United Airlines, the bureaucratic voice, “contracts of carriage” and airline economics (PART 1)

 

 

What grabbed me in all of this United Airlines stuff was the first series of emails from Munoz, and public statements from United, which were … how to put it? … works of art; a triumph of the willingness to pass the buck. Misstating objective facts and shifting the responsibility onto the passenger, David Dao. A sample from one of Munoz’s first emails:

What struck me as I read the email is how a careful and consistent use of syntax, grammar, and diction is marshaled to make a series of points both subtle and unsubtle. Colin Dickey, a grammatarian of the first order, noted in a series of comments on Twitter that it was a “master class in the use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility” and that it “highlighted its use of language to shift the blame on to the victim”.

 

When George Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, he began by arguing that the English language was “in a bad way,” decaying decadently due to jargon, cliché, and imprecise thought. His examples of poor writing exhibit two main faults:

• “staleness of imagery” and
• a “lack of precision”

Au contraire, mon ami! I would argue that today it is just the opposite. It is not in decline; it’s vibrant and flowering in multiple directions. For all its shortcomings, social media has allowed for a wide range of inventiveness of linguistic expression – look at the dizzying speed at which slang moves on the Internet – and is a testament to the continued vitality of language’s ability to capture the emotional crazy quilt of daily life.

I maintain Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr accounts and I stand in awe. The words that surround us every day influence the words we use. Since so much of the written language we see is now on the screens of our computers, tablets, and smartphones, language now evolves partly through our interaction with technology. An alphabet soup of acronyms, abbreviations, and neologisms has grown up around technologically mediated communication to help us be understood.

Ah, but as users become more creative in crafting language to reflect new kinds of expression, bureaucrats get more creative in using that expression to hide the levers of power. In Orwell’s time political writing was bad because it never strayed from the party line:

It is broadly true that political writing is bad writing…. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

In the twenty-first century, political writing is bad because it spews bullshit in new directions, always expanding its inventiveness and the reach of its perfidy. The success of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come from their ability to reject the party line in favor of … let’s say … “surprising” constructions of speech. But as Oliver Kamm noted “these creations drink from the same poisoned well of dull thought”.

One thing has not changed: political speech continues to be, as it was for Orwell, largely the defense of the indefensible.  We think of “Orwellian” as a shorthand for dystopia, but a more accurate definition might be a form of language whose fidelity is to institutional power at the expense of objective truth: Trump has showed us to expect it to be constantly in flux, particularly in a landscape where political power is itself nebulous.

It is brilliant stuff (sarcasm!) and it shows what Elyakim Rubinstein and Colin Dickey call “the bureaucratic voice”.  The bureaucratic voice makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy. Reading through the Munoz emails, numerous sentences leap out-their syntax varies, but their purpose does not.

First, let’s erase “cause”. Here is Munoz’s description of the start of the incident:

On Sunday, April 9, after United Express Flight 3411 was fully boarded, United’s gate agents were approached by crewmembers that were told they needed to board the flight.

Setting aside the passengers for a second, in this sentence there are two named actors: the gate agents and the crewmembers. You might expect, then, that this all started when the crewmembers approached the gate agents and told them they needed to board the flight. However, a closer reading of the syntax implies this is not the case; the crewmembers themselves “were told they needed to board the flight.” Who told them? The sentence does not make this clear, even though it is this unnamed actor, presumably a supervisor, who set this entire chain of events in motion. Deliberately pushed back as far off the stage as possible, there is no one here to responsibly hold accountable for subsequent events!

Munoz repeatedly makes reference to established procedures:

Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.

Here we have what seems to be a nice use of the active voice: we have actors (“our employees”) and they are doing something specific. But the figures responsible for establishing procedure are nowhere to be found. Whenever possible, bureaucratic style will shift responsibility to immutable rules and directives that appear spontaneously from the ether.

When bureaucratic agency is absolutely unavoidable it will be couched in a simpering use of adverbs to clear any wrongdoing: “We politely asked” a customer to deplane, to whom “we approached… to explain apologetically,” and so forth. Only with the utmost reluctance does the state ever act, and even then it does so patiently, politely, apologetically.

Add to this the free use of obvious falsehoods. Munoz states that employees told Dao “was being denied boarding,” when in fact he was already sitting on the plane. Munoz claims employees were following United’s “involuntary denial of boarding process,” but their “Denied Boarding Compensation rules” (it is here; I read the whole damn thing) cover oversold flights, and this flight was not oversold or overbooked.

NOTE: I will have more comments in Part 2 on “contracts of carriage” and the economics of the airline industry.

Ahhhhhh. But in contrast, Dao himself is portrayed with a dynamic and active voice. The passenger “defied Chicago Aviation Security Officers” and he “raised his voice and refused to comply with crew member instructions,” and he “repeatedly declined to leave,” and after he was forcibly removed, “he continued to resist-running back onto the aircraft in defiance of both our crew and security officials.”

THE TAKE-AWAY IS OBVIOUS: while the bureaucratic voice works to present governments and corporations as placid, apologetic, and unmovable, it also works to make their victims as active and vital as possible. The point, of course, is to make clear that a victim like Dao did this to himself. Munoz employs the passive voice at key moments to make it clear that there are no other actors in this drama other than Dao. In one spectacular sentence, Munoz writes of Dao:

He was approached a few more times after that in order to gain his compliance to come off the aircraft, and each time he refused and became more and more disruptive and belligerent.

The bastard had it coming! There is clearly a series of confrontations happening here, yet he is the only individual identified in the entire sentence. No one did the approaching and no one tried to gain his compliance; instead, the passenger just sat there on the plane, becoming more and more belligerent all by himself.