Wow, so THAT'S why New Yorkers ignore me! My midwestern accent, and the fact that I comment in an unironic way...of course, after 20 years on the East Coast, midwesterners are annoyed by my New York accent and don't get my irony...

I think you're right: if something is said in an accent you've only heard as a joke, the humor trigger is automatic, and may blind you to the content of what's being said. I had to constantly fight this problem when I first moved from Michigan to Hoboken, NJ. Everyone in my new home sounded like a low-level thug (is that like a mid-level cog?) from a gangster movie, and I expected them to be saying "yeah, boss" and "we're gonna take you for a ride." This is another of the crimes of Hollywood. Fortunately I got over this stupid bigotry quickly (my linguistic training helped me there).

Relevance, relevance...oh yeah, so the Muellers and Tenets, and (rather differently) the Jarvises and Yglesiases (wow that was hard to type) are less aware of this prejudice, and thus less able to fight it. I'm not sure what we can do about this except make them all take classes from Deborah Tannen -- and if we could get high-level switches (as opposed to cogs, eh?) to take classes, we should start with basic economic theory!

But a smart Harvard undergrad has less excuse. Take Sociolinguistics, kiddo. Read Tannen: start with That's Not What I Meant. Or visit Hoboken: you'll hear young people talking about combating hate, or about astronomy, in the genuine coulda-been-a-contenda accent.

I would have believed her because everything about her screams "This is a person who does not rock the boat." When these people start rocking the boat, it's only because they've been pushed really hard.

Laurie, that was pretty much exactly my take.

Are mid-level cogs supposed to be people you could eliminate without noticing they are gone or something? What are they for, then?

Obviously, I'm not seeing the images of this woman on TV that seem to have swayed our educated young friends to feel it is okay to ignore Rowley, so I've just been going by what she wrote. So now I'm starting to wonder why I'm supposed to ignore someone who has "schoolmarm glasses" and is willing "to propound her personal recommendations on any topic" - even the structure of the institutions for which she works! (As if nobody else does that.)

But jeez, c'mon, Patrick, no one should have to listen to some opinionated woman who isn't sexy or rich.

Avedon wrote: "But jeez, c'mon, Patrick, no one should have to listen to some opinionated woman who isn't sexy or rich."

Avedon, if you're attempting to describe yourself, you're way off the mark. You're certainly opinionated, and I don't deny that you may lack wealth. But...remember, some of us have met you. :-)

And I personally never listen to women who aren't opinionated, no matter how rich or sexy they are. In fact, I find strong opinions sexy in themselves. But then my judgements of sexiness in women may be suspect.

I thought it was just my pre-caffeine blurred vision, but did I just read that bloggers are putting someone down for being `...willing "to propound her personal recommendations on any topic"?'

Is there a Minnesotan Anti-Defamation League we should be calling here?

I'm with Patrick: Ms. Rowley seemed like an imminently sensible lady to me.

-NZB

Hey, you think being from Minnesota makes it hard for people to take you seriously, try Alabama.

Alabama, hell. I'm from California, and even I don't take me seriously.

(rimshot)

Uh oh. I grew up in Oklahoma, have lived in Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, and California. I'm neither rich nor beautiful. Nobody's *ever* going to take me seriously. (I'm also a short woman with blond hair, blue eyes, and round pink cheeks. Doomed I tell you...)

MKK

This sort of condescension is why I was actually rather upset with Paul Krugman, a guy I normally love, when he published his column a few weeks ago about the people in the red states, remember that one? And I _love_ hearing smart words accompanied by inch-thick Brooklyn accents; I had a couple of older male professors in college, my Intro to Business Law and my Auditing profs, who spoke like that, and I loved to hear them talk. I'm a little sorry I don't talk that way myself; when I was a kid, I watched so much public kids' TV that came out of Boston that I picked up a slight Boston accent.

I actually have had people refuse to take me seriously because I was blond and had a midwestern accent. Both blonds and blondes are presumed stupid until proven smart in our wonderful society (at least in NYC and environs -- not in Minnesota!)

After one particularly egregious incident, I took to bleaching my hair even blonder, so that I could shock people by turning out to be smart...you'd be surprised how many jaws I dropped by doing that.

I also had a NYC native tell me that she knew when she first saw me that I was an anti-Semitic racist (I am neither). How? I had blond hair and blue eyes and a midwestern accent, of course: evidence of racism, I'm sure you'll agree. Just not evidence of racism in ME.

And I do NOT have blue eyes.

Well, I'm no longer a Harvard undergrad like Matt Yglesias (just graduated! woo-hoo!) but I had the same opinion of the FBI agent as he did. It's not that we're both snobs, or that mid-Westerners get shafted, or that women must be beautiful or pushy. . . it's that it's really, really hard to listen to some people: imagine you're in the FBI and the crazy dude from Officespace sends you memos everyday? Would you take every sentence seriously? Would you know how to separate the wheat from the chaff?

That's not to say that she shouldn't have been taken seriously. But I suspect that it's mostly her fault that she wasn't. You know those psychics who by sheer chance predict a celebrity murder or a hurricane and get hailed for their clairvoyance, only to fail in every prediction thereafter? The FBI woman struck me as an earthly version of one of those psychics.

She should be listened to very, very carefully now. But we shouldn't attach more importance to her words than they deserve.

So Ms. Rowley's critics are now arguing that it's not her appearance or her accent - it's the undefinable sense that she's usually wrong. She seems like "the agent that cries wolf" to Jarvis, and the psychic who makes one lucky guess to Glenn Kinan.

This would be more convincing (a) if they would share their data indicating that Ms. Rowley is usually incorrect, and (b) if the initial criticisms had not been so overwhelmingly phrased in terms of her appearance, accent, and attitude.

"It's not her looks, really - it's just that I can independently tell that she's not worth listening to, and I chose to express that as criticism of her appearance for, um, stylistic reasons." Okay.

So now Glenn Kinen is assuming that Rowley is crazy because...well, he doesn't say why.

If you're a manager, and someone who works for you sends you memos every day, either you know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, or you sit her down and ask her to do the sorting herself, and give you a single weekly or monthly summary. That's part of what managers get paid for.

Yes, some people are difficult for some other people to listen to. I missed out on what I suspect was a good medieval history course, because the professor's voice bothered me. But never, from that day to this, have I thought that this was a flaw in what she had to say, her analysis, her education, or her information. It was an unfortunate-for-me mismatch. A hundred or more other undergraduates had no trouble, and took that course that semester.

At the moment, I'm finding Kinen's seeking reasons to blame Rowley hard to listen to.

OK, fine, I'm an evil, judgmental snob. And perhaps Vicki is correct, and I'm doing little more than rationalizing a person-for-person mismatch.

Vicki is right that managers should structure things so that the worthy points people like Rowley make get addressed. But if her memos resembled her testimony--that is, if they lacked concision and force--I could see how the manager who had to do the mundane work of sorting through them could miss some of Rowley's more vital insights. I'm simply skeptical that there is any reform that could get voices like Rowley's consistently heard in an environment where highers-up are already swamped with information.

If I'm being unfair, it'd be in extrapolating from how she expressed herself before a committee to how she expressed herself on paper. As for the jokes about the glasses, well that's just some of us post-adolescent males being smarky. It's not misogyny: I assure you that if a male, six-foot-eight FBI agent with a mullet were testifying, we'd be far more obnoxious :)

Thanks very much for your comments on Rowley. Having lived all my life in the South, I've seen more than one competent, intelligent person dismissed because of his or her regional accent. I confess, though, that her testimony did remind me of Frances McDormand's character in _Fargo_. You remember--she was the one who was smarter than everyone else and solved the crime.

I do not understand this. Is the FBI crawling with agents who complain about security problems, so that one has to complain with concision and force to be heard over the din? Were Ms. Rowley's earlier complaints found wrong, so that she was not listened to? Or did they never look into the problem? ("Bitch keeps asking for money." "What does she do with it all?" "How should I know? I never give her any?") Inquiring minds want to know.

I think Brett Cox and Arthur Hlavaty nail it, personally.

Yglesias, by the way, clarifies his earlier remarks; he wasn't saying he would have been right to dismiss her, just that he would have. A somewhat confused sentence in his original post led me to misread him slightly on this point. Fair enough.

(Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, announces "I'm accused of being an East Coast snob," something I don't actually recall typing. Whatever.)

I guess I don't understand the aversion to Rowley, who certainly seems no more grating or annoying than any number of Masters Of The Universe who we're constantly told to heed and respect. As more than one poster points out above, there's a peculiar insubstantiality to the rap against her, which is particularly notable when it comes from people who have no difficulty mustering substantial facts and details the rest of the time.

I'm a manager, too, and I know that some people are simply hard to take; but nothing so far cited seems to satisfactorily account for FBI management's behavior. These people are supposed to be hardbitten professionals, dedicated to our security. They're annoyed by some woman's manner, so much so that they ignore a truckload of useful information, and we're supposed to forgive them for it?

By the way, blogger Andrea Harris says much the same as Bob Webber did:

"It's pretty funny to read male bloggers fulminating about their right to expound upon any topic whatsoever in one breath and complaining about a 'schoolmarmish' female 'Midwestern cog' doing same in the next."

As F. Brett Cox said: "her testimony did remind me of Frances McDormand's character in _Fargo_. You remember--she was the one who was smarter than everyone else and solved the crime."

To which I'll add in my best Meen-es-soda accent, "Yah, and ya know, didn't those Meen-ya-plus F-B-I folks arrest an al-Kweeda guy _BEFORE_ Nine-Eleven? Say, I don't remember anyone else in the entire U-S-of-A doin' that, ya shure. Ya, ya know, I remember that now, ya shure ya betcha."

Funny, horrible, un-ironic thing of this is that even with 20/20 hindsight, the F-B-I now wants to kill the messenger. Did you see how Agent Rowley was treated outside of the hearings? No escort, no van, not even a scooter--shunted out the door, smack into the horde of press and photogs waiting for her. I read that many of the throng of veteran reporters were equally shocked--some said they had never seen an agent treated like such a pariah--and some felt sorry for Rowley and her position, and the way the F-B-I was treating her. She was just left standing in front of the building, trying to flag down a taxi. Apparently she was helped by several of the journalists present who recognized how heroic she truly is, and were ashamed of how she was being discounted.

Ya shure ya betcha. Heckuva deal. But, coulda been worse.

We'll be watching to make sure that she doesn't receive any retribution for doing a damn fine job.

BC -- Minnesota native from Minneapolis

Belatedly: I thought Rowley's letter looked pretty cohesive, and suspect her memoes are probably more concise than her testimony. Many people, including me, are not as structured when they speak ex temp as when they write.

Also, Rowley's letter refers to a joke shared by her co-workers about obstruction from the top being caused by some sort of agent of the other side. In other words, she wasn't the only person saying these things.

But, more importantly, it's pretty clear that the complaints in question aren't really about her immediate superiors, some of whom have made the same complaints. People higher up than Rowley were the people who were directly ignored - people who were doing precisely what Rowley appears to have wanted them to do. I don't think any of this is about Rowley at all. She's just someone who was observing from down below.