Huddling

 

Whenever the wealthy and the powerful conspire together, the newspapers speak of “huddling”.

Conspire, of course, has a sinister sound. Meet might be more neutral, but newspapers which have some pepper in their bloodstream like verbs that will pique the reader’s interest. There is nothing more uninteresting than meeting. Meetings are things that emails are sent out for, reminding recipients that it is mandatory, setting the day and the hour, nailing a piece of the collective flesh to this or that room.

In the spectrum of meeting types, the “huddle” enjoys a long career of being what happens when moguls, politicos, and the offensive line of a football team rub shoulders. As in this Sunday NYT article that begins:

“This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.”

The huddling here was about global climate change. Yadda Yadda Yadda went on. If your idea about changing our industrial structure to save the holocene includes representatives of Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, you may well be a centrist Democrat. Congratulations!

According to Skeat’s etymological dictionary, to huddle is genetically related to “hide”. To hide closely together, even. To hide in a crowd, or to be a crowd of hiders, presents us with a bit of a paradox, as crowds are mostly imagined as public and showy – a crowd or a mob or a demonstration makes a definite presence on the street. A hidden crowd, however, implies some disastrous social breakdown. The crowd of hiders in Saramago’s novel, Blindness, are suffering a peculiarly horrible fate, in that they have all contracted the epidemic blindness and that they are all collected and put away in a closely guarded reservation as a quarantine measure to stop the blindness from spreading. The crowd of the blind cannot, of course, see itself, although one of the characters is pretending blindness in order to stay with her husband, and can actually see the whole crowd – even as she is “hidden”, by counterfeiting being blind, from the crowd.

This notion of a hidden crowd is overlaid, in America, by the one instance of huddle that is known by all: “the huddled masses, yearning to be free”. Here the huddling has been done by tyrants overseas – from which said masses, en masse, are yearning to be free, and putting in action this yearning by getting third class tickets on boats and making the crossing in the holds of said boats to America. Once in America, of course, every manjack of them becomes an individual in his or her own right. And if they peddle, invest, sweat and save successfully, their descendants can one day hope to huddle, richly, with representatives of other rich people.

Perhaps, even, in a huddle room.

In the midst of the techmania of the year 2000, a Corey Kilgannon wrote a story for the Times about Ernst and Young, the accounting agency. Fearing that it was not cool enough, Ernst and Young set about arranging to be as cool as Boo.com – or any other dotcom startups.

“A smiling 20-something receptionist wears a name tag identifying him as Elvis Presley, and a blast of Bob Marley music accompanies an employee leaving a conference room. Actually, they are called “huddle rooms” and have plush easy chairs and white walls on which employees can write. The “college rooms” nearby have dormitory-style couches where workers on marathon shifts can take naps.”

I wonder if huddle rooms still survive in the Corporate archipelago? I have an idea that the “huddle room” in which Bill Gates huddled has more up-scale accoutrements than were ever dreamt of by Elvis Presley of Ernst and Young.

Somehow, I still prefer conspire.