Reading about these blogs, I couldn't help but wonder about taking things a step further: What about a waitress blog exposing people with atrocious table manners who eat sloppily or—worse in our era—unhealthily? Or how about adding an item to Don't Date Him Girl that comments on a man's performance in bed? Or, for that matter, establishing a Don't Date Her Guy blog that would do the same thing from the standpoint of the opposite sex?
Blogs already exist that are meaner than this. A website called Revenge World allows the aggrieved party of a former couple to attack his or her former mate, including, in some instances, showing embarrassing photographs. People will say on the Internet things they would never say to another person face to face or over a phone. The blog, with its absence of face-to-face contact, provides something very like whiskey courage—cyber courage, let us call it—and it cannot be a good thing.
In its destructive aspect, gossip is about two things: the ruination of reputation and the invasion of privacy. No institution does these two things more efficiently than the Internet, where it can be menacing, and will remain menacing until the time when laws come into being to guard against its many excesses. Difficult even to think about the complexity of such laws, which would require guaranteeing both freedom of speech and protection of reputation and privacy. But the need for them is becoming more and more acute, as became evident when, in 2010, an eighteen-year-old student at Rutgers University, after two classmates photographed him with a webcam having sex with another male student and then put the result on Twitter, took his own life. Webcams, Twitter, the Internet, who knew such things, at the service of gossip, could be deadly instruments?
As far as I know, I have never been directly gossiped about on the Internet. I live, after all, a dullish life that does not provide much fodder for exotic gossip. But I have been insulted innumerable times online, as has anyone who writes for the general public, and insults not made to your face but with the capacity to be instantly widespread are an indirect form of gossip. I have been called a lousy writer, a reactionary, and once, honor of honors, "blowhard of the month" (December 2008, in case you missed it). Another time, someone fiddled with my Wikipedia entry, slanting my interests and the character of my career, and only through the persistent efforts of the friend who told me about it was the entry set right. But that's the Internet, where one can say anything about anyone and probably not be contradicted, even by the truth.
Stendhal said that to write a book is to risk being shot at in public. But until the Internet, one didn't know all the tender places in which one could be shot. And there is no redress, not really, not likely, not ever, not so long as the Internet remains the playground of the too often pathological and the Valhalla of the unvalorous, where the unqualified and the outright foolish can say what they please about whom they please, which in the end amounts, as Molly Haskell has it, to "democracy's revenge on democracy."
Meanwhile, until such time as laws governing behavior in cyberspace are made, or at least an etiquette for Internet behavior is developed, we are all potentially Internet victims. So clean up after your dog, never leave less than a twenty percent tip, be more than attentive and courtly on dates, do not divorce or break up with a partner ... In fact, maybe you'd do better never to leave your apartment, what with all those little Big Brothers and Sisters out there watching you.
Diary
I have no recollection of gossip playing any part in the household in which I grew up. My parents were both intelligent, and my mother a cool and subtle judge of character, but neither seemed to hear or pass on any gossip. They might say between themselves that an acquaintance was "cheap," by which they meant unsporting in his spending; or a "four-flusher," by which they meant false in her pretensions. But there were no stories of secret drinking or adultery or truly egregious conduct. Possibly people in that time—the 1940s and early 1950s—were better at hiding their flaws. Possibly to speak ill of another person without having some foundation in fact was less tolerated. I do recall my parents scoring off an acquaintance or two for being a "busybody," but otherwise things along the gossip front were quiet.
I hope I am not making my parents sound prim, for they were not. They laughed a lot, and cut other people a fairly wide swath in their behavior. They were amused by other people's foibles and were comical about their own. But my parents, as were many of the adults of their generation, were pre-psychological; they did not attempt to explain behavior, other people's or their own, by recourse to labels put into the world by psychoanalysis and psychology. They would never say that someone behaved the way he did because he was insecure, or suffered an inferiority complex, or was paranoid, let alone that he had anything so arcane as an unresolved Oedipus complex. They looked out at the world and saw only admirable or less than admirable behavior; and under the category of unadmirable came behavior that was cowardly, dishonorable, thoughtless, ungenerous, foolish, cruel, and selfish.
As part of this pre-psychological condition, my parents were reticent, certainly about themselves. In her late seventies, my mother had liver cancer that she knew was going to end in her death. Even though her oncologist fought on against the disease, my mother, a very realistic person, in her certainty about the end of her life, was depressed, not wretchedly so, or in a way that made people around her sad, but she became less than her usual ebullient self. I happened to mention my mother's condition to a woman I know, who suggested that there were wonderful "support groups" for people suffering terminal diseases, and wondered if such a group wouldn't help my mother.
I would not for a nanosecond have thought of suggesting any such thing. Had I done so, my mother would, I have no doubt, have replied: "Let me see. You are suggesting that I go into a room full of strangers and we each tell one another our troubles and this will make me feel better. Is this what you are suggesting? Is this the kind of son I've raised, one who would suggest anything so idiotic?"
My mother's father died when she was in her adolescence. Her mother was the great matriarch of the family, loved and highly regarded by her four children. My mother rarely spoke about her father. When I quizzed her about him, which I did occasionally, and always gently, she was less than forthcoming. "He was a nice man," she would say, "a kind man." As for what he did for a living, she said that he worked in Chicago, in the garment trade. Plainly she preferred not to talk much about her father, and she, a formidable woman, was just as plainly not to be pushed to do so, even by her son.
One evening toward the end of her life, when my mother was in the hospital and my father and I were at dinner together after visiting her there, I asked him what he knew about his wife's father, whom, of course, he never met.
"He committed suicide," said my father, "but your mother doesn't know that I know. Years ago her sister Florence told me."
Now you have to understand that my mother and father were two people who, married fifty-seven years, loved each other, and without complication; each was, without the least doubt, the other's dearest and closest friend. Yet my mother felt no need to inform her husband that her father had committed suicide (I assume my grandfather must have done so out of depression, and not because of scandal of any kind), and he, my father, having come into this knowledge, never felt he ought to let her know that he knew, if only because she might not want to talk about it and the deep sadness it had to have cost her.
In fact my mother, whatever her reasons, didn't want to talk about her father's suicide, and apparently felt no overpowering need to do so. She must have viewed it as a terrible event in her life about which nothing was to be done, with no point in talking it to death. Since my mother was among the least neurotic people I have known, she was obviously living with this sadness, keeping it to herself, without any apparent distress or inner turmoil. Why talk about it? Why rehash it? What was to be gained? Nothing, evidently, that she could see. Reticence about the matter was more dignified, made more sense. And I find I love my mother all the more for her ability to live without the need to drag h
er sadness out into the open.
But I see that in telling this story, I am gossiping about my own mother, telling a tale she would not even now want told. What do you call a man who gossips about his own mother? At the very least, a writer, but also someone who, in regard to gossip, is not the man his mother was.
16. Whores of Information
Journalism is organized gossip.
—OSCAR WILDE
THE JOB OF THE JOURNALIST, every journalist, is to spy and to pry, to find out things that people, for various reasons, would rather not have revealed. Ordinary people spy and pry, too, at least some among us do, in the hope of getting beneath the unconvincing surface of things. But journalists earn their living spying and prying, which makes a substantial difference. They are professionals; they get paid for it; they are whores of information.
Why would anyone wish to talk to journalists, aid them in their undignified tasks? Because, the short answer is, they often have their own known, just as often unknown, motives for doing so. Manifold these motives may be. They might wish to pass along information to a journalist that would undo or short-circuit the plans of a rival or enemy. People might enjoy the brief glare of publicity journalism provides, thinking it lends significance to their lives. They might be concealing hidden (possibly devious) agendas behind such in-print identifications as "unacknowledged source," or "high-ranking Pentagon official," or "neighbor who did not wish to be identified."
Journalism was always a rough trade, not for the faint-hearted or sensitive. In Child of the Century, Ben Hecht recounts, during his days as a young journalist in Chicago, visiting the families of the recently deceased so that he could steal family photographs—and on one notable occasion an oil painting—so that his paper could have a likeness of the dead to accompany its obituary. Journalists have also been famously cold-blooded, a point heavily underscored in Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page. The play is a caricature, but journalists have not been especially noted for their kindness or mercy. Once set out on a hot story, journalists tend not to care how many innocent parties, or civilians, get hurt.
If whores they be, no one has ever accused them of being whores with hearts of gold. And the new dispensation under which journalism operates—about which more presently—has not made them any larger-hearted or observant of people's feelings or what they hold sacred.
Of course today in public life there is no longer anything staked out as sacred, and thus inviolable to journalistic poking. Think of the publicity logjam that hit Tiger Woods when, in the winter of 2009–10, his scandal of philandering became the main item in the national news. What began as gossip about Woods turned out to be quite true—truer, or, more precisely, wilder, than anyone might have imagined. Wrong though Woods was, and deceitful into the bargain, one has to have been without imagination not to have shuddered, if only slightly, at the klieg-light glare to which his antics were exposed. He should have known better, we confidently say. He was a fraud, we all agree. Yet are we entitled to know so much about the scandal, or about the man himself, as eventually was revealed?
Some people think we are. In the Wall Street Journal a psychology professor named Nicholas DiFonzo, who has written a book about office gossip called The Watercooler Effect, is among those who do. "The Tiger gossip is replete with moral messages and motivations that are compelling, instructive and powerful," he wrote. "Moral guidance can often sound like a collection of tired bromides when expressed in the abstract. But when told as part of a compelling drama—as gossip—it can appear as an eloquent demarcation of good behavior." One wonders if DiFonzo thinks it was moral instruction that the journalists so relentless on Woods's case had in mind.
Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and of The New Yorker, is someone else who feels that exposure through gossip can on balance be a good thing. "We live in a culture of destructive transparency," Brown wrote on her website the Daily Beast in connection with the leakage of a story about Mel Gibson abusing an ex-girlfriend. "Text messages leaked. Phone calls taped. Pictures uploaded in real time, and sound bites exploding on unsuspecting careers. But there's an upside to our leaky, sneaky world. Vile, fraudulent bullies like Mel Gibson or free-range sex addicts like Tiger Woods can be exposed at last to the censure—and ridicule—they deserve."
Athletes of earlier days never underwent such intense scrutiny as did Woods. The antics of Babe Ruth with women, though much talked about in a sub-rosa way, were never the stuff of the daily, even the tabloid, press. The great tennis champion Bill Tilden's homosexuality, also known to people inside the sport of tennis, was blunted, though he was charged with "lewd and lascivious behavior with a minor" and served a seven-month prison sentence for such conduct. The private life of athletes was pretty much their own. I remember as a boy reading, in Sport magazine, an article about Yogi Berra, the great Yankee catcher, that included the following sentence, which has stuck in my mind all these years: "Yogi enjoys plenty of pizza in the off-season, when he can usually be found at his pal Phil Rizzuto's bowling alley." Nothing more in the article was said about Yogi's private life, which was considered either of no interest or nobody's business.
No longer. TMZ, the celebrity gossip television show, having made great hay with its coverage of the Tiger Woods story, has recently begun a sports blog, TMZsports.com, dedicated to pursuing the delinquencies of athletes, of which, one may be sure, there will be no shortage. How could it be otherwise when you have a large number of undereducated young men, unused to people saying no to them, earning vast sums of money, out on the loose. Bad behavior of all sorts can be the only result. And with TMZ offering money for tips to such stories, the stories themselves are likely to come flooding in, about wife beating, gun toting, illegitimate children, minor crimes, major breaches of decorum and decency. It promises to be a field day, on a field athletes have not hitherto been asked to play.
Are celebrities—in sports, show business, politics—by the very nature of their celebrity, not entitled to the least privacy? Apparently not if caught out at bad behavior. The press used to talk about the public's right to know. But does this right extend to details, really quite grubby if not positively lurid details? Is it not enough to know that a man committed adultery? Do we also need to know he did so with a woman with a tramp stamp above her behind, her bra size, and that together they did this, that, and the other no fewer than three times while Rolling Stones music played on the hotel room stereo? Doesn't more and more exposure of this kind, in its cumulative effect, lower the tone of the society in which it takes place?
The change of social tone was a slow one, an accumulation of many bridges being lowered, gates opened, walls allowed to crumble. When was the first time an athlete said "pissed off" or "kick ass" on television, a woman said "fuck" at a middle-class dinner party table, kids took to using the phrase "it sucks" for things they didn't like, permission given to run ads for Viagra and other erection-inducing pills on prime-time television? When was the first time that older people deciding to live together without marrying, lest marriage reduce their Social Security checks, became respectable; the first time a comedian (Robin Williams?) did skits about cunnilingus on cable television; the first time The New Yorker permitted the word "bullshit" in its pages, with phrases such as "cunty fingers" (thank you, John Updike) in its fiction; the first time a politician, his timorous wife by his side, publicly apologized for having been caught out at having sex with another woman or young man?
All these undated events of the past three or so decades have helped to bring down the decorum that was a strong feature of—let us call it—square society. Not many people around today to defend square society, with all its rules and inhibitions. Square society could be stuffy, boring, dreary. Not many laughs there, and no titillation whatsoever. Yet in regard to gossip, it could be much subtler than the blatant exposure that has come to pervade contemporary life. In a John O'Hara story called "The General," published in his book Waiting for Winter (1966), O'Hara has a retire
d army officer return home to find his wife, Sophie, and her female friends gathered for afternoon tea. He assumes that these women had been gossiping before his arrival from his club.
Any real gossip Sophie had picked up would be duly passed on to him when they were alone, in language of the utmost purity but with illustrative gestures, and as completely descriptive as a police report. He had never asked her how her women friends were able to communicate details without using the language of the gutter or of the physicians; they would not repeat naughty words, and they were ignorant of medical terminology. Nevertheless Sophie and her friends made their stories graphically real, and there was nothing in the calendar of sin that she had not at some time been able to convey to him in the telling of an episode.
The decorum of square society established with some clarity what was permissible, what could and could not be said in public and, as the O'Hara story conveys, in private. If square society had a standard, it found it in the realm of taste. People of good taste simply did not do, say, or even think certain things.
One did of course think untasteful things, and in the privacy of one's home, or the intimacy of one's closest friendships, one also said tasteless things. But they weren't printed, at least not in such erstwhile respectable places as the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York, and elsewhere. Nor were they shown on television or said in mixed company. It took decades—one of these decades, that of the 1960s, was especially significant in this regard—for the old standards of decorum to be set aside. The increased brashness of gossip columns helped. So, too, did the changed relationships between men and women, so that things once permitted to be talked about only in exclusively male company now made it to the dinner-party table. The breakdown of censorship in literature, once one of the great and worthy causes of liberalism, brought with it the dreary consequences of adult bookstores and easy access to pornography on the Internet. For many people the defeat of decorum and the rise of candor represents pure progress. Others, toting up the side effects, are not so sure.
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