Shame, shame, shame
by Tom Sullivan
Van Doren in the isolation booth on the quiz show “Twenty-One,” with host Jack Barry (1957). Public domain via Wikipedia.
You may be forgiven if, like me, you missed the passing this week of Charles Van Doren, the one-time “Quiz Show Whiz Who Wasn’t.” For a few weeks in the 1950s, the Columbia University English instructor from a literary family dazzled the country on a televised quiz show that turned out to have been rigged.
But that revelation came only after he had walked away with the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money, tens of thousands of fan letters and marriage proposals, and the cover of Time magazine. It was all a fraud.
In the 1950s, that fraud was a scandal. From his obituary on Wednesday:
“I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years,” he said. He said he had agonized in a moral and mental struggle to come to terms with his own betrayals.
He lost his job at Columbia, NBC canceled his contract, and, along with others who had lied to the grand jury about their quiz show roles, he pleaded guilty to second-degree perjury, a misdemeanor, and received a suspended sentence. Many contestants shared the guilt, but the publicity spotlighted Mr. Van Doren because of his family’s prominence.
Conservative tax foe Grover Norquist famously threatened to drown government in the bathtub. With their fealty to Donald Trump what conservatives drowned instead is shame itself, writes Brett Stephens. Today, Van Doren’s perfidy would be shrugged away, explained away, and monetized. Probably with Trumpish bluster and “without apparently triggering any kind of internal emotional crisis.”
The annihilation of shame in Trump might be explained away with psychological diagnoses. (Surely, there are a panoply.) But his cult followers get no such pass, especially given their vainglorious moralizing over the decades since Van Doren:
It was once the useful role of conservatives to resist these sorts of trends — to stand athwart declining moral standards, yelling Stop. They lost whatever right they had to play that role when they got behind Trump, not only acquiescing in the culture of shamelessness but also savoring its fruits. Among them: Never being beholden to what they said or wrote yesterday. Never holding themselves to the standards they demand of others. Never having to say they are sorry.
Trump-supporting conservatives — the self-aware ones, at least — justify this bargain as a price worth paying in order to wage ideological combat against the hypostatized evil left. In fact it only makes them enablers in the degraded culture they once deplored. What Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx is to Smollett, they are to Trump.
By coincidence, a talk here by Wendell Potter on Wednesday brought evidence that shame’s demise may be greatly exaggerated. Potter is the former Cigna insurance executive whose “road to Damascus” began with a visit to the Remote Area Medical free clinic in Wise, Virginia. His appearance on Bill Moyers Journal led me there as well. Witnessing the spectacle of thousands of Americans, neighbors maybe (Potter is from nearby east Tennessee), receiving medical care at a county fairground in animal stalls and under open tents left the corporate communications specialist shaken.
Health care advocate Wendell Potter speaking in Asheville, NC April 10.
But it was not the final straw that made Potter a corporate whistleblower. He writes about that experience at Tarbell:
I’ve been asked many times if there was one thing, one moment, that led me to leave my job at a big health insurance corporation. Yes, there was, and it occurred five days before Christmas in 2007. That was when a beautiful 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan passed away, days after the company I worked for refused to pay for a liver transplant that her doctors believed would save her life. A few days after Nataline’s death, I turned in my notice.
It had been Potter’s job to spin the company’s refusal to intervene to save the young woman’s life. By the time a wash of bad publicity forced the company to agree to the transplant, it was too late. Nataline Sarkisyan died hours after Potter watched on television as a Cigna representative told her mother it would cover the transplant.
Since then, Potter has done penance as a health care advocate and insurance industry critic.
Shame may not be dead. But its existence as a curb on debauchery, corruption, and worse hangs by a thread.