The thing about losing your gruntle is — actually, there are all sorts of things about losing your gruntle, the main one being that you never really know you’ve lost it until somebody tells you so.
Another one being that it’s never your friends who will tell you. Nobody who works in Washington — and, of course, Washington is where this strange condition is most often reported — has ever found out about their ostensible gruntle loss from a friend. From an ex-friend? That’s possible. From an ex-boss? Even more likely.
And if it’s not the ex-boss himself, it’s almost certainly the ex-boss’s inside crowd, the ones who still place loyalty to the big guy above everything else. They’re the ones who’ll write the op-ed piece, step to the microphone, stare into the camera and announce for all the world to hear:
"Him? He’s just disgruntled."
They’re talking about you.
That’s because you’ve said something vaguely critical (or even more than vaguely) about the big guy — the big guy’s policies or procedures or attention span. You’ve said it, and now you have to pay for it. In public.
"That jerk? Ignore him — he’s a disgruntled former employee."
Is there any other kind? "Disgruntled" is to "former employee" what "hastily called" is to "news conference" — constant companion, rhetorical crutch. But "disgruntled" carries even more poison.
To be "disgruntled" is to be dismissed. To be disregarded. To be … dissed.
"Disgruntled" is the anti-personnel weapon of the bureaucracy. Stray from the company line, and the company strikes back. You’re a complainer. You’re a sore loser. You’re an opportunist. You’re a schemer. You’re not worth the paper your memoirs are written on.
Ah, your memoirs.
That’s what’s behind the latest surge — those hate-to-be-so-insistent-but-if-we-don’t-totally-trash-this-guy-before-the-next-news-cycle-people-might-actually-start-believing-him messages flying out of the White House with such urgency. Memoirs have been written, and memoirs — memoirs of a certain kind, anyway — trip the alarms.
Certain people who used to be more-or-less-inside people — experienced people, knowledgeable people, Cabinet people, anti-terrorism people — actually left the more-or-less-inside, willingly or otherwise. They not only left it, but they’ve gone and spilled the beans about what they saw and heard while they were there.
Are those spilled beans flattering to the big guy?
(Are spilled beans ever flattering?)
In certain people’s memoirs, the big guy comes across as determined — or is it fixated? He wants to lower taxes and he wants to lower the boom on Saddam Hussein. Any argument or scrap of evidence that promotes either of these two goals is welcome, the memoirs claim. Anything that doesn’t, isn’t.
Could anything be simpler?
But dangerous, too, if that kind of picture gets out — especially in an election year. If people start believing the picture instead of believing the big guy himself — well, that’s a recipe for disaster.
No self-respecting member-of-the-inside-crowd-in-good-standing would stand idly by and let that happen, not at all. They’d pound on that picture and the ungrateful wretches who were trying to paint it. And they wouldn’t rest until every voter everywhere understood that memoirs are nothing — some ink. Ink fades.
But "disgruntled" is forever.
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him by writing to
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