EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION USES GOOD MANNERS

Manners matter, good manners, if your aim is for effective communication.

Steady eye contact and active listening nods and acknowledgment are part of the deal, but don’t stare unblinking like a psycho.

Also, “Yup, yup, yup,” and “okay, okay, okay,” are not examples of active listening.

Unless you do it ironically, but only if you’re good a irony.

Irony?

“a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.”

If I’m doing it right you will track my blog posts from beginning to end and glean the insights I’m presenting.

Then I’m doing effective communication with good manners.

Without good manners you scroll past because who needs another know-it-all jackass trying to tell you what you already know.

Again, “Without using good manners a reader will scroll past to avoid unpleasantness.”

Manners are important in the world of two way streets, give and take, call and response.

You know, polite society that knows how to hold it’s tongue until it shit-talks you behind your back.

That’s right, fuckers, we know who you are.

 

So Big Blogger Dave, Who Are They

It’s the older lady who says, “Bless your heart,” when you say something disagreeable.

It’s the middle-aged man who agrees with his role model who claims good people on both sides of an issue that includes authoritarian repression.

Read between the lines, listen between the breaths, and remember a somewhat decent person still wants to be well thought of.

Effective communication keeps ideas flowing back and forth instead of descending into a screaming match that might leave one of you damaged.

Try explaining naked manners in a public gym dressing room to an exhibitionist.

All they hear is, “I’m getting noticed. Eat your heart out, bitches.”

Don’t they know they could get athlete’s foot on their ass if they sit bare-bottom on a bench?

Buddy, they don’t care. They just want to do their morning shave, tooth brushing, and lotion up at a four sink counter in front of a wall-sized mirror.

 

There was something like this back in my days in the Gerald Ford Army, 74-76.

Seven low maintenance toilets hung off a wall with no dividers with seven sinks right in front of them.

I’ll do the math: Fourteen trainees in the same bathroom.

It was a problem for the gently raised who came from homes where they had their own facilities.

Not so much if you had five people in a one-bathroom house on Ohio Street and your outhouse-raised, Marine Corps trained, Dad smoked a cigarette and read the paper when he sat down.

Whose got next?

 

Ineffective Communication Skips Manners

Ask an honest question, get a bullshit answer.

Then what?

I’ve wondered for a while how a grown-ass man would put himself in front of an audience in full make-up and whine and complain with a pinched-up face, then transition to angry blame and threats while the crowd goes wild.

Maybe it’s his other side they’re attracted to?

 

“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” Trump said. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

 

And the crowd goes wild. The men want to lend a hand, the women want the hand.

But what’s the part everyone has missed over the years?

Some of the women see sexual misconduct as part of the show-biz job description when some skeevy bastard starts pawing and slobbering on them.

 

The proper response to some yahoo saying:

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

1. Fuck that guy? Or,

2. That’s my guy!

 

And the answer that echoes across the land from the voters who sucked up the praise of, “I love the poorly educated.”

They love their guy more than he loves them.

What’s new?

 

How To Fix A Poor Education? Read All About It: Reading

Our chances for effective communication is understanding how it works in other ways besides some asshole screaming invective from a lectern.

Is that what you signed up for? What you travel to hear? These are your people?

You can do better. You’d be better off without them.

But you’d get lonely.

The world of the poorly educated includes more than high school dropouts who got a job, college dropouts who hit the road.

It includes lawyers and generals and doctors. You don’t get to call yourself a lawyer, general, or doctor by skipping class or dropping out.

It includes federal senators and representatives and supreme court justices.

“How can smart people be under educated?” you ask.

There’s an old saying that goes:

“The shittier the guy at the top, the shittier everyone else can be.”

What kind of a legacy does that leave after they exit the stage?

A loser legacy because when they’re compared to a seasoned professional in bad manners and shit-talk, they’ll never win.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t stop trying.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.

“This is a clarion call to come to Washington,” he said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime moment to serve.’”

You want to serve?

 

Serve This

 

A kid I know graduated from college with plans to go to the Marine Corps OCS.

He missed his chance, got cheated out of his chance, on a technicality.

But he had a bad-ass dream of being a bad-ass. So instead of quitting, or waiting a year, he enlisted.

He went through the hardest time, jumped through the smallest of hoops, and came out the other side the man he intended to be: Bad-Ass Man.

It was the program where most people drop out, or fail.

He did neither, but some of his new buddies quit.

A couple of years later his buddies reconnected. They were officers now and wanted to take another shot at the program they quit on.

 

“I’m enlisted and know what they are. They’re weak. They’re quitters, not leaders, but no one else will know. What’s going to happen when they face times tougher than the training? They’ll quit. In this community that gets people killed.”

 

Something dies when people who know better wipe their feet on others.

It’s not called leadership, or role modeling, or the better of two bad choices.

Call it what it is, an opportunity to oppress.

Things start rolling one way and cheers rise; what happens when the same thing rolls over the cheering throngs?

Tears. Lot’s of them. Along with, “We didn’t know.”

So we need reminders: The fancy man from 5th Ave is not your friend, your savior, or your salvation.

These people said they said they didn’t know, too.

Then they went home to vomit.