Larry O’Brien: stupidity “going forward”
Some day soon one of these organizations that does an annual ritual denunciation of some bit of jargon, buzzwords or other ofuscatory language is going to add the phrase “going forward” to their list.
They might choose to illustrate it with a picture of Ottawa mayor Larry O’Brien.
O’Brien got that phrase into a soundbite quoted in a CBC online story, which has to tell you something about the content of his less-than-a-minute speech to arts organization apparatchiks in which he told them he was going to fight against giving them the money the city had planned to give them.
Why is this phrase useful? If you’re a politician, you can tell a group of people you support them “going forward,” and it sounds good. You can drop this phrase into an empty speech and head for the rear exit.
With any luck you can get into your Beamer and burn rubber before your audience realizes that, translated, it means “not now, but at some unspecified time in the future at which point I reserve the right not to support you if you, in my estimation, have failed to progress in some other way, due to, among other reasons, a lack of support.”
We had such an opportunity to make Ottawa into a better organized, more caring and thriving city last November. O’Brien’s pledge to kill arts funding is just more evidence that we face a long winter indeed.
