Dear The Tank,
I am a highly visible public official. I have throughout my career taken great satisfaction in improving the lives of others.
Unfortunately, lately some mistakes from my past have come to light, and I’m afraid my (understandably) emotional response to this has caused something of a furor in my community. I feel like everything has gotten out of control. My life is at the mercy of the media’s worst, most sensationalistic instincts.
I feel like those who used to respect me and thank me are more likely to spit at me today. How can I get back their esteem, so I can again do my work?
—Flummoxed
Dear Flummoxed,
It is a natural human instinct to want to be thought well of by others. You want to be respected. You want others to have that image of you that you have when you stand up unnaturally straight, turn to 45 degrees, hold one hand firmly against your belly, use the other to pull your pants taut against your hips, and then quickly glance at the mirror. But ask yourself, did anyone much care about you when you were respectable, admirable, almost enviable? Did they clamor for a glance of you? DId they talk about you all through a million dinner parties across the continent?
No, it is the degraded, stomach-hanging-over-your-belt version people love. You need to learn to accept this.
Do I sound as if I know more about you than would be possible from your note? I don’t want to endanger your anonymity, but quite frankly, you were sloppy enough to send your note from a toronto.ca email address. Or were you really that dumb? Did you want to be found out and create one more opportunity for people to gawk and wonder at another of your fuck-ups? We think the latter. Congratulations! You are getting the idea.
More of this, please.
Your main challenge now is that the nature of scandal and fascination means that you have to continually increase the magnitude of your outrages to get new attention. If one day you’re caught doing crack, getting hammered the next day won’t interest anyone. So you need to find something beyond drug use, drunk driving, crude speech, and gross prevarication.
We’re thinking sex tape.
Regards,
—The Tank
Read more advice so bad it’s good from The Tank.
Need bad advice? We can help with that, too.
The Tank is inspired by Gracious Living Without Servants, the new novel by Wall Street Journal writer Brenda Cronin. Juliet, the heroine of that novel, makes all kinds of bad choices that end up making life way more interesting. Read the first chapter.
