I imagine other people hear about Citi’s reluctance to give up its new $50 million private jet, financed by the taxpayer’s $45 billion bailout of the company, and of the $1.2 million used to renovate the bathroom of Merrill Lynch’s CEO, and they think things like “corporate greed,” “arrogance,” “supreme cluelessness.”

I, however, think of the poor communications guy who has to try to explain this to the public. Most of us have been in similar situations: all the executives are sitting around agreeing that the $50-million jet is really an efficient use of funds and a cost saver in the end (given how precious executive time is and, of course, those golf club membership fees, though the latter isn’t mentioned) and you start laughing because they’re clearly joking, right? Right? But they’re not. They’re all nodding their heads, perfectly serious.

So you try to explain that this isn’t going to go down well with the public, and they turn to you and now they’re shaking their heads. That dang public, they just don’t get it. They just don’t understand. That’s your job, they tell you, to make them understand. And you say (or don’t) that the public understands all too well.

It’s a prevalent misconception: That communication is all just words, rhetoric, spin, and has little to do with the underlying facts. Perhaps it comes from working in the Reagan White House under withering and constant press scrutiny, but despite myths to the contrary, we never thought we could just “word-smith” our way out of a problem. Those executives who understand communications realize it’s not a one-way thing, and that their communications consultant or in-house communications executive is there just as much to communicate the outside (“real”) world to them as the other way around.

Looking at the larger picture, those of us who care about the free enterprise system can only hope that Wall Street gets it sooner rather than later, because the public’s tolerance for this kind of thing is not infinite, and the backlash will do more than just take executive perks away. There are people who essentially want to nationalize our banks. Let’s not give them more of an excuse than they already have.