Thursdays with Tina: The I Know a Little About Politics Edition
Our regular Thursday feature. We note this is the first column (since we started paying attention) to give any indication that Tina writes her column for a Washington newspaper.
Tina saysWhat she meansPaul O'Neill has chosen to tell his story about his two unhappy years in the Bush Cabinet in a form that's as weird as he is. . .I am blind to the obvious parallel in my own life.It's another example of the chronic disconnect I think of as mad CEO disease.I create the appearance of topicality by randomly stringing together trendy buzzwords. [Variation: I model myself on Maureen Dowd.] He was a product of old-fashioned, ore-smelting, smoke-puffing manufacturing . . . O'Neill was dark satanic mills, not pixels and PowerPoints.Physical labor frightens me. Also, I've read Blake.Paul O'Neill was always an odd duck, a man, as one colleague puts it, who is a "stranger to his unconscious."I impress even myself with my ability to ignore obvious occasions for introspection.When he was reviving Alcoa, no one cared much about his tendency to drone on. . . "If the CEO wants to hold forth about his policy views it doesn't matter much to the company that he heads."Hey, do you remember how I used to run a magazine once? Everyone did exactly as I said. It was fun.Bush the younger is about as interested in rational political discourse as Paul O'Neill is in the Hip-Hop Music Awards.My knowledge of popular culture is one of the many, many differences between Mr. O'Neill and myself.
Paul O'Neill, Odd Duck Out of Water [WashPost]