Transparency: Not All It's Cracked Up To Be
by Maggie Van Ostrand
For eyeglasses, transparency is fine. Same goes for
windshields, air, and nightgowns. I just don’t like it in my government. It sucks
the fun out of water-cooler supposition, conjecture, and gossip. The rightful
characteristics of politics — mystery, intrigue, and skulduggery — have had to
go underground to avoid Twitter’s bird droppings.
I don’t want to know how governments spy on each other, I
just want to suspect that they do because world history tells me they always
have. I don’t want to know which judges are corrupt, I’d rather figure it out
by their records. I don’t need to be told which politicians have morals lower
than congress’ poll numbers because it’s always the ones who talk to us like
they’re from Snob Hill and we’re from Duck Dynasty.
And I’m sick of hearing about leaks: Assange’s, Snowden’s,
and my grandmother’s. Exposing government secrets gives new meaning to the
phrase, “taking a leak.” And I sure don’t want to see leaking women hawking
panty guards on tv. Private parts are openly giggled about by schoolboys and are
way more detailed than when I was a kid and we merely tittered whenever the
word “breast” was read aloud in Joyce Kilmer’s poem about trees.
Trees are o.k. for dogs to take a leak. It’s not o.k. for leaking women. I have a problem with knowing about men, too. I don’t want men who
might take longer than four hours. What are we, lampposts? If you see us eating
a kumquat or reading a book while you’re snorting one of those purple
climax-control pills, by the time the commercials stop listing side effects,
you could be dead. Instead of getting laid, you’d be getting laid out.
I don’t want to see the backs of a man and a woman in
bathtubs staring at a fake lake. The tubs don’t even have plumbing fixtures. Are
these two knuckleheads escapees from an asylum who ran away just to sit in a
tub without water? Hey couple in the empty tubs: Take your meds and get off my
screen.
I don’t want to read quotations from sources who “are not
authorized to speak publicly.” What kind of people already know they
shouldn’t open their yaps and blab secrets and do it anyway? Do I want to
believe what this unknown source alleges? Maybe there is no source and the
whole thing is made up by the horse’s mouth. Or maybe the “source” is punking
us.
And yet, where is truly needed transparency, like when the U.S. buys
goods from foreign countries who work little kids in sweatshops when we have
laws against it for our own kids? What politicians wrote the bill condoning
this injustice?
My advice to both leakers and hawkers: Forget about transparency.
We can see right through you already.
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