O’Flaherty On Laziness

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Tarquin O’Flaherty writes in response to yesterday’s post
Dear Sirs,

What a splendid discovery. Morley writes both elegantly and wittily and my immediate reaction is to wonder why that elegance has been lost.

The obvious and politically approved answer to this is that people don’t have time for his measured pace anymore and his type of approach would not nowadays find an audience.

This, dare I say it is the reaction of the mediocrity industry who, lacking talent themselves, insist on this condition in others. Morley, however, did not learn to write in his manner by accident. He didn’t wake up one morning and discover a fully rounded talent to amuse pouring off the end of his fountain pen. The man had to go about not only inventing his own style but turning that style into something his readers rejoiced in. This involved application and talent so technically and amusingly able as to easily survive the critical rigours of almost one hundred years.

And the modern representatives of journalistic mediocrity would have us believe that there is no room for either style or elegance in the industry. My answer to this is a simple one;

The writer of the Age piece, a Mr James Adonis, describes himself as;
“…one of our best known people management thinkers…’

You must be very careful about witless mediocrity. We have become so used to the condition in our daily lives that  titles or statements like the above tend no longer to be viewed as either pretentious, ridiculous, or indeed even worthy of question. Instead we tend to stand back, to doff the cap, to defer to this patently complex job description which obviously belongs in the breathless echelons of multinational business society.

In fact, in the annals of drivel this is a corker, and as far as the language, our precious language is concerned, as a job description it is vacuous, imprecise nonsense which may only be understood by other equally vacuous nonentities. Nevertheless it is here amongst us, like ‘Futurist’ and many others.

A People Management Thinker…

Right away, one has to ask if these  ‘…People…’  are alive or dead?

If alive, do these ‘People’ volunteer to be managed, or are they recruited? Or more sinister still, are they Press-Ganged into service?  And why don’t we see them in the streets, being kept in check by a couple of working dogs  and being herded along (managed) by a whip-cracking Mr Adonis, perhaps with nice sashes over their shoulders to set them apart from ordinary vagrants.  There is in this the added danger of the whole mob being arrested for vagrancy, especially when Mr Adonis sits the whole bunch down on the kerb while he involves himself entirely in THINKING, chin on fist and naked, after the style of both Dali and Rodin. This will obviously upset deliveries to the shops, not to say a few passing Presbyterians, and make pavement users very grumpy indeed.

And what’s to happen afterwards, dare I ask?  Whilst about this journey, what regard would Mr Adonis have for the welfare of the managed? How likely would it be, for example that a kelpie, sharp of eye and noticing a little dalliance, might nip an ankle, bite a backside, and in a jiffy, tread on heads?
Would it be like “Le Tour De France’ with Band Aids and a caravan with a flop-down counter, from whence sandwiches and hot tea and sympathy might be available?
What if they meet a rival mob of ‘Managed People’ on the road?  Would they exchange fraternal greetings or hurl insults, imprecations, and dustbins?
These sorts of people, those who feel the need to be ‘managed’ probably wouldn’t be allowed on public transport, and therefore I feel that fracas of this nature are sadly unavoidable.
And what happens to them at night? Are there warehouses all over town with people happily chained to the wall until Mr Adonis comes and gets them out again in the morning? Does he hose them down and drip feed them? Or to Mr Adonis, is that unthinkable?
It would seem then, in the circumstances, until these ‘In Need of Management’ people get a grip on themselves, the opportunities for mountebanks to prey upon them can only increase.
On the other hand,as I mentioned earlier, if the people to be managed are dead or nearly dead then we must commend Mr Adonis whose work would then fall into that same category as the Red Cross, Medecin Sans Frontiere and Undertakers.
Finally, I would point out to Mr Adonis that a degree of unsuccessful people management thinking had been tried in Europe in the mid 20th century.  It was, as I have mentioned, not well received.

O’Flaherty