House of Eratosthenes

Got a family matter going on, the details of which are entirely irrelevant. As is typical of family matters, lots of involved/related people get a “vote” in what’s going on, but not really; you’ve probably had some family matters, and you know how it is. People make it clear they’d like to have your buy-in, but nobody has veto power, the thing is going to happen no matter what. So, you go through the motions of gathering information…after awhile, you start to feel like the doctor must feel when he’s giving an examination to a patient who’s eating or smoking himself to death, and won’t do what the doctor says. Just performing an autopsy a few months early.

So I have made the acquaintance of a professional who was selected by someone else. The thing that interests me is not that my questions are unwelcome; it was the way she went about letting me know she doesn’t like my questions. Reminds me of when we had another family matter about something entirely different, and my brother started making e-mail inquiries to a professional he did not select, the conversation went pretty much the same way.

After those experiences, I see this clip of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, avoiding questions that compare the cost of the White House tours — an expense that is a victim of the dreaded “sequester,” demanding as it does some $74,000 a week — to President Obama’s vacations. Again, the focus of my interest is not that Carney wants to avoid the question. It’s an awkward subject, and hey, it’s Jay Carney, this is what he does. He does very little else, from what I’ve seen. The focus of my interest is the technique:

I would summarize it thusly:

You: I’m concerned about [blank]. Since I have that concern, [question].
Other person: I don’t care about [blank]. [Topic change]

Like the first YouTube comment points out: “I wouldn’t say he avoids the question. He just makes it clear that he doesn’t care.” Precisely, and actually what he did was both of those things.

It is more than evasive. It is controlling. It is dishonest. It is intellectually lazy.

And I’m going to come up with a name for it right now: Transparency Deficit Disorder. Maneuvering of the focus of the discussion away, consciously or otherwise, from inspection or disclosure of some matter whose opacity is strategically desirable to the speaker, by means of bullying. The forceful imposition of one person’s attention-deficit problems upon another, at an opportune time.

I see it outside of politics just as much as I see it within politics. It is now about as widespread as a text-messaging acronym among high-school age kids, and it seems to have reached a popularity crescendo at about the same time. “I don’t care about that, and neither should you” is the sentiment. It is the opposite of inquisitiveness. Over a longer period of time, it is bound to make us stupid. There is no other outcome possible.

The time frame must have been fairly recent. Had Tony Snow or Ari Fleischer been asked something, and practiced such maneuvering, there would have been a full-blown scandal. So if this was on the rise during the Bush years, it must have been kept separated from politics. But, maybe it started within our nation’s politics. Perhaps when the anti-war movement sort of dissipated and drifted off into the ether, with the election of a democrat White House, this made non-inquisitiveness the order of the day.

Either way, I’m not liking it. I certainly don’t like bumping into it, several times a day, over entirely unrelated matters.

So many times when I have to contend with some kind of screw-up, on my part or on someone else’s part, it really doesn’t matter which one…as I triage the wreckage and try to figure out the point of failure, time after time it all comes back to a lack of access to, or availability of, or pursuit of, information. Someone did not disclose something, or someone did not take the time to learn it. In one form or another, information was not given the respect that it deserves, as an enabling agent of productive and discerning human effort. Again and again and again, this emerges as a root cause of some disaster, great or small…

I’m taking it as a tip-off that the people engaging their TDD are representative of, and accustomed to dealing with, a wholly different sort. What they mean to say is, of course, “that was a bad question.” But what they signify to me is that it wasn’t a bad question at all, it was a good one, and a little bit too good of a question. And they’re signifying something else to me as well: Insincerity.

I’m going to be pretty happy when we’re done with this fad. It’s going to demand a lot of patience.

Meanwhile…I don’t care if other people don’t care. It’s not answering my question.

Update: Actually, I see from my written archives this has been getting under my skin for, off-and-on, somewhere around seven years…

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.

I used to think ours was the dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world…. but each upcoming one disabuses me of that.

The end result will be Soviet-itis, the utter apathy that comes from effort (such as it is) becoming completely decoupled from outcome. P.J. O’Rourke, I think it was, tells a story he heard in the USSR. A Soviet couple finally through some bureaucratic miracle acquired a small refrigerator. They plugged it in and it worked, sort of (and when they had electricity), but it made the most godawful racket. Finally the husband couldn’t stand it anymore and started taking the thing apart.

He discovered that most of the screws had just been pounded in with a hammer.

Somebody at the plant must’ve failed to fill in the requisition forms, the man thought, and so the factory must not have had the right size screwdriver. They had a quota, and a deadline, and those screws had to get in there somehow, so they just slammed them home as best they could… But then O’Rourke actually went to one of the factories. He saw screwdrivers just sitting there while the workers banged away with hammers. I think one of the guys was actually using the screwdriver as a hammer, just for the hell of it. What did he care? The screws got in, and the quota got made, and the end user would get the fridge, or not, no matter what anyone said or did…

At least they had vodka.
- Severian | 03/14/2013 @ 14:56
Let me help-most recently, on tee vee…
H. Clinton
D. Feinstein
A. Sharpton (re: Detroit “recievership”)
And a day without N. Pelosi, draining the swamp, is a day without sunshine laws.

And yeah, I’ve been through those family (as well as “commitee”) debate/vote/YOU’RE WRONG things. UNEXPECTEDLY progressing to “newly evolved” sophist religion in minutia of (revised) Robert’s Rules of Order .
- CaptDMO | 03/15/2013 @ 09:27
[…] I’d love to see someone put that to Jay Carney. Of course, we already know how he’d answer…. […]
- QUILTS: Priorities | Rotten Chestnuts | 03/15/2013 @ 10:45

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I Made a New Word LXIIIThursday, March 14th, 2013

I Made a New Word LXIII
Thursday, March 14th, 2013