Tag: concealment

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A Hairy Moment

There are masters of illusion and concealment in this world. Artists who can make anything from a handkerchief to the Statue of Liberty seem to vanish without a trace.

Toupee Man is not one of those masters.

Who is Toupee Man? The Spanish police haven’t released his name, but his genius is surely one-of-a-kind. After all, there can’t be that many individuals who have hit upon the mind-bending idea of smuggling 17 ounces of cocaine into a country by … well … hiding it under a toupee.

Needless to say, said hairpiece and its cargo were more than a little obvious. Which is something like saying that Elton John was just a bit unrestrained in the 1970s.

“There is no limit to the inventiveness of drug traffickers trying to mock controls,” the police wrote in a statement reprinted by Reuters, one of the many news agencies to report this.

Inventiveness. Yeah. We’ll go with that.

It’s easy to laugh. Heaven knows I did. But like a lot of life’s humor, part of the laugh comes from familiarity.

We’ve seen this before.

Oh, I don’t mean we’ve all witnessed awkward items being smuggled under unlikely formations of hair, unless anyone has had the opportunity to live next door to Marge Simpson. (D’oh!) But we know the routine of trying to conceal the undeniable.

We’ve seen the prominent figure who “walks back” an outrageous statement, trying to explain why what he or she said wasn’t really what you heard.

Or the celebrity at the center of a scandal who tries to deny, to evade, and then to excuse.

Or anyone, great or small, who finds themselves in the midst of something unpleasant and tries, for just a moment, to “make it not have happened.”

There are a million terms for it. But it’s an urge as old as humanity. Hide the bad stuff. Make it appear normal. Even when it’s as obvious as trying to slip an Uzi under a baseball cap.

From the tale of Cain to modern playgrounds and politics, it’s always born of fear. And the answer is the same one that every kindergarten teacher knows, and that ever PR firm today teaches for crisis control.

Don’t hide.

Acknowledge the mistake. Admit the harm that was done.

Apologize. Sincerely.

And then make it clear how things will change going forward.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences. There almost certainly will be. After all, if it was harmless, there wouldn’t have been an urge to hide in the first place. Trust gets weakened. Customers leave. Policies can founder and elections be lost.

But invariably, owning your actions causes less damage than trying to bury them. Ask Mr. Nixon sometime.

The last step, of course, is the most important of all – how will things change? That’s where transformation can occur, if we let it. C.S. Lewis once noted that if you’re on the wrong road, the fastest way forward is to first turn back.

No wigs. No disguises. Just coming clean and taking the first step to do something different.

We know this. It’s why we get so angry when someone we know – famous or otherwise – refuses to learn, refuses to change, refuses to acknowledge that they have anything to change. And why we get so embarrassed when we catch ourselves, from time to time.

And it’s what makes it so wonderful when the change truly comes.

It starts with self-recognition. With empathy. With the recognition that other people matter, and that when we wrong them, we need to make it right.

Because if we don’t, there can be hell toupee.

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Puzzling it Out

Missy bent over the magazine, sharpened pencil at the ready. The point descended to circle one letter … then another … then one more.

She looked up from the penciled rings, her hundred-watt smile beaming. Just letters for now, no full words. But a New York Times crossword champion couldn’t have been prouder.

“Look!” she declared.

Despite all its other epochal moments, January 2017 will go down in history for Chez Rochat as the moment that Missy discovered Heather’s puzzle magazines. My wife Heather has long loved mind-benders of all kinds, from crosswords to sudoku to logic problems. Since her multiple sclerosis diagnosis two years ago, they’ve become not just a recreation but also a weapon to push back against the occasional MS “brain fog.”

Our disabled ward Missy, for her part, has always enjoyed more tactile challenges, like board puzzles, shape balls and simple jigsaws. But she’s never met a magazine she didn’t want to explore, whether to search for classic cars and pictures of fancy shoes or to disassemble for a spur-of-the-moment collage. And at a moment of Missy curiosity, Heather saw an opportunity.

Word searches and other letter jumbles are the current field of battle – anything Missy can peruse to track down a single letter, like finding where an “M” is or an “S.” It’s not quite the sort of play that the original puzzle-maker expected, perhaps, but it’s doing its job: sharpening a mind and challenging it to learn more.

Curiosity is a powerful thing once inflamed.

That’s something known by any scientist, any journalist, any parent of a 6-year-old. But somehow it still manages to surprise politicians. Even in its mildest forms, the nation’s curiosity can turn any offhand remark into a performance review, often pushing aside whatever message the elected official had hoped to promote.

And if that official is actually trying to hide something, or to cut off information, or to pre-empt debate? That’s when curiosity gets married to stubbornness.

Not always, I admit. People want to be right, and the desire to “mostly say hooray for our side” as Buffalo Springfield put it, can include a willingness to excuse behaviors and ignore inconvenient facts. But we also hate to hear words like “No,” “shut up,” and “You don’t need to know that.”

That becomes a challenge.

Ban a book and not only will it draw defenders, it’ll become a bestseller.

Cover up the truths behind a “third-rate burglary” and it becomes two years of Washington Post headlines, culminating in the first-ever presidential resignation.

Forbid someone to speak to the press officially and they’ll find a way to do it unofficially – often becoming more prominent and more embarrassing than if they’d been left to themselves.

Smart politicians learn this quickly. They learn that concealment and misrepresentation become their own stories, that open channels give you an opportunity to manage your message, that barriers don’t protect you but instead cut you off from any control.

The others? They learn what happens when you squeeze a sponge. The tighter you exert your grip, the more it leaks.

That mix of curiosity and stubbornness is woven tightly into this country’s fabric. It can be infuriating – but it’s also our national glory. Short of outright repression, it means no leader will ever go completely unchallenged. And none ever should, however popular they may be.

We want to know. We want to see. And given the slightest opportunity, we’ll find what we’re looking for.

Even if it’s as simple as an M-for-Missy.