Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  Americans live their lives more as people that are just a little bit late for something they have to do, often something they do not want to do. But they do it. Impossible things every day that are only made possible through the little reasonable compromises we all make.

  What compromises? (Didn’t this kind of blurry apoliticality give us George W. Bush via Ralph Nader in 2000?)

  Stewart made no mention of the coming elections, nor did he blame the right for the darkness we live in now. He blamed the press—“the country’s twenty-four-hour politico pundit perpetual panic conflictinator”—for making things look worse than they are. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing,” he said, and went on,

  There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned, you must have the résumé. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and tea baggers or real bigots and Juan Williams or Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.

  David Carr, after quoting these words in The New York Times of November 1, told a brutal truth: “All due respect to Mr. Williams and Mr. Sanchez, not many people know or care who they are.” Carr further pointed out that

  Most Americans don’t watch or pay attention to cable television. In even a good news night, about five million people take a seat on the cable wars, which is less than 2 percent of all Americans. People are scared of what they see in their pay envelopes and neighborhoods, not because of what Keith Olbermann said last night or how Bill O’Reilly came back at him.

  Of course, the two hundred thousand people who came to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear are among the 5 million who do watch cable TV—specifically, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The scriptwriters assumed this was the case, and the rally skits were filled with references and allusions that only watchers of these shows would grasp. Who but a watcher of his show would know what Colbert was supposed to represent as he crazily pranced around the stage? Stewart’s bland rally persona similarly drew on the resonance of his sharper Daily Show image. No doubt it was an accident of organization that required most of the people at the rally to defer their enjoyment of the stage show until they could watch it at home on a screen. But it couldn’t have been a more fitting accident. The world of TV is the world that Stewart and Colbert inhabit. To have seen them in real life, or even on a live video monitor, might have felt inauthentic, perhaps even transgressional.

  “An incredible gathering here in the Mall today,” Stewart said after showing clips of “real stories of momentary unreasonableness,” such as that of the irate flight attendant who got off his plane on an exit chute after a passenger dissed him. Stewart beamed at the crowd and went on, “But I think we all know that it doesn’t matter what we all say and do here today. It matters what is reported about what we said and did here today.”

  On their late-night shows, Stewart and Colbert brilliantly satirize TV news and news commentary. At the rally they had to struggle with the lack of a subject to satirize. There was some fun with the Colbert character as an embodiment of irrational fear (Stewart: “FDR once said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’” Colbert: “Yes. But just twelve years later he was dead.”) But mostly there was more gesturing toward comedy than comedy itself.

  If there is one thing that liberal Americans can legitimately pride themselves on it is their talent for creating irreverent signs. Who will forget, from the peace rallies of yesteryear, WHEN CLINTON LIED NO ONE DIED or THE ONLY BUSH I TRUST IS MY OWN? Here are a few examples from the Rally for Sanity and/or Fear:

  WE HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR BUT FEAR ITSELF AND SPIDERS

  MODERATION OR DEATH

  JEW AGAINST INVOKING HITLER FOR POLITICAL POINTS

  ATHEISTS FOR MASTURBATION

  GAY MALAYSIAN MUSLIMS FOR SARAH PALIN

  YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WAS A WHITE SOX FAN? HITLER

  SUPPORT SEPARATION OF HEAD FROM ASS

  On October 2, I’d attended the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by, among others, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the Sierra Club, and supported by groups that included the National Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Communist Party USA. The signs there had a different character:

  GOOD JOBS NOW

  STOP CORPORATE GREED

  GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL AND TRANSGENDER EQUALITY

  I WANT SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE

  GET OUT AND VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS

  The October 2 rally was a sober affair. The crowd wasn’t very large. (I noticed many minority and working-class families with children.) Most of the speakers (visible and audible on large TV monitors) were earnest and unpracticed. They were teachers and unionists and secretaries and veterans and carpenters and students and waitresses, as well as a few politicians like Al Sharpton, who spoke well. But when he exhorted the audience to vote—“We better get ready for the midterm exam”—there was only tepid applause.

  Walking back to the train station on Constitution Avenue, my spirits lifted when I saw a man in an elaborate Colonial costume. I went up to him and asked him what his role in the rally had been. He gave me one of the most incredulous looks anyone has ever given me in my life. Then he stiffly informed me that he was the leader of a guided tour of Washington.

  The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily), 2010

  PANDORA’S CLICK

  To say that Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is more a users’ manual than a book is not to belittle it. Email is like an appliance that we have been helplessly misusing because it arrived without instructions. Thanks to David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, our blind blunderings are over. With Shipley and Schwalbe’s excellent instructions in hand we can email as confidently as we load the dishwasher and turn on the microwave.

  Shipley and Schwalbe are not exaggerating when they say that their guide is essential. For, in truth, email is more like a dangerous power tool than like a harmless kitchen appliance. The more skillful (or lucky) among us have escaped serious injury, but many, perhaps most, of us have suffered the equivalent of burns, lost fingers, electric shocks, and bone fractures. Incautious emailing has cost jobs, ruined friendships, threatened marriages, subverted projects, even led to jail time. “On email, people aren’t quite themselves,” Shipley and Schwalbe write. “They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous. Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature.” It also has the capacity for instant retribution. In one of their cautionary illustrations, Shipley and Schwalbe hold up an email exchange between an executive and a secretary at a large American company in China. The executive nastily wrote:

  You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office until you have checked with all the managers you support.

  The secretary wrote back:

  I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even though I’m your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it’s someone else’s fault.

  She then performed the two-click operation that sent copies of her and her boss’s emails to the entire staff of the company. Before long the exchange appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive’s resignation.

  * * *

  Another anecdote that Shipley and Schwalbe tell to illustrate email’s special killer combination of winking at our bad behavior and horribly punishing us for it also involves a boss and secretary. In this case, the secretary spilled ketchup on the boss’s trousers, and he wrote an email asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he—and hundreds of people at the firm—received this ema
il:

  Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers

  With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to you straight away but due to my mother’s sudden illness, death and funeral I have had more pressing issues than your £4.

  I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater than mine as a mere secretary.

  Having already spoken to and shown your email … to various partners, lawyers and trainees…, they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.

  I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.

  Again, the exchange found its way into the press—and thus into Send. But Shipley and Schwalbe hardly needed to scour newspaper archives for examples of email’s destructive power. How many of us have—among other self-immolations—badmouthed someone in an email, only to make the fatal mis-click that sends the email to the very person we have betrayed? And what can we do to repair the damage? Anything?

  “The email era has made necessary a special type of apology,” Shipley and Schwalbe write,

  the kind you have to make when you are the bonehead who fired off a ridiculously intemperate email or who accidentally sent an email to the person you were covertly trashing. In situations like these, our first inclination is to apologize via the medium that got us into so much trouble in the first place. Resist this inclination.

  Instead, go see the person or telephone him, for “the graver the email sin, the more the email apology trivializes it.” “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” Shipley and Schwalbe write, introducing a notion that younger readers may find too radical to take seriously. The generation that has grown up with email—that has never done such a thing as mail a letter or walk down the hall to a colleague’s office to ask a question—will derive different benefits from Send. The young make different mistakes on email than the middle-aged and old do. College students who send outrageous email requests to their teachers (addressed “Hiya Professor!”) or college applicants who write long, self-satisfied emails to admissions officers “seem painfully unaware that the person they are writing to (and annoying) is the same person who could be offering them a place in a freshman class or grading them at term’s end.” The poor lambs don’t know better, and Send is good at setting them straight.

  * * *

  On the face of it, an email and a letter are the same thing: a piece of writing addressed to one or several persons. But letter writing was never the fraught activity that email writing is. Shipley and Schwalbe believe that the trouble derives from a fundamental flaw in email for which the user has to compensate:

  If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties.

  To counteract this perilous ambiguity, Shipley and Schwalbe suggest a program of unrelenting niceness. Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling-face icons) wherever possible. “The exclamation point is a lazy but effective way to combat email’s essential lack of tone,” Shipley and Schwalbe write. “‘I’ll see you at the conference’ is a simple statement of fact. ‘I’ll see you at the conference!’ lets your fellow conferee know that you’re excited and pleased about the event.” Shipley and Schwalbe then make an arresting remark:

  Sure, the better your word choice the less need you will have for this form of shorthand. But until we find more time in the day—and until email begins to convey affect—we will continue to sprinkle exclamation points liberally throughout our emails.

  So this is the crux of the matter: email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as is tone deafness. The problem of tone is, of course, the problem of all writing. There is no “universal default tone.” When people wrote letters they had the same blank screen to fill. And there were the same boneheads among them, who alienated correspondents with their ghastly oblivious prose. One has only to look at the letter-writing manuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to see that most of the problems Shipley and Schwalbe deal with are not unique to email but common to the whole epistolary genre. They are writing problems. Some of us do find the time in the day to write a carefully worded, exclamation-point-free email when the occasion demands. Mostly, though, all of us who use email avail ourselves of its permission to write fast and sloppy. Shipley and Schwalbe’s serene acceptance of the unwriterliness of email, of its function as an instrument of speedy, heedless communication, is correct, and their guide is helpful precisely because it doesn’t pretend that the instrument is anything but what it is.

  “We don’t think of ourselves as old, but we recall when the phone was a big deal,” the fortysomething authors write. It won’t be long before email, too, stops being a big deal. The people who now use email to fire employees or propose marriage or disparage friends will realize that they were doing the equivalent of throwing fragile silks into the washing machine. As email’s novelty wears off and its limitations become clearer, we will revert to the telephone when something complex, intimate, or low-minded needs to be communicated. We will use email for straightforward business and social arrangements. One takes away from Send a refreshing sense of the authors’ dislike of the tool they are teaching us to use. They may not be old, but they are old enough to see email in the perspective of life as it was lived before this Pandora’s box appeared among us.

  Interestingly, the models Shipley and Schwalbe choose to illustrate their section “How to Write a Perfect Email” were written by twelve-year-olds. The really young, evidently, don’t need the help the rest of us do; like Blakean innocents, they are untouched by email’s evil. Their harmless chatter (“OMG! I was playing yesterday, when this really CUTE boy rode up on his bike”) is reminiscent of the notes we used to pass in class, which are, come to think of it, the precursors of email: hastily written, instantly delivered and replied to, and, if intercepted by the wrong person, mortifying. As the really young become merely young it will be interesting to see what happens. Will their childish babbling evolve into decent writing? Does writing a lot lead to writing well? Even (OMG!) on email?

  The New York Review of Books, 2007

  _________________

  Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe

  PART III

  DREAMS AND ANNA KARENINA

  We do not think of Tolstoy as a comic writer, but his genius permits him to write farce when it suits him. There is a wickedly funny scene in Anna Karenina that directly precedes the painful scenes leading to Anna’s suicide. It takes place in the drawing room of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who, almost alone among the novel’s characters, has no good, or even pretty good, qualities. She embodies the kind of hysterical and coldhearted religious piety that Tolstoy was especially allergic to. “As a very young and rhapsodical girl,” he writes, she

  had been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very good-natured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection he met with a sarcasm and even hostility that people knowing the count’s good heart, and seeing no defects in the ecstatic Lydia, were at a loss to explain. Though they were not divorced, they lived apart, and whenever the husband met the wife, he invariably behaved to her with the same venomous irony, the cause of which was incomprehensible.

  Tolstoy, with his own venomous irony, makes the cause entirely comprehensible to the reader of Anna Karenina, as he shows Lydia Ivanovna fasten herself on Karenin after Anna leaves his house to go abroad with Vronsky, and preside over his degeneration into his wo
rst self. She is an ugly and malevolent creature who coats her spite in a thick ooze of platitudes about Christian love and forgiveness. When Anna was on the verge of death after giving birth to Vronsky’s daughter, Karenin experienced an electrifying spiritual transformation: his feelings of hatred and vengefulness toward Anna and Vronsky abruptly changed into feelings of love and forgiveness, and under the spell of this new “blissful spiritual condition” he offered Anna a divorce and the custody of her son—neither of which she chose to accept. Now, a year later, she wants the divorce, but Karenin is no longer of a mind to give it to her. The blissful spiritual condition has faded away like a rainbow, and Karenin, in thrall to the malignant Lydia Ivanovna, has reassumed his old, supinely rigid, and unfeeling self.

  * * *

  Anna’s brother, Stepan Arkadyevich (Stiva) Oblonsky, has gone to Karenin to intercede for Anna, and Karenin has said he would think the matter over and give his answer in two days’ time, but when the two days pass, instead of an answer, Oblonsky receives an evening invitation to the house of Lydia Ivanovna, where he finds her and Karenin and a French clairvoyant named Landau, who is to be somehow instrumental in Karenin’s decision. The comic scene that follows is filtered through Oblonsky’s consciousness.

  By now we know Oblonsky very well. Tolstoy has portrayed him as a person whom it is necessary to condemn—he is another dissipated rake—but impossible to dislike. He radiates affability; when he comes into a room people immediately cheer up. And when he appears on the page, the reader feels a similar delight. In the novel’s moral hierarchy, Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin occupy the lowest rung; they sin against the human spirit, while Stiva only sins against his wife and children and creditors. Through his geniality, Oblonsky has been able to maintain a job in government for which he is in no way qualified, but now, because he needs more money, he is trying to get himself appointed to a higher-paying position in the civil service. Lydia Ivanovna has influence among the appointers, and Oblonsky figures he might as well use the occasion to charm her into helping him. Thus, while listening to Lydia Ivanovna and Karenin’s odious religious palaver, he cravenly—but, he hopes, not too cravenly—hides his atheism: