6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Suzanne Harrington: Can we leave the Coldplay couple alone now?
Are you mean? Not with money — although that sucks too — but towards others?
We live, says author Stuart Jeffries in his brilliant forthcoming book on stupidity, in an age of 'spitegeist'. That is 'where joy in others' misfortune and in others' displays of ignorance is addictive'.
Not since public executions in the town square have we been so united in our delighted spite, thanks to the speed and power of the internet. Shazam.
We are all shrieking with laughter at your misfortune, in a town square gone global.
The spitegeist is schadenfreude on steroids. You've slipped on a spectacularly stupid banana skin and we are crowding over you, gurning and hooting like gibbons.
Hang on, though. Shouldn't we have evolved out of this by now? Not a chance. You'd think that Coldplay kiss cam couple had been caught killing kittens, or committing war crimes, the way we reacted.
With hilarity, yes — not only was their reaction comedic (for us, not them), but it happened at a Coldplay concert. Ha ha ha ha. Double awful.
But the spitegeist kept going, and destroyed the framework of their lives, despite no kittens having been killed, no war crimes committed.
Adultery, yes, but these two were private citizens and this global town square was not Jeddah or Kabul or the 14th century — so why the tarring and feathering, the public drubbing? The moralising, the high-horsing?
I'm not standing up for individuals cheating on their partners or families — come on — but for their right to be awful without the entire internet gathering pitchforks, and their company (now a household name — should the hapless Coldplay kiss cam couple invoice them for publicity services?) going turbo-puritanical on their ass.
Since when does the corporate world, perpetually prepped to prostitute its own granny for profit, have the right to moralise about anything? Ever? In a country run by an elected racist rapist? Do me a favour.
Similar spitegeisting happened to that New York-based, South African-born PR woman who in 2013 tweeted: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get Aids. Just kidding. I'm white!'
Twelve stupid words to her 170 followers retweeted to a journalist with 15,000 followers equalled spitegeist multiplied by n — when she disembarked in Cape Town 11 hours later, she'd been fired from her job, internationally reviled, shamed as a crass, clueless racist. A modern monster.
Trending worldwide as she turned her phone on, to tweets like: 'We are about to watch this @_____ bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.'
In Jon Ronson's 2015 book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, the woman said she was not being racist, but highlighting an Aids situation nobody in the US bothered to think about: 'Living in America puts us in a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the world. I was making fun of that bubble.'
The internet — which veers between South Park levels of humour and flaming pitchforks — missed the nuance.
'If I don't start making steps to reclaim my identity and remind myself of who I am on a daily basis, then I might lose myself,' she told Ronson.
She did eventually recover from being spitegeisted — in that she's still alive, still working. Unlike Caroline Flack.
Just a thought, but maybe we could redirect our spitegeist energy more productively towards the actively spiteful — the Trumps, the Tommy Robinsons, the public haters and dividers, the actual war criminals?
And leave the ordinary idiots alone?
