, or, for that matter, directly assert anything at all. Instead, it throws a stifling, damp, felt language blanket over its victims, who are of course referred to as “colleagues.” Though he was speaking of the tyrant, Clive James’ observation applies as well to the tyrant’s straw bosses: “. . . the . . . overlord’s power to bore was a cherished and necessary component of his repressive apparatus.”
If the bureaucratic straw bosses must engage in a direct confrontation with the people who do the actual work in an organization, that power to bore is generally the only component needed. You will recognize the drill: the straw bosses begin the meeting with a series of extremely long, jargon-laden “updates.” These plod on until the more desperately ego-ridden workers are writhing in their seats. When the meeting is opened for discussion of whatever complaint (excuse me, whatever Issue) it was called to address, it is these workers who will grab the floor with their own interminable remarks, some of which may relate remotely to the subject of the meeting. By the time these people run out of steam – and they always have a lot of steam – the rest of the workers are also writhing in their seats, desperate for a drink or a smoke or some welcome silence or some normal human conversation. The meeting disperses with no dangerous outcomes, because with no outcomes at all, except possibly the formation of a committee or two to further study the Issue.
Committee meetings resemble larger meetings in most respects. In addition, they generally feature at least one PowerPoint presentation, which requires the straw boss, or some committee member serving as the straw boss’s poodle, to project an endless series of slides bearing an outline of something numbingly obvious, and to read each slide aloud in the interests of redundancy or amplified humiliation. While committee meetings are nearly always maggot-laden, they require recall of another film to enable a normal human worker to endure them.
That film is Deep Blue Sea, one of the ten worst movies ever made. In the nadir of a career that’s had plenty of low points, Samuel L. Jackson plays Mr. Franklin, possibly a corporate CFO, possibly a successful entrepreneur, possibly a token executive in a firm or charitable foundation occupying a high-rise in New York City, whose possible President, CEO or Owner is an elderly white man who seems to have been taxidermied shortly before his one scene.
In that scene, an ostensible actress, evidently lobotomized in preparation for her performance, plays a genius researcher leading a project that may lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s, to which her father has succumbed to provide her motivation. She helicopters down to the NYC high-rise to find that Mr. Franklin, or possibly his moribund superior, is pulling the plug on her research, which Franklin or the recently dead man have been financing. She begs for a couple of days’ grace, and she pilots Franklin back to the research station, an abandoned WWII submarine fueling station in the middle of the Atlantic. Or the Pacific, or some ocean. During the flight, in some of the most awkwardly disguised exposition ever written, Franklin reveals that at some time in his past, he was a member of a climbing party caught in an avalanche in the Alps, and that he was responsible for saving some of the party.
The fueling station has been converted to a largely underwater holding facility for a bunch of Mako sharks, whose brains have been somehow enlarged so that the researchers can harvest some chemical peculiar to shark brains that, we are to believe, accounts for the longevity of its species. This is the chemical that will cure Alzheimer’s in an undisclosed manner. An unanticipated side-effect of enlarging the Makos’ brains has been that they have gotten really smart. In fact, the escape of one of the sharks, and its subsequent attack on a pleasure boat full of bikinied women, prompted Jackson’s decision to pull the plug on the project.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, a few hours after Franklin touches down on the station, a massive typhoon arrives, knocking out the facility’s electrical systems and trapping Franklin and the researchers below decks with a bunch of devious, angry sharks. The sharks are out for revenge. Turns out they haven’t appreciated having their brains enlarged or living in underwater cages. They make short work of the cages, the underwater bulkheads give way, and the research crew must scramble and thrash around through the rising water, trying to find safe haven. One after another, they fail to do so. (Their meagerly established characters have been so uniformly vacuous, repellent, and annoying that the theater fills with cheers as each one disappears down a shark’s gullet.) Finally cornered, the surviving principals take to arguing fruitlessly with each other, and Mr. Franklin, survivor of alpine avalanche, steps up to take command. Standing at the edge of a pool in which, in better days, the sedated sharks had had their brain chemicals harvested, Franklin says,
“You think water’s fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. When the avalanche came, it took us a week to climb out. And some way, we lost hope. Now I don’t know exactly when we turned on each other, I just know that 7 of us survived the slide, and only 5 of ’em made it out. Now we took an oath, that I’m breaking now, swore that it was snow killed the other 2. But it wasn’t. Nature can be lethal, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Man. Now you’ve seen how bad things can get, and how quick they can get that way. Well, they can get a whole lot worse. So we’re not going to fight any more! We’re gonna pull together, and we’re gonna find a way to get out of here! “First, we’re gonna seal off this ” – CHOMP!!!! And the last we see of Mr. Franklin is his foot sticking out of a submerging Mako’s teeth. You think ice is fast?
It’s a true highlight of World Cinema. Many people must share that assessment, since that scene has been enshrined numerous times on youtube, so you will have no trouble finding it, and won’t even have to endure the rest of the film to do so.
The memory of that scene will carry you through the most stultifying committee meeting. You’ll find it no trouble at all to mentally replace Mr. Franklin with whatever insufferable clown is prating away in Inspirational mode and watch that clown erased from existence in less than one second by a large, ill-disposed shark.
This advice should suffice, unless you are one of the few surviving members of the dwindling subspecies of people who suffer from the illusion that language was invented to convey clear meaning. If you are, you’ll understand the following rant by one of my former fellow wage slaves, Mark Prokto:
“Deep Beneath Mongolia a series of caves exists, a full thirty miles below the surface of the earth, hence heated by the magma itself. In these caves, the alpha-ur-humans are being brought to us. From their little petri dishes they blossom into creatures in all outer aspect no different from earthlings.
“For their first thirty years, they are coddled, petted, and surrounded by only two messages: ‘You are superior to all earthlings you will encounter – except, of course, for those with whom you share the Secret Handshake,’ is the first. The second is not so much one message as an always-changing series of messages, which these homunculi necessarily believe constitute human conversation: a few months ago, for example, these messages consisted of the word ‘robust,’ and the phrase ‘at the end of the day,’ but they change rapidly, depending on the date of Expulsion Day. On Expulsion Day, the homunculi, dressed appropriately for various climes, are put into a rocket-propelled elevator and blasted out through a tube in Mongolia into the near stratosphere. They rise and spread like dandelion seeds over the surface of the earth, and drift down into the executive offices of every goddam place on earth. And immediately, they begin to speak: ‘At the end of the day,’ they say, ‘the bottom line is this: it is what it is.’
“And that’s who’s running the show. Your show. My show. The show.
“Kurt Vonnegut has another version in his new book. He thinks who’s running the show is ‘C students from Yale.’ Naahh. It’s Mongolians.”
If you do somehow retain the belief that words are supposed to bear identifiable meanings, you define the uses of language far too narrowly. Dr. Smirnov’s denial of self-evident truth, depending on his role as representative of Authority, is a use that most, if not all, parents will instantly recognize, since they’ve had recourse to it themselves: BECAUSE I SAID SO!!!
Those same parents will recall as well that language can be used to soothe, bore or send off to dreamland – hence the once universally known nursery rhymes and lullabies that have only lately been replaced by machines programmed to emit numbing sounds. The most militant employees find it difficult to retain their fervor when drifting off to dreamland to the soothing strains of the “Think Outside the Box” mantras of those On the Cutting Edge.
A third use of language against the interests of clear communication is the ubiquitous practice of Ad Speak, of the sort inculcated in the Mongolian homunculi. Ad Speak comprises a wealth of techniques: qualifying phrases such as “As much as” and ” As little as,” sesquipedalian verbiage conveying manifestly erroneous assertions, “proof” by reference to irrelevant or non-existent authorities . . . .
If you have not yet learned the trick of tuning out meaningless or dishonest babble, you clearly haven’t watched enough messages from the pharmaceutical industry, and you will need to find a proactive approach to enduring meetings. For example, several of my colleagues and I used to get through assemblies led by a particular administrator by silently toting up his uses of the word “agenda” (approximately one per every two sentences). Whoever remained alert longest and counted the most “agendas” won. Donna Leon, a writer whose ear is tuned most delicately, astutely and precisely to the varying tones of dishonesty, suggests a more elaborate version of this approach in Fatal Remedies:
[Vice Questore (Deputy Commissioner) Giuseppe Patta is Commisario (Superintendent) Guido Brunetti’s superior at the Venice Questura (Police Headquarters). Signorina Elettra is ostensibly Patta’s secretary, factually the most intelligent, able, witty person in the building. She sees everyone and everything clearly, and very carefully dispenses her observations to her allies in competence.]
“There in Lyon [at a training course at Interpol headquarters] Patta had . . . sampled the various managerial styles on offer by bureaucrats of the different nations. At the end of the course he’d returned to Italy . . . head bursting with new, progressive ideas about how to handle the people who worked for him. The first of these, and the only one so far to be revealed to the members of the Questura, was the now weekly ‘convocations du personnel,’ an interminable meeting at which matters of surpassing triviality were presented to the entire staff, there to be discussed, dissected and ultimately disregarded by everyone present.
“When the meeting had first begun two months ago, Brunetti had joined the majority in the opinion that they would not last more than a week or two, but here they were, after eight of them, with no end in sight . . . .
“His salvation had come, as had often been the case in the last years, from Signorina Elettra . . . . she had come into his office . . . and asked Brunetti, with no explanation, for ten thousand lire [approximately one U.S. dollar].
“He had handed it over, and, in return, she’d given him twenty brass-centered five-hundred-lire coins.In response to his questioning look she’d handed him a small card, little bigger than the box that held compact discs.
“. . . . it was divided into twenty-five equally sized squares, each of which contained a word or phrase, printed in tiny letters. He’d had to hold it close to his eyes to read some of them: ‘Maximize,’ ‘prioritize,’ ‘outsource,’ ‘liaison,’ ‘interface,’ ‘issue’ and a host of the newest, emptiest buzz-words to have slipped into the language in recent years.
‘”What’s this?’ he’d asked.
‘”Bingo,’ was Signorina Elettra’s simple answer . . . . All you have to do is wait for someone to use one of the words on your card – all the cards are different – and when you hear it, you cover it with a coin. The first one to cover five words in a straight line wins’ . . . .
“And since that day the meetings had been tolerable . . . . Each week, too, the words changed, usually in conformity with the changing patterns or enthusiasm of Patta’s speech: they sometimes reflected the Vice-Questore’s attempts at urbanity and ‘multi-culturalism’ – a word which had also appeared – as well as his occasional attempt to use the vocabulary of languages he did not speak; hence, ‘voodoo economics,’ ‘pyramid scheme’ and ‘Wirtschaftlicher Aufschwung’.”
It can, of course, be argued that such approaches to enduring the abuses and humiliations fostered by Authority are pusillanimous and shameful. Perhaps, indeed, they are so. But it can also be argued that some degree of abuse and humiliation has always been the price of admission to gainful employment, and that putting up with it by turning it into an occasion for a few laughs is a sane, if not particularly admirable, strategy. Socrates said that in a democracy, you have three classes. “The third class will be the ‘people,’ comprising all the peasantry who work their own farms, with few possessions and no interest in politics. In a democracy this is the largest class . . . . ”
In our time, the peasantry no longer work their own farms, but rather work at various jobs in government or retail sales or, increasingly, as carbon-based servo-mechanisms to various robotic processes.
Nevertheless, in my long, if admittedly limited, experience, I have found that most working people still retain a good deal of pride in the performance of their work They have little or no interest in politics because they perceive that bosses are always going to be bosses and mostly jerks. They hope to evade the attention and interference of the bosses so that they can do their work in the best ways they’ve learned to do it. If they’re lucky, unduly interfering with their work won’t too often serve their bosses’ personal agendas.
If they’re not lucky, they may run afoul of one of the more pernicious sets of bosses, the certifiable psychopaths. (The Harvard Business Review observes placidly that “Chances are good there’s a psychopath on your management team.” Its essay on “Executive Psychopaths” goes on to say that “Many of psychopaths’ defining characteristics—their polish, charm, cool decisiveness, and fondness for the fast lane—are easily, and often, mistaken for leadership qualities. That’s why they may be singled out for promotion.”)
But you have a pretty fair chance of avoiding the truly psychotic boss. After all, “Nathan Brooks, a forensic psychologist . . . conducted a study surveying 261 senior professionals in the U.S. supply chain management sector. Brooks, along with his colleagues at Bond University in Queensland, and the University of San Diego, found that 21 percent of senior level professionals showed ‘clinically significant’ levels of psychopathic traits.” Four out of five bosses, then, are just garden variety jerks, who can be finessed or ignored without undue peril. Or, if not ignored entirely, creatively endured, using some of the techniques I’ve suggested. Imagination is not a frill; it’s often a vitally useful tool. Cultivate yours.
