Hi-Infidelity (Matinée #2)

This week's edition features: The Coldplay Two; Japanese commonsense; The Lead Paint Prize, and The Therapist's Chair with Doctor Sour.

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Uncle Ted’s Not Dead

Reader, welcome to The Matinée, a weekly dose of wit and wisdom, for paid subscribers.

The end is indeed nigh. The end of my dissertation, that is. The last few weeks have convinced me of a few things. One is that I’m not entirely mad. Two is that my vendetta against algorithms, smartphones, dopamine, and tech-nerd-ification has at least some grounding in healthy thought and is not the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia.

My dissertation, Scrolling Alone: The Rise of Digital Anomie, suggests that smartphones and dopamine culture have, at least in part, eroded social capital and, at least in part, driven us all mad. Through interviews with scores of interesting people, it appears I might have a point.

But where does this all-consuming task end? Either with a place on the PhD, or shacked up in a Montana log cabin, surrounded by oozing bathtubs of nitro-glycerine, padded envelopes, wrapping tape, and an address list beginning with “Zuckerberg, M.”

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Hi-Infidelity

Towards a moral adultery

Tables for Ladies by Edward Hopper (1930)

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As the late Auberon Waugh, president of VESPA—the Venerable Society for the Protection of Adulterers—once declared: “The adulterer is often the last romantic left standing.”

Last week, after an arduous nine-to-five at their tech firm, Andy Byron and Kristen Cabot attended a Coldplay concert. Who are these raffish, mid-life lovers? Why were they locked in an embrace? Why do we know their names? Why are they a laughingstock from Washington to Wuhan? Thanks to the heinous Chris Martin, Coldplay’s frontman, those questions are rhetorical. Even Bigfoot knows the score.

At a Coldplay concert in Boston, the Kiss-Cam panned on to two sprightly lovers, the tanned, photogenic mid-life types one sees advertising comfortable holiday wear. They scuttled beneath the barriers. The impish Chris Martin couldn’t help himself. With the social nous of a dive-bar handjob, Martin blundered on:

“Oh, look at these two!”

The silver-haired, lithe lovers dissolved into the ether.

The tactless Martin continued his ritual humiliation of paying customers.

“They’re either having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”

You know the rest. What followed was an orgy of tabloid morality. Millions of names on a screen poured forth their moralistic two pence.

One commentator, the usually funny Matt Walsh, said adultery should invite serious jail time for both offenders. Let’s do the maths. If thirty percent of American adults admit to having cheated, that’s 78 million people. The U.S. prison population stands at just under two million. Walsh would balloon the prison population by forty times. An arithmetic to make Josef Stalin wince.

But Walsh’s suggestion met nods of approval amongst the power-lusting hordes eager to correct the sins of strangers, if not to mask their own transgressions. In our surveillance society, anyone anywhere can fall prey to the moveable morality of the tabloid tithing-men.

This sordid little soiree colonised all thoughts in over three-hundred languages. All languages except one—French.

Whilst Anglo-Saxons poured scorn on the “adulterers” and their “evil” cuddle, the French lamented the trysting lovers’ plight. All that effort—enduring Chris Martin’s reedy crooning—and neither party got a bit of the old entrée-sortie.

I must declare a personal conflict of interest in this matter. I’m with the French. The only occasion where I would side with Chris Martin is if he expressed a desire to swim in quicksand.

The French are a literary, book-reading people, immunised to the predations of tabloid tattle. However, the Coldplay Two are by no means blameless. They flagrantly ignored a key tenet of French extra-marital culture.

In French slang, ‘cinq a sept’ (five to seven) refers to the state-sanctioned evening period during which amorous beings might burn a few calories with their lovers, before returning home in time for dinner. Five to Seven works much like that film, The Purge, in which inherently violent Americans slaughter each other for an annual, law-free, twelve-hour period. Like The Purge, Five to Seven releases those pent-up animal drives and ensures the flourish of French society.

In France, infidélité is unfortunate but not unforgivable. Just 47 percent of the French say infidelity is morally unacceptable. Eighty-four percent of Americans think so.

The Coldplay Two were rank amateurs of the carnal arts. Discretion is the golden rule. Affairs must be private, well-managed, and must never encroach upon family matters. Crucially, such dalliances must never embarrass the spouse. For his own selfish self-gratification, Chris Martin broke these time-worn rules, delivering two paying customers to the foaming ire of the tabloid mob.

Meanwhile, the French, who read more books per year than any other nation, didn’t miss a drag on their cigarettes. President Mitterand kept a second family. President Hollande was routinely snapped scootering around Paris en route to his five-to-seven with actress Julie Gayet. A cuddle at a Coldplay concert? On s'en fout!

In a saner, Frencher, more literary, less nosey world, Andy Byron and Kristen Cabot would receive honorary membership of the Venerable Society for the Protection of Adulterers, and French citizenship. Instead, they’re pilloried by the Church of St. Christopher Martin.

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