Empathy for the Devils

Dare I Ask if We’re All Sitting Ducks?

The Earth is hurtling toward the sun, but that’s not important right now. We need to talk about the married Astronomer CEO getting pinched on a Kiss Cam at the Coldplay concert with his arms around his equally married personnel chief. Everybody’s loving it. Me? Not so much.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. I’ve been married for thirty-eight years, but whenever I meet my girlfriend, Academy Award-winning actress Charlize Theron, for a clandestine rendezvous, I avoid skyboxes at popular concert venues. We tend to meet far out at sea on David Geffen’s yacht so that my wife, hauntingly beautiful French actress Sophie Marceau, doesn’t find out. She’s really strict.

Despite being amused by some of the memes, I’m not enjoying this scandal because I spent a long career in the presence of people and organizations that were destroyed or irrevocably damaged, often by their own actions. I have never been able to develop the requisite defenses to prevent internalizing former clients’ misfortunes. I have a persistent sense that I have let people down.

Despite this, I haven’t always been sympathetic to the actions my clients took that led them into trouble. There were plenty of times I wanted to say, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have done that.” The thing I couldn’t cut loose, however, was seeing the looks on the faces of people who were forced to mourn the life they were going to have when their dream — and their self-conceptions — were sucked into the vortex of public opinion.

One of the scariest lessons of a long career in damage control is that even if we are unlikely to commit a serious crime or a moronic blunder the likes of the Coldplay 2, few of us are immune from getting jammed up in a situation where our worst misjudgment or error collides with unwanted publicity. One reason why so many are enjoying the concert degradation is that seeing someone else get blown up in a manner that could conceivably happen to us is life-affirming. Whew, I’m safe!

Did you ever notice how, when people hear that someone died unexpectedly, they ask, “Did she smoke?” “Was he overweight?” Why? Because we need assurance that this isn’t going to happen to us, because we have played our lives with more savvy. We need to believe the departed’s fatality was self-inflicted. And sometimes people do bring bad things on themselves. In other cases, some people spend a lifetime courting trouble, and what goes around never comes around. Indeed, we all must think of the kind of world we’re going to leave behind for Keith Richards (heh).

We also identify with the Kiss Cam imbroglio because there is something biblical about it. What did Adam and Eve do when they were caught in the Great Apple Nosh? They covered up. Why? Shame. Instinctive and immediate shame, thus the concert-goers’ mad dash from the camera. All of us recognize Shame, and fear being visited by this ghoul.

Enduring public scrutiny is one of the worst experiences a human being can face. I’ve been there. Well-publicized litigation, leaked confidential information, and exposés of work done for much-loathed clients felt awful when they hit the media. Any publicized link to controversy makes you feel like O.J. Simpson fleeing down the highway in his white Bronco — even if you haven’t committed a crime or sexual impropriety. It eats away at you precisely because you know that somebody out there who doesn’t like you is enjoying it. And they are. They really, really are. The bloodlust may be the scariest thing of all.

At the crux of such embarrassment was the realization that not every business decision I had made over the decades was manifestly well thought through, and certain situations had devolved into ones I could not have conceived. It dawned on me too late that some of the cases I took on would provoke adversaries who had the agency and resources to come after me. Like with most Greek tragedies, sometimes the punishment far exceeded the violation (Try spending more money than some people earn in a lifetime on litigation just because somebody heard you were involved in a matter that you never even knew about until you got the subpoena). Remember, what doesn’t kill you almost kills you. God has a way of making Himself known, however He pleases.

I suggest that anyone rejoicing in the Kiss Cam capture consider that, in some sense, we are all sitting ducks waiting to have our unbleached roots pointed out by the lumpen. Ask yourself, if you would enjoy publicity surrounding the entirety of your medical records, search engine history, employment files, every email and text you’ve ever sent, every offensive joke you openly laughed at, every disparaging word (that we don’t use anymore) you used in the 1970s, financial statements, youthful summertime photos, voting history, organizational affiliations, romantic correspondence, etc. Imagine a reporter calling the very person who hates you most in the world and using that person as the sole judge of your existence in an exposé. I’ll admit here and now that if a camera ever showed me confronting a jammed printer, I’d be institutionalized.

Think about your lowest moment captured for posterity and shared with an untold number of people. Think about the young man I know whose life was destroyed because a high-school enemy found a photo of him making the “OK” sign with his fingers, and sent it to the admissions office of an Ivy League school to which he had been accepted with a note explaining how the gesture was a coded sign of his involvement in a youth white supremacist group. This information spread across the internet, leading to the revocation of his admission to the school. When the photo was taken, he had simply been conveying that something or other was OK, a sign that millions of us have harmlessly made (How this became a symbol of bigotry is beyond me, but it is evidently a thing).

Now, given all the above, ask yourself if you are immune to any such scenario, given the surveillance/capture state in which we all dwell.

In addition to their careers and families being destroyed, there is an existential hurdle the Coldplay 2 now face: They will have to learn how to define themselves by a metric other than what other people think of them because, trust me, this will be the only thing others will be thinking regardless of how much crisis management they throw at it. This will be daunting because everyone has, at one time, announced, “I don’t care what people think of me,” and almost all of us are lying; the proof is our very need to broadcast such a statement. The fact is, it is primal and human to want to be liked.

I have developed a particular empathy for those who are damaged. One must after the career I’ve had. My Charlize and Sophie flights of fancy aside, I’m a square guy who isn’t very interested in whatever rationalizations the Coldplay 2 have for their conduct. I do, however, understand that marriage isn’t an easy trail to hike and recognize that crazy stuff happens. I have no advice on that front, but do hope that after we snicker at the memes, we can consider that lives have been shattered, including those of children who did nothing to provoke it, and that in some manner, we are all a vector away from being sitting ducks.