Hands up, everyone who thought Bob Etheridge behaved horrendously when he grabbed the wrist of that college kid!
Is that everyone? What a lot of hands.
In the past few days, ever since videos went viral of the North Carolina Democrat’s heated encounter with two camera-wielding youths on a Washington sidewalk, the world — particularly its conservative half — seems to have been united in its condemnation of the man.
I just don’t get it. I’ve watched both videos and while Rep. Etheridge does not come off well, it seems to me that his reaction was frankly understandable and that the physical aggression began not with him, but with the young man who shoved his camera into the congressman’s face.
The self-described students — their faces are blurred on the video and they wouldn’t tell the lawmaker who they were — called out a question and then, as the older man passed, thrust the device close to him.
Honestly, who wouldn’t flare up? Wouldn’t you? It was a total breach of the unspoken rules of personal space, a concept that Americans normally respect.
Elsewhere in the world, people do things differently. In the Indian subcontinent, for instance, people will line up so close together that they’re leaning on each other’s shoulders and breathing down the necks of strangers.
Americans aren’t that way; we like our space. Indeed we use the expression “getting in someone’s face” exactly to describe a situation in which an aggressor tries to provoke a target.
Now: Of course Etheridge ought to have controlled himself. He acknowledged that with an apology and a promise to strive for “civil public discourse.”
Antagonistic camerawork has been a tool of opposition research for a long time. A U.S. congressman should be adroit in defusing such encounters, if not turning them to his advantage with a display of grace and wit. Etheridge certainly fell short of that mark.
Yet it was wrong, too, for those young men to jab at a man in the street with their cameras. They obviously had an agenda, and any feigned politeness notwithstanding, what they did was rude and unpleasant. If they were my sons I’d be taking back the car keys.
What’s distressing, to me, is that every incident of this sort pushes the boundaries a little farther. Michael Moore didn’t pioneer the on-camera gotcha moment — that honor surely belongs to Allen Funt of “Candid Camera” fame– but it was he who made it politically fashionable with his 1989 film “Roger and Me.” Whatever their politics, camera carriers who ambush other people are Moore’s demon spawn.
If yesterday it happened, via Moore, to auto executives and today it happens to congressmen, how long before it happens to you, O journalist, teacher, rabbi, or faceless midlevel functionary in a vast federal bureaucracy?
If the youths had asked Etheridge whether they could have an interview, or told him where they went to college, it would have been outrageous for him to react angrily. But they didn’t: They started recording, refused to identify themselves, and then retreated into the puerile defense that they were “just students, sir, that’s all we are.”
Sorry. Not good enough.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
