I have been trying to find the mission statement for an association that is clearly having a big impact on public conversation these days. I know this organization must exist because its members are so visible and audible. And yet Googling has not yet led me to the website for what appears to be a hyperactive group: SSMUG, the Society of Self-satisfied, Mean-spirited and Unhelpful Grandstanders.
Here is my best guess as to what I’ll find when I track down SSMUG’s mission statement: “SSMUG members hold both right-wing and left-wing opinions, but they are united in the belief that the most effective way to comment on human failure is to wallop opponents, over and over again, with the verbal equivalent of a 2-by-4.”
This practice does a big disservice to the profession we have christened “armchair quarterbacking.”
It is hard to find a refuge these days where we can escape SSMUG people. Some of them write op-ed pieces in newspapers. Vast numbers of them write blogs. Quite a few simply appear in our vicinity on airplanes and buses, or at dinner parties and cocktail receptions. Talk radio provides them a very welcoming habitat. And, in a worrisome phenomenon, an increasing number of SSMUG members hold public office.
This is a situation of some mystery: Positioned to be real quarterbacks engaged in actual exertion, these public officials flee the arena of productive action and choose, instead, to devote their life energies to declaring what other public officials could have, should have, or might have done.
Why does SSMUG’s takeover of armchair quarterbacking matter? Because the capacity to think critically about other people’s decisions — wise ones or dumb ones — is an essential part of a democratic society’s navigational system.
Reacting to SSMUG practitioners, a new organization has issued a “statement of professional distress.” The Association of Armchair Quarterbacks (AACQ, pronounced “ACK!”) has proposed “to prepare best management practices for armchair quarterbacking and to create a procedure for training and certifying practitioners.”
As the founder of ACK! and so far its sole member, I believe that armchair quarterbacking — if performed with empathy, modesty, humor, responsibility, and a refusal of fatalism — provides an essential service to society, positioning us to learn hard lessons from the past and to make wise choices in the future.
Under the ACK! reform program, as laid out in its statement of professional distress, credible armchair quarterbacks will adhere to four best management practices:
1. They must recognize that a simple and inflexible statement of disapproval contributes nothing to the understanding of our dilemmas. When a horse is out of the barn, a declaration of “that horse should never have been let of that barn” is not helpful. remark.
2. They must steer by the principle that humility builds the necessary foundation for fairness and credibility, while arrogance shakes that foundation past stability.
3. They must show at least a moment of empathy for the people they are criticizing.
4. They must acknowledge that people whose actions have produced a misfortune deserve an alternative to endless torment and condemnation. Such people have both a right and an obligation to play a part in repairing and rectifying the misfortune they brought into being.
Putting best management practice No. 4 instantly to work, the Association of Armchair Quarterbacks has designed a special membership initiative for refugees from the Society for Self-satisfied, Mean-spirited and Unhelpful Grandstanders.
We will waive the membership fee for any former SSMUG members who will endorse the ACK! best management practices, and get to work repairing the damage they did before ACK! offered them redemption.
Armchair quarterbacks of the nation, unite!
You have nothing to lose but your power to irritate.
Patty Limerick is faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado
