Fail Up (11 page)

The actions of James Willie Jones weren't at all dignified; you simply don't threaten, curse, or harm children. However, considering the natural inclination of any good father to protect his child, his frustration and anger were definitely justified.

Bringing Out the Ugly

As I recounted Jones's circumstances, my good friend, Dr. Cornel West, couldn't help but smile at me perceptively. After all, he had been with me when I had used his sage words to comfort a diva in distress.

“Even when you're justified, you have to remain dignified.”

We were having lunch at an upscale Los Angeles restaurant when we recognized a well-known celebrity who had become the entrée du jour in the blogosphere. It was reported that the entertainer spied her husband at a party, snuggled in a corner boldly giving “fever” to another woman. Allegedly, all hell broke loose, fisticuffs ensued, and the husband required stitches.

The media delight in propagating the foibles of celebrities. We're fed the sensational tidbits but rarely the painfully human backstory or action that instigated the ugly behavior.

The public was horrified in 2007 when news spread that actor Alec Baldwin had called his 11-year-old daughter a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” In a phone message, the actor also allegedly threatened to fly to Los Angeles and “straighten you out.”

In an emotional mea culpa on ABC's
The View
, Baldwin attempted to go beyond the headlines and explain his outburst. He and his ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger, were going through a nasty custody battle, he said. In earlier reports, Baldwin's lawyer said Basinger had ignored a series of court orders granting Baldwin visiting rights and had contaminated the child to the point where she didn't want to be with her father.

On
The View
, Baldwin said that he had grown frustrated with his daughter's refusal to take his calls: “Obviously, calling your child a pig or anything else is inappropriate. I apologize to my daughter for that,” Baldwin admitted. “There's nothing wrong with being frustrated or angry about the situation. But as people often do, I took it out on the wrong person.”

Actors, entertainers, and all those elevated to celebrity status are human, too. Often what's exploited and exaggerated in the media is a reflection of pedestrian behavior. What man or woman blatantly scorned hasn't felt the hair-trigger impulse (fortunately most often suppressed) to whop his or her lover upside the head? “Seeing red” isn't merely a quaint metaphor.

The Internet speculations of the star's fall from the stratosphere to the muddy ground must have contained an element of truth because the red-eyed, emotionally spent entertainer sat with a friend who seemed to be comforting her. Dr. West and I felt the need to go over and say something to ease her distress.

She graciously invited us to sit. We all understood that the details of the disgrace had become irrelevant when I interjected, “Even when you're justified, you have to remain dignified.”

That one little sentence seemed to contextualize something for her. A spark of resonance flashed in her eyes before she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly.

Glancing over her shoulder, I noted Dr. West's smile of approval. It was as if he remembered how much his short pronouncement had once meant to me.

Outside, Listening In

As a child growing up in an authoritarian Pentecostal household, I knew that cursing was strictly forbidden. I avoided the use of foul language until my sophomore year at Indiana University. That's when I shared a house with some of Bobby Knight's basketball players, who were just as foulmouthed as their coach. It seemed they couldn't communicate with one another or me, even in jest, without an expletive as a punctuation mark. To get my point across to them in conversation, I found myself imitating their crude language.

The players got a kick out of me—the religious kid from Kokomo—who could debate with the best of them but managed to mangle curse words. Apparently, my cussin' linguistics were way off, and they taunted me until I learned how to swear like a construction worker.

The habit stayed with me long after I left college. Not only did I have a cussin' problem, I also had a temper problem. I could go from zero to 90 in a New York minute, especially after my career started to take off.

Sheryl Flowers was the propulsion behind my take-off. In 2001 she became my radio producer and the guiding force of my public radio career. When she passed away in 2009, after a courageous two-year battle with breast cancer, a part of my soul went with her.

If you've read about the legendary fights between Don Hewitt, the producer who created
60 Minutes
, and correspondent Mike Wallace, you might have an idea of my relationship with Sheryl. We spent all our time together and, as producers and talent often do, we went back and forth all the time. She'd quit ten times and I'd fired her 12 times. But, at the end of the day, neither of us ever went anywhere. We created, argued, and loved with equal passion and forgiveness.

It was Sheryl who tried to corral my foul mouth. Over and over again she'd say: “Tavis, you're talented, disciplined, dedicated, loyal, and organized, and you don't mess around with your money. But there's a chink in your armor. The thing that's going to trip you up is all the cursing, screaming, and yelling you do when you get upset.”

To no avail, she counseled me about my temper. Sheryl insisted that I had to be more circumspect about my language. One day, she warned, I would curse out the wrong person at the wrong time and wind up paying a heck of a price.

Her prediction came true. But I had no idea that Sheryl Flowers would be that “wrong person.”

One morning we were in the NPR studio going at it. There was a technical glitch that should have been edited out of a pretaped segment that I kept hearing on-air. It happened one time too many, and I had had it. We were off-air, the studio doors were closed, and I was at my extreme—cursing, flailing my arms, slapping the wall, and pounding the desk—I mean, it was not my finest moment.

Unbeknownst to either of us, an engineer outside the studio could see us through the glass partitions. From his booth, the technician had the ability to turn on the microphone in our studio and record our heated conversation.

I knew nothing about this until the next day. The engineer turned the recorded argument into CDs and passed them all around NPR. One of those CDs made its way to management. I was called on the carpet for mistreating and cursing out an employee. To my rationalizing mind, my explosion was just another series of steps in the Sheryl and Tavis tango that we'd quickly get over. But to NPR management, it was serious enough to involve lawyers and to add a behavioral clause to my contract.

After the dust settled and I had endured the snickers, jabs, and suspect looks from colleagues who heard the tape, I decided to listen for myself.

I knew I had a foul mouth, but I'd never actually heard myself curse. But that day, sitting in the studio with my headphones on, listening to my voice, I was shocked beyond belief. The person who sounded like me was enraged and erratic.

That was it for me, man. I called Sheryl, apologized deeply, and promised to stop cursing. I couldn't promise that the perfectionism that sometimes fuels my anger and disappointment about all things work-related would disappear, but I assured her that she would never, ever hear me curse again.

“Never?” Sheryl's response reminded me of Chris Rock's joke about Tiger Woods's promise to never stray: “Tiger don't say never; just say you gonna do your best!”

Sheryl simply asked that I do my best.

Listening to my raging, vulgar voice on that CD set me straight.

It's been seven years, and I've kept my promise.

If We Could Only Hear Ourselves

Regrettably my unexamined behavior seven years ago seems to be part of a growing epidemic of unconscious, unjustified, and uncivil behavior. Today, we all live in an increasingly uncivil society, where everybody feels justified to be undignified. Fired CNN host Rick Sanchez apparently believed that his criticizing all Jews was a reasonable retort to the ribbings he received from one Jewish comedian—Jon Stewart, host of
The
Daily Show
. Students (and some of their parents) feel no regret if they curse their teachers. Getting flipped off in traffic is a common occurrence. The anonymous aspect of the Internet gives opinionated cowards license to write the vilest, most demeaning comments when responding online to articles or opinions published in newspapers and magazines. Folks who could never say these things to your face become big bad dogs online. Has the definition of “free speech” been amended to include the right to “demean and hurt” without censure?

During the 2010 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, attendees were presented with the results of an online survey involving 339 faculty members. The study conducted by three researchers at the University of Redlands (California) focused on faculty members' experiences with incivility at the hands of students. The types of student incivility ranged from sleeping or texting in class to more disruptive behavior—open expressions of anger, impatience, or derision. According to the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, which summarized the study, “When it comes to being rude, disrespectful, or abusive to their professors, students appear most likely to take aim at women, the young, and the inexperienced.”

Nearly 70 percent of those questioned in another Associated Press–Ipsos 2005 poll believe that people are ruder than they were 20 or 30 years ago. The interesting finding in the poll was that very few in that number admitted their roles in a rude society. Slightly more than 37 percent of the 1,001 adults polled did admit to using a swear word in public. But only 13 percent said they'd ever made an obscene gesture while driving, and a mere 8 percent claimed to have used cell phones in “loud or annoying” ways around others.

When asked about incivility in our society, people will admit it's prevalent and point accusatory fingers at parents, rap music, movies, terrorism, commercialism, and a bunch of other “isms,” but rarely do they acknowledge or accept personal responsibility for their role in society's devolution.

The disrespect virus has also been multiplying exponentially in the political arena—a Congressman shouts “you lie” at the President of the United States during a nationally televised speech; a former Vice President instructs a senator to “Go fu** yourself”; the President speculates about whose “ass to kick” during a
Today
show interview; political advertising drenched in cut-throat, personal attacks, and destructive lies—nobody balances the justified with the dignified anymore.

That old cliché—“It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game”—doesn't apply anymore either. Not only is the maxim destructive in politics, it doesn't apply on the job, on Wall Street, or in our personal relationships. For the most part, we're interested only in the game of scoring points, taking out our enemies in the most take-no-prisoners public fashion. Society's civility-versus-incivility balance beam is tipping toward the latter. We are creating an environment where rude, aggressive, and abusive behavior is socially acceptable. Instead of finding ways to articulate or deal with hurt and anger, we're settling for uncivil redress. And there's a thin line between a rude response and an aggressive one.

Therein is the doorway in which a caring father was transformed into an aggressive brute.

I often find myself wondering if there is a genuine solution to the absence of civility.

The school bus incident with the outraged father went viral on YouTube. Days later, James Willie Jones held a news conference and admitted that he had become a bully. Before offering a public apology for his actions, he explained his revelation:

“If you see the tape,” he said, “I feel like I was backed up against the wall as a parent. I just didn't know where else to go.”

Did seeing the actual tape online—seeing himself in an infuriated, explosive, and threatening state—did that have the same effect on Jones as it did on me? Did Jones, like me, see an angry stranger who looked and sounded nothing like himself?

Cultivating the Tools for Success

Just before I turned this manuscript in to my editor, tragedy struck the nation on January 8, 2011. Jared Loughner, 22, attended a political event called “Congress on Your Corner” at a Tucson grocery store. The event was hosted by three-term Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner allegedly shot Giffords in the head at point-blank range. She survived the shooting, as did 12 others who were wounded. They were luckier than the six attendees Loughner allegedly killed, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, an A student, dancer, gymnast, and swimmer.

At the time of this writing, Loughner's motivations for the attack weren't fully known. We had learned from prosecutors that he specifically targeted Rep. Giffords. We also know that the Arizona Congresswoman's seat was one that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin described as a top “target” in the 2010 midterm elections. Palin zeroed in on the lawmaker because she supported President Obama's health-care reform legislation. To emphasize her point, Palin posted an illustration of targeted Democratic seats with a gun's crosshairs positioned over each congressional district, including Giffords'.

Palin immediately pulled the map off her Website after the shooting and lambasted the media for daring to suggest that her images and language influenced Loughner. At the time, there was no concrete evidence linking the gunman's actions to Palin's caustic rhetoric. That fact, however, does not absolve Palin. She and too many other political figures—Democrats and Republicans—have engaged in the type of behavior that feeds the monster of incivility and easily ignites fringe individuals to extreme actions and reactions.