Raked Over the Coals

A good friend's husband was nominated a while back for a high-level job in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and almost immediately a few people started loudly declaring that he wasn't the right person for the job. This strikes me as an example of what Hamlet called the "the spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy takes." I wish I could sort it all out for you, but I can't—too involved. Much of it has to do with coal mining, and the complicated controversies involved in that. All I can do is tell you what happened to me once, quite a few years ago, in a completely unrelated situation.

I was a freelance reporter for a big-city newspaper at the time, and I did a story about how a film production was going on in a small rural town. While I was researching it, the film folks asked me if I wanted to be an extra in the film, and pretty much for a lark, I said yes.

It turned out not to be quite the lark I'd anticipated. The film sequences I was supposed to be in were set in a bowling alley in the 1960s, and the production company had found a suitable spot out in the country, and they had hired locals as extras. I soon saw that the locals hadn't done it as a lark—they did it because they were out of work and it paid 50 bucks a day. Not much, but more than nothing. It was also not a lark for them because we were literally objects to the film folks. The production people didn't use the term "extra"—we were called "background." That was exactly the term used. And when I looked at the other, well, background, I could see from their demeanor that they knew just where they stood in the scheme of things. Eventually I got so depressed by the situation that I just quit.

On one of the last days, one of the other extras accosted me. A middle-aged looking woman, she came striding up to me glaring, accompanied by a child who looked to be about six. "Did you tell my little girl she couldn't use the bathroom?" she asked.

This was dumbfounding: I'd never seen either of them. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said. A woman from the production company noticed trouble brewing and was there in a moment. "He's not a member of the crew," she said.

The mother didn't care. "Somebody told my little girl a scene was going on and she couldn't use the bathroom until it was done," the woman said. She looked down at the girl, who was clutching a parental leg, sucking her thumb. "Was it him, honey?"

The little girl didn't say anything. She just kept sucking her thumb, glaring at me herself. And she slowly nodded "yes."

It's understandable. I didn't look like the other extras, in my wire-rimmed glasses and leather jacket. I looked a bit like the crew. I was the Other. Understandable, as I say. But eerie, too. She was wrong. Absolutely, unequivocally wrong. I had done no such thing. But she said I had. And meant it. In her mind, I was the bad guy, although in real life we'd never encountered each other.

Eventually things simmered down. The mother and daughter stalked away, unconvinced. But ever since, when people accuse someone else of doing something bad without any convincing proof or real evidence of wrongdoing at all, I've thought about that incident.

My own accusers had no power at all, and someone who did have power knew that I had no power either, and couldn't have been the culprit. So nothing came of it. But what if the accusers had gotten someone powerful to back them up? People end up in all kinds of dicey situations for just such trivial things. That little girl nodded "yes," and in a different situation, it would have been so much the worse for me.

My obvious point is that in this world, people hurl accusations with little thought of the consequences. Innocent people are jailed, tortured, killed. Upstanding people have their characters blackened.

So maybe we should stop playing politics with people's careers, reputations, lives, what have you. Maybe we should have some epistemological humility, and ask ourselves, "Could I be wrong?" Because quite often, you know, we are. You, me, that little girl, all of us. Sort of comes with the territory. If you've ever been wrongly accused of something, then maybe you understand.

UPDATE: The department involved is Interior, not EPA. The point remains the same—let's just stop all the accusing people of being horrible corrupt evil destroyers just because we have some point of disagreement with them. Just try to accomplish something in the real world and see how easy it is to get things done and maintain some ideal of never-existed purity as well. It isn't.

FURTHER UPDATE: I don't mean to go on and on (saying that is always a signal that a person is going to go on and on) but this stuff really does happen all the time. One of the best people I've ever known was a building manager. One of his jobs was to manage the contracts for the vending machines, and to keep costs down they had these no-name brands of crackers and such. So this big upstanding churchgoing person was complaining about the crackers and blandly suggested that he was probably taking graft to have them there. Now, see, to my mind, if you go around accusing people of being corrupt because you don't like the brand of crackers they chose, you're pretty much functionally insane and in a sense you're a danger to others. In most states that means you can be locked up in a mental hospital. I'm just sayin'. At any rate, people really shouldn't go around making baseless accusations. It's not nice. Not to go on about it or anything.