Mitt Romney uttered an uncomfortable truth: a large portion of
the electorate has been bribed with government funds to vote for
the party of government. Noting aloud that the land of the free is
slowly becoming the land of the freeloader isn’t necessarily wrong.
It’s just not the kind of thing polite politicians say in public —
which, in defense of the too-polite Romney, he didn’t.
“Forget the content of Mitt Romney’s remarks,” writes Bob
Lefsetz of the Lefsetz Letter. “What troubles me is he’s
so out of the loop, technologically and socially, that he didn’t
realize that anything you say outside of the privacy of your own
bathroom, alone, in the dark, is no longer private, and will
surface, if anybody truly cares what you have to say.”
G. Gordon Liddy wishes Lefsetz were around in the '70s to defend
him. Forty years after Watergate, we celebrate rather than
prosecute the peepers, the buggers, and the creeps. The celebrity
knows this better than her ugly cousin, the politician.
Kate Middleton recently discovered that good fences make great
neighbors only when your neighbor doesn’t possess a ladder and a
telephoto lens. Like her brother-in-law, and all of her subjects
really, she needs to be naked —it’s an English
thing. So when she removed her top to sunbathe at a French
chateau, a photographer there — or about 500 meters away —
snapped 240 shots. Magazines in Italy, Sweden, France, Ireland,
Denmark, and points beyond have allowed their readers to become as
cretinous as the picture taker. The sun never sets on the British
Empress-in-Waiting.
Paris Hilton, a sort of Kate Middleton who dropped out of
finishing school, experienced her gotcha moment in a late-night New
York taxi discussing a smartphone app — it’s gaydar really — that
enables homosexuals to locate one another for trysts. “Say I log
into Grindr,” a gay male model (redundant?) companion informs the
hotel heiress. “Someone that’s on Grindr can be in that building
and it tells you all the locations of where they are and you can be
like, ‘Yo, you wanna f***?’ And he might be on like, the sixth
floor.”
Paris, in Paris fashion, responds: “Ewww. Ewww. To get f***ed?
Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting.
Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.”
Grossed out by strangers acquiring carnal knowledge, Hilton
counsels her friend against the semi-public hook-ups. “I would be
so scared if I were a gay guy,” she explains. “You’ll like, die of
AIDS.” This commonsense advice has, like, made Hilton a homophobe.
OMG!
The media revulsion is not over anonymous encounters in public
but a conversation among friends ostensibly in private. When the
star of 1 Night in Paris plays the grown up, it’s later
than you think.
Society tolerates private behavior performed in public but
condemns the expectation of public figures’ discussions remaining
private. Like children, we don’t know boundaries. We have no
concept of personal space.
The government, with its traffic-light paparazzi and airport
grope-downs, hasn’t set the best example. Neither has popular
entertainment, with reality television awarding every exhibitionist
a voyeur. Technology is the worst offender. Facebook and Twitter
prove the mirror too antiquated, with too limited an audience, to
satiate the narcissist. GPS vehicle trackers, cell-phone cameras,
and Spyware make Peeping Tom feel like James Bond.
Encroaching eyeballs and antenna ears just show the value of
maintaining a personal sphere. If one wants proof that people crave
privacy more than ever, just consider the behavior of the invaders
of privacy. Allen Funt aside, the man behind the hidden camera
never ventures in front of it. The bugger never puts his secret
utterances on blast. The source’s demand of anonymity is often a
tacit admission of sleaziness. We redact our names from what causes
us shame.
“Privacy is passé,” claims Bob Lefsetz. The anonymity of Kate’s
stalker photographer, Paris’s eavesdropping cabbie, and Mitt’s
candid cameraman suggests that it’s anything but.
