Getting Lauren Boebert Off My Chest

I don’t know why the Lauren Boebert theater incident resonates so strongly with me. If you’re unaware, Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert was asked to leave a performance of “Beetlejuice” in Denver after causing a number of disturbances, including taking flash photos, vaping, talking, and giving her date a handsy while he Turtle-waxed her tee-tees. All in all, a low-rent night on the town featuring one of America’s most vapid elected representatives.

So why am I still thinking about it days after the fact?

I suspect it has something to do with the value of public decorum and the value of the common good. Among many troubling revelations the last few years has been the realization that a good percentage of our population simply doesn’t believe in the common good, that certain ideas and institutions are worth investing in not because they will generate a profit for a few, but because they benefit everybody. Parks, public art, libraries, public healthcare, public education, etc. A sizable minority simply doesn’t believe these things are worth the expense.

Instead, they take a more libertarian or Objectivist view that individual desires take primacy over collective desires and that, when the individual does everything in their power to satisfy the needs and wants of themself that, by definition, society’s needs will also be satisfied since the free market abhors a vacuum. If there is a market to be made for something, some enterprising young buck will come along to make it.

The logic is beautiful until applied.

The fact is, many arenas of life aren’t particularly well-served by the pure profit motive. Healthcare, infrastructure, education, incarceration… all of these demand public and private contributions to work at their best. Actually, the nations where these big sectors seem to work their best is in socialist countries, which makes some sense. One need look no further than China’s high-speed rail system or Norway’s public education outcomes to see that a well-managed public sector is capable of producing excellent results that benefit the maximum number of people.

The Turtle waxing and handy in question.

Another problem with the libertarian/Objectivist view is that it prioritizes “selfishness,” which Ayn Rand calls “the ultimate moral value,” because according to Rand, life’s ultimate pursuit is individual well-being. But what happen when one’s well-being, like, for example, the desire to vape in a crowded theater, confronts another’s well-being, like, for example, the pregnant woman’s desire in the row behind you to not have to inhale the fumes of your Juicy Fruit E-Liquid? What happens when the desire to, say, memorialize the night’s activities by taking flash photos of the performers bumps up against the theater’s policy of not taking flash photos? Or when your desire to get off in a crowded theater runs into the fact that you are getting off in a crowded theater? What happens is you get the scene that unfolded the other night when Lauren Boebert and her date were escorted from the premises.

The Congresswoman apparently believed herself to be the victim, giving theater staff the finger as she departed. And it’s hard to argue that she wasn’t the victim if you put yourself in the headspace of somebody simply exercising their highest moral value of doing whatever the fuck they want wherever the fuck they want to do it.

I don’t care about Lauren Boebert. The problem is we’re living in a nation of Boeberts. So many of my fellow Americans have become defiantly, stridently selfish. You see it on flag-waving pick-up trucks featuring Punisher decals, the “fuck your feelings” t-shirts, the epidemic of gun violence, the Karenization of our public spaces.

The country feels on edge. Some of that anger is, I think, attributable to the Me First crowd. When notions of the common good erode, virtue and regular ol’ civility erode with it. What’s the point of holding the door for somebody if they’re just going to turn around and slam it in your face?

Afterwards, Boebert put out a gracious statement apologizing for her behavior saying, in part, “While none of my actions or words as a private citizen that night were intended to be malicious or meant to cause harm, the reality is they did and I regret that.”

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of her apology and I take it at face value. Moreover, I don’t envy public officials whose every move is open to criticism. Also, I got a hand job in a mostly-empty movie theater when I was nineteen so who am I to pass judgment? (Lauren Boebert is 36 and was in a crowded family musical but, again, I’m not passing judgment except for maybe a little.) So I commend her for apologizing and acknowledging that she was out of line, but I also can’t quite help but question how she ever put herself in that position in the first place.

How does she not know minimum basic public behavior? How does she not know it’s illegal to smoke in theaters? How does she not know flash photography is against the rules? Or is it that she does know and doesn’t care? And if that’s true, then that means there are millions of people like her that know better and don’t care.

Boebert’s antics were dumb. But it’s their very dumbness that makes them so depressing. Because dumb people aren’t creative. Boebert wasn’t thinking outside of the box. She was imitating the kind of aggressively stupid behavior she admires, the very kind of behavior that got her elected to Congress. That’s where we are. And that’s why I can’t stop thinking about it.