The VISION Thing

Here's a cute little report in the Washington Post today: turns out not too many industry members are volunteering for the administration's voluntary pollution reduction programs, and thus not much pollution reduction is taking place. Surprising? Of course not. That was the point, after all, wasn't it? But it's discouraging all the same. And it's yet more proof that the one constant to this administration is its replacement of actual governance with governance simulacra. We get slogans and talking points, we get logos and billboards, but we don't get much else.

More than anything in this particular article, though, I think it's worth noting the names of those programs the government oversees. "The Environmental Protection Agency sponsors 'Climate Leaders,'" the Post tells us, "while the Energy Department oversees 'Climate VISION.'" VISION, ominously all-capped, strikes one instantly with the flat heavy hammerback of the acronym. The Post doesn't break it down for us, but internet search technology does. VISION, it turns out, stands for "Voluntary Innovative Sector Initiatives: Opportunities Now."

The first thing we should note is the idiotic fascination with acronyms as such. Or, rather, the fascination with idiotic acronyms. It's not particular to this administration, but it's surely more prevalent here. Acronyms are all the rage in the business community these days. I sit in meetings at least once a week watching whiteboards fill with strings of all-caps jumbles and their lower-case clarifications. Usually, it's the acronym that comes first. Someone tosses one out, and if it's got "ring" to it — which seems to mean it sounds vaguely military, or vaguely sexual, or vaguely rock-and-roll, or just that it makes an actual word that doesn't require cartwheels of the tongue to produce — then you all spend the next forty-five minutes trying to make each letter stand for a word that has something, anything, to do with the topic at hand. They're all colossally, relentlessly juvenile, enough so that the whole thing starts to feel like a kindergarten exercise — you know, the kind that demonstrates our wondrous variations on letter pronunciation — and yet the entire room chases them, and with alacrity. Invariably some exec will develop a liking for one or another (usually one he came up with, of course; I guess there's an acronym hall of fame somewhere to which deskplates are retired. Or maybe they're showing up on resumes, as in, "Holy shit, Bob, did you see that guy in the interview lobby? I checked his resume, dude. He's the one came up with CRACK!"). When this happens, the whole room turns its focus to the exec's personal favorite, struggling mightily to validate it, make it sing, or if not sing then at least just work, just eke out sense, just not sound like the utterly vain and childish arrangement of blocks it certainly is. Sometimes this is not enough. And sometimes it's not enough that it's not enough: we use them anyway. (The colon can be an invaluable tool in effecting this, as we see in "VISION": it permits a complete disjunction in the logic of word flow, which in turn allows you to assign those last two pesky letters, sense be damned.)

Where does this fascination come from? Business school. MBA programs. It's really that simple. The people coming up with them are business school grads (or maybe serve at the pleasure of business school grads), and the people to whom they're ceremoniously presented — they're known as clients, or, in politics, as "donors" — are also business school grads. And no doubt both sides love them so precisely because they harken back to student-project days, to role-playing exercises of the kind reproduced on "The Apprentice." What's the first thing you do? Come up with a name for your team. Make it zip, make it pop, make it zing. Hire a consultant if you have to. Become a consultant, if you find you're really good at inventing words that mean nothing but sound as though they might, like Lucent. Once your team is named, what's the next task? Come up with a name for your initiative. Make it — well, you know.

Who cares? No one and everyone. The fascination with acronyms telegraphs the triumph of the business school mentality in the leadership corps of our current government. The business school mentality believes in acronyms. The business school mentality believes, above all, in marketing, of which acronyms can be a particularly accessible cornerstone. What the business school mentality does not believe in, of course, is a role for government — aside from the redistribution of tax dollars to corporate executive bank accounts.

We live, all of us, today, in a culture defined by the triumph of marketing. It's what we do, and it is, increasingly, all we do. There's a great deal more to be said about that. For now, though, let's look at the actual content of the VISION acronym (as opposed to the actual content of the VISION program, which, as the Post reports, is nonexistent: and thus my point). The goal of a good acronym is to sum up the talking points of your marketing initiative: hit the key notes of the sales pitch simply and concisely, so that each occasion for spelling out the acronym becomes an opportunity for reiterating those notes. What are the key notes in VISION?

First and foremost, of course, is "Voluntary." Here we have the whole enchilada. It means you only do it if you want to (and who wants to?). It's the keyword every exec longs to hear vis-a-vis government regulation. It allows them to say, after all, with a straight face, that they do not in fact oppose all government regulation, and that of course sounds good in any public context.

Next up is "Sector Initiatives." This spells new business, and probably spells government contracts or subsidies for same. Hate government, hate taxes, but love the government checks that are funded by taxes: that's the American business motto. "Sector initiatives" tells the industry that whatever paltry efforts they make at pollution reduction won't cost them a dime: that the bill will be footed by taxpayers: because it's a government program, after all. And you can be sure there'll be plenty of profitable overbilling, and that any investigations of that overbilling which are forced upon the administration by political forces not yet wholly owned will be promptly turned over to the deaf, the dumb, the blind or the well-bribed: so not to worry.

The last and best member of this particular acronymic army, though, is "Opportunity." "Opportunity" is genius. "Opportunity" is multivalent, allusive, scriptural: it means different things to different people, and all the things it means are good. There are business opportunities. There are public relations opportunities. There are political opportunities. Opportunities are what America is all about: the creation of them, the promotion of them. They can be seized or declined, of course; and they conveniently imply no particular outcome (and thus can't be faulted for not achieving one). Opportunities are the sine qua non result in themselves: value-laden, content-free, inarguable and unassailable. They are the American Dream.

Nice work, Bob. See you through my toxin-filtering faceplate* at the hall of fame.


* See? An opportunity — for the nascent toxin-filtering faceplate industry.