Among them are angels, fools and knaves
January 31, 2020 | 3-minute read
When Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles decides he wants to run a dairy farm, he visits dairy farms all over Wessex. He is surprised to discover big differences among the farm owners and workers. Some are good natured, some are boors. Some are intelligent, some are drink-addled floozies. By the end of his travels, Angel Clare sees that dairy farmers across the English countryside exhibit as much diversity as the members of his own social class.
I always think of Angel Clare’s experience with the Wessex dairy farms whenever I encounter communications people. Some, like my friend David, have worked their way through all seven books of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Some, like my old cubicle mate Monica Calvertson,* could not write a topic sentence even if you promised her a night with Brad Pitt. Most stupefying of all, however, was Laurent,* my medical center manager, who expended the strength of Samson to interview potential writers, but in the end hired the least capable of them this side of Wessex.
It probably didn’t help that Laurent’s English — his third language after Arabic and French — was not native enough to head a major medical center’s communications department. I marveled at how a man who could read Allen Ginsberg and celebrate the release of Julian Lennon’s “Too Late for Goodbyes” could not tell the difference between “I had a bad dream” and “I a dream bad had.”
Laurent’s bringing Colleen* and Giselle* on board to produce two of the medical center’s most important news organs irked me. What I eventually understood, though, was that, like Oz, which has good and bad witches, a corporate communications department has good and bad nincompoops.
Colleen was a good nincompoop. She was loud and animated and talked eight beats to the bar. Like the time she got word that her father had had a heart attack and died in a midtown ER. Colleen let out a howl and pleaded with me to come with her to the hospital. We took a taxi from the Bronx and arrived to see her father laid out on a gurney with a breathing tube still lodged in his throat. It was a scene I wouldn’t mind erasing from my memory. Yet when I think back on it, I admire how Colleen flew into action and got to the hospital in time to comfort her mother. Turns out that Colleen in an emergency was the same affable Colleen in the communications department. She acknowledged that her stories were poorly written and asked the seasoned writers to edit them. Who would have guessed she knew how to get things done.
Giselle,* on the other hand, was an unschooled writer with a gigantic ego. She was a bad nincompoop. Rather than ask for help, she would plop herself down in front of Laurent and badmouth the writers. Useless as she was, she nonetheless caught on faster than any of us that digital was going to replace print. She began campaigning to eliminate all of the medical center’s newsletters, even before the advent of tablets, digital readers and smartphones made digital publication possible. Giselle had the diabolical passion to rain down destruction on the communications department. She was ready to sacrifice herself as long as she could kill the publications and writers. Most days she came back from long lunches smelling of scotch.
Colleen and Giselle are proof that nincompoops are as diverse a group as the Wessex dairy farmers Angel Clare studied. Just as clever people do everything from developing a vaccine for polio to mastering the art of torture, nincompoops likewise can perform acts of decency or wreak havoc. Who would Colleen and Giselle have been during the Nazi occupation of Poland? During American slavery times? During the massacres in Rwanda? Nincompoops, grand and grandiose, are everywhere with us, in our workplaces, our polling stations, our sports arenas. Just look around.
* Not a real name
