'West Wing' makes a person wish for clarity

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© St. Petersburg Times
published January 14, 2003

Yes, I am a shameless participant in that liberal guilty pleasure West Wing.

I and all of my liberal, tree-hugging, tax-and-spend, peacenik, welfare-loving, corporation-hating, Birkenstock-wearing friends huddle in front of our television sets on Wednesday nights to see How Things Should Be and How They Will Be when, to borrow a term from Gerald Ford, "our long, national nightmare is over."

Come on, give us this. You other guys have CIA, Chuck Norris, JAG reruns and control of most of the governmental podiums in the country.

And, yes, we really do know it's just fiction, and if there had been any doubt, it would have been dissolved a few episodes ago, when there were actually high-ranking government officials considering rewriting government manuals in clear English.

In both public and private sectors, we should know by now that we, as a nation, are inherently incapable of the necessary ideation to eschew obfuscation.

Franklin Roosevelt (yeah, I know, another liberal) during World War II actually coined the term bureaucratese, and an oft-quoted story about him (here from a 1980 U.S. News and World Report article by James A. Chapman) concerns instructions for blackouts in federal buildings.

The original memo said, "Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal Government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility by reason of internal or external illumination. Such obscuration may be obtained either by black-out construction or by termination of the illumination."

"Tell them," Roosevelt is to have said, "that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something over the windows; and, in buildings where they can let the work stop for a while, turn out the lights."

Roosevelt, of course, is long gone.

Why am I ranting?

I'm trying to figure out statements from a medical insurance company. "Here's why we're not paying" would have been a better way to start, and -- heaven help me -- from a cell phone company.

The cell phone bill has a lot of language and numbers on it, all of which translate into, "Yeah, I know we advertise all of those free minutes, but here's the bill for twice as much as you thought it was going to cost."

I admit I didn't read the entire contract word for word -- I would have had to stand there in the mall for two days to have done so -- so I probably missed the paragraph that said the free minutes rule applies only if you are calling on a leap year while standing in a bucket of Allen wrenches and speaking with a woman named Jennifer who is explaining why you can't get the computer rebate you thought you were going to receive.

I want insurance contracts that say, "Give us this much money and if something bad happens, we will pay for it," and cell phone contracts that say, "It costs this many dollars per month, and here are your preprinted payment coupons for the year." Mortgage companies can do it. Why can't telephone companies?

Some network news magazine a couple of years ago actually hired a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon and put them on the air asking them to explain their regular telephone bills, and found out that doing so apparently is neither rocket science nor brain surgery, because neither could.

Just about every time I sign onto the Internet for something, I am asked to read and accept the terms of an agreement written in legalese that, if printed out, would be 6 feet long and, I'm sure, promises the contracting firm and its "heirs and assignees" the right to kidnap me and remove various major organs/and or demand that I hand over my firstborn in return for looking up the lyrics to some song I can't get out of my head.

If I have a second career it might be in writing contracts in plain English, beginning with something like, "Okay, chump, here's why this is a better deal for us than it is for you. Otherwise, we would be known as a charity and not a business."

I think I might just do that, as soon as I download the instructions for filing state incorporation papers.

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