Anchoresses Aweigh!

Elizabeth Scalia is a good writer, if not always (for my money, at least) terribly original. So when she is (and in fairness, this is not the first time), it's a high one right out of the park.

I must attend an "all hands" meeting of the entire communications staff in less than one hour, the content of which has been as tightly-guarded as anything I've witnessed in nearly three decades here. But I've got an inkling of what might happen, and if I had the nerve (and I will, eventually, this is the piece by "The Anchoress" that I would send to everybody involved.

The men who built the Empire State Building stood on bare planks to work in the sky; paradoxically, they were grounded in reality, not theory. They did not have to concern themselves with tones and timbres; nor did the educated architects who dreamed up skyscrapers. One suspects that if either the man on the beam or the one with the blueprints had been approached by a tanning-booth-bronzed-and-manicured corporate bureaucrat, and asked to enumerate their “goals” as part of their “performance review” they both would have hooted at him in derision. “My goal,” the first would say, “is to not fall. It’s to stay alive so I can pick up my pay, have a beer with the wife, raise the kids and get into heaven a half-hour before the devil knows I’m dead.”

Pray for me, and stay tuned ...

UPDATE: The meeting is over. The status quo survives -- for the moment.

(Note to Ms Scalia: I'm a much harsher critic of my own work. Take care.)
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