Dorsey Templeton was a math teacher at my community college. He’d served in the 101st Airborne during the Korean War, gone to college under the GI Bill, and was an All State football player, on both sides of the ball. His heritage was Osage and Cherokee, and he never stopped teaching wherever he could about Native American history. He was a big man who bore himself in the military style.
I happened to be standing next to him along the wall of the gymnasium the day our latest new President had called us to assemble for her introduction. She had clearly attended a New President Workshop, where she had learned that it was important to establish Warm Personal Relationships with her faculty. She proposed to do this by coming around the big circle of teachers and hugging each of us in turn.
When she came bearing down on Dorsey, he folded his arms and stood back against the wall. The new President kept coming, arms akimbo. She was finally stopped in her tracks when Dorsey’s bass voice drummed out, “My People Don’t Do That.” As I recall, she tried to smile, gulped, and moved on to the next target.
My People Don’t Do That. I’ve treasured that statement ever since, and frequently found occasion to repeat it. My people and Dorsey’s were very different and often deadly opponents, but we shared at least that visceral aversion to public, physical displays of affection, especially affection for people we didn’t know.
My people were of the 20th Century – I can’t honestly limit it much finer than that. I could say, with some truth, that my people were Midwesterners, descended from farm and small town folks, and that they generally shared a cautious outlook on life. They were like the people described by a Cubs fan named Jack Wiers: “We were taught to believe you never promoted yourself. You let your work speak for itself. There is a Midwest sensibility there.”
My particular people were, more specifically, Chicagoans, and one of the first things I learned, before I knew I was learning anything, was summed up in a Chicago saying: Don’t Put Your Business in the Street. In other words, keep your private life private.
You could find all sorts of fault with that sense of privacy. It often led to the concealment of evil behavior within families. It led to the press’s “gentlemen’s agreement” to stay mum about the moral or mental shortcomings of public figures. It led to egregious and long-lasting failures to deal with all sorts of discriminatory behavior. Yet I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that our rapid and nearly complete rejection of privacy has brought about great improvements in any of those areas.
A preference for privacy was hardly limited to Midwesterners or Chicagoans. Robert Frost wrote in one of his journals, “After babyhood self-improvement becomes a private matter. Physical, mental, or moral, please attend to it where I can’t see you if you care to avoid my disgust.” Later in the century, Katherine Hepburn observed, “The right to privacy – Fifty years from now this word as we have understood it – will have no meaning at all – if our world continues in its present direction . . . . Talk – tell it – it is never your fault – We’ll fix the blame – Mama – Papa- Uncle Sam – Teacher – Employer – They are responsible . . . . if you have a public geared to listen – read -speak -about the most intimate details of another’s life (to say nothing of their own) and geared to ‘understand’ any vagary – because nothing is either right or wrong . . . . ”
Hepburn saw what was coming, sure enough. Over the past few months, the internet has enabled me to learn the following: Rihanna has a new and “weird” habit since welcoming a baby boy With A$AP Rocky. Shakira is moving to Miami with her sons after hammering out a custody agreement. Chanel West Coast is sharing the name and image of her baby girl. Steven Spielberg wept on the set of The Fabelmans—a lot. Kim Kardashian has revealed the sex with Pete Davidson that was Inspired by her Grandma. Kylie Jenner’s daughter, 4, is storming to the top of the best dressed lists in her silver dress and chunky trainers – with her own $991 handbag. And though Natasha Lyonne has confirmed her split from Fred Armisen, she insists that they’re “still talking all the time.”
Learning these things about people I wouldn’t know even if I knew their last names, I wept all the time – a lot. I’m very sensitive, you see. You need to know that. But I can’t really get with this new century. I run around in a state of constant bafflement at people’s newfound propensity for publicizing details of their private lives. I don’t engage in antisocial media, but I gather that billions of people are emulating the Kardashians by Telling All to the world at large.
Back before Facebook and the rest had started, Lewis Lapham put his finger on the motives of all these Non-Secret Secret Sharers: “In order to fuel the engines of publicity the media suck so much love and adulation out of the atmosphere that unknown men must gasp for breath. They feel themselves made small, and they question the worth, even the fact, of their existence. . . . . At any one time the ecology of the media can bear the weight of only so much celebrity, and as the grotesque personae of the divinities made for the mass market require ever more energy to sustain them, what is left for the weaker species on the dark side of the camera?”
Answer: put everyone on the lighted side of the camera through the miracles of digital technology. Now anyone can prove his or her existence with the expense of a few hundred dollars and a great deal of time: voilá, my website/blog/page of selfies, baby photos, etc. See, I really do exist. And I can claim your interest by revealing my grandma’s sex secrets, the details of my separation agreement, or the clothes I bought little Pootifac Gulf of Mexico Jaws for her six-month birthday.
Maybe some or all of the new internet celebrities are deriving satisfaction and confidence and a sense that they’re valuable from putting their business on the internet street. To me, their activities seem generally tawdry and ephemeral and silly, but that’s undoubtedly the common view geriatrics like me take of succeeding generations’ activities and choices. As Katharine Hepburn went on to observe, after lamenting the abandonment of privacy she saw growing around her, “Bobby Kennedy wants to climb his brother’s Canadian Mountain – to be the first to get to the top – leave a token there – This was warm and thrilling and mysterious – until he sold or gave it to Life magazine – and the television went along – the act had to lose a lot of its meaning to him by being publicized – or at least it would have to me – Who am of another generation.”
Me, too. So while I could tell you about the precious little BMW I gave my grandson Agoraphobia Blitzkrieg for his graduation from prison, I guess I won’t. I need to walk my dog. And besides, my people don’t do that.
