God Bless Me

This weekend, I was hanging around the house trying to beat this nasty rhinovirus—a convenient excuse for laziness, I know. I happened to be listening to MPR, and felt lucky to have the house and the radio to myself for "This American Life," one of life's serendipitious little pleasures. (I wouldn't want to arrange my life around a radio show, even if its host and I have a mutual appreciation society [that's The Rake in his in-box there, thanks IG!].)

Anyway, the show was about amateur spying, which is a great subject. The prelude was about a friend of Ira Glass's who was a newspaper reporter in the 1980s. He happened to be working late one night, screwing around the way everyone does in an idle moment. When he rebooted his computer, he used his boss's username and made up a likely password—and it worked! (I could go on at length about how depressing this is that our lives are this predictable. For God's sake, do NOT use your spouse's name, your child's name, or your pet's name as a password.) Without even wanting to, he succumbed to what you could call the hacker's rush—the pure joy of trespassing with no other purpose in mind than being where you aren't supposed to be.

Well, the reporter inevitably found the spreadsheets that listed the entire company's payroll. He was shocked to learn that he was the lowest paid reporter on the paper, even though he had considerable seniority. This forbidden knowledge poisoned the workplace for him; it even poisoned his own self-image. Now you could argue that the truth, no matter how painful, is better than functional delusion, and you'd have a point.

On the other hand, I think it is possible to get too much information, and to thus convert self-love into other-hatred. There are simply some things you would rather not know about yourself, particularly what others might think of you in the privacy of their own minds and emails. You forget that others lack perspective on your life. You have to trust that if they felt you really needed to know you'd screwed up, or that a character flaw of yours was so distracting that it was ruining their life, they'd be a man about it and tell you out loud.

When I was a boy, I used to fantasize about reading other people's thoughts. The fantasy had obvious origins in being frustrated with understanding where other people were coming from, and how they saw me—I didn't even know how to see myself, and it might have been useful to get access to what others thought. But with adolescence, I realized just what a terrible thing that particular super-power would be. You realize how much of your interior life would be an embarassment if it screened in public—most of it.

In this month's cover story about Eric Utne, we revisited an old newspaper article in which employees of the Utne Reader confessed that they had made fun of their boss. This phenomenon is universal, of course, but usually no one intends for it to go public, because it can be so hurtful and prone to exaggeration. When the private becomes public, the ugliness of the human condition reveals itself—and only a true mensch like Utne can, as he did, turn it into an opportunity to reflect and evolve.

Me? I would have fired the little shits.—The Editor in Sneeze