All of us make questionable decisions.
I remember, for instance, the day in 1982 when I was driving my 1968 Mustang in Phoenix, Arizona, much faster than was prudent on a road that gradually curved to the left. It is vital to this story that you understand that the car had leather, bench-style seats, and while the car had seat belts, those seat belts were detached and sitting loose in the trunk. Therefore, by the time I completed the curve, I was steering from the passenger side of the front seat, where I had slid.
That’s just one of many poor choices I have made in my life, and one of the few I am willing to share.
Happily, though, none of my poor decisions has involved putting shoe polish on my face or attempting to blackmail the richest man in the world, which are two of the biggest poor decisions in the news the past week.
Perhaps I would have made at least the first of those decisions if I had hit my teens or 20s while living in Virginia, where during the 1970s and ‘80s apparently every young white man out for fun on the town donned blackface and posed in front of a camera to immortalize his stupidity.
Luckily, though, my family lived in Virginia for only a couple of years and moved to North Carolina when I was 6. I did not live in Virginia again until I was nearly 36. The only things I ever slathered on my face were red and gray paint (my high school colors), Oxy10 (acne ointment), sunscreen, and aloe vera when I forgot the sunscreen.
It also has never occurred to me to try to blackmail or extort someone with unlimited means to fight back, as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, says the owner of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc., attempted to do to him. The Enquirer threatened to publish suggestive or lewd photos it had acquired that Bezos and his mistress had exchanged.
I can only imagine the conversation behind such a decision.
Enquirer stooge: “Hey, boss, I thought of a sure-fire way to get the richest man in the world to do what we want!”
Boss: “That would be a great thing, to have control of such a man. What is your plan?”
Stooge: “A secret source of mine gave me these sexy photos from his phone that he and his girlfriend sent back and forth.”
Boss: “Oh, yes?”
Stooge: “Yes.”
Boss: “Interesting.”
Stooge: “I’ll say. So what if we tell him that unless he does what we want, we’ll publish these photos and embarrass him? He’s sure to beg us and offer to do anything just so he won’t be embarrassed. It has never failed.”
Boss: “Now, this is the same man who made his billions founding a high-tech company, right? A company that relies on top security technology.”
Stooge: “Yeah, that’s him.”
Boss: “So he knows basically all of the top computer security experts in the world on a first-name basis, right?”
Stooge: “Well, he probably does.”
Boss: “And in theory he could spend many millions of dollars, far more than we have, to find out how we acquired those photos, take us to court and ruin us, leaving us to beg for pennies in the streets …”
Stooge: “Well, I mean, if you want to be pessimistic about it, maybe …”
Boss: “Hmmm.”
Stooge: “So what do you say, boss?”
Boss: “It’s a bold move. I say do it.”
Maybe the conversation didn’t go that way. But it’s hard to think of a reason no one involved didn’t consider what might go wrong with the plan. They even got lawyers involved. Perhaps they hired really bad lawyers – another poor decision.
I don’t say that I will never make a bad decision that tops these. After all, I’m on social media. That alone raises the odds. I drink beer – higher odds yet. Like many people, I have a smartphone and have Wi-Fi at home. In some ways, you could say that I and many others of us are practically begging for our darker angels to prod us into doing something impulsively stupid that will haunt us forever.
I hope by now I’m old enough to have enough healthy awareness of my own fragility to make me back away.
But I admit, anything’s possible.
I just find it hard to imagine.
Newsroom With A View 