Opinion | The Coldplay concert shame is something to celebrate

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

There was a break for me last weekend in all the earthly murk and doom of our times when shame finally reappeared like a golden spotlight on the global stage. Andy Byron, the chief executive of Astronomer, a previously obscure data infrastructure company, quit his job. It’s not that I get pleasure out of anyone feeling forced to resign, but there was something refreshing about learning that someone somewhere was taking responsibility for his actions, even if he probably had no choice.

For those of you who generally mind your own business, the kiss-cam at a Coldplay concert last week caught Byron blissfully embracing the company’s head of human resources, Kristin Cabot, from behind. Byron is married but not to Cabot. Not that this is any of our beeswax — they are consenting adults and the common wisdom of the world I grew up in was that stuff like this really should just be between the people in question and their families.

Unless, well, it sort of is our business, or certainly Astronomer’s, as C.E.O.s and H.R. heads are not supposed to be clandestinely romantically involved by the rules of the game and apparently of their very own company.

I had thought that the toxic sludge of shamelessness — that love child of Donald Trump and the internet — had wiped out the old-fashioned notion of humiliation, but I was wrong. Kind of like when I thought we’d wiped out measles when the World Health Organization declared the disease eliminated in the United States in the year 2000.

I never thought I’d be glad to see shame as a concept, at least, brought back from the dead.

I hope they will become sort of folk heroes in this age of utter shamelessness, when the House and the Senate vote for things that most Americans know are wrong, like cutting funding for Medicaid and food assistance programs. These leaders evidently don’t care. Why? Because they are afraid of the president, or they just don’t want to give up their tiny piece of power? (Although I’ll ask you, just how powerful is a person who shamelessly follows Trump?)

This seems to be a know-nothing obedience by people who were formerly intelligent (e.g., Lisa Murkowski, Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy). Maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, which comes with their jobs, while they blithely get rid of it for more than an estimated 11 million Americans by 2034 according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is legislation that is inherently shameful.

We should all be rising up behind Byron, who had the instinct to sink to his knees and run the way scofflaws used to do, in real life and in the movies, and ultimately resign in the face of his trespasses (ahem: Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel and Clarence Thomas).

Richard Nixon resigned, albeit when he had no choice, and he wasn’t found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Or found liable in civil court for sexually abusing a woman, and then liable for defaming her, thus awarding her $83.3 million in damages, or had at least 25 or more other women accuse him of sexual misconduct. Or palled around with the king of pedophilia, Jeffrey Epstein, at least enough to apparently send him a bawdy birthday note and a drawing of a naked woman utilizing an Al Hirschfeld-like flourish by signing his first name as a stand-in her for her pubic hair. (Trump has broadly denied the misconduct allegations and says he did not write the note to Epstein.)

He should be ashamed of himself.