Being Mean to Richard Quest and Tom Friedman: Can We Have a Little Humanity and Class on the Blogosphere, Please?

I'm a newbie in this blogging game. I started because I want to help enact health reform and I support Barack Obama. I'm still learning the ropes. At 45, I'm also an oldster when compared with most other writers and my legions of screaming fans. I hope this posting doesn't come off as the objections of some fastidious uncle.

There is a proper place in the blogosphere for expressing our screaming ids. There is a place for righteous anger directed at the people who have enmeshed our nation in a foolish mismanaged war. There is a place for sharp-edged humor and, yes, ridicule to communicate the occasional needed insight. Since we are living in bad and frustrating times, it is easy to forget that we must sometimes pull back, to behave with decency and civility towards human beings who falter in various ways, and towards those with whom we disagree.

Consider the reaction of HuffPo posters and readers towards two recent stories. The first concerned the arrest of CNN reporter Richard Quest on a drug possession charge. Mr. Quest was apparently snagged for violating a Central Park curfew. He admitted to the officers that he was holding a small amount of methamphetamine, presumably for personal use. Media accounts included gratuitous salacious details that could only be intended to humiliate him while drawing undeserved attention to publicity-seeking police officers and the crass New York Post reporters and editors who gleefully reported it. Lots of people are chuckling. Ribald emails are flying across the internet.

I like a good dirty joke myself, but these aren't funny. As far as I can tell, we are trashing a guy who has some sort of substance use problem, but who didn't drive drunk, didn't abuse a spouse or a child, didn't fight the cops. He didn't get intoxicated and act gross. OK he's a CNN reporter, but he's not holding nuclear codes, making public policy, or driving an 19-wheeler in the next lane. I don't see why his drug problems are anybody's business but his own. Plenty of people who don't hesitate to criticize barbaric drug laws don't seem to understand that.

I've been researching substance abuse interventions and policy for 15 years now. I have talked with many people who are drug dependent or who have misused drugs in various ways. I almost never use the term "drug addict." I just don't know who these people are. I don't like the totalizing label. It creates an unpleasant psychological distance that is both hurtful and counterproductive for public policies and for treatment interventions. Mr. Quest is an interesting and accomplished person. His life is hardly summarized by his arrest the other night. I wish him well. I wish the rest of us would show a little compassion and discretion as he goes through rehab.

Then there are the pies thrown at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman during his lecture at Brown University. Friedman isn't popular around these parts, because he supported the Iraq war. He deserves criticism for that, it's fair game to make fun of him for his rather molding globalization shtick he delivers all over the place for big lecture fees. He does not deserve to have two creepy guys rush him at the podium and pelt him with pies. He also deserves better than the comments posted by many HuffPo readers reacting to this event. Apparently, if you don't like somebody's politics it's ok to throw things at them.

I watched the YouTube clip. For a moment there, he was genuinely scared. I would have been. Somewhere in the back of his mind -- in the back of every celebrity's mind -- must be the fear that some nutcase will harm him to get attention, impress Jodie Foster, advance some political agenda, or take revenge for some casual comment he made in some interview three years ago. Hitting a lecturer with a pie is a juvenile act of aggression that deprives the audience of the chance to hear Friedman's perspective. It makes more civil people who disagree with Friedman look like jerks, as well.

By the way, it is very uncreative and unfunny. Is this the best that radical Brown students can do? My friend Mark Kleiman in two minutes came up with many ribald and pointed alternative things a truly clever person could have done that don't involve personal aggression.

Most of all, it is an act of cruelty, minor to be sure, designed to humiliate an actual human being. In our TV and celebrity-obsessed culture, we tend to see people like Friedman and Quest through the lens of their celebrity and their political views. In fact, however, they are flesh and blood people like the rest of us. I feel the same way about Idaho Senator Larry Craig. I don't like his Senate record, but I'm glad he resisted being railroaded by his Republican colleagues.

Throughout my career as a public health researcher, I have learned and re-learned that risk-taking for comfort, excitement, or pleasure is a symptom of our common humanity. Like Mr. Quest, many Americans struggle to hide some covert vice. Like Senator Craig, many of us feel powerful drives that brighten our lives but that can also hurt us and those we love. I might add: like Mr. Friedman, some of us have been wrong about something important.

Most of all, I wish the rest of us would show some humanity and class. Commenting on the travesty of President Clinton's impeachment proceedings, Philip Roth wrote that Bill Clinton's White House should have hung a banner saying: "A human being lives here." There is something ugly about the mob mentality a personal scandal or even a pie in the face can unleash. We can do better.

Comments

[WorkingClass]

"For a moment there, he was genuinely scared" We wouldn't want a war monger to actually experience fear, now would we. Screw Friedman!

[S1m0n]

I give up. What does the blogosphere have to do with either event?

The NYPD sure ain't the blogosphere, and neither are pie n'pamphlet throwing campus activists. The author of this piece resorted to youtube to see video of Friedman's attempted pieing, so he can't be against that.

So what was the point of this screed, besides the strawman attack?

[InofTouch]

Two Wrongs, don't make a right.

[SamEllison]

Central Park at 3:40am and a college prank poorly executed are two different things.
No where near; torture, kidnapping to torture, making preventive war on civilians and occupying that country with no end in sight.
You saying something about our humility???????????

[OtayPanky]

Harold Pollock writes: Most of all, I wish the rest of us would show some humanity and class.

===

Can't we all just get along?

Listen, Harold: It's not the blogosphere, even though they call it that. It's the BLOGOSTAN.

It most certainly is a convenient venue for ids and superegos, as well as egos. You can wish it otherwise - and while your at it, wish for world peace, too.

[BobMunck]

We had some of this discussion on the Brown Alumni mailing list. My position: if they'd set up picket lines or asked really good questions in the Q&A period, would anyone ever have heard about it? Would you have written this blog entry?

Freidman was "genuinely scared?" I'm genuinely scared that this person is an NYT columnist and is allowed to appear on television.

Freidman is more in need of a pie-in-the-face than any other white man on earth. Our pie throwers apparently mostly missed; what Brown needs is more and better pie throwers. We should explore endowing on-campus practice facilities and target ranges. Perhaps a system of scholarships for high school kids that are really good with the kool-whip.

[SamThornton]

If anyone ever deserved a pie in the face, it's Thomas Friedman, the poster boy for all that is wrong in today's so-called journalism.

[burnt]

I have the capacity to forgive or ignore deviance of most types... especially if it's consenting or victimless.

However, you lost me on Friedman. Globalization as it is practiced today, is at best incredibly harmful or life threatening to millions of people worldwide (accurate death tolls are not kept... in order to protect the innocent).

If the US dropped pies instead of bombs, I might be able to feel sympathy for poor little frightened Tom Friedman... but he IS part of the problem, and until he realizes that fact,... well, perhaps a couple pies are in order, no matter how juvenile the act might seem to you. He promotes far worse and the results are terrorizing to all by a very small few.

As for civility and decorum on the blogosphere... this isn't your mother's parlor. I've worked decades to promote the medium that you are using, mainly insure that people of all walks could break through the barriers imposed by those who would constrain discourse to fit their own personal model of propriety.

You are here because people stood up and said something akin to "NO! Don't censor me." Now, I realize there are limits... words, however, are mostly just words... not bombs... or pies.

alienated in Seattle

[tompoe]

Globalization and "growing the economic pie", according to Friedman, relies on his sometimes idiotic assumptions that do serious harm to the discussion on hunger, healthcare, and enhancement of the world community's overall health and well-being. If you missed the connection, the Brown students will forgive you, maybe.

[pdbim]

People like to be titillated..and of course, they are really glad it's not them...so they go at it even harder...

[RabidRightRebel]

Perhaps we are just tired of load mouth shumcks. Both Freidman and Quest easily fall into the narcissistic I am so much smarter than the rest of the world category. Perhaps if these blowhards would adopt a little more humility people would not laugh so hard when they make fools of themselves.

[InofTouch]

So what dose that say about you then.