 Suppose that all the politicians, business czars and celebrities
of today had had access to blogs and social networking tools when they
were teenagers, and that all the archives of local newspaper articles
and crime blotters from that time were electronically available today.
If they were, what would we discover about these people? Would
their 1960s and 1970s teenage rants be so outrageous that they would never have
achieved elected office because their opponents would have thrown these
indiscreet and half-formed thoughts back in their face, and humiliated
them in the public eye? Would we know just what Bush said and did during his drunken and
drug-addled youthful binges? Would we know for sure how his lies and daddy's
money kept him out of any real military service, and out of jail when
he went AWOL from the cozy arrangement daddy made for him in the air
force?
Would Canadian prime minister Harper's youthful dalliances with
Western separatist movements and anti-democratic,
anti-immigrant extremist groups, and his belligerent and intemperate
letters to the editor and editorials have been paraded out early enough to prevent him
from ever attaining any major public office?
My guess is that the truth about the past of famous people is out
there, despite the lack of electronic records of it, and despite that
it is not publicized, deliberately, for two reasons that have nothing to do with research:
- The press, for some reason, exercises great discretion when it
comes to dealing with events in the personal lives of the famous before
they became public figures. They seem to get a free pass. Even the
early self-absorbed and angst-ridden letters of (then Young Republican)
Hillary Clinton, which got great publicity in the NYT
last week, are hardly damning, and unlikely to be the most embarrassing
correspondence that the press could find if they were inclined to. My
guess as to why this is is that the press might realize that airing all
the old laundry of potential leaders might so ruin anyone with any
courage, new ideas or individuality that we'd end up with mediocre, fanatically
reserved and secretive people running our countries.
- Liberal muckrakers are surely aware that the youthful antics of
conservatives are probably more restrained and uncontroversial than
those of young liberals, so they are probably inclined not to start a
war with conservative muckrakers they would be sure to lose. And
conservative muckrakers have discovered that most voters don't care
that much about the distant past, that trying to hurt progressives by
bringing up their youthful indiscretions can backfire, and that the
indiscretions of conservatives, while milder than liberals', are often
more recent and hence less likely to be pardoned by citizens. We
saw this with the 'swift boat' sleaze campaign against John Kerry on
his Vietnam War record, which backfired when it was found to be untrue,
and led to much more embarrassing questions about Bush's military
'record'.
So the press and the muckrakers keep quiet about 'the early years' of public figures. But if it was
all there today, a Google click away, it's doubtful that bloggers and others
with fewer qualms about consequences, and less to lose, would show such
restraint.
What will happen then, twenty years or so from now, when we all
look at the youthful blogs, Facebook entries and chat room rants of the
prospective leaders of that
time, and when the news reports and the data from every local police
blotter are available online, and aggregated and leaked by Homeland
Security types? Will we become inured to them, and
grant everyone a 'statute of limitations' for indiscretions? Or will
power become only available to those who have kept their mouths shut
and
their behaviours innocuous all their lives? And will those quiet people
end up being just puppets for the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys of the
world, who
will have the real power without having to be elected at all?
I don't think you can put the genie back in the bottle. There is
no way to excise the records of things we said before we knew better
(or at least before we became more discreet and tactful in public
expressions of what we know). Google caches and the Wayback logs will
keep it on the record forever.
So at some point we will have to decide whether to ignore what
people said and did when they were young, or to accept only lifelong wimps and
nondescripts as leaders. Given today's (lack of) sensibilities, I would
suspect the latter -- there seems to be no end to the public's appetite
for scandal and sleaze, and no limit to the public's willingness to
punish any indiscretion once they know of it. Whether that will change as the firehose of
information gets ever-wider remains to be seen. With the cult of
leadership so well entrenched, especially in the US, it will require a
huge change in attitudes before we learn and accept that both our expectations and
our adulation of leaders are wildly misplaced. We will learn that no
one is worth more than anyone else, and that everyone makes lots of
mistakes.
Perhaps that will bring about the end of learned helplessness, the
end of billion dollar lawsuits for honest mistakes, the end of
autocracy and cults, the end of abdication of personal responsibility,
and the end of executive salaries a thousand times the poverty
level. Perhaps we will finally realize the wisdom of crowds, that
decisions made by consensus are invariably better than decision made by
swollen-headed experts, czars, gurus, tyrants and executives.
That would be a truly democratic political, social and economic
revolution, powered, ironically,
by information we don't really need and probably shouldn't care about.
Then we could roll up are sleeves and start figuring out what to do to
make the world a better place, peer-to-peer, with no one pretending to
be in charge. Photo: Hillary Rodham at 19, uncited source |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
