New Types of Cover-Up

Excerpts from On Being a Shit: Unkind Deeds and Cover-Ups in Everyday Life

This study began with the identification of such cover-ups as humor, withholding information, minimization, prevarication, duplicity, shaming, blaming, and name-calling. In conducting the analysis, I identified additional cover-ups including indignation, mockery, gaslighting, silence, cut-offs, threats to abandon, “I can’t recall,” “Mistakes were made,” and “What do you expect?”

Some Noteworthy Cover-Ups

Heather’s boyfriend was a master gaslighter. His slights of hand, mockery, and minimization led to his questioning of Heather’s values. How important is a coffee grinder? What really matters? He activated her hot buttons. Heather was undone. She could not match wits with this Clever Fox.

Acting hurt and innocent and then walking out in indignation are other tactics the preliminary theory did not anticipate. Don exemplified this when he chastised Ella for asking him if he still slept with his wife. He delivered the knockout blow when he stomped out of the house, with Ella running after him pleading for forgiveness. False hurt, indignation, attacking the other, threats of abandonment—cover-ups indeed. They work.

Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales used many variations of these tactics, which helped them to succeed at getting what they wanted for a long time, but in the end, they both resigned from office after months of pressure from many quarters to do so.

Cover-Ups as Protean

Cover-ups, like unkind deeds, are protean, meaning they continually change shape. Just when you think you have heard them all, creative enactors come up with new ones. For example, days before this book was going to press, I discovered a variation called “I want it both ways.”

Allen Raymond, a consultant for the Republican Party, served three months in a federal prison for jamming the phone lines of the Democratic get-out-the vote effort in the 2002 New Hampshire elections. On contract with the New Hampshire Republican party, Allen claimed that an executive of the Republican National Committee (RNC) asked him to jam the phone lines and someone from the New Hampshire Republican party gave him the phone numbers.

The executive was convicted in a lower court and acquitted on appeal. The RNC paid for his defense, but not for Allen’s. Allen said the Committee defended the other man because they “wanted him to keep his yap shut” about who was responsible for the dirty trick.

Allen pled guilty. He told the judge, “Your Honor, I did a bad thing. While what I did was outside my character. I take full responsibility for my actions.” Allen’s lawyer made an argument that Allen was not responsible. He said in court, “This was not Allen Raymond’s idea.” It was the RNC executive’s idea. The judge answered, “What about a personal moral compass?”

Bitter about the Committee’s failure to defend him, Allen complained that the Committee “not only threw me under the bus but then blamed me for getting run over.” With this statement and the statement of his attorney, Allen undermined his own declaration of full responsibility.

Allen did not keep his “yap” shut. In 2008, he published a book called How to Rig an Election. Like Bill in regard to Sophie, Allen may be motivated by revenge. On the other hand, if he contributes to electoral reform, he is doing a great service.