Personal P.R.

In early June of 2010, a group of young people broke into the Albuquerque Zoo and got up close and personal with a number of the animals there. How do we know? Because they took pictures of their encounters and posted them on Facebook.

I will pass over the obvious danger of kissing a giraffe on the nose while taking a flash photograph of the event. What amazes me–yet again, for this happens all the time–is that someone did something illegal, then not only documented it but posted the documentation for God and everybody to see.

I have been writing about computers for over 25 years and made email and other electronic communications the subject of my 2004 Ph.D. dissertation in cultural anthropology. I might have thought that in all this time people would have gotten smarter about how they commmunicate electronically, but with the advent of social media apparently the opposite has occured. People get fired from their jobs for ill-judged Tweets, people end up not getting hired in the first place because prospective employers are only a Google away from seeing high-res pix of a job candidate’s last debauch in San Diego, people break up because of the Hansel and Gretel-like trail of pink bits that a cheating paramour leaves, in spite of all precaution, for an aggrieved partner to see.

Used to be only actors and politicians had a public image, which they hired and paid P.R. agents copious amounts to manage. Now, anyone who is on
the Web has an image. And yet most of us fail to manage it.

My stars, some could write a book about the subject–and maybe I will, you don’t know. In the meantime, though, what I truly wish everyone would keep in mind as a first principle is just this: Anything that leaves your computer, iPad, or cell phone may be seen by anybody and everybody in the world.

It might not be, especially if it’s uninteresting or unobjectionable. But if you snap a picture of your naughty bits and send it in a text message to a prospective partner, that picture can be forwarded (with your name on it) from Tiburon to Timbuktu. (This event will be made much more likely, of course, if you have a nasty break-up with said partner.) If you forward a tasteless, racist email to thirty of your closest friends, it can be forwarded and forwarded (with your name on it) until it reaches someone who’ll take exception to it, and if you’re a politician and the exception-taker is in the media, Heaven help you. If you post twenty-one pictures of yourself getting blind stinking drunk on Jello shots for your 21st birthday, no matter how tightly you lock down your Facebook security those pictures are still available to be saved and passed around (with your name on them) so that you cannot claim surprise when the East Taboga Public School District decides you are not a suitable candidate to teach Civics to their 9th graders.

I could state all this more simply as a corollary to the initial principle of what I call the Digital Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. In this case, do no harm to yourself. Before you click ‘Send’ ask yourself: Is there any way this could jump up and bite me in the butt later? If the answer is ‘yes,’ no matter how unlikely a ‘yes,’ just click ‘Delete’ instead. After all, you’ve got an image to uphold.

Deep Fat

In the 1973 Woody Allen comedy Sleeper two characters from the future are discussing the dietary habits of the past:
Dr. Melik: “You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?”
Dr. Aragon: “Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”
I thought of this because the other night I did something I haven’t done in a while: I fried chicken in bacon fat. It was delectable.
Lard has been rehabilitated. Mind, it isn’t health food. It’s still pure fat and loaded with calories and unwholesome when consumed in mass quantities. It’s just that it isn’t the pure poison that it was formerly thought to be. That position, at least in lipid terms, now belongs to trans fats such as we find in hydrogenated vegetable oils. I find it poignantly ironic that my grandmother, who died of heart disease at the age of 77, gave up lard years and years ago to instead fry everything in Crisco, thinking this to be the healthier alternative. Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
My grandmother had a lot of bacon fat in the kitchen. My grandfather had bacon for breakfast just about every morning, except for a few years after his first, mild heart-attack when he consumed egg substitutes (there’s another bad food recently returned good) and those gawdawful engineered ‘breakfast strip’ products that tasted of salt, soy, and nitrate. A little of the bacon fat my grandmother collected went to season the green beans and black-eyed peas. But mostly it went into gravy for the cats.
Every morning my grandmother made a large skillet of what she called ‘cat gravy.’ There were a large number of feral cats on the farm–and a few tame ones. We grandchildren were responsible for the latter; when my grandfather reported the location of a new litter of kittens, we would find and handle them. One time when I was a teenager I encountered a grizzled old gray tom who instead of running, looked up at me and said ‘Mew!’ in a sweet little tenor voice. Turned out I had tamed, and forgotten, him years before. When I saw him, he was coming up to have breakfast at the gravy trough, but he stopped to beg me, as an old friend, to scratch him behind his battle-scared ears.
The cats knew there was bacon-fat gravy to be had every morning at about nine o’clock. They would start coming up from the barn about that time, gathering on the old cistern on which rested the small, shallow, cast-iron receptacle into which my grandmother poured the gravy once it had cooled. She said it kept them going when mice and rats were scarce. I think she did it because she just couldn’t bear to throw the rich, golden renderings of bacon away.
I did it myself for years: threw the bacon fat away. That’s after my first cholesterol reading came back in my late 30s and showed that my bloodstream had so much lipid in it that you could, in one colleague’s memorable phrase, ‘churn butter out of it.’ I’ve learned since that diet is only a small factor in this number, and that a congenitally overactive liver is much more to blame. Generic Zocor does an admirable job of keeping it in check, and gives me hope as I pass 50 that I won’t be repeating my grandfather’s coronary experience in five year’s time. Statins, and the recently lifting of the taboo against the fat of the pig, have brought my bacon fat jar back.
Julia Child said on more than one occasion (she wrote it in her magnum opus The Way to Cook, for instance) that we should not be afraid of our food. The key, children, is moderation. Moderation in all things, including in temperance. We don’t need to shun the things we love, we simply must avoid indulging in them to excess. So I looked out a smaller chicken when I planned this fried-chicken dinner, and I cut the split breast portions into two, for a total of four. As I bit into my steaming hot piece, moist and tender and every-so-slightly smokey in a way that set off the sharpness of the black pepper and the perfume of the sage, I could not have been happier. I’ll have to remember that.

Truth in Headlining

I clicked a link on a news site, “Nick Clegg warns Barack Obama over ‘megaphone diplomacy’,” surprised that the relatively mild-mannered leader of the UK’s Lib. Dem. party would be sending such a stern message to President Obama. No such thing. The link opened an article on the UK’s Telegraph newspaper web site, documenting a question-and-answer session after a Clegg speech in Spain. If anything, Mr. Clegg was explaining to his questioner why he wasn’t going to fire back at Obama. His remarks were not addressed to the U.S. president nor were they critical of anything particular that has been said about the BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. In essence, the Telegraph completely mis-characterized Clegg’s remarks.
Happens all the time, doesn’t it? And it isn’t associated with a particular spot on the ideological spectrum. I find inaccurate and misleading headlines about political statements coming from both left and right wings. I suppose spicing up the headline leads to more views for the associated material–it got me to click the Clegg story–but somewhat at the expense of the overall credibility of the site doing the spicing.
Short of some Quixotic campaign to write comments on and letters to every site that offends in this way, I am at a loss what to do. I suspect, sadly, that nothing would be effective in getting writers to stop and think about how they’re characterizing an event, make sure to get it right, and, most importantly, to not let their own political position influence their characterizations any more than they can help.