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.
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