Embarrassing Blunders

There was a picture in the news of Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz gazing at a military drill through binoculars that clearly still had the lens caps on. According to the photographer, he did this three times, while nodding to the military official who was explaining to him what he was supposed to be seeing. Of course he wasn’t seeing anything.

What do you suppose was going through his mind at the time?

I suppose he could just have been too drunk to notice. Or so angry about something else at the time that it didn’t even register that he only saw black through the binoculars. But I want to think of it as a parallel to The Emperor Has No Clothes – just because HE didn’t see anything, doesn’t mean others didn’t, and if others might see it he certainly wouldn’t want to admit that it wasn’t clear to HIM.

It is our propensity toward covering up this sort of inadvertent, confusing, ‘at-the-moment’ mistake that makes people-watching so interesting: delicious glimpses into the psyche. We can endlessly speculate “what were they thinking?” It’s not the public displays of idiocy, where you just don’t CARE what they were thinking (like Brittany shaving her head or the Anna Nicole Smith judge pandering to the cameras) but the Hillary-captured-in-an-unguarded-moment sort of thing – or this bit with the binoculars. It is the stuff of wanting to save face, putting on a good face, not realizing anyone is watching our face, or hoping that people can’t see our real face – and the psychological drama behind it. It makes for fascinating observation.

We cover up. We pretend we didn’t do what we did. We pretend we did something else, or act as if we don’t understand what we did. In our confusion it is our feelings of embarrassment that become our focus and we will do almost anything to avoid them. We don’t ask questions, we don’t question ourselves. We don’t get to the bottom of ‘it,’ or back up and reassess or, most ridiculously, don’t even laugh at ourselves and move on! (Though that should probably be our goal.)

And if you don’t think that is part of the universal condition, just look at a cat the next time he falls off a windowsill.