Know Thyself…Whilst Thou is Still Thee

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s website, “identity theft occurs when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes.” Were this nuts and bolts definition your only guide you might imagine the impact of identity theft on the victim as falling in the extremely-disruptive-annoyance range of potential life tragedies, on par with an auto accident in which no one was hurt but your car is totaled. Yet according to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s website “the emotional impact on victims is likened to that felt by victims of more violent crimes, including rape, violent assault, and repeated battering.” Despite the best of intentions, the FTC lacks insight into the ferocity of this crime. Imagine the outcry if the following definition appeared on a federal government sponsored website: sexual assault occurs when someone uses your vagina without your permission to commit rape or other crimes.

The only clue to the gravity of the crime in the FTC’s description is the use of the term identity theft. Identity theft is not a sexed-up misnomer for personal information theft. In the 21st century, “when someone uses your personal information without your permission to commit fraud or other crimes” they have not just spoiled your credit or crippled your finances, they have well and truly robbed you of your very identity. Identity theft is as descriptively named and as potent as that other quintessentially 21st century crime, suicide bombing. To witness the shocking potency of identity theft is to encounter the vulnerability of our unavoidable new identities. Identity theft is actually a misnomer, because it is not theft but murder, the murder of our digital selves.

Identity theft can be as crippling as rape or battering because of a fundamental shift in identity. The American Heritage Dictionary defines identity as “the collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known,” recognizing that identity resides not in the individual’s self concept but in other’s perceptions. One’s identity in the world is nothing more than how one is known and recognized by the world. Increasingly, the world knows us as an accumulation of little bits of data. We are akin to George Seurat’s pointillist paintings, but instead of an accumulation of tiny colored dots coalescing to form the human image on canvas, we are the accumulation of tiny dots of data (credit rating, tax bracket, debts, liquidity, 401K, e-mail account, HDTV, cell phone network, health insurance) coalescing to form identity.

The world now knows us primarily by the series of letters and numbers that surge through the digital network when our name and social security number are entered. In a world of genetic determinism, this data is the DNA of identity. If you cling to the notion that your identity flows from the wellspring of your moral reputation, just speak with an upstanding victim of identity theft whose digital data went haywire after the crime. Victims of identity theft suffer like victims of violent assault because once the world recognizes you as an accumulation of deficient data it will begin battering you as such.

The split between identity and reputation is now complete. To be sure, identity trumps reputation. It was not long ago that men fought to the death to defend the honor of their reputations. A lifetime of humble good deeds, formerly underwritten by goodwill in the community that guaranteed security in an uncertain world, now won’t even get you a cup of coffee if you have the wrong set of data attached to your name. This is the horrific specter of identity theft, that a lifetime devoted to doing the right thing and respectful of the need to have the right set of data can be undone in an instant by some guy in New Jersey using your “personal information” to finance his personal mission to download every available internet image of anal sex (of which there are surely millions). You may be the world’s most devoted soccer mom, but if the computer screen reports $60,000 in debt from a bad porn habit than that is how the loan officer will see you (not that soccer moms and porn are mutually exclusive, I guess, but most of the pro-porn feminists I have had the privilege of encountering don’t fit that demographic).

Identity theft opens up a world that most of its victims have only seen on TV or the movies or read about in the paper. This is the world that is supposed to apply to Jerry Springer-style white trash, immigrants, and “inner city” blacks. It is the world that makes us happy to stay in our suburbs and good schools. It is the world that Republicans want to ignore and Democrats want to save by making it like their selves. It is, at heart, a world that does not open doors. If identity theft had a logo it would be a closed, padlocked door. Life in America from the middle class up is about being welcome inside. Identity theft makes you Lucky the Leprechaun when all the signs say No Dogs or Irish Allowed Inside.

The outside created by the American inside is a shadowland. The aforementioned Jerry Springer is a modern-day Barnum, staging the American shadowland as circus and beaming it into our homes every weekday. The bearded lady has been replaced by the man who wants to have a sex change so he can have a lesbian affair with his step-daughter, but as ever, we are meant to ogle. And to gloat that we are inside, if somehow a bit underwhelmed by our predictable sex lives, which are after all a small price to pay to be on this side of the door. (Full disclosure: when I was younger and more ridden with angst I occasionally tuned in Cops to tune out the angst; Cops always told my angst “this is the world’s smallest violin, and it is playing just for you”. Thank you Cops.)

Identity theft is a backstage pass to the American shadowland, where the first fact of life is that it is nothing like The Jerry Springer Show. Instead of threesomes with your landlord, try having your electricity turned off. You might have been up for a fling with a little person, but you can’t pick him up because your car just got repossessed. And it might be fun spending the next two weeks trying to seduce the lesbian vegan who lives next door into eating meat and your sausage, but how about going on your own diet of ramen noodles and Ho-Hos because you can only get to the corner store and that’s all you can afford. Want to tell your black wife you’ve been sleeping with your Aryan supremacist gay boss? That will be hard if you can’t even get a job because you are living out of your ’83 Datsun and haven’t bathed in a week and a half.

The crime of The Jerry Springer Show is that it portrays those who live outside of America while living within its borders as enthusiastic sexual deviants while ignoring the reality that their lives are often shitstorms, where if sex plays a role it is frequently in the form of abuse or unwanted children. The horror of identity theft is that it boots you outside where making ends meet could mean being the kind of stripper who strips not to get rich or pay for college, but to pay the rent. The tragedy of America is that we who live inside are willing to treat those on the outside looking desperately in as if they were prostitutes in the windows of Amsterdam’s Red Light District ready to turn a trick for our delight. Really kinky sex is clearly still beyond the pale inside America. Beyond the pale lies the shadowland, whose residents must carry the weight of American sexual denial, in addition to the crushing drudgery of survival.

The FTC warns that “one bit of personal information is all someone needs to steal your identity.” In a few years the FTC may have a similar warning that one bit of DNA is all someone needs to clone you, making ownership of our bodies as tenuous as our current struggle to keep identity under lock and key, lest it slip away in the night like an overprotected hormonal teenager who you just know is coming home pregnant. Just as parents ward off evil by lying awake in bed until teenage child walks through the door at 3 AM, Americans have their own ritual to protect every last bit of personal information. Every time you shred your credit card statement you are symbolically sacrificing your digital self in order to placate the identity gods. The shredding of your digital self is the sacramental statement that it is better to be torn asunder than to have one’s identity stripped. When you shred you affirm that it is better not to exist at all than to exist outside, in the American shadowland.

The pious shredder exhibits an absolute faith in the state of grace that is insider status. This common American faith is as fundamentalist a religion as exists anywhere in the world. It is practiced just as fervently, and heaven and hell are as real as your own retirement plan and your wife’s grandmother’s inability to afford dentures. In the American faith identity theft has substituted the fear of hell for the fear of God, and left us all scrambling to cement our place in the heaven of insider status. But the lives we build as insider cathedrals are as sturdy as a house of cards; Remove one card, have “one bit of personal information” stolen, and the entire edifice crumbles. I reserve judgment on spiritual devices such as rosary beads or prayer wheels designed to ease passage of the soul into the afterlife or to smooth reincarnation. But no amount of shredding can ward off the shadows outside every American insider’s window. You might as well wear a garlic necklace while you are feeding the shredder.

Identity theft is, at the last, the mirror image of the American Dream. Behind the looking glass it is always riches-to-rags. Though I am tempted, I have not yet purchased a shredder. But my faith is strong. I tear my credit card statement to pieces with my bare hands.