Cartography and friendships

I spent 5 weeks when I was fifteen working for Smart Talk Network. STN sold long-distance savings plan at then-unheard of cut rates. They sold good long-distance: cheap and reliable. It didn't take too long for them to go belly up, but the year before they died, somewhere in there anyway, they gave me a job.

Everyone does one or two uncharacteristic things quite well. One of mine is: I shoot well. Another is: I'm a good salesperson. Here' s the secret: When I believe in what I'm doing, I have very good drive and charisma, even though I am normally quite an inconsistent person. You see, for me, when I see poor people with phone bills for two grand a month, living fifteen people to a two-bedroom apartment, I can and will get them to sign anything. STN was good for them, therefore I got them on board.

STN told us that we needed to walk the "line between truth and lies." My trainer liked to rub his sneaker along the curb to illustrate this "line." These tutorials took place on the sidewalk by the cooling van: his notion of a 'pep talk' before letting us loose in what I called Somalian Towers -- poor skyscrapers on the edge of nowhere filled with the newly arrived. These people didn't know much about Canadian culture; they were very trusting, very courteous. What I couldn't get over was how clean they were. I don't know anyone who could put their entire extended family in a tiny apartment and emerge looking so fresh and tidy. They barely understood our money, too, I think, although of course they would've got over that pretty fast. I say this as they didn't seem to acknowledge how terrible their bills really were. So I sold a lot of long-distance to these people, because they worried me.

But of course the STN people started to get on my nerves too much. Here I was, selling like gangbusters, and these fuckups were going, "Tell them you are from the phone company. STN is a phone company, after all. " Well, in Ontario, Canada, Bell Canada monopolises local service lines. There is only one "phone company," but many long-distance carriers. And, "Tell them it's not an application, just a credit check to see if they're eligible." More bullshit. Anyways, I quit.

There are actually two lines, maybe more, I think. The one between truth and lies, and the one between me and you. The STN people wanted us to lie, clearly to lie. Let lawyers quibble about their wording: STN's intention was to deceive people. I believe there to be only one reason for lying in this case: the profit motive, or rather, me versus you. Self-interest. Now, lying is often wonderful, and we all know that truth is a slippery fish: "No, I'm not hiding any Jews on my boat, Mr SS Officer," as I cruise out of Nazi Germany: my philosopher friends tell me that is the classic example of a good lie and it works very well for me. But this line on the curb was grotesque. It was spin. It was: profit for me matters more than anything.

Let us leave the Somalians' rights to the side, because really they are the obvious competing interest here. It's obvious that abusing poor people is rather a human rights violation, and I need not say more. So I'll just digress instead and just note that profit is not more important for me than, well, language. Language is the mirror of our thoughts, a cloudy mirror that is very hard to get clear, maybe impossible, but a thing that we craft to represent our thoughts and feelings, since we can't think at people. When a person writes or speaks with meaning, gives it a good go, they're fighting to polish and buff the mirror so other people can see their thoughts more exquisitely. But for STN, language is just a socket wrench to manipulate with. For STN, a paragraph isn't a beautiful structure in its own right -- not a poem or an argument -- it's just a trap.

When did we stop treating language honourably? Am I putting a gloss over history? Somewhere there is a graveyard for all the abused phrases in the world, a mass grave full of presidential speeches, for example, weeping with grief over what they might have been under other pens.

The Harry Potter books include a scene where a kind of punishment pen writes by magically sucking blood out of the writer and inscribing what's written on both the page and the back of the writer's hand, leaving a gruesome wound. I sincerely hope that Hell for speechwriters is like that -- an unending self-inflicted tattoo of I shall not tell lies, I shall not tell lies.

But let me get away from torturing word whores and back to lines. Some lines, really more continuums (continua?) really interest me. For example: Individuation versus belonging, individual versus collective, self-interest versus societal health. The latter has already been the subject of one blog here, and will no doubt tiresomely poke its sticky way in here again.

Now, here are the second and third examples of lines and the original reasons I'm writing this blog entry. This week, someone asked me when you should tell someone they need to get out of their relationship/job/whatever. And today, I told someone that his self-deprecation was making me angry and he needed to stop. So: where is the line between accepting people's behaviour and choices, and enabling them? When is intervening merely interference?

As an aside, I think often it's easy to avoid these questions by being tactful. Respect and a little care allow a person to insert herself sometimes too deeply into another person's life. I get away with an awful lot and I think I ought to back off more, frankly.

But discretion doesn't answer the questions. I'm sure the answer includes some combination of love and respect and fatalism, but it's the recipe I need, not the ingredients. Any ideas out there?