A Time to Be Blunt

I’m turning myself in. I just got off the phone with a headhunter checking references for a woman being vetted for a big corporate job. She used to work for me.

• After the setup chitchat, I heard myself describe my former colleague as “decisive,” when my vivid memory of her was that she was impetuous, rarely seeking or accepting advice from people better informed than herself.
• It got worse. I called her “intuitive,” even as my memory played back awkward client presentations where she appeared to be grossly underprepared. In a summary sentence, I described her as “upbeat” when, under sodium pentothal, I would have settled quickly on “tedious.”
• I would be more embarrassed by these lapses but for the fact that everybody — even you, dear reader — does it all the time. We may still be in important respects the Land of the Free but, day to day, we seem to have become the Land of Close Enough.
• How did we get here? How did we get from plain, America-strong speech to this Euro-euphemistic stuff? How did we travel the road from Gregory Peck to Brad Pitt? Or, for that matter, the even longer road from John Wayne to Joaquin Phoenix?
• Part of it, of course, is the lawyers. In institutional life these days, honesty is almost never the best policy. The repercussions from a straight-up, no-kidding critique of a colleague can be both swift and sure. The HR lady can weaponize the employee manual, and outside counsel can do the wet work. Overnight.
• But that’s not all of it. It’s been a long time coming, this transition. I first noticed it when I was involved in professional sports. It came as a shock to me when coaches — most of them burly, bent-nosed tyrants — would slip into coach-speak, a dialect closely related to but clearly distinct from everyday English. It took me awhile, for instance, to understand that when our coach would say of a new player, “He’s having some trouble picking up our playbook,” what the coach was really saying was, “The kid has the IQ of a mushroom.” Or when the coach would say of a high-motor player, “Yes, he has a rare passion for the game,” he was really saying, “The trainer thinks he may be juicing.” “He’s a leader of our team on the field [or the rink or the floor] and off” meant something like, “He’s on a first-name basis with the manager of the best girlie bar in every city in our conference.” Coaches! Ban-Lon-stretching, tobacco-spitting, ass-chewing coaches! They may have looked like the Duke, but they began to sound like Joaquin.
• Which brings us to the president of the United States. You know what they say of him. He’s a man of deep experience. He chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He knows every major figure on the world stage. He’s been around the track a time or two. (Fortuitously, I have never heard them say of Amtrak’s favorite commuter, “This ain’t his first rodeo.”)
• All of which is sort of true, or at least not demonstrably false. But all of it is designed to obscure the central reality: The president of the United States is losing his mental faculties.
• We Americans are, in this rare and dangerous moment, in need of a commander in chief. The man currently carrying that title spent Sunday, we’re told, trying to “restrain the Israelis,” telling them to “take the win.” And of course, we were informed unnecessarily, he warned them sternly, “Don’t!”
• The U.S. objectives, the president is reported to have stated, are (a) to restore regional stability and (b) to prevent a wider war. What I hope he meant, but doubt that he did, is that he knows full well that there is no stability in the region. One sovereign nation has just launched a massive attack, with more than 300 drones and missiles, upon another sovereign nation. With the proxies pushed to one side, the wider war is now upon us.
• My further hope is that the unnamed Israeli government source did not mean what he said on Monday when he was quoted as saying, “We don’t have to react right now.” Not true. If anything is clear in these foggy days, it is that Iran has restored Israel to the moral high ground — but only for a moment. If America and its remaining allies must stand their ground, if they must re-establish a credible deterrence, if they must push back somewhere against the global ambitions of the China-Russia-Iran axis, where would be a better place and when would be a better time to draw the line than right here and right now? The Israelis have F-15s, F-16s, F-35s, and some of the best pilots in the world. The Iranians have F-4s, F-14s, MiG-29s, and Iranian pilots.