Decent Exposure

By Roger Rosenblatt

So ended week 10 or 20 or 1,000 of the parade of naked lives, with Paula Jones summoning America to Dallas to announce the appeal of her summary judgment and the chatterboxes on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the Sunday morning Face the Cokie shows awaiting word or further word from Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky, Lucianne Goldberg & Son, Gennifer Flowers and all the other intimates and tattletales who have made of the spring such an infinite delight.

Another charmer, Bob Mulholland, a California Democrat, crawled out from under his rock long enough to declare that he planned to indecently expose the Republicans who sought to indecently expose the President. The White House hit him with a stick, and he slunk back to obscurity.

This unending "search for truth" has been conducted under the assumption that the exposure of private lives is always a purely destructive, if entertaining, exercise. But a small, recent incident proved otherwise. It happened around the time of the "Was he aroused?" TV interview of Kathleen Willey, and was so fleeting (and tasteful) one could easily have missed it.

The incident involved the brief but purposeful exposure of the private life of the Today show's Katie Couric. Couric returned to her position as host after a period of mourning following the death of her husband Jay Monahan, an attorney and legal analyst for NBC. Monahan, only 42, died of colon cancer. On the day of her return Couric wore his wedding ring on a chain around her neck. Welcomed back by her co-host, Matt Lauer, she proceeded to thank the thousands of viewers who had sent condolences and then extended her sympathies to those who were struggling with terminal illnesses "and are wondering how the world keeps going."

That's all there was to it. There was warmth but no tears on the part of Lauer, no tears from Couric, no further mention of her loss. She went to work interviewing former Secretary of State James Baker. What made the incident impressive as well as affecting was, in part, that it was so out of step with the modern way of handling personal difficulty. In an age that makes the most--and generally the worst--of any disappointment, much less grief, in which people weep lavishly at the drop of a stock market, and the tendency of television is to devote a special to the heartbreak of psoriasis, here was decent, neoclassical, proper restraint.

Even more impressive was the way Couric chose her words. Too tasteful to dwell on her sorrow and not content merely to acknowledge those who had expressed concern for her and her small children, she expressed concern for others who might be in the same hopeless boat that she and her husband had known. Nor did she offer any easy answers or palliatives, but straightforwardly gave her "sympathies," which in her case were literal; she did feel what those others felt. By doing so, Couric made something valuable of a private life exposed. She showed what Tripp, Flowers and all their eager reporters never dreamed of showing--that a life exposed could be useful. Her very reappearance on Today indicated "how the world keeps going."

She behaved, in short, like an aristocrat of the spirit, a rare bird these days. E.M. Forster defined this class of human being in his essay "What I Believe." He wrote, "I believe in aristocracy. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke."

Forster's definition is nicely democratic, but its special accuracy lies in its three components of praiseworthy conduct. By pluck he means endurance of the sort that neither swaggers nor dresses itself in Hamlet's black. By consideration he means the exercise of just enough attention to others to display genuine feeling, but not so much as to be cloying. It is significant that he names sensitivity first. To be sensitive within oneself and for the benefit of others--that is an aristocrat. Couric's statement comes to mind. Adding action to words, she is spending her free time raising money for colon-cancer research.

Implied too in Forster's way of thinking is what the aristocrats of the spirit are not--cheap, whiny, petty. They are without showiness, without envy, without narrowness of any kind. They do have certain snobberies. They look down on bullies, bigots and cheats. Their idea of lowlife is a gossip, and the commoners they snub are the cruel, the ungenerous and the unkind.

In the current climate of small-minded chatter, we think of personal lives made public solely as fodder for wisecracks and cheap thrills. Couric's return to Today was memorable because it was exposure in the interests of right thinking and right acting. It was unusual, particularly for television, but I do not believe anyone was really surprised by it. To the contrary, her conduct was what most people expect from one another, which, when it occurs, evokes the sort of pleasant recognition reserved for similar satisfactions, like sunrises. We know a lady when we see one.

But it was useful to be reminded that under the prominent and seemingly relentless eruptions of crumminess and noise, a nobility of the species still exists that will occasionally unearth itself for the public good. This is how the world keeps going.