I’ve never accessed porn on my office computer. (It’s blocked, OK?) But I do have a Web secret I hope my bosses never discover. It’s embarrassing. And, yes, stripping is involved.
Every weekday morning, without fail, I check in on Mary Worth.
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a comics reader of a certain age. Is that moth-eaten serial still around?!
Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a Millennial or even a Gen Xer. (And by the way, how’d you find me?) You’re asking, “What’s Mary Worth? Is there an app for it?”
Well, Mary Worth, if you don’t already know, is an antique comic strip—dating back to 1940—about a widow of indeterminate elder age whose self-appointed role in the world is to nose around in other people’s business, solve their problems to her own satisfaction, then wrap things up by dispensing rosy platitudes while birds sing and the sun beams. It’s a throwback to an earlier era that Washington Post readers voted years ago to throw off the print pages. (The newspaper still links to it online.)
But I personally find Mary Worth to be so bad that it’s great. (Unlike such so-bad-they’re-insufferable comics as The Family Circus, which I’ll get to shortly.) Mary Worth—with her tight ‘do, matronly duds and presumably cold-showering boyfriend, Dr Jeff Cory—strikes me as being a Norman Rockwell character sprung to hideous life. Think, for instance, of that iconic Rockwell man who’s checking his watch, tapping his foot and impatiently waiting for his girlfriend to arrive at the Bijou. Sure, that illustration’s details look dated now, but the situation is timeless: Somebody’s always late, somebody’s always waiting.
Now, what would happen if, after the woman showed up, and after her beau quickly forgave her because she was pretty and smelled nice, a dowdily attired older lady were to step out of the drawing’s shadows and forcefully offer the startled pair her unsolicited counsel that tardiness is rude, that the young woman should apologize immediately, and that young man should show himself a little more respect?
In real life, the couple would tell the wrinkled buttinski to mind her own damn business. If this scene were happening in her comic strip, however, Mary Worth would beam as the grateful guy ‘n’ gal rode her sagacity train all the way to a much greater understanding of each other’s needs.
In a recent Mary Worth storyline, the eponymous biddy succeeded in getting a young couple together by 1) bullying the man into reconciling with his estranged father, thus resolving his longstanding commitment issues, and 2) cowing the woman into patiently waiting for the guy to straighten himself out. Also, 3) the dad conveniently corked off roughly a nanosecond after the reconciliation, leaving the marriage-bound couple free of any financial burden for the aging, sickly older man. It was classic Mary Worth—the melodrama, the setup for Mary’s deus ex machina intercession, the speed of resolution (father-son reconciliation and paternal demise within maybe a week), and the spotless tidiness of it all (matching the doubtless order of Mary’s closet and dresser drawers).
Such enthralling nonsense makes Mary Worth ripe for parody, of course. Wikipedia obliges with a compendium of examples from over the years, ranging from a 1950s lampoon by Mary’s late cartoon neighbor L’il Abner in the 1950s, through a Carol Burnett Show TV sketch in the 1970s titled “Mary Worthless,” to a Family Guy bit in which son Chris flattened the strip, Silly Putty-style, on his obese dad Peter’s belly and boasted, “Look what I can do to Mary Worth’s smug sense of self-satisfaction.”
So, clearly, I’m hardly the first or last reader to delight in the strip’s heavy-handed moralizing and anachronistic stylings and dialogue—not to mention the odd color scheme, in which every other character seems to have blue hair. Still, I’m not chagrined that so many other people are in on the inadvertent joke. To the contrary, I’m quite happy to continue, every workday morning, clicking in on this jihadist Miss Manners’ never-ending crusade to shape the populace of fictitious Santa Royale, California, to her exacting image of how the world should be—nay, must be.
Presumably the same reader polls that excised Mary Worth from the print edition of the Washington Post have kept The Family Circus on those same pages. Which is hard to figure on its face, because where Mary Worth can be campy fun, The Family Circus is unfailingly cloying, precious and vomit-inducing. But when you think about it, it’s really no mystery who comprises the seemingly inexplicable fan base of Bil, Thelma, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Kittycat and Barfy (the revealingly named dog). Who’s giving the love to The Family Circus? Senior citizens are.
In fact, there may be no firmer proof of the ossification of print-subscriber bases than the continuing publication of The Family Circus in well over a thousand newspapers. In many senses it’s a perfect fit for children of the Depression. Like that demographic, the cartoon is frugal—in The Family Circus’s case, as regards originality, imagination, cleverness, even number of panels (just one). Like many a septuagenarian, it’s traditional in its God-and-family sensibilities. And like many a grandpa, the comic’s “humor” breadbasket— Kids Say the Darnedest Things—is pull-my-finger corny. Never mind that most of the darned things uttered by Family Circus kids sound like outtakes rejected from Art Linkletter’s 1960s show for sounding too coached and artificially saccharine.
Other cartoonists have amusingly parodied cartoonist Bil Keane’s Family Circus characters and groan-inducing gimmicks, such as the circuitous dotted-line routes the kids take to get places, the dead grandfather who occasionally hovers benevolently over the proceedings, and the mischievous characters “Ida Know” and “Not Me”—ghostly embodiments of the children’s excuse-making when they bust a vase or sock a baseball through a window. Family Circus characters have been drawn into funny sequences in such comic strips as Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead. And just this week came word that Twentieth Century Fox plans to make a live-action Family Circus movie.
Hopefully the movie, too, will be a parody, because 90 minutes of Family Circus characters played straight would induce insulin shock. (And who’d shell out the money to watch an earnest Family Circus movie? My mom, who’s 79, predictably adores the cartoon, but she and my dad probably last paid full price at the cinema when The Sting debuted.)
I can only hope the Family Circus movie will be made in collaboration with the satirists at The Onion. That’s where I first read the news, under the headline “Single-panel comic strip to become single-joke film franchise.” That piece praised the strip as “brilliantly deconstructionist” because it “subverts the notion that comic strips should exist in strip form or be inherently comic.” The article described The Family Circus as “the misadventures of four hydrocephalic children whose abnormal accumulation of cranial fluid causes them to interpret everything an adult says incredibly literally, then repeat their misunderstandings, to the laughter of a cruel world.”
The Onion, too, questioned any film treatment’s potential for box-office success, given that “we’re fairly certain most Family Circus fans exist solely as grim-faced specters hovering over their grandchildren in the clouds, waging silent war for their souls against the itinerant demons Ida Know and Not Me.”
Given its comparative obscurity at this stage of its cartoon life, I can’t see Mary Worth similarly being turned into a movie, even as a parody. Which is just as well, from many standpoints. Not the least of which is the inevitability that any film version made in the next few years would star the dreadfully overexposed Betty White, doing her “sassy senior” thing.
Do I want to see a randy Mary Worth exchanging her sensible dress and pearls for a bustier, intent on rocking Dr Jeff Cory’s world? No thanks! I’d rather just keep visiting my favorite goody-two-shoes in the (online) funny papers.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010
That Certain Smile
I turned 18 in 1976, America’s bicentennial year. I did not celebrate by donning breeches and a tricorn hat. Nor did I have anywhere near the hedonistic fun later depicted in the film Dazed and Confused, which celebrated the debauchery of a certain party-centric Class of ’76. (If I’d lived that particular high school experience, I might’ve donned the breeches and tricorn hat but now have no recollection of it.) What I did do in 1976 was vote in my first presidential election.
That was the contest that pitted the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Ford was and still is the nation’s only un-elected chief executive, having ascended to the post upon Richard Nixon’s resignation two years earlier. Carter was a former governor of Georgia who came out of nowhere to secure the Democratic nomination. It was a great year to come out of nowhere, because in the wake of the Nixon stench Americans were in much the same throw-the-bums-out, anti-Washington-insider mood that prevails in this year’s bi-elections. For the same reason, it was not a good year to have given Richard Nixon a full presidential pardon, as Ford, his successor, had done.
The race between the un-flashy longtime Michigan congressman—inaccurately but rather endearingly caricatured by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a bumbling klutz based on one real-life tumble and an incident on a golf course—and the intriguingly obscure Southerner promised to be close. And indeed it would prove to be. But for me the choice was pretty easy.
I was a freshman in college that year, and most of the students in my coed dorm, unsurprisingly, were primed to vote for any candidate who hadn’t pardoned Tricky Dick. But I’d been sufficiently influenced by my parents’ conservatism to have registered as a Republican, and there was a dull earnestness about Ford that I liked. Also, then as now, I had a wide contrarian streak and was drawn to the idea of bucking the dorm’s tide. Mostly, though, Jimmy Carter’s smile drove me nuts. (No peanut-farmer pun intended.)
It was fitting that one of the more prominent campaign buttons that year was dominated by a cartoon depiction of Carter’s gleaming choppers, because they were his dominating physical feature. Every time you saw him on TV—in those days, the only visual option other than a live campaign appearance—he displayed that full-bore smile that made it look as if he’d picked up extra teeth along with convention delegates during the spring primaries. But the thing was, Carter's smile, to my mind, was not one of friendship and goodwill but one of deep self-satisfaction and know-it-all-ism. His populist catch-phrase that fall was something like, “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’d like to be your president.” The smile said, “My name is Jimmy Carter, I have all the answers, and if you don’t vote for me you are at best ill-informed and at worst a moron.”
The truth was, I was a registered Republican in 1976 only in the sense that a virgin is a spokesperson for abstinence. On paper, yes, but frankly I just hadn’t gotten out much. Even at that point in my life I was philosophically liberal enough to probably have voted for Carter, who actually straddled a centrist line slightly to the left, while Ford stood slightly to the right. But I just could not get past the shit-eating smile that scolded me for even thinking of voting for Ford.
As it happened, of course, Carter narrowly won the election, my ballot notwithstanding. But that was the first and last time I voted for a Republican presidential candidate. And given how far to the right the GOP has shifted in the years since, it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in which I’ll see a Republican as a viable candidate in 2012 or any foreseeable presidential-election year.
I bring all this up because of a couple of recent instances of former President Carter, now 86, being in the news. The widespread view of Carter by Democrats and Republicans alike—save perhaps those who take issue with his frequent harsh criticisms of Israel—is that he was an ineffectual president but has been a dynamite ex-president. We’ve all seen him pounding nails for Habitat for Humanity, helping monitor elections in countries where ballot-stuffing and voter intimidation are government sports, and doing more than his part to Make the World a Better Place through the conflict-resolution work of the Carter Center. Maybe he was too prickly and rigid and holier-than thou to get anything done in the Oval Office, the line goes, but in the years since, Private Citizen Carter has kicked some serious do-gooding ass.
And you know, I don’t dispute any of that. To a large extent, his actions and legacies speak for themselves. The problem is, Jimmy Carter won’t let his accomplishments stand as mute testimony to his intelligence, hard work and strong moral core. He has to talk about them. And when he does, his 2010 words mirror his 1976 smile in impatient sanctimoniousness.
Discussing his post-presidential work recently with NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Carter skipped right over the humble “I do what I can” and the reasonable “I think I’ve accomplished a lot” in favor of the immodest but revealing, “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents.” (Perhaps he thought the “probably” was qualifier enough.) In the same interview Carter added, “I feel I have an advantage over many former presidents in being involved in daily affairs that have shaped the policies of our nation and the world.”
I’ve always hated the word “hubris” because it’s So Washington and I’ve never been sure exactly what it means, but it immediately springs to mind when I read quotes like those ones from Jimmy Carter. Hubris always has seemed, in context, to be an inside-the-Beltway synonym for “smug” or “self-satisfied” or “about 10 sizes too big for his or her bicentennial breeches.”
But Carter didn’t stop there. It’s not enough for him to be recognized as the ex-president who was out saving the world while his historical peer group was golfing or giving lectures or dying shortly after leaving office. No, he feels compelled to burnish his presidential credentials, too. And to do so at the expense of a beloved pol who’s too dead to defend himself.
On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Carter stated that all of today’s angst and acrimony over health care reform would’ve been rendered unnecessary if only Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy—who coincidentally had challenged Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination—hadn’t royally screwed him over back in the late 1970s.
“The fact is,” Carter said, “we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed. It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill. … He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.”
Hubris, hubris, hubris, hubris! So, if not for Ted Kennedy, Carter would have accomplished decades ago what has eluded scores of skillful and accomplished lawmakers ever since? And the same Ted Kennedy who made health care reform his life’s work scuttled Carter’s brilliant plan simply out of spite, and not perhaps because, just maybe, he deemed it flawed?
See, this is the Jimmy Carter for whom I didn’t vote: The guy who not only teaches Sunday school but sees himself as, if not a messiah, at least a very, very Wise Man. The guy whose heart is often in the right place but whose head tends to be up his ass when it comes to humility, generosity and self-awareness.
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The world is a better place for everything you’ve done. And whatever my views of your presidency, maybe America needed Jerry Ford to go down in 1976 in order to hasten the post-Watergate healing process. But you know what? I’ve never regretted my ballot choice 34 years ago. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling better about it than ever.
That was the contest that pitted the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, against Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. Ford was and still is the nation’s only un-elected chief executive, having ascended to the post upon Richard Nixon’s resignation two years earlier. Carter was a former governor of Georgia who came out of nowhere to secure the Democratic nomination. It was a great year to come out of nowhere, because in the wake of the Nixon stench Americans were in much the same throw-the-bums-out, anti-Washington-insider mood that prevails in this year’s bi-elections. For the same reason, it was not a good year to have given Richard Nixon a full presidential pardon, as Ford, his successor, had done.
The race between the un-flashy longtime Michigan congressman—inaccurately but rather endearingly caricatured by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a bumbling klutz based on one real-life tumble and an incident on a golf course—and the intriguingly obscure Southerner promised to be close. And indeed it would prove to be. But for me the choice was pretty easy.
I was a freshman in college that year, and most of the students in my coed dorm, unsurprisingly, were primed to vote for any candidate who hadn’t pardoned Tricky Dick. But I’d been sufficiently influenced by my parents’ conservatism to have registered as a Republican, and there was a dull earnestness about Ford that I liked. Also, then as now, I had a wide contrarian streak and was drawn to the idea of bucking the dorm’s tide. Mostly, though, Jimmy Carter’s smile drove me nuts. (No peanut-farmer pun intended.)
It was fitting that one of the more prominent campaign buttons that year was dominated by a cartoon depiction of Carter’s gleaming choppers, because they were his dominating physical feature. Every time you saw him on TV—in those days, the only visual option other than a live campaign appearance—he displayed that full-bore smile that made it look as if he’d picked up extra teeth along with convention delegates during the spring primaries. But the thing was, Carter's smile, to my mind, was not one of friendship and goodwill but one of deep self-satisfaction and know-it-all-ism. His populist catch-phrase that fall was something like, “My name is Jimmy Carter and I’d like to be your president.” The smile said, “My name is Jimmy Carter, I have all the answers, and if you don’t vote for me you are at best ill-informed and at worst a moron.”
The truth was, I was a registered Republican in 1976 only in the sense that a virgin is a spokesperson for abstinence. On paper, yes, but frankly I just hadn’t gotten out much. Even at that point in my life I was philosophically liberal enough to probably have voted for Carter, who actually straddled a centrist line slightly to the left, while Ford stood slightly to the right. But I just could not get past the shit-eating smile that scolded me for even thinking of voting for Ford.
As it happened, of course, Carter narrowly won the election, my ballot notwithstanding. But that was the first and last time I voted for a Republican presidential candidate. And given how far to the right the GOP has shifted in the years since, it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in which I’ll see a Republican as a viable candidate in 2012 or any foreseeable presidential-election year.
I bring all this up because of a couple of recent instances of former President Carter, now 86, being in the news. The widespread view of Carter by Democrats and Republicans alike—save perhaps those who take issue with his frequent harsh criticisms of Israel—is that he was an ineffectual president but has been a dynamite ex-president. We’ve all seen him pounding nails for Habitat for Humanity, helping monitor elections in countries where ballot-stuffing and voter intimidation are government sports, and doing more than his part to Make the World a Better Place through the conflict-resolution work of the Carter Center. Maybe he was too prickly and rigid and holier-than thou to get anything done in the Oval Office, the line goes, but in the years since, Private Citizen Carter has kicked some serious do-gooding ass.
And you know, I don’t dispute any of that. To a large extent, his actions and legacies speak for themselves. The problem is, Jimmy Carter won’t let his accomplishments stand as mute testimony to his intelligence, hard work and strong moral core. He has to talk about them. And when he does, his 2010 words mirror his 1976 smile in impatient sanctimoniousness.
Discussing his post-presidential work recently with NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Carter skipped right over the humble “I do what I can” and the reasonable “I think I’ve accomplished a lot” in favor of the immodest but revealing, “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents.” (Perhaps he thought the “probably” was qualifier enough.) In the same interview Carter added, “I feel I have an advantage over many former presidents in being involved in daily affairs that have shaped the policies of our nation and the world.”
I’ve always hated the word “hubris” because it’s So Washington and I’ve never been sure exactly what it means, but it immediately springs to mind when I read quotes like those ones from Jimmy Carter. Hubris always has seemed, in context, to be an inside-the-Beltway synonym for “smug” or “self-satisfied” or “about 10 sizes too big for his or her bicentennial breeches.”
But Carter didn’t stop there. It’s not enough for him to be recognized as the ex-president who was out saving the world while his historical peer group was golfing or giving lectures or dying shortly after leaving office. No, he feels compelled to burnish his presidential credentials, too. And to do so at the expense of a beloved pol who’s too dead to defend himself.
On 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, Carter stated that all of today’s angst and acrimony over health care reform would’ve been rendered unnecessary if only Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy—who coincidentally had challenged Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination—hadn’t royally screwed him over back in the late 1970s.
“The fact is,” Carter said, “we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed. It was his fault. Ted Kennedy killed the bill. … He did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.”
Hubris, hubris, hubris, hubris! So, if not for Ted Kennedy, Carter would have accomplished decades ago what has eluded scores of skillful and accomplished lawmakers ever since? And the same Ted Kennedy who made health care reform his life’s work scuttled Carter’s brilliant plan simply out of spite, and not perhaps because, just maybe, he deemed it flawed?
See, this is the Jimmy Carter for whom I didn’t vote: The guy who not only teaches Sunday school but sees himself as, if not a messiah, at least a very, very Wise Man. The guy whose heart is often in the right place but whose head tends to be up his ass when it comes to humility, generosity and self-awareness.
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The world is a better place for everything you’ve done. And whatever my views of your presidency, maybe America needed Jerry Ford to go down in 1976 in order to hasten the post-Watergate healing process. But you know what? I’ve never regretted my ballot choice 34 years ago. In fact, lately I’ve been feeling better about it than ever.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Bridge of Sighs
We used to drive over the George Washington Memorial Bridge on our way to Lynn’s mom’s house in Rhode Island, but the traffic always was awful, and the gritty urban vistas in no way compensated for the pace. That’s why we were zipping across the nearby Tappan Zee Bridge in the New York City suburbs on September 22 while, that same day, things were turning uglier than usual over on the GW.
Having posted a Facebook status update that read, simply, “jumping off gw bridge sorry,” 18-year-old Tyler Clementi proceeded to do just that. His roommate had posted on the Internet video of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another man. The Rutgers University freshman’s reaction had gone well beyond mortification, all the way to suicide.
As coincidence would have it, authorities retrieved Clementi’s body from the Hudson River on September 29, the same day we re-crossed the Tappan Zee on our way home. By that evening, news of the death and the circumstances surrounding it were all over the digital and old-school media.
The story stirred a variety of thoughts and emotions in me. Most viscerally, I felt tempted to renounce my opposition to the death penalty—just as I'd reacted more than a decade earlier, when thugs in Wyoming had strung up Matthew Shepard. The 21-year-old, who’d told two men at a bar he was gay, was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fencepost and left by the duo to die. His tormenters now are serving life sentences. While Clementi endured no physical violence at the hands of Dharan Ravi and Ravi’s childhood friend, Molly Wei, their merciless contempt for his privacy arguably killed him no less surely than Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had murdered Matthew Shepard.
The Associated Press has identified at least 12 cases in the US since 2003 in which children and young adults between 11 and 18 killed themselves after “falling victim to some form of ‘cyberbullying’—teasing, harassing or intimidating with words or pictures distributed online or via text message.” The best-known case involved a 13-year-old Missouri girl, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after she was cruelly dumped on MySpace by hoaxers posing as a teenage boy she'd worshipped. An adult was found guilty of participation in the plot, but her conviction was overturned.
Again, my gut reaction to Tyler Clementi’s suicide was that execution is too good for people who taunt or embarrass other people to death, regardless of the perpetrators’ age or understanding of the potential scope and depth of their actions. My secondary reaction, surely of no surprise to readers of this blog, was that we live in an absurdly, sadly, maddeningly over-sharing and insufficiently reflective and caring world of instantaneous communication that casts a dark shadow over all the wonders 21st-century technology is constantly delivering. When news like that of Tyler Clementi’s suicide reaches me—generally through such quaint media as the newspaper, radio or TV—I feel not only unashamed but downright smart to live largely off the social-media map, this electronic version of a spiral-bound notebook you’re reading now being my closest proximity to a Facebook page or Twitter account.
What I’ve been ruminating about at the greatest length for the past few days, however, is my third, and most deeply personal, reaction to the unthinking cruelty highlighted by the Clementi story. And that’s the call to personal responsibility and the reminder that words and actions can deeply wound, even if they rarely kill. As much as I preach kindness and rail against yielding to the temptations of mass communication and groupthink, I’m only too aware of the times in my life when I’ve willingly compromised my personal ethics while traveling a path of least resistance.
Tyler Clementi’s story transported me back to the seventh grade, when I was a dorky, pudgy, shy kid with a prosthesis instead of a right hand. I wasn’t by any stretch popular, but neither did I endure the ridicule that one girl in my class did for an oddly misshapen visage that was considerably flatter on one side than the other. Junior-high wit being what it is, she miserably endured the nickname “Pancake Face.” Seeing me, the school’s “Captain Hook,” as a likely ally, she started chatting me up and waiting for me at my locker. Ordinarily I’d have been stunned and thrilled by the attention from a member of the opposite sex, but her social toxicity was such that her attentions initially made me uneasy, and eventually hostile. I sensed that our association quickly was downgrading me in my classmates' eye from “barely tolerated” to “increasingly tarred,” so I did what cowards of all ages always have done in disadvantageous social situations: I contributed to my would-be friend's humiliation. One day, in a crowded hallway for maximum public impact, I, for the first and only time, called her not Patty but Pancake Face, and essentially told her to get lost. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fled. I don’t think we ever spoke again.
It strikes me now that this was a form of bullying. And as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, there were subsequent stains on my record. There was the time in my 20s, for instance, when I spinelessly turned against a co-worker no one else liked simply because it made my work life easier to do so. I like to think I’ve matured in the decades since, and that in many ways I've become a better person. But the truth is that the aging process and our personal circumstances tend to do a lot of that work for us. We get more comfortable in our own skins as we get older, and consequentially care less how others perceive us. Also, cocooned by our families and/or coteries of longtime friends, we tend to feel more generous toward the marginalized.
Yes, I’m shocked and appalled by stories like that of Tyler Clementi, and feel that those who drove him to suicide must be held responsible for their actions. But it’s my greater hope that the aggregate media attention being paid to such cases is serving, over time, to encourage introspection and change behaviors—especially in younger people who’ve known only the Internet age and its limitless range of scaleable peaks and slippery slopes. The observation "just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should" is a piece of timeless wisdom. And the advice “count to 10 before you act” seems more important now than ever, given the devastation precipitous actions can wreak almost instantaneously. In fact, in cyberspace, let's count out 10 minutes. Ten days, if possible, better yet.
This week I’ve been reflecting on the kid and young adult I once was and asking myself how access to today’s technologies might have broadened or narrowed, loosened or hardened, facilitated or stunted my moral and ethical growth. What I’ve concluded is that I’m just as happy, frankly, not to know.
Having posted a Facebook status update that read, simply, “jumping off gw bridge sorry,” 18-year-old Tyler Clementi proceeded to do just that. His roommate had posted on the Internet video of Clementi engaged in sexual activity with another man. The Rutgers University freshman’s reaction had gone well beyond mortification, all the way to suicide.
As coincidence would have it, authorities retrieved Clementi’s body from the Hudson River on September 29, the same day we re-crossed the Tappan Zee on our way home. By that evening, news of the death and the circumstances surrounding it were all over the digital and old-school media.
The story stirred a variety of thoughts and emotions in me. Most viscerally, I felt tempted to renounce my opposition to the death penalty—just as I'd reacted more than a decade earlier, when thugs in Wyoming had strung up Matthew Shepard. The 21-year-old, who’d told two men at a bar he was gay, was pistol-whipped, tortured, tied to a fencepost and left by the duo to die. His tormenters now are serving life sentences. While Clementi endured no physical violence at the hands of Dharan Ravi and Ravi’s childhood friend, Molly Wei, their merciless contempt for his privacy arguably killed him no less surely than Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson had murdered Matthew Shepard.
The Associated Press has identified at least 12 cases in the US since 2003 in which children and young adults between 11 and 18 killed themselves after “falling victim to some form of ‘cyberbullying’—teasing, harassing or intimidating with words or pictures distributed online or via text message.” The best-known case involved a 13-year-old Missouri girl, Megan Meier, who hanged herself after she was cruelly dumped on MySpace by hoaxers posing as a teenage boy she'd worshipped. An adult was found guilty of participation in the plot, but her conviction was overturned.
Again, my gut reaction to Tyler Clementi’s suicide was that execution is too good for people who taunt or embarrass other people to death, regardless of the perpetrators’ age or understanding of the potential scope and depth of their actions. My secondary reaction, surely of no surprise to readers of this blog, was that we live in an absurdly, sadly, maddeningly over-sharing and insufficiently reflective and caring world of instantaneous communication that casts a dark shadow over all the wonders 21st-century technology is constantly delivering. When news like that of Tyler Clementi’s suicide reaches me—generally through such quaint media as the newspaper, radio or TV—I feel not only unashamed but downright smart to live largely off the social-media map, this electronic version of a spiral-bound notebook you’re reading now being my closest proximity to a Facebook page or Twitter account.
What I’ve been ruminating about at the greatest length for the past few days, however, is my third, and most deeply personal, reaction to the unthinking cruelty highlighted by the Clementi story. And that’s the call to personal responsibility and the reminder that words and actions can deeply wound, even if they rarely kill. As much as I preach kindness and rail against yielding to the temptations of mass communication and groupthink, I’m only too aware of the times in my life when I’ve willingly compromised my personal ethics while traveling a path of least resistance.
Tyler Clementi’s story transported me back to the seventh grade, when I was a dorky, pudgy, shy kid with a prosthesis instead of a right hand. I wasn’t by any stretch popular, but neither did I endure the ridicule that one girl in my class did for an oddly misshapen visage that was considerably flatter on one side than the other. Junior-high wit being what it is, she miserably endured the nickname “Pancake Face.” Seeing me, the school’s “Captain Hook,” as a likely ally, she started chatting me up and waiting for me at my locker. Ordinarily I’d have been stunned and thrilled by the attention from a member of the opposite sex, but her social toxicity was such that her attentions initially made me uneasy, and eventually hostile. I sensed that our association quickly was downgrading me in my classmates' eye from “barely tolerated” to “increasingly tarred,” so I did what cowards of all ages always have done in disadvantageous social situations: I contributed to my would-be friend's humiliation. One day, in a crowded hallway for maximum public impact, I, for the first and only time, called her not Patty but Pancake Face, and essentially told her to get lost. Tears welled in her eyes, and she fled. I don’t think we ever spoke again.
It strikes me now that this was a form of bullying. And as much as I’d love to claim otherwise, there were subsequent stains on my record. There was the time in my 20s, for instance, when I spinelessly turned against a co-worker no one else liked simply because it made my work life easier to do so. I like to think I’ve matured in the decades since, and that in many ways I've become a better person. But the truth is that the aging process and our personal circumstances tend to do a lot of that work for us. We get more comfortable in our own skins as we get older, and consequentially care less how others perceive us. Also, cocooned by our families and/or coteries of longtime friends, we tend to feel more generous toward the marginalized.
Yes, I’m shocked and appalled by stories like that of Tyler Clementi, and feel that those who drove him to suicide must be held responsible for their actions. But it’s my greater hope that the aggregate media attention being paid to such cases is serving, over time, to encourage introspection and change behaviors—especially in younger people who’ve known only the Internet age and its limitless range of scaleable peaks and slippery slopes. The observation "just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should" is a piece of timeless wisdom. And the advice “count to 10 before you act” seems more important now than ever, given the devastation precipitous actions can wreak almost instantaneously. In fact, in cyberspace, let's count out 10 minutes. Ten days, if possible, better yet.
This week I’ve been reflecting on the kid and young adult I once was and asking myself how access to today’s technologies might have broadened or narrowed, loosened or hardened, facilitated or stunted my moral and ethical growth. What I’ve concluded is that I’m just as happy, frankly, not to know.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Unhand Me!
I’m not sure which recent news item boggles my mind more—the fact that that one in seven Americans now are living below the poverty line or last week’s evidence that enough people care what Sarah Palin thinks to vote for the loons she endorses for political office. I would suspect the two things are related—desperate people do crazy things—except that the Tea Partiers tend to be impoverished mainly in empathy and reasoning. From what I can gather, their primary money problem is that the Muslim socialist in the White House wants them to share their ducats for the common good, through outlandish schemes such as affordable health care for all.
The big local story last week was the defeat in the Democratic primary of Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose debatable success at improving city services and an abysmal school system was trumped by his unarguable brilliance at being an arrogant prick. So, goodbye Fenty and, it seems certain, his distaff twin in bedside manner, schools chief Michelle Rhee. Hello, incoming mayor Vince Gray, the weird-haired city council chair who’s about 30 years older, perhaps no wiser, but about 95% more amiable than the man he’s replacing.
But, enough of all that. Any idiot with a blog feels compelled to pontificate about the Major Issues of the Day, and I’m no less an idiot than anyone else with an electronic soapbox, so now I’ve duly weighed in. But what I’d really like to write about today is urinal etiquette.
I spotted this headline recently in the Baltimore Sun: “‘Hand-Washing Police’ Find More of Us Are Washing Up After Bathroom Use; Men Still Dirtier.” These were my initial thoughts:
· Law enforcement certainly is specializing these days!
· Really? and,
· Duh!”
What I mean is, I wondered, respectively, if:
· The NYPD now has an affirmative action program for applicants with OCD,
· The words “more of us are washing up” are supposed to jibe with the parade of guys I see walking directly from whiz basin to hot dog stand at any given sports stadium, and
· That headline writer seriously thought we needed to be told that men are grosser than women.
Anyway, this was how the article written by an Associated Press “medical writer,” started:
Researchers who secretly spy on people using public restrooms say that Americans seem to be washing their hands more often.
Checks during August in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and San Francisco found 85 percent of people washed their hands, up from only 77 percent in 2007.
It’s the best rate since these periodic surveys began in 1996.
One thing hasn’t changed. Men are still dirtier. About 23 percent of men failed to wash up, compared to only 7 percent of women.
First of all, where does one apply for such “research” spying? Who leads these studies—George Michael? Second of all, so, it’s really about a quarter of men who are exiting the loo with urine (or, um, worse) on their hands? Now, those are the guys I know.
What is it about men that makes them think it’s OK to whip out, zip up and walk away? I mean, full disclosure here, I don’t spend a fortnight at the sink vigorously soaping and rubbing together my hands (hand and stump), the way health officials advise. But I do think it’s important to at least wash off the basic residue of one’s bathroom visit and to be in position to assure any subsequent new acquaintance, upon shaking his or her hand, “‘That? Just water.”
Some subsequent Web searching netted further details about “the latest observational study sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology” (George Michael, chairman) “and the American Cleaning Institute” (that guy who spied on Erin Andrews, president). Not surprisingly, a lying 96% of adults contacted for a separate telephone survey said they always washing their hands in public restrooms. (The other 4% conceded, “OK, it’s not water.”)
And then I came upon this supremely unsurprising tidbit: The Atlanta site where the “researchers” had amused themselves watching fellas shake their weiners dry was Turner Field, and it was that venue that “by far fielded the worst percentage for the guys—barely two-thirds (65%)” washed their hands at the ballpark after going to the bathroom. Aha!
So, what can we cull from all of this, other than the depressing fact that the United States presumably is hygienically advanced compared to many countries, yet we (and I mean the male half of our population) are gross?
Well, all I can say is, if you’re sitting in a sports stadium and the guy sitting next to you has just returned from the baby changing station with his little son or daughter, whatever you do, do not high-five him when the home team scores a key run or a touchdown. Because only 80% of guys with kids who were contacted for that phone survey said they always wash their hands after changing a diaper. And God only knows how much lower the real percentage is.
The big local story last week was the defeat in the Democratic primary of Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, whose debatable success at improving city services and an abysmal school system was trumped by his unarguable brilliance at being an arrogant prick. So, goodbye Fenty and, it seems certain, his distaff twin in bedside manner, schools chief Michelle Rhee. Hello, incoming mayor Vince Gray, the weird-haired city council chair who’s about 30 years older, perhaps no wiser, but about 95% more amiable than the man he’s replacing.
But, enough of all that. Any idiot with a blog feels compelled to pontificate about the Major Issues of the Day, and I’m no less an idiot than anyone else with an electronic soapbox, so now I’ve duly weighed in. But what I’d really like to write about today is urinal etiquette.
I spotted this headline recently in the Baltimore Sun: “‘Hand-Washing Police’ Find More of Us Are Washing Up After Bathroom Use; Men Still Dirtier.” These were my initial thoughts:
· Law enforcement certainly is specializing these days!
· Really? and,
· Duh!”
What I mean is, I wondered, respectively, if:
· The NYPD now has an affirmative action program for applicants with OCD,
· The words “more of us are washing up” are supposed to jibe with the parade of guys I see walking directly from whiz basin to hot dog stand at any given sports stadium, and
· That headline writer seriously thought we needed to be told that men are grosser than women.
Anyway, this was how the article written by an Associated Press “medical writer,” started:
Researchers who secretly spy on people using public restrooms say that Americans seem to be washing their hands more often.
Checks during August in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and San Francisco found 85 percent of people washed their hands, up from only 77 percent in 2007.
It’s the best rate since these periodic surveys began in 1996.
One thing hasn’t changed. Men are still dirtier. About 23 percent of men failed to wash up, compared to only 7 percent of women.
First of all, where does one apply for such “research” spying? Who leads these studies—George Michael? Second of all, so, it’s really about a quarter of men who are exiting the loo with urine (or, um, worse) on their hands? Now, those are the guys I know.
What is it about men that makes them think it’s OK to whip out, zip up and walk away? I mean, full disclosure here, I don’t spend a fortnight at the sink vigorously soaping and rubbing together my hands (hand and stump), the way health officials advise. But I do think it’s important to at least wash off the basic residue of one’s bathroom visit and to be in position to assure any subsequent new acquaintance, upon shaking his or her hand, “‘That? Just water.”
Some subsequent Web searching netted further details about “the latest observational study sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology” (George Michael, chairman) “and the American Cleaning Institute” (that guy who spied on Erin Andrews, president). Not surprisingly, a lying 96% of adults contacted for a separate telephone survey said they always washing their hands in public restrooms. (The other 4% conceded, “OK, it’s not water.”)
And then I came upon this supremely unsurprising tidbit: The Atlanta site where the “researchers” had amused themselves watching fellas shake their weiners dry was Turner Field, and it was that venue that “by far fielded the worst percentage for the guys—barely two-thirds (65%)” washed their hands at the ballpark after going to the bathroom. Aha!
So, what can we cull from all of this, other than the depressing fact that the United States presumably is hygienically advanced compared to many countries, yet we (and I mean the male half of our population) are gross?
Well, all I can say is, if you’re sitting in a sports stadium and the guy sitting next to you has just returned from the baby changing station with his little son or daughter, whatever you do, do not high-five him when the home team scores a key run or a touchdown. Because only 80% of guys with kids who were contacted for that phone survey said they always wash their hands after changing a diaper. And God only knows how much lower the real percentage is.
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