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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

Epigraph:

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North Dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem” by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…

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The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position

Note: This is the fifth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. Our fourth position is about what we consider the inequitable banning of clove cigarettes by President Obama in 2009.

I. Starting Point — Dignity, Not Debate

Trans people exist. This is not a trend or a modern invention. Gender variance appears across cultures and across history, long before the vocabulary we use today existed. Whatever complexities emerge in policy, youth development, or medicine, one thing is foundational:

Trans people are owed human dignity.
No conditions, no asterisks. Just dignity.

Everything else follows from that moral floor.

II. Adults — Full Citizenship and Recognition

For adults, the ethical picture is straightforward. Trans adults should be able to live, work, love, and move through the world without harassment or discrimination. This includes:

  • The ability to legally transition through a fair, transparent process
  • Access to transition-related healthcare under informed consent
  • Workplace and housing protections that include gender identity and expression
  • Access to military service and civil participation under the same standards as any other adult

At the adult level, the question is not whether trans people exist or deserve rights — they do. The challenge is implementation, not justification.

III. Youth — Compassion and Caution, Not Panic

Young people need something slightly different from adults. They need care, patience. Youth — Listening First, Care Without Panic

Young people do not need slogans or pressure; they need adults who are willing to listen carefully and stay present over time. Before policy, before pathways, before decisions, there is a more basic responsibility: to take a young person’s experience seriously, without rushing to explain it away or lock it in.

For some youth, feelings about gender are clear, persistent, and deeply rooted. For others, gender exploration may be tentative, fluid, or intertwined with anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, social stress, or the ordinary turbulence of adolescence. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and none of them invalidate a young person’s distress or self-understanding.

A healthy response begins with attentive listening — not as a procedural step, but as an ethical practice in its own right. Children and adolescents deserve to be heard in their own words, at their own pace, without the expectation that every question must immediately produce an answer. Parents and caregivers are allowed to say, honestly and without shame, “I don’t know yet.” Uncertainty, when paired with care, is not neglect; it is often wisdom.

Exploration itself is not harm. Questioning gender assumptions, trying out names or pronouns, or experimenting with presentation can be a way for young people to understand themselves more clearly. When such exploration reduces distress and helps a young person feel safer or more coherent, it should not be treated as dangerous or pathological.

At the same time, adults have a responsibility to protect young people from both kinds of harm: the harm of being dismissed or unheard, and the harm of being rushed into irreversible decisions before they are ready. A balanced, compassionate approach includes:

  • Making space for reversible forms of social exploration when they ease distress
  • Offering non-judgmental counseling that supports understanding rather than steering toward predetermined outcomes
  • Thoughtful screening for co-occurring factors — such as anxiety, depression, trauma, or neurodivergence — without stigma or presumption
  • Treating medical interventions for minors as decisions that require time, persistence of dysphoria, multidisciplinary evaluation, and informed consent

The goal is harm reduction in both directions: reducing the risk of long-term, untreated dysphoria while also minimizing regret from irreversible interventions made too early. Compassion and caution are not opposites; they are partners.

Most importantly, young people should never feel that they must perform certainty in order to be taken seriously. Listening does not require immediate resolution. Care does not require panic. What children need most is the assurance that the adults around them are paying attention, taking them seriously, and willing to walk with them — even when the destination is not yet clear.

IV. Language and Pronouns — Respect Without Fear

Using someone’s chosen name and pronouns is simply respect — no different from honoring a nickname or a married name. It is not complicated on a human level.

Our stance:

  • Respect is the default
  • Mistakes are human and correctable without punishment
  • Deliberate misgendering is disrespect, but ordinary errors are not crimes
  • Institutions should model inclusive language, not create environments where people feel terrified to speak

Respect should enlarge conversation, not freeze it.

V. Sports — Inclusion and Fairness, Context by Context

Sports are not a single system — they exist on a spectrum with different purposes and stakes at each level. Because of that, one rule for everything doesn’t work.

At the youth or school level, sport is primarily about identity formation, belonging, and joy. Stakes are low, development is ongoing. In these settings, inclusion should be maximized and kids should generally be able to play on the teams aligned with their gender identity.

In adult amateur or recreational sport, flexibility should continue. Local leagues and organizations can experiment with mixed teams, open categories, or self-organizing solutions based on context and community. These spaces are more about health and community than lifetime opportunity.

However, college athletics, scholarship competition, and pathways into professional sport introduce real material consequences — scholarships, visibility, and career access. In these spaces, fairness and inclusion must be balanced, and physiological advantage has to be considered. Trans participation is possible within a framework that takes development, hormone levels, and evidence seriously.

At the professional, elite, and Olympic level, physiology cannot be ignored. These competitions involve prize money, legacy, and national representation. Rules here should be science-informed and sport-specific. In some cases that may mean time-based hormone requirements; in some cases, open categories or structural alternatives might emerge. The goal is not exclusion — the goal is competitive integrity that respects all athletes.

In summary:
In everyday sport, inclusion is the natural priority.
In elite sport, fairness and physiology matter more strongly.
Different contexts call for different solutions.

VI. Women’s Spaces (Prisons, Shelters, Spas, Bathrooms) —

A Category We Are Listening To

Not every issue in the trans conversation is equally simple. Spaces involving privacy, trauma history, and safety — such as domestic-violence shelters, prisons, changing facilities, and spas — require deeper listening and care. Women’s vulnerability and trans women’s vulnerability both matter, and overlapping fears cannot be solved by declaration alone.

Rather than issue a premature stance, we hold this position:

We are listening.
We are learning.
We are not ready to speak in absolutes.

Refusing to claim certainty where uncertainty exists is not weakness — it is honesty.

VII. Our Tone Moving Forward

We choose nuance rather than slogan, discussion rather than trench warfare. We reject cruelty toward trans people and we also reject moral panic. We value evidence where policy is needed, care where identity is forming, and the courage to say “we’re not sure yet” where complexity remains.

In short:

Trans people deserve dignity.
Where rights are clear, we affirm them.
Where questions are hard, we move with care.

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The Splinter Fraction: On the Joys of Karaoke, Communal Song as Social Solvent

Note: This is the third and for now final position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our final position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible. We are entirely serious.

We affirm karaoke as one of the last remaining civic rituals in which strangers meet without preconditions and leave with fewer barriers than they arrived with. A microphone passed between an office worker, an American traveler, an Indian engineer, an older Japanese gentleman, a young woman finding her voice again — this is not entertainment alone. It is a brief suspension of hierarchy, suspicion, and self-protection. In these small rooms people remember how easy it is to be together.

Karaoke is not mandatory, nor do we idealize it. We simply encourage every citizen — once in a while, or for the first time — to step into a space where age, gender, profession, and political commitments dissolve for the length of a verse. It is a civic practice hiding in plain sight: a low-cost, low-risk release valve healthier than most vices and far more generous in its returns.

Society is fraying at the edges. But give people one Tom Petty track, one “What’s Up” howl, one chance to sing badly but sincerely, and cohesion begins again — not through policy, but through the ordinary bravery of shared song. The Splinter Fraction supports public encouragement and, where possible, public subsidy of these communal singing rooms, as engines of ease and democratic belonging.

Karaoke will not fix the world. But it will bring us back into easy congress with one another, which is more than most programs can claim.

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Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)

I used to be free/ I used to be seventeen

Sharon Van Etten

Never said a word, I never had to/ it was my attitude/ that you thought was rude

The Replacements

Long may you run

Neil Young

Note: This is the last in our series about Saint George’s, the school I attended from Grade 1 through Grade 12. You can find the other parts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI. Thank you to everyone who read this series.

Senior Year II, and After:

It’s time to wrap up the Scenes from St. George’s series, as I’ve said most of what I want to say about that time and place. Before I finish, I want to write a bit about the very end of senior year and the summer after graduation as well as the first winter vacation back from college, and add a short coda.

After a number of us seniors got busted for drinking on our senior trip, things were pretty much winding down. Because we were a smallish class, everyone pretty much got along and there weren’t many cliques, however it is true that the two or three-season athletes, myself included, lived in a slightly different world than those students who mostly didn’t play sports. After baseball season of senior year whatever remaining barriers between classmates crumbled, and sometime around here I finally got a driver’s license. As a result, I spent a bit of time out at Dyche Alsaker’s house. Dyche and I were not all that close, but I liked him for a couple of reasons. One was, although his family certainly had more money than mine, and a bigger house, he never acted like some kind of alpha, which was cool. He just seemed happy to have people over (his parents never seemed to be home) and to go with the flow. I was as well. Dyche’s house was in “the valley” (do all towns have a valley?), which was really just the open space between Eastern Washington and Western Idaho. Most of the real rich folks at St. George’s lived on the South Hill, so maybe there was something about the Valley that was a little more “beta” than the South Hill. At that point in time, as now, I was more than happy to hang with some beta-males, or at least in a circumstance where such ridiculous distinctions no longer obtained.

Dyche loved the band the Replacements and their lead singer Paul Westerberg, and I caught onto his passion for this band. Actually, I may have discovered them on my own first, as their single “Merry Go Round” played a lot on VH1 and at that time I was a regular viewer of their music video program. “Merry Go Round” is the lead off track on the band’s final record All Shook Down, which was released in 1990 and is still by far my favorite “Mats” album. I bought the record and played it over and over in my room as “rock music” was kind of verboten in the main part of the house for reasons passing understanding. I remember one specific day where we drove out to a lake, probably in Idaho, and Dyche boated us around while drinking and listening to Westerberg’s first solo record 14 Songs. 14 Songs is pretty good and has a catchy single “Knocking’ on Mine,” but it’s no All Shook Down. As for drunk boating, while not advisable, it is somewhat preferable to drunk driving because there is simply more space, and Westerberg made the perfect companion for such an outing.

Although I was already into a lot of music at the time, including Dylan, R.E.M., Fine Young Cannibals, and Dire Straits (this list holds up pretty well actually), I was impressed with Dyche’s deeper level of fandom and aspired to know more about my favorite bands. By the time I got to university I had a better idea of what it meant to be a music fan, and this was in no small part because of Dyche. Out at Dyche’s house, there was a predictable amount of drinking and hooking up; the first interested me a little, the second more, although I was still having a bit of a tough time getting anything going in that area. Drinking was easier. One night I drank most of a bottle of whiskey in the hot tub there, and people came to think I had a high tolerance, which wasn’t really true. I also remember commandeering a bed at his house one night when a classmate came in with a girl I did not know. Can we have the bed, they asked–we are stuck on the trampoline. This was not my problem I felt, however they persisted and I gave way. I suppose they needed it more than I did.

As I mentioned, there didn’t seem to be much parental presence at Dyche’s house, which was a positive, but things never got too crazy. People came over, enjoyed the trampoline and the hot tub, and stayed the night instead of driving impaired. It was, all in all, a reasonably healthy developmental zone. This action lasted for a few weeks after graduation, and then kicked off again during the first winter after we went off to college. During that break there was a party at another classmate’s house–similar vibe, no parents, booze, and hooking up. I attended, and the next morning found myself with a girlfriend of sorts. This was a positive. What I recall about that night was, I watched the film The Graduate, walked away with a girlfriend, and smoked a cigar. Decent action, good action, bad action. Two out of three ain’t bad, baby.

Like all scenes of this sort, it didn’t last, nor did my girlfriend. I didn’t really know how to have a girlfriend, so to speak, and although we wrote letters from our respective colleges that spring the relationship had faded by summer. Nonetheless, the whole period, bisected by a few semesters of college, stands out as a crucial, if brief, interlude between high school and “real life.”

Coda:

Disclaimer: This section is pieced together from things I know and things I think probably happened. This is not meant to serve as a strict historical record of events that, for whatever reason, my parents have barely shared with me–and even if they had, this would only be one side of the story. Thus, in historical terms, this is kind of a reconstruction, so take it for what it’s worth.

St. George’s at this point should have been in the rear view mirror, and it mostly was. I came back as an alum, hung around a little, and moved on to the next thing, which turned out to be Japan. However, it was not entirely behind me because my parents still worked there, and my father, after I left, got sucked deeper and deeper into school politics. I wish to tread lightly here because there is so much about this murky period that I still don’t totally understand, however the basic facts as I know them are as follows:

i) After George Swope, who had a cameo in Part VI of this series, St. George’s had a new principal called Jonathan Slater. My father had wanted the job, and didn’t get it.

ii) At first, my father and Slater were fast friends, but I think this was a mutually cynical political relationship in a sense. My father was the head teacher and a power in the school, and Slater would have come in knowing this. They bonded under the auspices that Slater would give way at some point to my father, but this was never going to happen. I knew this, even if my parents did not. At first Slater would invite my family to Thanksgiving and such, and my father praised him to the skies. That changed however, and the two men became bitter enemies. This enmity led eventually to my father leaving the school.

Now St. George’s was an interesting place, and it was pretty much run by the rich folks that sent their kids there. There was some kind of board that pushed the principals around, and this was mostly made up of folks from the South Hill, who tended to be a little on the stuck up side–not terribly in most instances, but somewhat for sure. Also, by the time in question here Dyche’s father was on it, as I understand. I guess Dyche’s dad was the token Vallyer on the basically South Hill board, but then the school got a big donation from the Gates Foundation and I think Bill Gates’ sister came onto the board, or at least into the zone. In essence this was Western Washington doing a little light colonization of Eastern Washington, the red-headed stepchild of that state. Eastern and Western Washington are divided by the Cascades mountains, where Twin Peaks is set. Twin Peaks is in this piece.

Now I don’t know much about Bill Gates, but I suspect he’s not a great guy. In fact, I think he’s pedophile-adjacent. But I know that Bill Gates is not a force for good in the world for a different reason, which has to do with my struggles with my Skype password a few years back. Back before Zoom came along and ate Skype’s lunch six ways to Sunday, I used the service and had a password for it which worked fine. Then Microsoft took it over or something and all the sudden I had to provide a Microsoft password to “get through” to Skype for some reason. This was terrible, because I try to avoid Microsoft at all costs and I didn’t even know if I had a Microsoft password. Certainly I didn’t want one.

But for weeks I could not get anywhere near Skype because of this password issue, and it was driving me nuts. I needed Skype for work and it just wasn’t coming through. In marketing terms, this is a “process” issue. Process is one of the 7 Ps of the marketing mix in business, and basically it refers to how easy, or hard, it is for the customer to access your good or service. Amazon’s one-click check-out is an example of good process. Microsoft’s multi-step, super frustrating, password labyrinth is the opposite. I got so fed up with this whole situation, and by extension Gates, that I even ranted about it and him on the short lived, but awesome, Periscope platform–which Twitter later bought and then killed.

So like I say, Microsoft sucks, Periscope rocks, Skype sucks and deserves its fate, and Bill Gates, in my opinion, also sucks. I don’t know anything about his sister, but her arrival was, I think, the catalyst for my father’s removal.

(By the way, the Skype password issue reminds me of the soft-water issue. When I was a teenager I would frequently see soft-water trucks driving around, and I wondered what in the world soft-water was. I am basically a huge fan of the prefix “soft” and wrote about it here. The only soft-prefixed phrase I don’t like is soft-water. That’s because, trucks and aggressive marketing aside, soft-water is terrible. It’s marketed as some kind of improvement over “hard-water,” which I guess is supposed to be full of minerals or something. However, soft-water is completely terrible. The absence of minerals means that it is totally ineffective at getting soap off your skin, so after a soft-water shower you walk around all day with a patina of soap residue stuck to you. Soft-water is awful and a total scam, just like orthodontists. There is no real connection between Microsoft passwords and soft-water, except both totally suck. I bet you Bill Gates is a big soft-water guy–he does look a little soapy.)

In any case, my father was friendly with the rich folks on the South Hill, and as a result we spent a lot of time at their various big houses. I was less enamored with the South Hill crowd as a whole, as I have made clear, although I did have friends who lived there, however my father was political so he kind of had to suck up a bit. But I don’t think he really loved this sort of hobnobbing–he never seemed really at home in these settings. My overall sense is that at St. George’s my father was mostly on the right side of history, but his shortcomings as a politician were his Achilles Heel.

So, the relationship with Slater was going south for a while, and then the principal’s little predilections started to become basically public knowledge. I don’t know if Slater is still alive–if he is he’d be pretty old, but I think it is a matter of record that if George Edwards liked him some beach babes, Jonathan Slater there was more interested in babes in the cradle, so to speak. Again, just something I’ve heard, but I’ve been hearing it more and more these days. The rumor was that Slater would spend time in, I guess they were, basically sex clubs in downtown Spokane, and his tastes ran as young as possible, staying, perhaps, just this side of legal. Spokane is not that big of a city, and with something of that nature, well word does get around.

So let’s use a little Occam’s Razor on this situation. Just looking at it, here’s what I guess happened. This dude Jonathan Slater was principal for a while and was good at raising money. He was also, like Bill Gates, pedophile-adjacent and Spokane is a small town. While his money raising skills gave him space to engage in some borderline bad action there in downtown Spokane and to cover for a few bad actor friends of his on campus for a while, over time tongues talked and whispers became louder and Slater had to go. My father (who is named Ross) ran point on this effort from within in terms of rallying the teachers to oppose Slater, and at the same time Ross was perhaps positioning himself to get nominated as principal, but I’m not really sure. However, the board didn’t want Ross to be principal because they recognized that he would be a “teacher’s principal” (like a player’s coach in a sense). Board opposition to Ross probably had a few aspects, some more flattering to the board, some less.

One aspect was probably that the board as a whole (I don’t mean any one board member individually, but as a collective over time) had covered for Slater a bit even when his little peccadillos were, or should have been, becoming apparent, and when they came to the conclusion finally that he had to go they wanted to do it quietly. Ross’ involvement was making that difficult. This aspect of the situation is not in the board’s favor. A second aspect is perhaps that the board realized that not only did Slater have to go but the school as a whole, the teaching staff and the administration, needed more accountability and standards, and having a teacher’s principal in place would, in their view, not advance this goal. This is more in the board’s favor.

I am not suggesting that Ross was anti-standards, quite the opposite in many respects, however it is true, in my view, that he was very much driven by personal relationships and by who was on his team. In this sense he approached school administration like he did coaching. And while there are positive aspects to this approach to administration, there are also drawbacks, which the board must have been aware of. Another factor here is that for someone who had serious political aspirations within education for several decades, Ross was in many ways still a limited politician. Although he associated with the wealthy class that ran the school, attended their parties, ate their food, and, at times, flattered them, he was, as I mentioned, at heart not comfortable in these spaces and indexed this in multiple ways. His other weakness, in my opinion, was a tendency to vilification, which as I say started with Slater a while before all the action came to a head. In this case though, I think the vilification was justified. All in all, in the immortal words of The Mendoza Line, mistakes were made.

Somehow the Gates sister got deep in the mix, and the board summarily fired Ross’ best-friend and right hand man. Ostensibly this was, I believe, for not updating his teaching credential, and/or for being habitually late for work (which he was), but in actuality this was a shot at Ross, whom they felt they could not fire. Ross did not take the firing well, and started to raise holy hell, using the Slater business as leverage. There was some kind of teacher revolt that was shut down, and then Ross was pushed out–fired, or left, I’m still not quite sure. Then, Ross sued the school (again, I heard this but my parents never really told me about any of it, but I believe they did eventually get some money), and the Slater business may have made the papers. The Spokane papers don’t have great archives (unlike the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), so I don’t know this for sure, but the basic narrative is along these lines, I believe.

With Slater and Ross both gone, the school moved on and probably the Gates sister installed her own puppet, and that was that for my family’s association with the school. Ross’ relationship with the South Hillers was pretty much shattered, and for some reason he took special issue with the role of Dyche’s dad (who he never had had a relationship with). I didn’t really know Dyche’s dad much, and when I did meet him he seemed pretty chill, so I’m guessing there might have been a bit of projection there. In any case, all those doors closed.

Years later however, one of the rich families who Ross used to be close with must have thought that having Ross back in the fold would be a good idea, and they decided to use me in a roundabout way to try and re-open the door. I was already pretty well along in my IB career here in Asia, and St. George’s was in the process of, or had become, an IB school as well. I got a message asking me if I wanted to come and consult with the school, and although I could totally handle a little consulting, this was a bit odd because I was based in Asia and surely they could get someone more local to give advice. I got the feeling that what was really going on though was the consulting gig was being dangled as a way get to Ross, but maybe it was in good faith, in which case cool. I told my parents about the offer and my mother was horrified that I would even consider it. That’s how bad matters were left with the school. But consider it I did, because if someone wants to fly me somewhere and pay me for my time, I’m probably gonna take it.

The offer fell through though, I’m guessing because the powers-that-were figured out that whatever they were angling for Ross to do wasn’t going to happen and they never really wanted me to consult anyway. I felt a little used, but not really–it was just politics.

Ross moved on to become principal of a Catholic school in Oregon, and was able to implement his team-based approach there and I think he did a great job. He is, I believe, a retired principal in good standing there, and he was widely liked, except by those that he let go. My father is a good man, and a moral one, but he was also a little tough and if he didn’t like the way things were going with a staff member he’d cut the cord. I understand this, and sometimes you gotta do it, but myself take a little longer term view of trying to get people to pull their weight. People are different.

The epigraph for this piece is from the Replacements, of course, from the song “Attitude” off All Shook Down. My two favorite songs on the record are “Someone Take the Wheel” (“I see we’re fighting again/ in some fucking land/ aw throw in another tape man,”) and “Attitude.” All in all I think I’m an alright fellow much of the time, but some people have said I have a little attitude myself. Well, if so I probably picked it up from the Mats.

And Mr. St. George’s, if your IB program is dragging a little or if you are looking for a little consultation in pretty much any area, hit me up. I’ll be there and it won’t even cost you that much. After all, I’ve always been a cheap date.

Dedication: For Dyche. Getting to know you was way more interesting than any subsequent politics. Thanks for the Mats. And for my father. Long may you run.

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Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s “The Social Construction of Reality” and Related Issues

Author’s Note: This piece is a re-write of a piece from my first blog, Classical Sympathies. At that time I was interested in the relationship between the individual and his or her place of work/ organization. Classical Sympathies was fortunate to have a number of regular readers, some of whom took the time to comment, sometimes at length. The blog got a surprising amount of traffic for some reason, although it is now lost to time. Some pieces from back then are, looking back, a little too flowery, however the style was the style. Andrew Inch, a guy that a uncatagorizable cross-section of people here in Japan knew back in the day, was one of the most prolific and interesting commenters, and I have left his remarks in this re-write.

Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality:

This piece will look in some detail at Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, and comment on some of the ideas that it raises. Anyone who works in an organization will be aware that the intersection of the individual, in all of her preferences and particularities, and the institution can involve some friction. In The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann spend 45 pages on the topic of “institutionalization,” so they had obviously gave the matter some thought.

They make the point that while man (The Social Construction of Reality, published in 1966, uses the gender-specific term), makes his world, he is given to losing sight of this and projecting (or “reifying”) aspects of the social world so that they are perceived as entirely external and beyond his control. They write:

“Man’s self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations” (51).

Human culture, then, is invented. However, being prone to reification, people tend to:

“{apprehend} the products of human activity as if there were something else than human products–such as facts of nature, results of cosmic law, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world {and experiencing it} as a strange facticity, {…} over which he has no control” (89).

When mis-apprehending social reality as something other than the product of his own action and consciousness, man forgets that:

“the social world was made by men–and, therefore, can be remade by them,” but, ironically that,“reification is a modality of consciousness {…} Even when apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it” (89).

We can extrapolate the statement “even when apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it” to suggest that the perception of sedimented, externally controlled or created, facticity continually creates the very facticity in question. Put slightly differently, the denial of agency diminishes, even uncreates, free-will, while the exercise of free-will depends in large part, perhaps entirely, on the strength of one’s belief in it.

Now, this is not to argue that reification is simply false-consciousness, or that groupings within society do not go to considerable trouble to perpetuate and legitimate reification of their activities. Berger and Luckmann make this quite clear in their analysis of what they call “socially segregated subuniverses of meaning” such as “Hindu castes, the Chinese literary bureaucracy, or the priestly coteries of ancient Egypt” (85), (and we would add to this list lawyers, doctors, television pundits, university English departments, etc.). They write that subuniverses:

“become esoteric enclaves {…} to all but those who have been properly initiated into their mysteries {…} The outsiders have to be kept out {but} if the subuniverse requires various special privileges and recognitions from the larger society, there is the problem of keeping out the outsiders and at the same time having them acknowledge the legitimacy of this procedure. This is done through various techniques of intimidation {…} mystification and, generally, the manipulation of prestige symbols” (87).

“And generally the manipulation of prestige symbols” indeed. Those who engage, consciously or unconsciously, in the manipulation of prestige symbols are, in Berger and Luckmann’s language, involved in creating a “typification.” The acceptance of typifications, in turn, sediments social facticity and brings into being a taken-for-grantedness in the performance of social actors.

The authors indicate that while the typified actor may “act-into” a socially authorized way of acting in public, the same actor, in the privacy of their home, the confessional, or the bar may seek to establish a certain “role distance” through behaviors which blur, or indeed outright contradict, their public “face;” this distance is apt to shrink again when the times comes once again for the actor to take up their public role. In so doing, the actor re-activates that segment of the self which is objectified in terms of the currently available socially available typification(s).

When I started my first blog in 2009 I wrote at some length about why I wore a necktie at work, even though I didn’t really have to and some co-workers thought it was a little strange. My buddy Andrew Inch wrote an extensive, and highly perceptive comment on the topic which is instructive here. Mr. Inch, it will be apparent, is one smart dude. It’s kind of long, but it is worth it.

“Reflection on MT’s devotion to this apparently innocuous task, knotting a piece of cloth around his neck each morning, leads us towards what has become a key element of many recent theories of ideology. Derived from Pascal’s advice to non-believers, ‘kneel and pray, and then you will believe’, the French philosopher Louis Althusser sought to assert the materiality of ideas, and how ideology works through our actions as well as our words to define us as certain sorts of subjects. For Michel Foucault, one of Althusser’s students who sought to break with Marxism and the concept of ideology, the knotting of that neck-tie might have been considered a ‘practice of the self’, a way of disciplining oneself in line with a particular matrix of power and knowledge. The question that I think both of these thinkers struggle to address, however, is the extent to which we are able to shape our own selves, rather than simply being shaped by power. What scope do we have to resist the power embedded in these apparently mundane everyday motions? {…} By kneeling to pray, or standing in front of the mirror adjusting the knot, we perform belief and so take on socially available identities. And as for the rest of us in that office – what was the effect of not knotting the tie each morning? At times there were no doubt some who reveled in the non-conformity of that not knotting. In truth, however, did our alternative practices of the self not simply reproduce a slightly different, perhaps less respect-able but nonetheless conformist, relationship to the rules and rituals that regulated life in that particular setting? Was not wearing a necktie not just another kind of necktie after all?”

“In truth, however, did our alternative practices of the self not simply reproduce a slightly different, perhaps less respect-able but nonetheless conformist, relationship to the rules and rituals that regulated life in that particular setting?” This sentence is phenomenal, and predicated on a particularly alert and acute piece of self-knowledge. Mr. Inch is saying that those in the office who refused to put on a tie, or who flaunted the organizational dress code altogether, while thinking that they were “rebelling” and “sticking it to the man,” were in fact playing into a pre-determined archetype every bit as much as I was with my neckties and apparent “conformity.”

Mr. Inch is essentially making the same point that Berger and Luckmann do when they point out that roles and typifications are “endemic to social interaction {…} All institutionalized conduct involves roles.” And then, the authors bring matters home:

“The institution, with its assemblage of ‘programmed’ actions, is like the unwritten libretto of a drama. The realization of the drama depends upon the reiterated performance of its prescribed roles by living actors. The actors embody the roles and actualize the drama by representing it on the given stage. Neither drama nor institution exist empirically apart from this recurrent realization” (75).

In short, both Mr. Inch and Berger and Luckmann do not confine the acting out of prescribed roles, the submission to typification (e.g. “conformism”) to those in positions of authority within an institution. To the contrary, I read them both as saying that both the master and the servant, the “teacher’s pet” and the “bad boy,” the necktie wearer and the necktie shunner, the consummate insider and the professional rebel are all engaged in the recurrent realization of pre-typified activity.

Explication With Reference to Obama and Talleyrand:

Now, it is true that the above reading of Berger and Luckmann may leave the door open a purely cynical outlook by suggesting that all forms of behavior by institutionalized actors are equal. This is not quite what I wish to argue. Barack Obama has defined his political philosophy as “ruthless pragmatism.” While I understand this formulation, it does seem a little cold (as Obama is famously said to be) What if we added the word “principled” here? Could “principled ruthless pragmatism” sustain meaning without slipping irrevocably into the realm of the oxymoronic?

Let’s take a closer look in relation to organizational life as opposed to the political sphere. “Principled” because one’s initial agreement to engage with institutionalization (through the acceptance of a job offer for example) assumes a principled acceptance of the role one will be asked to play and the attendant tasks and behaviors that will be expected.

“Pragmatic” in that in order to accomplish anything in the social world, wherein competing interests, visions, and ideologies are, and ever will be, an unavoidable reality, one must be prepared to lose the battle in the service of, hopefully, winning the war. It has been my experience that the inability to lose a battle is a problem for many people in the modern workplace. Related to the ability to lose a battle is one’s attitude toward “compromise.” Is “compromise” a dirty word? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, the actor who blithely declares “there can be no compromise where my principles are concerned” may sooner or later find their principles encased under glass in their own private shrine to imagined rectitude. In other words, total denial of the possibility of compromise is tantamount to surrendering all hope of getting anything done. In the immortal words of William Jefferson Clinton, “sooner or later, you have to cut a deal.” On the other hand, there are a certain class of situations where certain compromises just do not feel acceptable, situations where one has what we could call an existential objection to the terms of the proposed compromise.

The question does not, I think, concern whether deals should be struck in general, they should, so much as whether any individual deals is in the long term interest of the project in question and the people involved with this project. This is where “ruthless” perhaps applies. At the very least, the pragmatist needs to accept in herself a degree of strategic focus where goals rooted in principle are concerned. We cannot deny, of course, that this is an easily misused sentiment—if we continually apply “pragmatic ruthlessness” to a project which we are deeply attached to there is the real danger of a concomitantly continual shifting of the moral goal-posts. In short, these are muddy waters.

Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister is, perhaps, most famous for his remark that “treason is a matter of dates.” Gives you the chills, does it not? Benjamin Schwarz writes of Talleyrand:

“Arguably a turncoat, possibly a degenerate {…} certainly a shameless flatterer and world-class bribe taker, Talleyrand was also the most skillful and farsighted diplomat of his age and a man of arresting grace, wit, and style {…} He was as seductive as he was obviously dangerous {…} Talleyrand subscribed to the idea that statecraft’s modest but arduous task is to enable one’s country to survive and prosper in the world as it exists–not to transform international relations and not to further the alleged cause of mankind” (The Atlantic, December 2007, 93-4).

A hero or a villain? Schwarz is not sure, but he is charmed. For my part, I see in Talleyrand perhaps an 18th century form of “principled ruthless pragmatism” where France’s survival and prosperity was the principle from which his ruthless pragmatism stemmed. While your own cause may or may not be the triumph of the French nation, the application of a ruthless pragmatism in the service of a deeper principle does hold a certain appeal. However, I just don’t personally feel that “ruthless” is really the most appealing qualifier for pragmatism in regards to acting within the public sphere.

Comment:

Instead, I am more interested in understanding how and when to “follow the rules” and surrender to form, as opposed to how and when to do a little end-run. To function effectively within an organization it is essential to realize the power inherent in form. At times, often times really, a “surrender to form” is required. However, instead of simply surrendering to form and that being that, we may be able to add a qualifier of our own. Certain situations may call for a “strategic surrender to form” for the moment, while at the same time “bracketing” or “pocketing” the possibility of the end-run. Here, perhaps, we may have a window into a pragmatic post-post-modern stance which takes post-modernism’s relentless questioning of form and turns it inside out, recognizing that the tyranny of form is something we bring upon ourselves by allowing form to tyrannize.

Put another way, we can expand slightly on Berger and Luckmann’s claim that “an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative derefication of consciousness, which is a comparatively late development in history and in any individual biography” (90). I would suggest that an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative dereification of consciousness which may then lead into the ability to either and/or alternately i) embrace reification and role typification as a strategy (that is to inhabit a form which brings with it certain prerogatives and forms of access), and ii) radically overthrow reification and typification through the recognition that the establishment of social facticity is but a spectacular bluff resting on the manipulation of prestige symbols and the shaman’s art whereby an illusory thinness is reflected as an eternal massivity. In so doing, we may be of service to truly worthwhile cause, protecting a space for action and free-will in the face of the ever-expanding institutionalization of both the public and the private sphere. That might be worth working on.

Dedication: For Mr. Inch. Thank you for commenting. You rock baby.

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On the Prefix “Soft”: Part I

The prefix “soft” is incredibly useful. Generally speaking, it indicates either actual relative softness (e.g. “soft cream,” a softer form of ice cream), or a certain gentleness and/ or flexibility obtaining to a non-tangible concept (e.g. soft schedule). This piece (which will be broken up into a couple of posts) will explore a number of instances of the prefix “soft” at greater or lesser length.

“Soft-schedule”

Francis Wade in the classic blog post “Hard vs Soft Scheduled Items” comments thusly on soft scheduling:

Professionals who undertake the discipline of Scheduling at higher skill levels (Orange and Green belts) have their calendar as the central point of focus (…) Their lives would be made much easier if Outlook were to distinguish between different kinds of segments, recognizing them as either “hard” or “soft.

(Let’s just pause for a moment to appreciate Wade’s capitalization of “Scheduling,” as well as his reference to “Orange and Green belts” as scheduling skill levels. This dude is serious about scheduling.) Wade here hits on an essential point, Outlook (the Microsoft program) does not (or did not, Wade was writing in 2011) allow users to classify schedule items as “hard” or “soft,” viewing instead all items as identically fixed. In Outlook, something is either on or off one’s schedule. This is a problem according to Wade because:

A soft item is one that only involves the user, and can easily be moved around one’s calendar, with few immediate consequences. They might have great importance, but a late start would not endanger the end result.

Obviously, Wade is differentiating a soft item from a “hard item.” Thus, in the realm of scheduling, “soft” indicates that the item is flexible because it is individually owned. For example, a teacher may have “grade papers” on her schedule at an appointed time, however in practice everyone knows that this schedule item is fungible.

In my opinion, Wade is right on as far as he goes. His point about Outlook is a seminal one. However, I do not agree that we can only soft schedule something that applies only to ourselves. I believe we can just as easily soft schedule a call with a friend or a meeting at the pub. If my friend texts me and wants to speak on the phone tomorrow, I might reply with “sounds great, let’s soft-schedule that for 2 PM.” This means, clearly, that 2 PM is the target time, however it may be a little earlier, or, more probably, a little later. If you think about your own life you will probably recognize the role that soft scheduling plays in it. In fact, soft scheduling is everywhere, you probably just don’t use the term.

(Before we go any further I want to address the issue of hyphens. Mr. Google suggests that “soft schedule” should not be hyphenated, nor, in fact, should basically any of the terms this piece will examine. I can give this one to Mr. Google because it is just easier to skip the hyphen. However, logically, and even emotionally, I like the hyphen for a lot of “soft” prefixes. This is because the hyphen, in my view, serves to attach the prefix to the term, thereby underlining the fact that we are engaging in an act of proactive and meaningful categorization.

An additional grammatical point here is that nowhere in Wade’s piece, for example, does he use “soft schedule” as a verb phrase, or indicate that we can do so. Folks in general massively underrate the effectiveness of turning a noun phrase like “a soft scheduled item” into a verb phrase “to soft schedule.”)

In any case, you get the idea with soft scheduling. Let’s move on.

“Soft pedal”

A soft pedal originally referred to a piano pedal, which is interesting, however for our purposes it means something else. According to Collins dictionary: “If you soft-pedal something, you deliberately reduce the amount of activity or pressure that you have been using to get something seen or done.” (Look at this s***—Mr. Collins Dictionary is hyphenating soft-pedal! Mr. Google, though, disagrees. Why would we hyphenate soft-pedal and not soft schedule? What’s going on?)

We see soft-pedaling all the time in politics. A politician or party will advance an idea and then back away slightly from said idea without entirely abandoning it. They just turn down the temperature around it. It will be apparent that soft-pedal is lexically and conceptually related to a number of other idioms, for example “tap the breaks,” “put on the back-burner,” “let’s put a pin in that,” and, my favorite and perhaps quasi-original to me, “to bracket.”

(When we bracket something, we acknowledge the existence, and importance, to one or more parties in a conversation, of the item in question while indicating that the item needs to wait or be placed in the background for the time being. We may bracket an item because we don’t have time to deal with it right now, because it doesn’t fit conceptually with what else we are doing, or because it is too sensitive, political, or otherwise complex to address at the current moment. As an example, let’s imagine a newly hired HR manager at a large company. In the first week on the job she is told by multiple people of an alleged instance of sexual harassment from a senior male manager to a subordinate younger female. The HR manager is told that everyone knows about this instance and that nothing has been done or said on any level. Now, our HR manager (let’s call her Jessica) is in a tight spot—obviously the allegation is a live issue, and perhaps a growing one as it has not even been acknowledged. Also, by very virtue of the fact that this complaint has come to Jessica several times immediately after her hiring it is clear that other employees are expecting her to do something about it. And she should. On the other hand…Jessica is brand new. She probably does not have a full handle, or even much of a grasp, of the corporate culture or power dynamics at the company. She does not know who to go to, necessarily, and even if there is a specified reporting flow for these kind of complaints, and, this point is crucial, she knows already that even if there is a flow it is not functioning properly. In fact, if she was to bring the matter immediately to a direct superior she could well be stepping on a political land mine. So our Jessica, god bless her, may say to her colleague something like: “I get it. This sounds like a serious issue and I understand that the fact that it has not been addressed only exacerbates the situation. However, let’s bracket it for the time being, and in the meantime I’ll try to learn more and see what the right next step might be.” Now in theory is this the right call? Maybe not. Maybe Jessica should go guns blazing up the chain. But no, she really shouldn’t. She should listen, observe, assess. In other words, she should probably bracket.)

Back to soft-pedal. Unlike soft schedule, which is basically always a positive, soft-pedaling can cut both ways. Soft-pedaling can be a risk. Take for example the Democratic primary contest for the 2020 presidential nomination in the United States. As any political watcher knows, candidates in primaries generally tack further to the left or right and in the general tack back to the center. The reasons for this are obvious, however in the digital age where every word, every micro-shift in a candidate’s position, gets analyzed in depth in real time, it is becoming far harder to tack from side to side without coming off as inauthentic. In the 2020 primary, Bernie Sanders’ plan for Medicare for All became the default position of anyone running anywhere near the left lane of the party. Now, the fact that Medicare for All was unlikely to get passed even under a Sanders administration, much less that of a bandwagon candidate like Kamala Harris, made it basically safe for a leftish candidate to champion the cause right through the primary.

Two candidates, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, initially jumped on-board with Medicare for All as they were trying to run in the left (Warren) or center-left (Harris) lane. Other candidates including Joe Biden (the eventual winner) and Pete Buttigieg were running basically as centrists, so they weren’t obligated to support it. Others, such as Andrew Yang, were niche candidates and/ or somehow on a tangent to the left/ center axis, and were therefore not endangered by the issue one way or the other. Harris and Warren could have just stuck with their support, however as the primary advanced they felt compelled to soft-pedal their position. This was probably from some combination of media demands for them to differentiate their plan from Sanders’, advisors telling them they needed to triangulate ahead of the voting, and, in Harris’ case, a lack of a political core that left her susceptible to political wobbling. Harris was going to lose in any case; she was a bad candidate with a toxic relationship to her staff and a habit of telling ridiculously embellished life stories. Warren, on the other hand, arguably lost her shot at the nomination because of her decision to soft-pedal Medicare for All. She couldn’t get her position straight, started to dissemble and flop-about, and her candidacy stalled in the Fall of 2019 as a pretty direct result. Such was the fall-out from her soft-pedal.

Nonetheless, in politics and in organizational settings the soft-pedal can be a crucial move. In an office environment a manager or manager group may try to roll out a new initiative and run into headwinds from employees. Said managers then have a choice, they can continue to push straight through and force the initiative, in the process risking the goodwill and enthusiasm of the team, or they can soft-pedal. Here, the soft-pedal is often the right call because it is quite different from “the climb down.” When managers climb down (or “back down” in more common parlance), they may put the issues to rest however they will likely lose face. Sometimes a climb down is necessary and hygienic, as when the managers realize the initiative is simply a non-starter and it’s best to cut their losses. The soft-pedal, however, allows for two things: i) it allows the managers to save face and to maintain the flexibility to bring the initiative back, perhaps in a revised form, at a later date, and ii) by leaving the initiative on the theoretical table while taking it “off the front burner” employees are reminded that the point behind the initiative may still be important in the future. When and if the initiative is brought back, the issue set has been “seeded,” and this seeding can “prime” employees to be more receptive the next time around when the initiative (by this time re-packaged) is re-introduced. Of course, the managers can also just allow the initiative to die off of its own accord over time while avoiding the (more sudden) climb down.

Such are the pros and cons of the soft-pedal. Handle with care.

to be continued…