The Forgotten Lem Boulware

Ronald Reagan's insane policies helped create today’s Gilded Age.

— Ben Gran

They are ideologues. I hate ideologues. 

— Philip Roth

Historians credit Ronald Reagan's antediluvian notions of "big government" to the influence of the right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater.

They've forgotten the more important influencer: Lem Boulware.

Boulware was GE's head public relations man in the 1950s. 

While on the job, Boulware gained a national reputation for extolling laissez-faire, bashing Washington bureaucrats, and bullying labor leaders.

Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of raw capitalism, Boulware insisted.

Nothing.

Boulware's libertarian influence on American businessmen was so pervasive that it endures today, when a nonnegotiable stance—such as the price of a new car—is called an instance of Boulwarism.

The paranoid Boulware believed that American workers, abetted by New-Deal era intellectuals in Washington, posed a mortal threat to the business-owning class—and made no secret of it. He rang the reactionary's alarm bell at each and every opportunity, using GE employees like Ronald Reagan as his shill.

Reagan had befriended Boulware while the Hollywood actor served as the weekly host of "General Electric Theater," one of the nation's top TV shows for over a decade.

As they toured the country hosting press junkets, Boulware took it upon himself to "tutor" the dimwitted actor (Christopher Hitchens once called Reagan "as dumb as a stump" and his deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver told me that he "babysat" the puerile president).

Like a sponge, Reagan absorbed Boulware's Hobbesian views.

America, Boulware preached, was the land of opportunity, private ownership, free markets, and low taxes. 

Anyone who wished to call himself an American accepted those qualities—plus the fact that prosperity trickled down from the "beneficent" 1%. 

Resistance meant you were a goddamn Communist.

Boulware's Gilded Age views were known in Chamber of Commerce circles as the "philosophy of private enterprise."

The gullible Reagan, while traveling with the wily PR man, would listen to his teachings and swallow them whole.

The actor wasn't the only one of GE's 190,000 employees to imbibe Boulware's Kool-Aid during the '50s. 

Tens of thousands did.

The PR man made sure of that by circulating right-wing books among management and publishing four in-house magazines that explained the philosophy of private enterprise; arranging continual in-house workshops on the topic; and deputizing supervisors throughout the company to act as his mouthpiece.

To prepare GE's supervisors to carry his message, Boulware also circulated reprints of articles by the arch conservative William F. Buckley.

Boulware viewed his task as one of re-educating the serfs.

The simpleminded star of Bedtime for Bonzo was merely one of them.

Grammar

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

— B. R. Myers

On a Facebook group dedicated to the prize-winning writer Shelby Foote (a fav of mine), a civil war broke out after I corrected someone who used "hung" to mean "executed." (If a man or woman was executed by hanging, as grammarians know, he or she was "hanged.")

Some group members backed me, but many went apoplectic over my comment, insisting grammar was irrelevant to communicating.

Facebook even banned me for 24 hours, saying "your comment didn't follow our Community Standards."

The irony of advocating sloppy grammar in a group dedicated to Shelby Foote escapes them, as, I'm afraid, do most subtleties.

B.R. Myers is right: sloppy grammar signals a sloppy thinker—or at least a poorly read one.

No, sloppy grammar doesn't prohibit communication.

But it does reflect a pitiable sort of poverty.

The Gnadenhütten Massacre

The news of the atrocities in Ukraine are heartbreaking.

Russians are barbarous, we say.

It can't happen here, we say.

Wrong.

In March 1782, a year before the end of the American Revolution, a band of Pennsylvanians murdered 96 Lenape Indians by smashing their skulls with mallets as they knelt and prayed to Jesus.

In what became known as the "Gnadenhütten Massacre," the Pennsylvanians then piled the bodies of the men, women and children inside a Moravian mission and burned it to the ground.

The murderers claimed they wanted revenge for Lenape raids on their homes.

But the Lenapes they bludgeoned were innocent.

Like Quakers, Moravians were pacifists; so were their Indian converts.

Ironically, the Moravians and the Lenape converts had been helping the Patriots all through the war, working as guides and spies—acts that often got them arrested and tried by the British.

The incident spurred reprisals.

The Lenapes resurrected their practice of ritualized torture—discontinued during the French and Indian War 20 years earlier—and targeted the men who had participated in the atrocities.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "To the war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there."

Many a Slip

There's many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip.

— English proverb

I've always loved this 2nd-century proverb.

We 21st-century folks—quick to shun responsibility—like to say instead, "Shit happens."

But the ancient proverb puts the onus on the individual, not the universe. 

The individual is where the slip so often begins.

Business people are always slipping up: dropping the ball, laying an egg, spoiling the party.

It seems to worsen every day.

Of course, a lot of us have too much to do. 

But a whole lot of us are just plain sloppy and unprofessional.

As my parents would say, "You can't get good service anymore."

Please don't contribute to the problem. 

Instead, today, try to:

• Show up
• Call back
• Keep the appointment
• Follow through
• Pay attention
• Speak plainly
• Be honest
• Offer to help 
• Find an answer
• Keep your promise

And, for god's sake:

• Don't send me a survey every time I interact with you.

Chances are, it will reach me when I'm in a foul mood.

I am a Member of the Chain Gang

I've plunged into Web3 by arranging to buy my first NFT.

So you might say I am a member of the chain gang.

As in "blockchain."

It feels like a fad, but so did Web1, at least for a month or two.

If it is a fad, soon I'll be a fugitive from the chain gang.

Which reminds me...

If you've never seen the 1932 film Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, check it out.

It won the Academy Award as Best Picture that year.

And, no, Edward G. Robinson didn't slap Groucho Marx at the award ceremony.

Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was "pre-Code," meaning it's raw for its day.

The script came out of the pages of True Detective, and was as racy and hard-boiled as that pulp.

And better still, it was based on a true story.

In 1991, the Library of Congress chose Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang for preservation in the National Film Registry along with the likes of Vertigo, The Godfather, and Airplane!

It doesn't get better than that.