Hot Mics

 At some point during the early pandemic, after we had all made the transition to living our professional lives on Zoom, the horror stories started pouring in. There were the YouTube videos, say, telling the cautionary tale of a white collar worker who forgot her camera was still on, and who proceeded to use the toilet in the middle of a staff meeting. Not to speak of the notorious Toobin incident. 

Some of the YouTube videos were probably staged. But, whether real or fake, they spoke to a genuine nightmare we all shared—the terror of exposure. The Toobin affair, which was all too real, likewise stuck in our minds because it spoke to our own deepest anxieties. We mocked and ostracized Toobin not because we could not relate to his error—but, to the contrary, because it seemed all too close to us. 

As much as we laughed and cringed at the people embarrassing themselves on Zoom, that is to say, it wasn't really because we couldn't see ourselves in them. It was quite the opposite. It was because we knew, on some level, that "there but for the grace of God go us." Perhaps we knew the victim was "a better lad, if things went right," (Housman) than the more fortunate ones now chanting his condemnation.

The mistakes these videos recorded had an air of inevitability. If it wasn't these particular individuals, it would have been someone else. They were a necessary sacrifice, in order for society to learn the lessons of Zoom life. If it hadn't been Toobin, someone else would have been caught masturbating on camera. Even as people cruelly rejected him for it, then, they were really just glad it was him, and not them. 

Of course, some would deny this. They would say they feel no identification; that they would never do something so humiliating. People have the same reaction to every "hot mic." They say they would never be caught saying or doing the kinds of things that land other people in trouble. But they might be surprised. After all: we all have more than one self we present to the world, depending on context. 

I remember hearing a talk from Monica Lewinsky on NPR at one point—famously, a victim of being recorded without her consent. She talked about the experience of hearing her own voice later on, on tapes that she didn't even know were being made. She couldn't believe that she had said the things she evidently had. It didn't feel like herself, because the "self" she meant to present in public was so different. 

A character makes this point well in Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. The play—like much of Pirandello's work, such as the novel One, None and a Hundred Thousand is largely an exploration of identity. Its thesis is one that would be familiar now to most sociologists and psychologists: namely, that human beings play "roles" in society, much as they do on a stage. 

The character in the play, who is caught—rather like Toobin—in a compromising sexual situation, protests that the same thing could happen to any one of us. He says that we each like to go through life pretending that we have some continuous identity—that the "self" we are in private is always the same "self" we manifest to the world. But "it is not true," he cries (Musa trans. throughout). 

"We see this clearly," says the character, "whenever, in something we do, under very unfortunate circumstances, we are all of a sudden caught, as if suspended on a hook; we realize, I mean to say, that all of our self is not in that act, and that, therefore, it would be an atrocious injustice to pass judgment on us by that single action [...] as if our existence were all summed up in this [...] action." 

This is surely an apt description of what happened to Toobin, Lewinsky, and so many others. They are in fact, like all of us, complex people. And yet, by being caught unawares in a moment of humiliation, their public self was "fixed, hooked and suspended" (as Pirandello puts it) in that one moment of total abjection. They would be defined ever after by a single, momentary mistake. 

The public of course reveled in Schadenfreude at the downfall of both Toobin and Lewinsky—the tendency to "swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage" and to "trample savagely on the fallen" being a part of the "eternal spirit of the Populace," as Matthew Arnold once put it. The "crowd"—to quote Yeats—is always inclined to "hawk" titillating scandal "for news."

But this predictable Schadenfreude is surely motivated in part by a sense of identification with its victims. We feared that we might be next, so we rushed to heap scorn on them—to "trample on the fallen"—so as to reassure ourselves that their fate had not been our own; to reestablish some distance between ourselves and the spectacle of their humiliation that would otherwise have hit too close to home. 

Of course, many will still deny this. We have a tendency to think that the "hot mics" expose people's "true selves." And if someone comes across as a monster or a slob, when they are being recorded in what they think is the privacy of their own thoughts, then they must really be a monster or a slob. And since no one thinks of themselves as monsters, they do not imagine they could ever identify with such. 

But, to Pirandello's point—why is the private "exposed" self any more the "true" self than the dignified one we wish to present to the world? Are we not all in fact a combination of both? Is not Toobin both the eminent journalist and the man caught in a compromising situation without expecting it? Is Lewinsky not both a serious person and the person recorded non-consensually on the tape with Linda Tripp? 

Were the members of the LA city council who were secretly recorded saying racist things not also more than just the racist things that they said on that one occasion, when they thought no one was listening? I don't in any way defend the things they said on the tape—my point is simply: what right do we have to say that these cruel comments disclose who they really are, whereas their subsequent apologies do not? 

Were the LA city council members not just as much "really" their public as their private selves? Is Donald Trump not—oh wait, no, he is not any better than the things he said on the Access Hollywood tape. But that's not because the person on the tape is somehow the "truer" version of Trump. The problem is rather that the public version he presents is just as sexist and terrible as the private one the tape disclosed. 

I think that every person has a right to a public self. They have the right to construct the dignified self they wish to present to the world. If their public self—like Trump's—turns out to be no better than the private one, well, that is on them. But no one has a right to expose someone's private self without their consent, and then declare that it is who they "really" are. Human identity is far too complex for that. 

D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem complaining about the phenomenon of "image-making love"—how people created an image of his identity, and then worshipped that which they had made and "mistook for me." The same surely can be said of "image-making hate." We should not take only one mask or role that a person inhabits for the entirety of them. We each should have the right to be more than that.

Bryan Stevenson famously says that every person is "more than the worst thing they have ever done." Beneath its comedic exterior, Pirandello's character is really making the same serious point: "it would be an atrocious injustice to pass judgment on us by that single action," as he puts it. Indeed. Toobin is more than just the Toobin incident. And Lewinsky is more than just a single affair.