Why I’m Not Letting Your Nazi Comment Stand

I’m practicing for when it matters

While I appreciate your comments about the serious nature of work, and I am familiar with some of your arguments, I am puzzled by your willingness to mischaracterize my thoughts in your recent comments. I feel the need to affirm that language can still be used positively on behalf of workers and that the workplace is not a hopeless case; most astonishingly, it also appears I must assert that taking pleasure in using language clearly and well doesn’t make someone a Nazi.

First, as you should know, those disciplinary write-ups we’ve been discussing reflect processes that emerged from collective bargaining, as a better alternative to draconian corporate policies that fire people without warning and without cause. Moreover, if you’ll look at the example, the write-up is describing abusive and violent behavior, with an eye toward mitigating it. We do that sort of thing now, you know.

Second, I must say that saying that all of that activity is corrupt and cultish is profoundly cynical and discouraging to those who still try to make a positive effect in the workplace.

I agree that there is much to say about the fraught nature of work and its effect on the human soul, but I’m taken aback by your assertion that frivolity is never appropriate in any situation where anything serious ever happened. If that’s your position, then I suppose you might want to avoid articles tagged “Humor.” As I was reading along, I thought I might beg your pardon if my lighter approach to problems in the work place offended your sensibilities.

Finally, I must admit that when you suddenly jumped to the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, AND imagined that someone like me was like a zealous clerk happily checking off people to be executed, I was brought up short. How’d we get way over there, I wondered?

I choose not to let that careless and gratuitous offense stand.

I thought about it hard. My friends said, “Don’t bother replying — he’s not worth it.” It’s certainly not up to me to say whether someone is “worth” a response or not, but this discourse is worth it. We are exchanging ideas here. In this space, we were talking about how to write clearly and well for institutions, to avoid obfuscation and cut through the fog.

But your comment derailed that discussion, and you took the meeting onto a pretty sharp tangent and left it there. So I’ve thought more about what you brought up.

To be sure, those wrongs in the workplace are serious and need to be addressed. The critiques are real, and I would be interested in your considered analyses of these issues.

The masses, the proletariat are living in society bent on erasing us.

Our relationship with work since the Industrial Revolution has changed our souls, undermined our families, fragmented our culture, destroyed our health, trashed our environment, and dimmed our future.

We don’t even know what work is any more. Foucault called madness the “absence of work” — what will this mean in a future where “work” means staring at a computer monitor, the way you and I are each doing as we have this discussion?

All of these things are quite true. And yet, you offered no ideas about the proper uses of rhetoric in the face of these crises. In fact, if I understood you correctly, you seemed to indicate that there wasn’t any use in trying.

Instead, seemingly out of the blue, you fired off a Nazi bomb. It was a random, thoughtless suggestion of an insult toward someone you don’t even know, the ever-popular she-sort-of-sounds-like-a-Nazi reference, because I suggested that writing up some blowhard who lost their temper in the office might be satisfying — yes, even fun, if the blowhard was a particular pain in the neck.

I had the audacity to be frivolous. I must therefore be a Nazi, and a stereotypical bureaucrat, and a gendered stereotype secretary too, for the trifecta.

So, no. I cannot let that stand. It is not as if I were gleefully checking off the names of those about to be executed. You have misunderstood the analogy, sir, in your eagerness to hurt.

So who do I say we should be? Who would I be in the analogy? Why, I’d be the one doing the damned write-up. I’d be the one documenting for posterity the crimes against humanity committed by those employed by that evil institution. That’s who I would be in the analogy.

Would it be “fun” to recount those serious and deadly deeds? No. Of course not. In that scenario, I would choose a different word.

If I were called thus to speak truth to power, and I had the skill and the courage, it would not be fun.

It would be glory.