As if life weren't complicated enough already
The message from the Ashley Madison scandal seems to be: If you're going to cheat on your marriage, do it off the grid.
(Please withhold calls, emails and letters expressing righteous outrage at my unspeakable moral apathy. It's a joke.)
But seriously -- to whatever extent common sense even enters into this bizarre snapshot of American marital and sexual mores, doesn't it seem like this is the kind of thing it would be more prudent to do in private?
Maybe the question is its own answer. Maybe in the era of ubiquitous hackers, video surveillance and smart phones, "private" has been all but reduced to an illusion anyway. I hope not, but I have to acknowledge certain realities.
There's a breathtaking collective stupidity in the fact that computer addresses from so many government offices, from Washington down to city halls nationwide, logged on to a website whose sole purpose is facilitating infidelity. (Motto: "Life is short. Have an affair." Which, if you get caught, might make your life substantially shorter.)
OK, so you don't want your spouse looking too closely at the browsing history on the family desktop. Jeez, dude (or dudess), take your laptop or tablet or whatever to a public wi-fi. It's not as if they're hard to find.
Maybe they're harder to find in Washington than they are in Columbus, though I doubt it. How else to explain the fact that hundreds of federal government employees appear to have been e-cruising for "strange" on taxpayer time? AP reported that the massive Ashley Madison hack found the addresses of at least two federal attorneys, a White House info tech administrator, Justice Department folks, and even -- you've gotta love the sweet irony -- one of Uncle Sam's own Homeland Security hackers. Karma, baby.
The hackers also revealed domain links to the departments of Defense, Energy, Justice, State, Transportation and Treasury. Oh, and let's not leave out House and Senate networks as well.
That's two out of three branches of government; anything regarding the Honorables of the judiciary? Please let there be something on Scalia, please please please ... OK, never mind.
(Somehow it seems to have been regarded as news that a former "reality" TV "star" was exposed for infidelity and hypocrisy. Seriously? In what perpendicular universe is it possible for the bottom layer of sludge in the whole entertainment sewer to produce anything a rational mind could regard as scandal?)
It's not just Washington. In all, reports now say, some 10,000 of the 33 million hacked accounts involve addresses of government domains, including some here in Georgia.
The Marietta Daily Journal reported that officials are looking into reports of links to that city, as well as Augusta, Atlanta, Savannah, Greene County, Dalton, Columbia County, Fayette, Glynn County, Meriwether County, Pickens County and the Georgia DOT.
(Right about now, Columbus folks might feel a little like Melanie and Scarlett at not seeing Ashley's name on the Gettysburg casualty list -- glad it's not there, but not completely reassured just yet.)
But the numbers I can't get my mind around are the biggest ones: the 33 million hacked accounts out of a total some have put at around 38 million. That's 38 million people supposedly going online to find somebody else interested in a little adulterous fun.
If you're looking for some kind of angry moral denunciation here I'll have to disappoint you, except to say I have zero pity or sympathy for anybody who got outed. For one thing, I have sins enough of my own (adultery has never been one of them, but in the greater scheme of things that hardly makes me a morally superior being). For another, I really don't know enough about this to know how many of these people were really serious about cheating and how many might have been just pushing the envelope of titillating fantasy.
Either way, it's their problem, not mine.
Except for the ones doing it from government offices. That's worse than morally wrong. That's tacky.
Dusty Nix, 706-571-8528; dnix@ledger-enquirer.com.
This story was originally published August 23, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "As if life weren't complicated enough already ."