The Spin Doctor
The Spin Doctor is another name I could have given to my book, The Language Professor, given the ease and effrontery with which its central character deliberately misrepresents his doings.
Here are some examples from the book:
When confronted with extensive written evidence that he has illegally and unjustly removed a stellar employee from her job, he changes registers effortlessly. But no one gave you any verbal assurances that you would get your job back when you returned from you leave, he says, because if they had, I would have felt bound to honour such a commitment.
In that same conversation, he advises the employee to accept a compromise, The college thinks highly of you, he says, and wants the happiness of its employees.
And he describes the union rules that protect the employee as petty technicalities.
Of course, months later, when his job is on the line, a most unusual, esoteric rule becomes a right.
And, again, in reply to the question why there had not been any strikes at the college, he answers that budget restrictions were being managed by attrition as opposed to layoffs because staff morale was of the utmost importance to him.
Finally, in response to repeated criticism of his secretive and despotic ways, he feigns shock and ignorance. Why didn’t people come to him, his door was always open, he didn’t understand it, why people didn’t come to him.
Spin, spin, spin. Say what you need to say when it suits the moment, the veracity of what you say is of no importance.
So why The Language Professor? Because there are many spin doctors out there, but the story told in The Language Professor is about the effect this kind of spinning has on a morally upright individual to whom words have always had meaning and whose world is turned upside down when she learns otherwise.
Debora Resnick
author of
The Language Professor
Eloquent Books
Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6
http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html