So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson Page A

himself?
    â€”
    Ted Poe’s punishments were sometimes zany—ordering petty criminals to shovel manure, etc.—and sometimes as ingenious as a Goya painting. Like the one he handed down to a Houston teenager, Mike Hubacek. In 1996, Hubacek had been driving drunk at one hundred miles per hour with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK , and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash site, and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send ten dollars every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drunk-driving accident.
    Punishments like these had proved too psychologically torturous for other people. In 1982 a seventeen-year-old boy named Kevin Tunell had killed a girl, Susan Herzog, while driving drunk near Washington, D.C. Her parents sued him and were awarded $1.5 million in damages. But they offered the boy a deal. They would reduce the fine to just $936 if he’d mail them a check for $1, made out in Susan’s name, every Friday for eighteen years. He gratefully accepted their offer.
    Years later, the boy began missing payments, and when Susan’s parents took him to court, he broke down. Every time he filled in her name, he said, the guilt would tear him apart: “It hurts too much,” he said. He tried to give the Herzogs two boxes of prewritten checks, dated one per week until the end of 2001, a year longer than was required. But they refused to take them.
    Judge Ted Poe’s critics—like the civil rights group the ACLU—argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany and the Ku Klux Klan’s America—it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed. How could Poe take people with such low self-esteem that they needed to, say, rob a store, and then hold them up to officially sanctioned public ridicule?
    But Poe brushed the criticisms off. Criminals didn’t have
low
self-esteem, he argued. It was quite the opposite. “The people I see have
too good
a self-esteem,” he told
The Boston Globe
in 1997. “Some folks say everyone should have high self-esteem, but sometimes people
should
feel bad.”
    Poe’s shaming methods were so admired in Houston society that he ended up getting elected to Congress as the representative for Texas’s Second Congressional District. He is currently Congress’s “top talker,” according to the
Los Angeles Times
, having made 431 speeches between 2009 and 2011, against abortion, illegal immigrants, socialized health care, and so on. He always ends them with his catchphrase: “And that’s just the way it is!”
    â€”
    â€œIt wasn’t the ‘theater of the absurd.’” Ted Poe sat opposite me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. I’d just quoted to him his critic Jonathan Turley’s line—“using citizens as virtual props in his personal theater of the absurd”—and he was bristling. He wore cowboy boots with his suit—another Poe trademark, like the catchphrase and the shaming. He had the look and mannerisms of his friend George W. Bush. “It was the theater of the
different
,” he said.
    The Rayburn building is where all the congressmen and congresswomen have their offices. Each office door is decorated with the state flag of the congressperson who is