You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse.
I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum, can't take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was 70 years ago. Then a whole generation went by. And the second world war came along and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to be as hard to say. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock...battle fatigue.
Then we had the war in Korea in 1950. Madison Avenue was riding high by that time. And the very same combat condition was called Operational Exhaustion. Hey we're up to 8 syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase now. It's totally sterile now. Operational Exhaustion: sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course came the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about 16 or 17 years. And thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Still 8 syllables, but we've added a hyphen. And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I bet you, if we'd still been calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I bet you that. But it didn't happen. And one of the reasons is because we were using that soft language, that language that takes out the life out of life. And it is a function of time it does keep getting worse.
Give you another example. Sometime during my life toilet paper became bathroom tissue. I wasn't notified of this. No one asked me if I agreed with it. It just happened. Toilet paper became bathroom tissue. Sneakers became running shoes. False teeth became dental appliances. Medicine became medication. Information became directory assistance. The dump became the land fill. Car crashes became automobile accidents. Partly cloudy became partly sunny. Motels became motor lodges. House trailers became mobile homes. Used cars became previously owned transportation. Room service became guest room dining. Constipation became occasional irregularity.
When I was a little kid if I got sick they wanted me to go to a hospital and see the doctor. Now they want me to go to a health maintenance organization. Or a wellness center to consult a health care delivery professional. Poor people used to live in slums. Now the economically disadvantaged occupy sub-standard housing in the inner cities. And they're broke! They're broke. They don't have a negative cash flow position. They're f--kin' broke! Because a lot of them were fired. You know, fired. Management wanted to curtail redundancies in the human resources area. So many people are no longer viable members of the work force.
Smug, greedy well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that. The CIA doesn't kill people anymore, they neutralize people, or they depopulate the area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation. The pentagon actually measures radiation in something they call sunshine units. Israeli murderers are called commandos. Arab commandos are called terrorists. Contra killers are called freedom fighters. Well if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part of it to us, do they?
And some of this stuff is just silly. We know that. Like when the airlines tell us to pre-board. What the hell is pre-board? What does that mean? To get on before you get on?
They say they're going to pre-board those passengers in need of special assistance ...cripples! Simple honest direct language. There's no shame attached to the word cripple I can find in any dictionary. In fact it's a word used in Bible translations. "Jesus healed the cripples." Doesn't take seven words to describe that condition. But we don't have cripples in this country anymore. We have the physically challenged. Is that a grotesque enough evasion for you? How about differently-abled? I've heard them called that. Differently-abled! You can't even call these people handicapped anymore. They say: "We're not handicapped, we're handy capable!" These poor people have been bullsh-tted by the system into believing that if you change the name of the condition somehow you'll change the condition. Well hey cousin ... doesn't happen!
We have no more deaf people in this country. Hearing impaired. No more blind people. Partially sighted or visually impaired. No more stupid people, everyone has a learning disorder. Or he's minimally exceptional. How would you like to told that about your child? 'He's minimally exceptional.' Psychologists have actually started calling ugly people those with severe appearance deficits. It's getting so bad that any day now I expect to hear a rape victim referred to as an unwilling sperm recipient!
And we have no more old people in this country. No more old people. We shipped them all away and we brought in these senior citizens. Isn't that a typically American twentieth century phrase? Bloodless. Lifeless. No pulse in one of them. A senior citizen. But I've accepted that one. I've come to terms with it. I know it's here to stay. We'll never get rid of it. But the one I do resist, the one I keep resisting, is when they look at an old guy and say, "Look at him Dan, he's ninety years young." Imagine the fear of aging that reveals. To not even be able to use the word old to describe someone. To have to use an antonym. And fear of aging is natural. It's universal, isn't it? We all have that. No one wants to get old. No one wants to die. But we do. So we con ourselves. I started conning myself when I got in my forties. I'd look in the mirror and say, "Well...I guess I'm getting ...older." Older sounds a little better than old, doesn't it? Sounds like it might even last a little longer. I'm getting old. And it's okay. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won't have to die. I'll pass away. Or I'll expire, like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they'll call it a terminal episode. The insurance company will refer to it as negative patient care outcome. And if it's the result of malpractice they'll say it was a therapeutic misadventure.
I'm telling ya, some of this language makes me want to vomit. Well, maybe not vomit ...makes me want to engage in an involuntary personal protein spill."
Harshad Mehta, Rajan Pillai, Ketan Parekh, Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff all faced the law courts and, in some cases, served jail stints for breaking the law. Mehta and Pillai died halfway through investigations into their dealings — securities fraud that brought down the stock markets in Mehta’s case and cheating in Pillai’s case.
Lay and Madoff presided over corporate empires that duped a range of people, from shareholders to investors and employees. Lay was found guilty within four years of the collapse of Enron but died before he could be sentenced. Bernard Madoff is languishing in a fairly luxurious prison for white-collar criminals in North Carolina having been sentenced to 150 years after pleading guilty (and enjoying a certain notorious popularity, according to latest reports).
Meanwhile, in India, the jury of public opinion is still out on the question of Keshub Mahindra’s responsibility as chairman of Union Carbide’s India subsidiary when the Bhopal disaster took place (had the tragedy occurred in the US, the issue would have been legally settled years ago), even though shareholders recently voted to retain him as chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra.
The point here is that all of these people have paid in some way for their errors of omission and commission. Cynical as this may sound, the Mehta, Bhopal, Enron and Madoff debacles were reprehensible and morally indefensible but their negative impact was, ultimately, limited. They do not begin to compare with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, in April this year.
But Tony Hayward, the faux pas-prone CEO of the corporation responsible for this environmental disaster, has been allowed to exit with a £1 million payoff and a £10 million pension pot. Nor has he faded into jobless anonymity. Despite his spectacularly poor management of the crisis (at its height he famously said, “I want my life back”), he’s been appointed non-executive director of a Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.
Meanwhile, the company he has exited has had to set aside £20.7 billion to meet clean-up costs and has put up for sale $30 billion worth of assets to pay for it. It’s not just British Petroleum’s (BP’s) over 2,000 employees worldwide and shareholders who are paying the price for the disaster. All along the coast where the Deepwater Horizon rig spewed out 5 million barrels of crude oil, thousands of people are losing their livelihoods in an area that thrived on tourist dollars, not to speak of the long-term ecological damage.
Legal culpability is one thing, moral culpability quite another. No laws or corporate governance rules can address the latter adequately. Yet it is becoming an increasingly critical issue as global business integrates the world more closely than ever before. It is no longer far-fetched to say that every craftsman or textile worker laid off from the diamond-cutting shops of Gujarat and garment factories of Tiruppur can trace her job loss to the slowdown in global demand precipitated by the decisions of investment bankers in Bear Stearns, Merril Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Citigroup. Like BP’s Hayward, each of the CEOs who presided over these institutions was eased out with millions of dollars in pay, pension and benefits.
To take just one example. The board of Citigroup forced CEO Charles “Chuck” Prince out for plunging the world’s largest bank into the sub-prime crisis. But his job loss still earned him almost $30 million in benefits. Like him, the CEOs of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merril Lynch all took home multi-million dollar “rewards” in pay and benefits.
None of these CEOs wilfully broke the law. Sub-prime mortgages and the dodgy financial instruments they spawned were all the outcome of regulatory weaknesses, just as much as BP’s oil spill was the result of cost-saving negligence. Yet, these corporate chiefs oversaw operations in their mammoth global corporations that virtually brought the global economy to a standstill in 2008 and the impact of the sub-prime debacle is still being felt worldwide.
Naturally, it would be difficult for governments to legislate against bad corporate decision-making, but there is surely something morally out of sync in rewarding top management when things go wrong, especially in trans-national corporations in which decisions can have global implications. It is possible that the time has come for corporate boards to insist on checks and balances so that tarnished CEOs do not become the beneficiaries of golden parachutes.
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