Early in the Internet’s life, and relatively late in his own, the great journalist Christopher Hitchens embarrassed me away from the Web. This embarrassment, luckily, did not involve his writing anything. He had invited me to work on a project and deadlines were approaching. I emailed him without getting a reply. This was unlike him. His reputation as one who drank life (and much else) to the lees was not exactly made up. But as long as the sun was below the yardarm, he was fastidious, even punctilious, about deadlines, word counts, correspondence, billing, and the other elements of an orderly writer’s workday.
“Do you check your email?” I asked him over the phone.
“Oh, yes!”
“Really?”
“Well. . .” he paused, before mumbling plummily, “not rilly.”
“You should have told me that.”
“I should think you’d understand, deh boy,” he said. “It’s a tebble thief of time, the Internet, daintchy think?”
Till then I had been an “early adopter.” I hadn’t considered myself one, but put it this way: Every time I signed on with a new Internet service provider my actual name was still available as an email address. A decade’s worth of corporate propaganda about how computers were going to revolutionize the workplace and blah-blah-blah must have done its work on me. Hitchens’s “thief of time” remark was a summons back to common sense. What revolutions mostly do is bestow power on a new set of creeps and impose drudgery on a new set of schmoes. They don’t make things more efficient. (Robert Gordon’s new history of American growth shows the tech revolution is no exception.)
The second wave of Internet innovation has passed me by. I neither poke nor ping nor Bing. Beware of geeks bearing GIFs is my motto. Except when an article requires it, I am not on (or in) Facebook, Instagram, Vine, or Yik Yak. The other day I realized there might be a downside to this. A friend told me that a mutual acquaintance had posted a kind tweet about an interview I’d done in a French newspaper. I went to look for it. There it was! And what fun! There were other flattering things there, too! One post described me as “hilarious, funny, irreverent, beautiful, bold and. . .” Jeesh! Except for beautiful, the guy had me down to a tee! But actually the word “beautiful” kept coming up. It looked like my modesty was just going to have to give way to popular consensus.
Then I came across a post about how beautiful I looked in a dress. Then an expression of amazement that “Christopher Caldwell peed onstage with this!” Then one that read simply “Don’t you love a drag queen?”
It turns out I share a name with not just a drag queen, but one of the great cross-dressing performers of our time. And not just that, but one who has won a spot on the long-running nationally televised show RuPaul’s Drag Race and has thereby gained an Internet following. He’s the one who’s “hilarious, funny, irreverent, beautiful, bold.” Me? I share a name with someone you might have heard of.
Now, this has happened to better men than me. The magnificent Irish essayist John Waters is almost impossible to find on the Internet underneath references to the Baltimore filmmaker of the same name. There is a superb British political scientist named Colin Crouch, but whenever you look for his writings online, you get referred to the books by another Colin Crouch, a chess master. When I was a boy, there were two NFL wide receivers named Gene Washington, one with the Minnesota Vikings, one with the San Francisco 49ers. It was hard to keep them straight, and that was before you threw in Gen. Washington, the one who crossed the Delaware.
I was hoping to find out more about my namesake. Unfortunately, in my ignorance of how the Internet works, I tend to fear cyber-cookies the way Chinese tourists fear communicable diseases. If there were an Internet equivalent of those surgical masks they wear on planes and trains, I’d wear it. I avoid links. One click on “peed onstage with this” and Google will put the computer I share with my wife on the list entitled “send them pictures of things people pee with.”
For now, all I can offer my namesake is congratulation. And commiseration. If it’s a nuisance for me to be told, “I hear you look great in an alligator-skin lamé cocktail dress,” the other Chris is probably no more thrilled about people coming up to him backstage, just as he’s applying his mascara, and saying: “What do you mean, ‘Trump is right about Putin’?”
