Please read the article below before reading this one.

It was hard work.

I am apologizing for knowing a lot of stuff yu don’t know.

At the same time you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t think I know a lot of stuff in my own field that you don’t know.

A professional politico is like a professional comedian: He must direct his words to each audience separately. A comedian simply does not direct the same jokes to a roomful of Orthodox Jews that he would tell at a Baptist Convention.

The comedian makes his living doing this. He knows a lot of jokes that that particular audience will not understand.

Some of those other jokes he thinks are a lot funnier than the ones he tells.

If he is a PROFESSIONAl, he damned well BETTER know more jokes than he tells you.

But he ignores the jokes he thinks are funnier and only tells the ones that are undersandable and therefore FUNNY to the audience in front of him.

Now tell me ask you something:

Is this comedian practicing his profession or is he PANDERING to his audience?

Both.

Here comes another Whitakerism:

Professional is exactly the same thing as pandering.

The problem with experts and self-syled “artists” is that they have not learned the rule the rest of us learned by the age of six:

People don’t PAY you to do as you wish.

So when they do what people pay them to do they say they are “pandering.”

Grownups don’t use that word much. If I say I am “pandering” to you, it means I do not feel that I need to explain as much as I do. You’re smarter than that. It is both a putdown and a compliment.

“Artists” say they are “pandering” because they are ALWAYS smarter than you are.

A lot of people say to me, “What really puzzles me is how hard it is for me to WRITE. I can express myself perfectly when I talk, but I can’t get it into writing.”

I then ask them, “can you fix a car?” Unless that is their job, they answer that they can’t, and wonder why I asked them such a question.

I then say, “I worked my butt off learning to write and I would have to work my butt off to learn how to fix a car. Why in heaven’s name do you think you shold just be able to sit down and WRITE?”

I could always TALK too.

I could talk to myself very fluently. I understood every word I said.

Writing only got to be WORK when I had to learn to sit down and write for YOU.

An “artist” would call that PANDERING. He says he sees no reason why he should have to come “down” to your level.

And a lot of people worry about being pandered TO.

I know a LOT of things you don’t know.

And vice-versa.

That is the reason speech was invented.

What an artist calls PANDERING is what I call it professionalism.

Writers must get over the illusion that they are better than plumbers.

As a matter of fact, the real world tells us just the opposite every day. A professional plumber can get a good job any day of the week damned near anywhere that is fit to live. A professional writer had better have some real skill or he won’t be able to buy breakfast.

A person who thinks he is a “professional artist” and who thinks he is “pandering” is in even worse shape than a professional writer. He still believes what he believed in Kindergarten, that whatever he produces is worthwhile bcause HE did it.

Let me tell you a little secret that will keep the people who worry about “pandering” awake at might:

Your plumber is PANDERING to you.

Plumbers talk to you because they HAVE to. They explain, each time, what you will understand and how much it will cost you, in YOUR terms.

And they get VERY sick of doing that ten times every day.

Do you think a professional plumber would rather explain things for the thousandth time to another customer, or do you think he would enjoy it more if he could get into the details with another plumber?

A real talk between two plumbers in front of me might as well be two Martians talking: “Is the gradient flushing? No, the flange is warrst. You know how the lower pipes gilk? You need to grungethem first.”

All this fascinates plumbers but it leaves me cold.

If you want to see it that way, all professionals are patronizing you. It is just the ones who haven’t grown up who really believe that.

I haven’t looked forward to this, because it is hard to write.

Let me begin this at an angle by talking about humor.

You and I know that nothing falls flatter than a joke you have to EXPLAIN.

So let me state a Whitakerism, which means that I am looking at something so obvious that we tend not to analyze it because it so generally understood that it is part of the background.

The Whitakerism is this:

Humor begins with common ground.

Bible Belt humor begins with the assumption that we are all familiar with the Bible. Try a joke like this:

“Do you believe in baptism?”

“BELIEVE in it? Hell, I’ve seen it DONE!”

A Moslem or an Oriental would not have the slightest inkling about what this joke was about.

To get the joke, we assume that all of us understand what “Do you believe in baptism” means in a theological context. You must know what Original Sin is. To see the humor of this you must have some idea of the history of the bloody history connected with this question.

When you say, “I’ve seen it DONE.” you come down from all that with a thump.

But to hear the thump, you must understand what you are coming down FROM.

You do not have to be an intellectual giant to understood that joke. But you do have to have a certain common background.

Somebody who does not understand baseball would have a hard time understanding why you are standing there cheering because someone caught a fly ball.

You cannot make very interesting comments about baseball if you have to explain the entire rules of the game before each comment.

Now you are in a position to understand why “For GRANTED!” is so important to me.

I have a hard time explaining many of my observations as a professional in my particular area if I have to explain the rules of the game constantly.

That’s too bad, Bob, because that is largely what my profession IS. Professional politics should consist of explaining the game to people.

To my sister it was a contradiction that people dedicating their lives to the study of political science had not the slightest interest in real politics. This brought me up short and reminded me of the world Where those who do not live in my world reside:

THEIRS is the REAL world, not mine.

The field as a professional sees it is always going to be different from the world as others see it. That is the ONLY reason he gets PAID.

You don’t need to hire anybody to have opinions. You DO have to hire somebody to express what you conider INFORMED opinions.

The reason you are here is because I have thought out your opinions.

The reason you are here is because what I say makes sense IN YOUR TERMS.

But, as a professional, I see some things you don’t see.

To give a concrete example, if I am talking to someone who refers to Cuba as “socialist” I will go on with the assumption that this person is a Marxist.

Why? Because he has just told me he is a Marxist.

To anyone else, Cuba is what it calls itself, a Communist state. But in Marxist theology, “communist” is a technical term. Marx said that all the countries on earth are either in a socialist state or they are capitalist or feudal. A socialist state like Cuba is trying to REACH communism.

In EXACTLY the same way, it woud be hard for a person not schooled in Christian theolgy to understand that a Christian, who has used the word “damn” so much, attaches such grim importance to the word “damned. Like a “counist” society, a Damned soul is entirely different.

A person who refers to Cuba as “socialist” has told me he is Marxist.

Likewise a person who says “THE National Review” has told me has not been a part of the conservative political movement.

Everybody who has been INSIDE the conservative movement refers to that publication as “National Review. When he says, “THE National Review” he is telling you a lot about himself, just as the person who says “socialist Cuba” is telling you about himself.

Einstein got caught by other physicists when he divided by zero. I catch theorists all the time using some phrase that means, “You are not allowed to argue with this.”

Most of you will never learn what I take for granted. But I am begging for a few of you who think it worth your while to find out.