The Nationwide Laugh Fest for the video of the kiss cameras couple bends down in a Coldplay concert on the outskirts of Boston: Was it so bad or good?
The Canoodling couple only needed minutes to become viral, especially after Internet detectives identified the couple as Andy Byron, then executive director of the technological firm of the Eastern Costa, Astronomer and the then Chief of Astronomous Resources, Kristin Cabot, who is not Byron's wife. The parody memes began immediately, and they were frankly, fun. My two personal favorites were the recreations of AI that presented, respectively, Lego Minifigures and Gats. (Yes, AI is good for something).
As expected, the second thoughts and reaction were quickly in the media. Readers and spectators were reminded of substantial personal toll every time infidelity receives a public transmission, especially when helped by social networks. In this case, both participants renounced, and Byron has a wife and children who can be humiliated by the ridiculous surrounding the incident. (The current marital status of Cabot seems unclear, although there are reports that she was married to another CEO from February).
In the leftist tutor, the Miski Omar collaborator complained: “Public shame is now a participatory sport.” She asked: “Was Doxing, the intense and invasive publication of private details a proportional response?” The Unherd on the right was even more indignant. The columnist Matthew Gasda wrote: “While turning someone into a meme may seem fun, it is very indignant and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society to participate in a sadistic pile.”
I respectfully disagree. George Orwell wrote an essay in 1941 about cheap and slightly swollen humorous postcards that the British working class of the time simply loved. The majority of the jokes were sexual jokes, and changed with wide and raw human cartoons: the adulterer husband on the sender of seduction, the scolding wife with her chimney poker, the voluptuous young man who captures the attention of the husband for a moment when he will go back, a “sub-gloss of the headlines and the law of the girls.”
But as Orwell pointed out, the popularity of low bright postcards reflected not a decadent society but “a society that is still basically Christian”, that is, a society that still takes marriage and marriage votes seriously. It is only among the genuinely decadent, the cultural and intellectual elite, which you find rationalizations elaborated to deceive your spouse's back: it is “polyamor”, or it is “to have too much love to limit it to a person.” The rest of us can see the infidelity of what it is: a too related failure. And that is something healthy.
We also know how fast the extramarital commitments can at stake when the interest of a part is at stake. In the Coldplay video, the disturbing jump of Byron away from Cabot (while holding his face in his hands), once he realizes that the camera is on him, he leaves her alone. (I do not believe that Byron's wife is suffering any opprobrium of this, quite the opposite. All the tweets I have seen express hope that she takes him to the cleaners if there is a divorce).
The reason we laugh at incidents such as Fiasco Coldplay is not that we believe that we are morally superior to the embarrassed couple. We know, in our hearts, that even those of us that we are dedicated to our spouses could be a little tempted by the new attractive hiring, or the handsome executive that also has a couple of multimillion -dollar houses. Our laugh is the laugh of recognition in the defective and fallible human nature that we share with all others on the planet. As Orwell wrote, people are capable of selfless heroism when the occasion calls, but there is always “the other element in man, the lazy adulterer, cowardly and with debt that is within all of us, [and who] It can never be completely suppressed. “
He did not help, of course, that Cabot's work proved to be that of the human resources lady that everyone loves, the one who takes energetic measures against the romances of the office of other employees (perhaps not in Astronomer but in other places), and puts workers in trouble to complement the appearance of their colleagues. And how much privacy could Byron and Cabot have expected reasonably when they appeared together in a public concert, sitting in conspicuous seats?
Kiss Cams has been a characteristic of stadium events since the early 1980s, along with warning signs about video recording, and occasionally they have caught couples in relationships that did not want others to know, which should have served as a warning to exercise an appropriate discretion. Naturally, we should not put children or other vulnerable people under the glow of a public care center, but as for the rest of us adults: if you do not want to be in a kiss camera, do not go to places where there are kiss cameras.
Then I say: they do not apologize for the jokes. They show that we, as a society, still have a robust respect for the institution of marriage and marital loyalty. In addition, the memes have been terribly fun.
Charlotte Allen is an arts and culture columnist for Quillette and film critic for Salmagundi.
