listenlearnleverage.listenlearnleverage.listenlearnleverage

You started the conversation and by God you'll finish it

I don’t have the energy anymore to do the Humblebrag Hokey Pokey. I have a Columbia diploma; I receive alumni emails; the latter’s implied audience demonstrates the former’s uselessness as a proxy of intelligence, insight, or basic decency. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the new interim president’s promise to do what no CEO has ever done before: Listen, Learn, and Start The Conversation.

You’d think at least one person around this salmon-clad functionary would have said something like, “Whoops, that’s a necrotic cliche, how about a subject heading that approximates how real human beings talk?” The conspiracist in me, though, whispers that the cliche is precisely the point. A mind-shattering statement of insincerity, the subject heading reminds its addressees that it’s beyond stupid to expect people to say things that mean anything. This was probably always a pretty dumb expectation, even before Trump regained the presidency by combining Christian warrior apoplexy with an undeniable talent for performing fellatio on a microphone. But in an era of unabashed liberal capitulation, epitomized by the craven hypocrisy of Shipman’s predecessor, the presumption of sincerity belongs in a museum of antiquities, next to the last surviving Betamax machine.

What is this conversation that Shipman has pledged to start? And will it start after she listens and learns from people who are already talking? If so, hasn’t the conversation already started? And if that’s so, shouldn’t the subject heading read, “Starting The Conversation, Listening, And, After All Is Said And Done, Learning”? But that just sounds aggressively awful, as compared with the merely passive awfulness of the actual word salad before us. Maybe Shipman is going to start a conversation with people other than those to whom she has listened, and from whom she has learned. Having performed their role, these supporting actors can then shuffle offstage as Shipman turns her attention to talking to people who are actually important. Manhattanville’s perpetually blue-balled investors, perhaps.

I suppose Shipman “listens and learns” the same way that the average Ivy Leaguer is trained to listen and learn to anyone not from their rarified world: i.e., in a way that makes the listening learner look very smart. One might, in fact, characterize the ethos of the entire elite establishment as seeking out, or creating, situations in which to look smart, or look virtuous, or - wait for it - look smart and virtuous at the same time. Finding and capitalizing on such opportunities used to be an art. Fortuitously, though, fascism has a way of making us all grateful for the barest scraps of intelligence and virtue. All Shipman had to do was not be Katrina Armstrong, fire up ChatGPT, and ask AI to simulate a harried-but-empathetic university president.

The problem is that ChatGPT, or whatever quarter of Shipman’s psyche that flatulated this waste of Gmail storage, couldn’t even be bothered to keep up this pretense for the duration of her communique. In the middle of cooing over the plight of international students, Shipman’s animatronic gestures of compassion give way to this bluntly sinister statement: “Let me also make clear—Columbia doesn’t have the ultimate authority, and we’re committed to following the law.” At this point, it seems evident that Shipman hasn’t been listening to the actual immigrants and international students, who, like no one else in this country, recognize the extent to which “following the law” means tracking a spastic, maliciously dynamic target. She probably also hasn’t been learning from the corpus of scholarship on Nazi Germany, or other fascist hellscapes, in which collaborators justified their passivity by whining about how much authority they didn’t have. If she had, maybe she wouldn’t have made a show of “being clear” about being a tool. Maybe she would have augmented the performance of plainspoken moral conviction with an actual commitment to it.

Who has Madame President been listening to? Tom Homan, fresh from a visit to Eric Adams’ penthouse, occasionally drooling editorial suggestions while respawning on the couch? More likely, the devils perched on both of Shipman’s comfortably padded shoulders. I doubt people like her still retain an angel under one ear, after all. Gabriel himself would tire of remonstrating our apocalypse’s smug architects, people too smart to listen, too virtuous to learn.