Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

I had notified an officer, even before I got close to the front of the line, that I would opt for the pat-down, and he promised to find me a female assist. In navigating security, I had learned to be exceedingly polite—and patient. Now, at the front of the line, I inquired respectfully about every five minutes. I was (consistently) told that the staffing was short and I would just have to wait, and sometimes was even asked “What time is your flight?” If there was a sense of urgency among the TSA staff, I could not detect it.

Meanwhile, my flight departure time was approaching, other fliers were being processed through security, and I wanted to at least be able to grab a cup of coffee before boarding.

My polite entreaties obviously were not working.

Inwardly growing perturbed, but outwardly sporting a big smile, I burst forth with the first verse of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the top of my lungs. In full voice, and mustering up full stage presence like an opera singer, I gave it my all. The idea had just come to me that a headline TSA ARRESTS WOMAN FOR SINGING NATIONAL ANTHEM could be a little embarrassing for the powers that be. After all, singing “The Star Spangled Banner” could certainly be seen as a patriotic display, even as an endorsement of U.S. airport security procedures and the idea that they keep America safe.

What happened next? At first, all the officers looked around confusedly, trying to figure out where the singing was coming from. A loudspeaker, perhaps?

Then they spotted me, smiling and singing at full throttle well into the first verse. I was just about up to the “land of the free and home of the brave.”

How long do you think it took them to find that elusive female assist?

I had barely finished the first verse before a TSA officer waved me through to my handler, who patted me down and sent me on my merry way. I got my coffee and made my flight.

For a few moments there, I felt empowered, though airport staff may have felt chagrined. Later I realized how proud I was of my success—of having beaten the system. It was like the pride I (and routinely many others) felt when they successfully maneuvered the challenges of everyday life in communist Eastern Europe in, say, getting that scarce item in a store through a relationship with the clerk. Pride is the antidote to succumbing to the humiliation that the system offers up.

What does this story tell us?

If I had screamed and yelled and expressed outrage, asked to see the big boss, threatened to file a complaint, or worse, the TSA would have known exactly how to react. They have procedures for that—well-honed methods for dealing with unruly behavior and disgruntled complainers. No doubt it is codified in their manuals and is a substantial part of their training.

My strategy worked precisely because my behavior was so far removed from the standard playbook that the officers were at a complete loss. She is attracting puzzling attention, and it is awkward , I can imagine them thinking. How to deal with someone who is respectfully, yet unexpectedly, singing the U.S.A.’s national anthem? We must get her to stop. How to do that? Find that female assist, pronto. Apparently, that was not a problem.

My (singing) strategy worked because it was out of place and didn’t even come close to fitting into the confines of what the staff knew how to deal with. It worked because it diverged from the standard impersonal, formal way of operating. My behaving well outside the norm required the system’s functionaries, too, to step outside their prescribed roles and find a unique way of reacting. The spectacle I had created demanded a human reaction—the same human reaction that has been lost in our age of structured unaccountability—replete with digitization of almost everything, silos, and a broken connection between bureaucrat and client, policymaker and voter. The same connection that is lost in, say, the customer-service phone tree or the world of sliced-and-diced mortgages and exotic derivatives.

The old ways are no longer so effective, but such strategies as the one I resorted to in the airport can be.

My own small effort to get through an airport pales in comparison to the norm-busting strategies employed in cases much more consequential. Take, for instance, the so-called Yes Men whose slogan is “Sometimes it takes a lie to expose the truth.” 2They sought compensation for the thousands of victims killed and sickened by the 1984 Union Carbide chemical spill in Bhopal, India (a still-contaminated site), for which the company had disbursed only $470 million. 3Posing as a spokesman for Dow Chemical (which had acquired Union Carbide) in an interview with the BBC on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, a member of this enterprising duo said that Dow would assume full responsibility for the accident and pay $12 billion to the victims. 4That hoax news required a response from the company. While an embarrassed Dow denied that it would do anything, 5the spectacle “prompted the world media to put the debate over corporate responsibility in the news,” as the Washington Post observed. 6

Consider, too, the impact of fake news programs such as Stewart’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report . In the 2012 election cycle, and in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC, “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” brought huge public attention to the unaccountability and lack of transparency of these political-influence groups.

Such hoaxing and posing “does not fit a common understanding of resistance or opposition,” say anthropologists Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, who, like me, observed a similarity between the public propaganda of late-communist societies and the mainstream media of today in the West. 7That is precisely why it works so well.

A successful norm-busting strategy draws public or media attention to an issue through a performance that is unconventional yet inoffensive, as well as puzzling, humorous, or dazzling. Ironically, it is imbued with qualities of shadow elites. The ambiguity surrounding the activity of hoaxers and posers and their agility in shifting roles and playing with the rules resembles that of shadow elites. In both cases, these qualities render the players effective—and unaccountable. Moreover, such strategy plays on the very performance culture that motivates regular people to turn to parody in search of something more authentic—and in the process, of course, is itself a performance. It must attract unusual attention and demand a response from its target and the public.

Still, however entertaining and successful such strategies may be, they are piecemeal, ad hoc, unsystematic, and thus severely limited in potential impact.

While not ethically challenged, these strategies, like those of the practitioners of the new corruption, also “innovate” beyond the bounds of law. Just as I broke the unwritten rules of how to behave in the airport security line (and just as there was no script for dealing with my behavior), so do practitioners of the new corruption operate beyond the bounds of legal violation.

And, let’s not forget, while posing and hoaxes are public displays, they are private responses to broken public institutions. They cannot restore public accountability or trust. They are a workaround that highlights what is missing in society.

REUNITING ETHICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Before getting to some very specific remedies, let’s look at the broader issues of what society must do to restore the public trust.

At the core of the rise of the unaccountable is the fundamental problem that ethics have become disconnected from the mores of a larger public or community and detached from the authority that states and international organizations, boards of directors, and even shareholders once supplied. Carol in Ohio, the Bank of America employee who appeared earlier in this book, performs for the “accountability” checklist, above answering to her clients. Through no fault of her own, the relationship between her and her clients has been severed.