Gore remained seated; I wish I would have looked to see if he clapped at all but I was looking through the DSLR to take photos. I wish I had appreciated how epic this moment was at the time, but I had forgotten that Gore blamed Lewinsky for his loss.
Quotes from her TED Talk:
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.”
“You’re looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that’s changed, but only recently.”
“a surprising thing happened. At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. (Laughter) I realized later that night, I’m probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.”
“What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.”
“My mom… was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.”
“A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. We’re in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more we click. All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else’s suffering.”
“Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop.” “We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.” “Shame can’t survive empathy.”
From a Facebook discussion about this photo, someone proposed that maybe she is a fabulous person, a possibility that never occurred to me prior. Having seen her in person for the first time (she even invited me to lunch), I can now understand the question, as she has been re-humanized from the abstract projection we saw in the media. The headlines and labels de-humanize the specific person and evoke a penumbra of associations, where headline readers fill the gaps in our minds with the stereotype or mental model of an “actor” like this. It feels like the common strategy of de-humanizing the enemy in wartime.
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