The guardrails of shame

The ferocious sensitivity in a society without shame, and Jason Kidd fishing for compliments free from the context of criticism.

I believe in pleasure. I love seeking pleasure. I like finding it even more. But if you’re a hedonist, you also have to have a social conscience because you can’t enjoy eating a beautiful meal and drinking beautiful drinks and taking drugs that make you feel great if right outside where you’re doing it, people are starving to death on the pavements.

Shane MacGowan, 1957 - 2023

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I saw the collision play out before it happened, but I didn’t stop. Later, I’ll think about how this could have been very dumb of me. How small aberrations in daily life can and seem lately to bloom into altercations we wind up seeing in the news, sometimes violent, capable of upending the course of not just a day, but a life.

Still, as the guy cut aggressively in front of me, walking fast and forceful into the stream of people I was following out of the subway, I didn’t move to acquiesce, didn’t stop short. So he ran into me, shoulder-checking the right side of my body, collarbone to bicep. He was moving so fast the collision didn’t slow him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw him spin a few steps later and yell, Fuck you! There was an invitation in it, but no surprise. The invitation was to turn and engage. The invitation like a dare for the way he had already been moving through the world, just then. I was walking so closely single-file that I watched the head of the guy in front of me swivel to look but everyone else continued through the exit doors of the station and I let myself be carried along with them. The jostle of the crowd smoothing over my quickened pulse.

Less than three minutes later I waited at the counter of the library coffee shop and ordered a drip coffee. The cashier, looking at me blankly for a beat, said, Sorry but I can’t hear you. Before I ordered, we’d exchanged How are yous. Nothing, to my senses in those few seconds, had changed. The sound was a low murmur of voices from the scattered tables inside and the white noise of overhead HVAC.

It was so abrupt it felt disorienting, almost more than the physical contact from the guy in the subway, but I also didn’t trust myself completely. Maybe there was more blood than normal rushing around my ears, dampening the sound of things, including my own voice. I repeated the order. She moved down the counter to the carafes and asked if I had a preference for roast. Her voice didn’t get any louder and when I answered, neither did mine.

I was texting with Josh when I found a seat upstairs in the stacks, about the resurgence of the word ‘insane’. A word I used to, in step with what felt like the social consciousness of the day, actively substitute with something else so as not to be glib about mental health. I can’t and haven’t counted how many times I’ve seen something shared in the last little while with just the caption INSANE, or, This is insane, or, This person is insane, as explanation. I’ve probably been using it more too, in conversations with friends to describe everything from the price of a single lemon to something someone did.

Josh and I agreed it feels both like a dumb little reclamation, and a nod to the broader state of things. Because it’s true, most days something or someone is going to make you feel insane. By insane I mean out of your depth, feeling like you are the only person witnessing something and finding it glaringly out of touch, on a scale of alarming to annoying. That behavioural caveat is the thing I’m most interested in, underscored by Josh’s very apt response to the two side-by-side interactions I had before we started texting: “People are really just fucking doing whatever!”

Is everyone, in our varying states of crises mounting and multiplying daily depending on where we go, who we talk to, what we consume, going just a bit more feral? Is it compounded by the rise of therapy-speak and the centring (as in selfish, not balanced) of self? Does it have to do with shame, the lack of it? I don’t mean puritanical or damaging shame, the shame imposed on people once pegged as other in order to silence and shrink them, but more shame’s social rules. Shame that’s inverted by political and high-profile figures, sold as confidence, bravado or “telling it like it is” that people admire but fail to see is being exploited as a way to continue to isolate, through how divisive it is and who gets to wield it. Shame as societal rudder — because there hasn’t been a better one introduced — now ripped off, so we’re all bobbing along, buffeted by greater forces, too caught up with how fraught things feel to recognize that our collective dismay, while not ideal but potentially galvanizing, could be the rudder that replaces shame.

What I wonder, beyond the sociological conditions that have compounded to produce the present moment, is if this is a social swing that will tilt back in the other direction, or is this state — call it shamelessness, call it isolated fury — here to stay?

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Jason Kidd with his elbow on the table and his chin snug in his palm, eyeballing Tim MacMahon, who is asking him a question, almost fondly. In 16 seconds, Kidd blinks approximately once.

The question is what difference has Kidd seen in the dynamic between Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving so far this season compared to last. The underlying critical through-line is that MacMahon, like the rest of us and Kidd whether he cares to admit it, saw how terribly the two played together to close out last season after Irving got to Dallas.

Kidd answers like he’s been waiting for this. The aloofness and weirdly dreamy look in his eyes is gone. He lowers his hand to the table and starts, "Tim, maybe it’s the things you guys thought should’ve happened day one — is that they should’ve been successful off the bat.”

What follows is a soft pep-talk on failure. By soft, I definitely mean in tone of voice, something that would be delivered on a kid’s show at the end as the takeaway lesson. I don’t mean it as shorthand for a toxic masculine knock, though that is going to be where this, where Kidd, takes us.

Speaking in the same slow, even dulcet, Kidd eventually arrives at the sharper edge this voice has been hiding. The effort that Doncic and Irving are showing in “clutch time” has been the same that was there all along. “That was a big thing you guys wanted to make a big deal about last year”, Kidd says, blunting the word big both times, “but you’re now making a big deal about it this year — cause shit’s going good. Right? So write some positive shit.”

While Kidd is still talking to adults doing their jobs as if they were children, this is no longer a kid’s TV show.

It’s chilly and infantilizing all at once, that “Right?”, as if it were actually a question. Under this roundabout delivery, Kidd turning a room of reporters like blindfolded children before a piñata at a party, is the bullseye he wants to be sure we all hit.

“I just asked you a question,” MacMahon says, voice light with a laugh.

“And I’m giving you a fucking answer,” Kidd says, with his own little laugh. His voice has changed though, and he shifts his focus from MacMahon down to some middle distance between the table and the floor. Without being too prescriptive about it, but in a way I can only place for the times I’ve been in situations where the social temperature takes a sudden barometer drop, it’s a bit chilling.

“It’s alright to write positive stuff, people will read your positive shit,” Kidd’s voice has sped up, he’s back to making eye contact with MacMahon, and his arms have suddenly spread out to either side of the table, like an anchor. He does another shallow laugh on an exhale, pushed out with some strain through his flashing teeth. His eyes are lasered now, “You don’t always have to be negative. Right?” He buckles and bobs his stretched arms in goofy juxtaposition to his otherwise confrontational body language, “The world’s already negative enough. Let’s see some positive stuff on some positive people who are playing—doing their job on a nightly basis.”

For the way he’s enunciated the P words, as if in a rhyming scheme, and simplified the thread of criticism in the question reaching from last season to this to people just “doing their job”, you’d think we’re all of a sudden back to the kids show. But then, when MacMahon correctly points out the team is making it a lot easier to be positive this year, Kidd clamps down again.

“We’re only into this year. We can’t go back to last year. That’s the fucking problem.” He pushes his chair abruptly back and starts to stand, “Have a good night.”

It must be hard, as the de facto representative of the team and its decisional rudder, to take constant criticism. Criticism can be hard enough to take when you’ve asked for it or when it’s coming from someone who cares about you, so forget a room of people whose job it is to dissect every right and wrong step the thing you are in control of has made. That said, it’s the job. Certainly, there are coaches who’ve made personalities out of their gruffness and hostility to people asking them the simplest questions, and even with those who are most often forgiven for it, it begins to wear thin.

Sports reporting is transactional by nature. While there are ways to make it not feel so grossly transactional in person — ranging from pleasantries to eye contact, offering thoughtful questions that show an understanding of, or an evolution alongside, the thing being asked about — the nature of questioning in a pre or postgame scrum is to ask and be answered. Kidd, I think, wanted to veer away from an answer, because the question didn’t suit him. Kidd’s frustration and strange delivery of, essentially, an admonishment to the people in the room to be blindly nicer to the people he coaches, who he is the effective conduit in these situations for, wound up giving much more away than an actual answer would have.

He says failure can be an important and necessary thing, which is absolutely true and something he and his staff have used, probably, to learn from and correct. Another way to put this: constructive criticism. His body language goes from cooly patient to way too hot, engaged to annoyed, pleading to totally shut down. He careens between last season and this one like they were planets apart, feigning a kind of disoriented disconnect like the five months that have passed since Dallas lost in a quick five games to Golden State was a centuries long cryostasis for him, instead of something that is clearly so fresh, that he is so ready to react to the barest reference to, that he physically exits the room.

And it all started with a compliment. The inherently positive thing Kidd was pleading for. A compliment I would say is better with context — Irving and Doncic looked out-of-step and blundering together and now they don’t — than without. What Kidd wants, it sounds like, is praise without background, hype without a story.

What’s alarming to me is how many people in the comments of that clip seem to agree with him. Someone wrote, “jason kidd kept it real with media always looking for something negative, they really dont want kyrie and luka to play well together its insane” (someone else wrote, “Jason Kidd has the calm demeanor [sic] of as [sic] 80's serial killer.” and 206 people, so far, have liked it).

Maybe the strangest irony in our new no-holds-barred (or I guess, depending how you want to look at it, “no fucks given”) daily reality of everyone doing their own thing, at all times, solely for themselves, is that most everyone has grown deeply, ferociously, more sensitive. To anything that can be interpreted as criticism, especially. We want to operate without the guardrails of shame, or social niceties, or whatever constructs of behaviour that have been holding things in place, gleefully leaning on our own horns with a middle finger out the window, but can’t comprehend that we might be hurt, or hurt other people, in the process. We want the bubble, but are confused, in a world growing more ragged, when it pops.