April 3, 2010

Be counted, early and often

Well, I received my U.S. census questionnaire in the mail this week … again!

I mailed the first one back weeks ago, two days after it arrived, in fact. But now I suppose Uncle Sam’s not content to count me once; he feels my presence and participation is so vital to the nation’s future that he must be doubly sure I’m on the rolls.

When I saw the second mailing in my box, my first reaction was bafflement. Why was I getting this thing again? Perplexity was immediately followed by consternation; not at the implied allegation I hadn’t returned the first survey form. No, I was mad because now I was saddled with the unfair burden of deciding whether mailing the second one back was the numerically sound and responsible thing to do.

It’s bad enough I have to count myself citizen of a country whose lamentable fall from deliberative constitutional democracy and rapid descent toward brutal capitalist oligarchy has me gazing dreamily at world maps and wondering if Australia has tough immigration laws. But now I’m compelled to second-guess my own Federal government’s competence in the matter of administering its $300 million decennial census. Now I’m forced to decide, on behalf of the responsible agency, if it’s the proper thing to fill out the second questionnaire, and what might be the statistical consequences if I do. (I don’t have even one stats course on my college transcripts, so this goes waaaay beyond my pay grade.)

Then on the other hand, there are the legal implications if I don’t return it, but should have. Because after all, as the envelope boldly threatens, my response is “REQUIRED BY LAW.” It doesn’t matter that I already responded weeks ago. No, the mere possibility that the first survey form was lost in delivery emblazons Disaster! all over my heretofore stellar record as a law abiding citizen.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I minded answering those ten questions in the first go-round, or that it’s a major inconvenience doing it all over again. Heck, I even weighed the moral and ethical implications of responding a second time just out of spite. I mean, if those knuckleheaded bean counters in Essex, Maryland can’t see how repeating this second mailing tactic with all 115 million households in America royally screws up the statistical validity of the whole darned process of census taking, then why should I give a white-guy’s-checkbox-of-a-damn just how messed up the numbers are on account of my personal contribution!

In all fairness though, I should explain that the redundant mailing contained a powder-blue, half-page note acknowledging the government’s mailing of the first census form. And furthermore, it goes on to caution how godawful earth-shatteringly crucial it is that households only respond to the census once. But … just so there’s no confusion about my civic duty, the warning is prefaced with a stern reminder that this second question form is my last chance to respond by harmless, impersonal mail, and if I don’t fess up to consuming oxygen within the boundaries of the ‘ol U.S. of A. this time, then the Census Bureau will have no choice but to dispatch an official G-man posse to my door, presumably to slap me around my livingroom and beat the 10 answers out of me, if that’s what it takes to get me to take this whole census business seriously.

So I say, ease up with the threats, fellas. Just keep those census forms coming and I’ll gladly let you count me as many times as you’d like.

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February 22, 2010

Narrow and hard the path to vegetarianism

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the path to an ecologically conscientious faith is vexed with misleading dead ends.

News & Observer religion reporter Yonat Shimron’s profile of one local church’s stab at environmental ethics during Lent illustrates how easily parishioners drift off momentarily on a tangent, often motivated by misinformation or transient fads.  The result being that many simply retrace their path, then forever abandon the journey forward.

I’m not saying there’s nothing meritorious in the good folk of United Church of Chapel Hill denouncing their carnivore habits for the duration of the Lenten season.  Only that doing so for the sake of reducing carbon emissions is about as convoluted a line of reasoning as one could concoct.  Furthermore, it smacks of hopping aboard a popular bandwagon which, these days, is inordinately obsessed with global warming at the expense of addressing a root problem of overconsumption, an issue where Westerners shamefully lead the world’s parade to destruction.

You see, the environmental pitfall in eating meat really has little to do with CO2, methane, or gaseous emissions of any sort.  The sticking point with meat is that the agricultural industry generally pours ten times more energy into producing 1 kcal of animal meat as it does 1 kcal’s worth of a grain product like wheat, rice, or corn.  So for what it takes to feed and care for the one Angus, you could feed ten adults for much longer than the bovine’s lifetime.

If you step back and look at the physics and physiology of what’s going on, you see you’re devoting considerably more resources just keeping a cow alive long enough to satisfy your preference for the taste of cow flesh.  And the operating principle is no less true for other living creatures like fish and chickens or scallops.  You expend extra energy maintaining the life of the animal just long enough to eventually kill it.

Naturally, I haven’t even touched on all the other ancillary ecological issues that swarm around livestock farming — things like land use, antibiotic overuse, animal wastes, and perhaps most damning of all, the horrendous conditions to which industrial farming systems subject the poor creatures they churn out of their meat mills.

In turn, this raises the ethical questions that come with saddling an already economically disadvantage and socially oppressed people — namely, the unfortunate slaughterhouse workers — with the gruesome task of personally butchering thousands of animals week after bloody week.  If we don’t have a Christian obligation to consider both the physical and psychological damage that imposes on our neighbors, then what’s Christianity good for?

So a token Lenten effort to abstain from eating animals is only about as good as the 40 days it covers.  Void of a sounder rationale for the enterprise, if one simply returns to his previous habits, the few pounds of carbon emissions spared won’t mean much juxtaposed against the lifelong commitment to rape and pillage the planet while condemning its creatures, be they humble or human, to an endless cycle of savagery.

I hate to come across like a killjoy, but if conserving inanimate carbon, the sixth element of the periodic table, is the strongest incentive the congregation at United Church of Chapel Hill can find to compassionately steward Yahweh’s planet, then perhaps their time might be better spent getting to know a few live chickens the other 325 days of the year.

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February 3, 2010

Distracted beyond reason

It seems the much-distracted, father-daughter driving duo who openly confessed their mutual cell phone addictions in the pages of The News & Observer last month has stirred up no end of commotion among the local rabble.

Far be it from me to exonerate this featherbrained pair of motorists, the junior member of which racked up three phone-instigated car wrecks in as many years.  (By all accounts, her inability to properly estimate public sentiment at this revelation just about evenly matches her overall lack of judgment and self-control.)  But if ever readers needed evidence to explain why there’s senseless tragedy, injustice and unabated evil in the world, I’d be more inclined to point them in the direction of the convoluted blathering of the two women who defended their obsessive need for cell phone distractions behind the wheel in yet another recent installment of the same Road Worrier column (“They call from the car, carefully,” Jan. 19).  I haven’t a doubt that neither entertains the slightest suspicion of how absurd her arguments sound in the court of public opinion.  And by comparison, they give Buckley and Tyler Strandberg the aura of self-flagellating saints.

One mark of an adult mind (as contrasted with the juvenile version of that equipment) is its ability to extrapolate actions into the future to contemplate possible outcomes and their implications for all concerned. But by their shortsighted rationalizations, Gilda Branch and Susan Jancuski reveal that neither age nor motherhood has contributed a scrap of maturity to either’s thought process.  Each places her own interests and priorities squarely at the center of the excused misconduct without a shred of consideration to civic responsibility for the welfare of others.

Perhaps one day these ladies will share with us whatever measure of comfort her twisted justifications might confer waiting at the car wash while the blood of an eight-year-old she’s run over in a school crossing is scrubbed from her front bumper.

I vouchsafe no pity and spare no contempt for those who value human life less than their own personal comfort and convenience.

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January 21, 2010

U.S. military as sick as Hasan

Under the classification of “throwing in my two cents worth,” I can’t resist commenting on the unfolding revelations about U.S. Army personnel evaluations of Nidal Hasan, the psychiatrist under indictment for mass murder at Fort Hood last November.

The Associated Press reports detailing Hasan’s evaluation irregularities and the erratic, inconsistent assessment by various supervising officers comes as no surprise whatsoever.

Without hesitation, I can verify that the military uses performance evaluations as a technique and device for managing and manipulating careers rather than objectively documenting performance and on-the-job behavior. The subjectivity of these HR processes is notoriously well-known among the ranks, and many enlisted soldiers and officers accept this with varying degrees of ascent, depending on the favorability of their own specific evaluations.

So it’s no shock the military brass now chooses to throw its peons under the bus, even those — perhaps especially those — who made honest efforts to document the deficits, warning signs, and outright misconduct swirling around Hasan earlier in his career.  This is so typically Army … nay, so typically military!  (I have experience working professionally among Army and Air National Guard as well as U.S. Navy personnel.)  These are organizations for which self-preservation is the inherent mission.  Consequently, they’re populated with officers and NCOs who instinctively circle the wagons to defend their own job security when hostile forces arise, and they won’t hesitate to cut anyone down who might threaten their comfortable stability.

Invariably, that means the gutless homebodies at the highest levels freely exercise their prerogative to slice and dice up those with smaller … well, let’s just not go there.  This is pretty much guaranteed whenever there’s no hope to be gained by standing together, which of course is clearly the case, we now plainly see, where Hasan is concerned — no startling tactic when it comes to administrative mismanagement, as opposed to, say, when the actual lead bullets are flying wildly about the troops.

There’s no organization like the Pentagon to operate by the principle that the finest, most upstanding and honest deeds will not escape unpunished.  And if you ask me, the rueful fact of it is that Nidal Hasan’s unfortunate targets were, in the final assessment, several levels of rank below their rightful mark.

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December 13, 2009

Public Relations Defined, Part II

*    *    *

Public relations is the systematic study and strategic design
of organizational identity and behavior in relation to all else,
human or otherwise.

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So, what is public relations?

It’s a question I’d vowed to answer in a post made many months ago.  There, I offered the definition for PR I had developed while in graduate school.  It wasn’t to be found, strictly verbatim, in any textbook or journal, but it upheld fundamental principles of the public relations profession commonly shared by many scholars and practitioners alike.

To aid present readers, my now-discarded definition went like so:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships with stakeholders essential to an organization’s success.

The key element that ties this definition to what’s taught in post-secondary institutions is that of PR’s management function within an organization.  It emphasizes the role of relationships with defined “publics,” and the goal of improved outcomes by consciously shaping that interplay.

But I’ve found this definition wanting somewhat, over the years.  Most notably, it fails to adequately represent the mission of public relations practitioners in particular.

Granted, public relations manifests itself in the doings of everyone within an organization.  But by that measure, PR is something in which everyone is engaged, and so my old definition neglects the preparation unique to the field as a scholarly discipline, and essentially implies that anyone with a company ID and access to clientele is a PR practitioner.  To a certain extent, that’s indeed true.  But in the same way that anyone with a head cold and access to an aspirin bottle isn’t necessarily a physician, neither is the trained public relations professional simply another cog in the PR machinery.

Sadly, however, the reality of commerce might be found resistant to claims for PR any greater than just that very thing, though, if one were to judge by management’s traditional relationship with PR directors, agencies, and consultants.  For, in fact, pretty much all PR pros — even in those rare instances when they’re given a seat in the board room — function as little more than toadies and mouthpieces inexplicably eager to take a bullet for the company or get thrown under the bus of public opinion, all for the sake of a steady paycheck.

One of my chief complaints against those trained in the PR field is that they’re content to take public relations just as it’s handed to them in the world of commerce.  Rather than behaving like professionals trained and educated in a classroom, who might seize an opening to define public relations in its fullest expression of potential and the manifestation of what they professionally believe it ought to be, they accept it as expressed in the ignorant expectations of managers, who have no formal training in PR whatsoever, and are unlikely to have devoted even a second’s critical thought to what it is, let alone what it should or could be.

In other words, Ms. or Mr. PR Pro’s definition of public relations amounts to an empirical one, and the Empire’s definition is hopelessly steeped in stupidity and ignorance and random chance.  Therefore, PR practitioners are usually consigned to nothing greater than honing their writing and public speaking skills, and of course, to love and court the news media — a dreadfully misguided romance if ever there were one.

So, without further delay, I offer my new and improved definition of public relations here for public scrutiny, so that, in the same way open-source software can be tested and refined by the critical fire of many programmers and users, my definition can foment the seeds of professional discontent and provoke a quest for PR’s future betterment.

Public relations is the systematic study and strategic design of organizational identity and behavior in relation to all else, human or otherwise.

My new definition remains broadly inclusive, so as to acknowledge the relations-building function of everyone in the organization.  Yet it makes room for the PR professional’s unique contribution as one intentionally tasked to open the eyes of the organization’s members to the character of those impressions and relationships, and to suggest their intentional deconstruction and refashioning within the framework of organizational values.

On the other hand, this definition makes no presuppositions about the responsibilities any specific organization delegates to its PR staff or consultants.  Instead, it projects the scope of public relations as an academic enterprise which can offer meaningful insights with or without the consent of those examined.  As a profession, it needn’t be limited by management’s or labor’s narrow mythology of public relations.  At the same time, its insights remain pragmatically applicable and imminently useful.

By my definition, as a scholarly enterprise, public relations is introspective, it’s unflinchingly critical.  It is a discovery of organizational self through the eyes of others, and portends a truer understanding of who is doing the looking.  But it cannot be undertaken by the layperson, and so it is a discipline in the truest academic sense.  It requires study and structure, as well as natural gifts predisposed to social sciences, but with the philosophical humanities at their core.

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December 9, 2009

One rat lost in the race

They ran him down that’s what they did right in front of my very eyes this morning they just drove right over him without a thought or a pause and they just ran the little guy down.

No, he wasn’t big, as rats go, and might’ve been difficult to see in the pouring rain if your weren’t driving cautiously.

He was quick, too, but not quick enough. He must’ve scurried only inches past my feet as I approached the curb where I catch the morning bus, when I saw it coming.  I gasped out loud, “Oh no, oh no!”  But it was no use.  No one was slowing down.  No one seemed to notice or to care.

He dodged one car.  He dodged a second.  Then he and his luck expired with the third.  It was horrible.

It was obvious the little fella was only trying to get someplace dry.  The rain was coming down furiously and he was running from an open parking lot with no shelter of any kind.  He only wanted to get out of the wet and find a dry spot, so he made a mad dash.  Instinct told him to go, but he never stood a prayer of a chance.  And he lost his life, just trying to find a dry place.

That wasn’t much to ask, it was nothing at all, but it was more than anyone was willing to give him.

*    *    *

We make it hard on animals at every turn, we do.  Every activity of our rat race lifestyle seems designed to doom the rodents and any other helpless creature in our paths to the point where we won’t even let them get out of the rain without killing them.

I hope, one day, there’s payback.  We deserve it.  This is one rat race we deserve to lose.

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November 22, 2009

Lessons from a small bug

Profound, far-reaching truths are to be discerned in nature, provided we aren’t so arrogant as to dismiss any schooling that lacks a grand campus as its setting.

In recent days, I was relaxing on my porch soaking in the warmth of one of our autumn Piedmont afternoons, when a small bug — a beetle, by my best approximate description — landed close by me.  I watched him for a minute or two while he explored the flat, gray slab that served as both our resting places that moment, when he went aloft again for a few inches and landed on his back.

But he, being of a beetle sort with wings tucked behind a hard, split carapace, was finding that righting himself on this broad, flat, unyielding surface was more difficult than one might have first estimated.  And after several seconds watching him struggle in that task, it appeared he was likely to exhaust himself before he ever succeeded.  So I took mercy on the capsized fellow and helped him back on his six feet to resume his explorations elsewhere.

Reflecting on his situation, though, it struck me that in an environment undisturbed by man, where it’s almost impossible to find natural surfaces that are so uniformly planar and solid as the concrete slab of my porch, the awkward position in which this little invertebrate had just found himself would probably never occur.  And doesn’t this improbable clash of circumstances aptly describe the very same faced by many a misplaced person in this hard, hostile world which is so unfit a habitation for many.  We’re thrust into situations we’re not properly outfitted to overcome because they represent artificial constructs completely alien to our natural gifts and survival skills.

In short, man’s parochial shortsightedness has constructed a world where those not suitably designed for it can fall flat on their backs, incapable of getting right-side up.  It’s a lesson we’d do well to consider the next time we pass someone asleep on a heating grate or park bench.  It might even lend serviceable insight toward comprehending those among our casual acquaintances who live out turbulent lives in search of a friendly landing place where their natural graces are sufficient and they can feel at home.

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