WHEN LUKE RAVENSTAHL TALKS...
...people sicken.
I know that my talents and my passions and my
professional interests make me much more sensitive to these things than most
people, but oh, for the blessed love of Pete and articulate politicians, who
taught Luke Ravenstahl how to speak? Every time he opens his mouth on camera, I
have to fight the considerable urge to shoot, or at leat to mute, my television.
Any time I see his name and a set of quotation marks in the same newspaper
paragraph, I want to dive under my desk or my kitchen table and think nothing
but happy thoughts until the coming of the next news cycle. Watching our
twenty-seven-year-old mayor try to communicate is, I imagine, a lot like
watching a seventeen-year-old kid try to have sex: you know he has all the right
parts, and you can tell that he thinks he’s doing a really great job, but
the people on the receiving end certainly aren’t getting any satisfaction,
and you know, if only from your own, squirming sense of embarrassment, that
it’ll take years of help and practice before he can do it with any
semblance of grace or dignity or
sensitivity.
Consider, for example, this unfortunate ejaculation, quoted in today’s Pittsburgh-Post-Gazette:
I am happy to participate in the ethics board's request. I think it's appropriate, and am more than willing to participate myself, in person, which I plan on doing.
What is most shocking, perhaps, is the strategy beneath the surface of the first sentence: answer directly, keep it positive, make yourself look clear and forthright. This suggests that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to handle or coach or consult The Boy Who Would Be Mayor into saying the right thing and sounding, at least occasionally, like a grown man and a mature communicator. But then, like the seventeen-year-old who’s nailed the penetration but, with no idea what to do next, just starts flailing around in the hope that something will fit well and feel good, Mr. Ravenstahl just keeps banging away through that second sentence — all four qualifications of it — until he thinks the reporters have had enough. Or, worse still, until he catches his breath and starts to grind again:
The truth is there, and that is what, at the end of the day, we're going to reveal.
To which I can only add: the sentences are there, and they are what, at the beginning of some day, are going to make my head explode.
It’s as if he and his handlers or consultants or coaches or whoever’s been giving him advice — his old high school athletic trainer? the guy who used to hold for his place kicks in college? the Cotton Candy Guy at Mellon Arena? -- haven’t progressed past a few opening ideas or simple strategies. They clearly need to redouble -- retriple? requadruple? -- their efforts and spend some more time on the advantages of simple sentences. And on the importance of trying not to sound like the orphaned, red-headed love child of a bad lawyer and a first-year MBA student.
With both the NFL and NBA currently out of season, and with President Bush keeping a mercifully low profile while he tries to figure out how next to suggest that everthing in Iraq is just peachy-keen, it’s safe to say that you’ve neither seen nor heard a pair of responses that tortured since the last day of the Alberto Gonzales hearings. Or, perhaps, since the last time the Mayor tried to address this topic:
The issues presented at the hearing are of critical importance to me and we have taken and will continue to take corrective actions to reform the system on a go-forward basis.
This one, heaven help us, actually appeared in a prepared statement to the press. Which means that Mr. Ravenstahl and his crack team of linguists had a chance to consider, to revise, and finally to approve that premature proclamation. And then released it anyway.
Are of critical importance to me? Have taken and will continue to take corrective actions? On a go-forward basis? That’s like a card-and-a-half of Bullshit Bingo right there. Hell, that last phrase alone — ever once heard a politician pledge to do something going backward? how about going sideways? -- is enough to win the game and rack up at least 50 bonus points.
I could go on. And on. And on. But you get the idea. And I might not survive if I did. So we'll just conclude with this...
...Our young Mayor may not have the experience or the resume or the accomplishments or the intellect of a mature and seasoned politician, but I suppose we should at least give him credit for one thing: he already sounds like one. Which is not, alas, in any way, nor by any stretch of real, live, human imagination and communication, a compliment. Because to sound like that is to look, again, like that blindly thrusting seventeen-year-old kid: doing what you once saw on tv, or what you once read in a book, or what someone once foolishly whispered in your ear, all the while oblivious to how little gratification you're actually providing.
Consider, for example, this unfortunate ejaculation, quoted in today’s Pittsburgh-Post-Gazette:
I am happy to participate in the ethics board's request. I think it's appropriate, and am more than willing to participate myself, in person, which I plan on doing.
What is most shocking, perhaps, is the strategy beneath the surface of the first sentence: answer directly, keep it positive, make yourself look clear and forthright. This suggests that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to handle or coach or consult The Boy Who Would Be Mayor into saying the right thing and sounding, at least occasionally, like a grown man and a mature communicator. But then, like the seventeen-year-old who’s nailed the penetration but, with no idea what to do next, just starts flailing around in the hope that something will fit well and feel good, Mr. Ravenstahl just keeps banging away through that second sentence — all four qualifications of it — until he thinks the reporters have had enough. Or, worse still, until he catches his breath and starts to grind again:
The truth is there, and that is what, at the end of the day, we're going to reveal.
To which I can only add: the sentences are there, and they are what, at the beginning of some day, are going to make my head explode.
It’s as if he and his handlers or consultants or coaches or whoever’s been giving him advice — his old high school athletic trainer? the guy who used to hold for his place kicks in college? the Cotton Candy Guy at Mellon Arena? -- haven’t progressed past a few opening ideas or simple strategies. They clearly need to redouble -- retriple? requadruple? -- their efforts and spend some more time on the advantages of simple sentences. And on the importance of trying not to sound like the orphaned, red-headed love child of a bad lawyer and a first-year MBA student.
With both the NFL and NBA currently out of season, and with President Bush keeping a mercifully low profile while he tries to figure out how next to suggest that everthing in Iraq is just peachy-keen, it’s safe to say that you’ve neither seen nor heard a pair of responses that tortured since the last day of the Alberto Gonzales hearings. Or, perhaps, since the last time the Mayor tried to address this topic:
The issues presented at the hearing are of critical importance to me and we have taken and will continue to take corrective actions to reform the system on a go-forward basis.
This one, heaven help us, actually appeared in a prepared statement to the press. Which means that Mr. Ravenstahl and his crack team of linguists had a chance to consider, to revise, and finally to approve that premature proclamation. And then released it anyway.
Are of critical importance to me? Have taken and will continue to take corrective actions? On a go-forward basis? That’s like a card-and-a-half of Bullshit Bingo right there. Hell, that last phrase alone — ever once heard a politician pledge to do something going backward? how about going sideways? -- is enough to win the game and rack up at least 50 bonus points.
I could go on. And on. And on. But you get the idea. And I might not survive if I did. So we'll just conclude with this...
...Our young Mayor may not have the experience or the resume or the accomplishments or the intellect of a mature and seasoned politician, but I suppose we should at least give him credit for one thing: he already sounds like one. Which is not, alas, in any way, nor by any stretch of real, live, human imagination and communication, a compliment. Because to sound like that is to look, again, like that blindly thrusting seventeen-year-old kid: doing what you once saw on tv, or what you once read in a book, or what someone once foolishly whispered in your ear, all the while oblivious to how little gratification you're actually providing.
Posted: Wed - July 18, 2007 at 12:54 PM
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