It’s…why we should all be a little more ashamed our ourselves
the superbug of shamelessness
I have this joke — it’s dumb and problematic if you squint — that July should be Shame Month. This is my WASP ass talking: after the celebrations of Pride, we all ought to hide inside the cage of our neuroses and feel bad about ourselves.
Honestly I think the culture could do with a bigger superego. This, at least, was my first thought when my girlfriend showed me that regional Kanye spot from the Super Bowl. The ad is innocuous enough, funny, even, in the non sequitur deadpan he adopts to report that he blew through his budget on new teeth and thus has to film his promo from the chair at the dentist in vertical video. But the man who’s not often lost for words then stutters: “um....go to yeezy.com.”
If you had followed his instructions, you would have been directed to a page, since taken down, that featured a single item on sale for twenty bucks: a white tee with a big swastika.
The shamelessness has always been the point for Kanye. His sheer gall is on display in that excellent documentary from a few years back, Jeen-yuhs. It’s amazing that there’s so much footage of Kanye’s pre-breakthrough years at all, but that’s the bit. Who’s this kid dragging a film crew around to capture him cajoling Jay-Z into giving him studio time? The same kid who almost dies in a car crash, gets his jaw sutured shut and records a song anyway, wins a Grammy, and then gives, in my mind, the best acceptance speech anyone’s ever given at an award show. He’s brash, boisterous, maybe even boyish.
But it’s been a long time since Kanye was a plucky underdog. The world that rewarded his “jackass” antics1 — where content is king, attention is currency, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity if you have the stomach for the spotlight — is the same one that produced the world’s richest man sieg heiling at the inauguration ceremony of a reality TV president.
If the out-and-out Naziism of some of this country’s 21st century icons indicates an erosion of our culture’s moral sensibility, it comes on the heels of the great moral retrenchment of the last decade.2 Surely these phenomena are connected: as one tribe brands certain behavior impermissible, so another gleefully crosses the line.
I don’t think you can understand this battle between Nazis and Puritans without a compelling story of how shame and its cousin, power, have worked over the last decade. Here’s one such story.
Shame is the mightiest weapon of the weak. Even the meekest among us have recourse to stamping our opponents as wicked and casting them from the accepted bounds of society. The use of shaming as a tactic to enforce a threatened moral order got supercharged when Trump was first elected in 2016. What protest leaders on campus — of which I was one, a relatively powerless student looking for leverage against a relatively powerful college administration, including through moral suasion — had known as “call out culture” metastasized into the public as cancel culture.3 The logic was, I think, sound: Trump was a disease to the body politic that needed to be quarantined and flushed.
Our country was caught in a kind of fever (“hyperpolitics,” in Anton Jäger’s word) in those years. The moral antibodies deployed by the #Resistance shamed those who could be shamed, but there were strains of the disease with a resistance of their own. Those strains got stronger as the weaker ones were culled, resulting in a superbug of shamelessness. If you could withstand the moral onslaught of shaming, either through independent wealth or unscrupulous friends or sheer force of will, you could profit from the attention. Witness the Trump shitcoin scam, Anna Delvey’s turn on the catwalk during New York Fashion Week, Kanye reporting that his wife was the most googled topic on the planet when she showed up basically naked at the Grammys.
If you buy this story — and I’m not sure I do — then the disease has overwhelmed the medicine. We could chalk up the damped response to Trump’s second victory as the willpower of the #Resistance breaking against the shamelessness of MAGA. I’m reminded of Stokely Carmichael’s criticism of MLK: "in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”4 If you’ve concluded that you cannot shame the shameless, then the internet’s worship of Luigi Mangione becomes a bit clearer.
But the story has problems. Foremost, I think, is that shame ought to be a weapon of last resort among the most powerless. Instead it’s been a first defense, overprescribed by those who often hold quite a bit of power, whether through social capital, organizational rank, philanthropic support, institutional reputation, college attainment, net worth, whatever. There is a long list of actions between character assassination and actual assassination. That list is the work of politics.
Our politics, then, must start with a new prescription. Shaming can draw attention to misdeeds successfully, but those without shame are often able to parlay this attention into more power, control, and wealth. The rest of us become trapped in the spectacle, incapable of doing anything but gawk.
Shamelessness is the psychic thread that ties Kanye and Elon and Trump together. It’s their superpower. The emperor who wears no clothes must still invent reasons for his nakedness. In the Hans Christian Andersen fable, the reason is that they’re made of magic silk, visible only to fools. It’s a lie that protects the emperor from feeling shame, like so much of our etiquette. But the emperor who wears no clothes and doesn’t care dispenses with those reasons. Even after the ruse has been spoiled by the child, the story ends with the emperor prancing in the buff prouder than ever. He is, after all, still emperor.
It’s not shame that will depose the tyrant, then, but politics: the strategic undermining of his support. And maybe key figures within the Trump coalition can still be shamed. It’s worth finding out, especially since the people “just following orders” are often not as shameless as their superiors. Not for nothing, the $400 million contract for armored Teslas from the State Department — a flagrant example of Musk enriching himself from the Oval Office — seems to have been paused for now.
It will take strong judgement to determine when shame should be deployed and when it will backfire, but that’s strategy. We’ll have to be honest about the power we do have, and wield it well.
So here’s why we should all feel just a little more ashamed of ourselves: as evidence that the great plurality of humanity speaks through our conscience, shame reminds us of the courage it takes to act, to risk failure, and still to choose. It is evidence that we are more than just ego. That’s a gift in a culture trapped by self-obsession.
Burn After Reading
My friend
has a wonderful missive about contesting the meaning of the American flag, a symbol that has meany many different things throughout the country’s history:I live in the unfortunate reality, like many of us, that the only two homes I’ve ever known—Poland and the United States—have governments infused with far-right ideology. Yet, I remain proud because I know what’s possible. I remain proud because I’m an organizer. And as an organizer, I’ve seen symbols make movements.
The flag is not neutral. Its meaning is contested, and that contest is part of the struggle itself.
With fifteen years perspective, it’s telling that Obama used that word to reprimand Kanye, calling to mind the stuntmen who themselves anticipated so many viral challenge memes.
I’m tempted to use Andrew Sullivan’s term Great Awokening here, but I can’t bring myself to. While I appreciate the connection that he makes to the unique Americanness of social justice culture as well as to the religiosity of its adherents, I think the term obfuscates the role that corporate and political elites played in pushing symbolism over substance when it came to solutions to America’s punishing racial, gender, and class hierarchies.
A genealogy of these two names would be a fun research project. For now I’ll note that blog fav Mark Fisher wrote an essay in 2013 that commented on the ritualistic “calling out” of lefty figures on Twitter. One of his examples was Russell Brand, which, well, to quote Kendrick at the halftime show, “you picked the right time but the wrong man.”
My cursory search to find the source of the quotation only yielded this janky Facebook video of Carmichael. It seems to me like he’s being slightly tongue-in-cheek, satisfied to have landed a nice zinger.