Crystal Kelley deputizes John Stossel to call those attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 hypocrites--for using too much energy getting there.
Kelley--the delusionally self-described Friendly Neighborhood Republican--doesn't allow dissenting comments, nor will she clarify her censorship policy--or even reply to an inquiring blogger's questions. Were she willing to engage in civil discourse, we might ask her why it makes sense to single out the attendees' energy use. The problem--GW--is either serious or it isn't, and either way the leaders' energy use is of no special import. Is it?
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If you believe things you're ashamed to say in public, without benefit of anonymity--you're a hypocrite. If you express devotion to values you also violate, you're a hypocrite. If you misrepresent your feelings or viewpoints in order to massage others' perceptions of you, you're a hypocrite. If you occasionally present yourself in a pleasanter light than the one in which your meanest detractor sees you, you're a hypocrite. (The tie is a purely hypocritical garment.)
In short, life avails no non-hypocritical option for building an identity. As social primates, we're intensely interested in molding others' perceptions of us--and we're acutely status conscious.
Ergo, all is hypocrisy. But in day-to-day parlance, we ought to try to agree to a definitional tightening of the venerable hypocrisy! charge: We don't want it to encompass everything.
You shouldn't merely need to show that someone's stated goals, actions and thoughts might be in conflict. You have to argue that the conflict matters--and that society ought to label it out-of-bounds. If you're going to shout hypocrisy!, you owe some explanation as to why we ought to take your charge seriously.
The Tiger Woods' implosion reminds one of the old American hypocrisy concern/dodge. Prior to two weeks ago, there was a human being named Tiger Woods, residing alongside a Madison Ave-created figment also called Tiger Woods--an entity wafting around the culture, managed by professional image-enhancers, no doubt with their own oft-sated flattery demands. As a physical reality, this Tiger Woods consisted of trillions of electrons bouncing around the country and world, onto screens and in front of eyeballs.
We've since learned Woods isn't just a quiet, excellence-loving, wife-kissing bourgeois--or the air-brushed WASP fantasy of the expensive-watch ads--but a carnivorous man who reacts as most men do, when somewhat arbitrarily flung into the status stratosphere. The human Woods isn't merely the uxorious, poker-faced study-sitter limned by the electron tsunami, but a skirt-chasing slob no different from the next parvenu. A Benetton Denny Hecker. (It's nice to see a self-promoting phony get his comeuppance, particularly when it isn't me.)
X2 and I were dissecting the Tiger Woods matter. She came to his defense, accepting Wood's innocence in the creation of his own myth, prior to two weeks ago. She accepts the former Woods image as something society created and foisted upon a non-participating, innocent Woods. (Woods elicits a strong maternal reaction in the fairer sex, no?) But the golfer was a knowing participant in the creation of his remunerative Gatsby schtick, and then the shit hit the fan. Whoop di doo--even if we acknowledge his underlying 'crime' is of no concern.
