Keeping, and not keeping, secrets

I’ve actually acquired a guilty pleasure/game show addiction.

The Game Show Network has a show called “Baggage.” It’s sort of a mutant grandchild of” The Dating Game,” although I doubt “Baggage” will ever have a board game. And if it does, it’ll be the kind of board game you only find at adult stores.

This is how it works: Contestant A has to choose from among three people of the opposite sex, contestants B, C and D. Each of the three has three progressively larger suitcases. In each suitcase is a personal secret — the titular baggage – and the bigger the suitcase, the bigger (or weirder) the secret. Contestant A uses those secrets to cashier two of the other contestants. The winner then gets a look inside the single, large piece of baggage brought by Contestant A. The winner then gets to decide whether the two will hook up (in the show’s parlance whether one person can “accept the baggage” of the other).

The secrets revealed range from the benign, if not silly (“I’m deathly afraid of ketchup) to the bizarre (“I still own a house with my ex and he’s my boss”) to the frankly disgusting (“I bite my toenails in bed,” and this from a woman). At one point in the show, secrets are revealed without immediately saying which contestants have which secrets; part of the fun is gaming out whom the secrets belong to.

Oh, and incidentally, this whole freak show is hosted by Jerry Springer.

Yeah, it’s cheesy enough to clog your arteries. It’s dumb. The scripted jokes are horrendous. Even Springer looks a bit abashed sometimes.

But the secrets and the explanations behind them – which often explain them away pretty well – are highly amusing, if you have the stomach for people like the toenail-chewer. The little mating dance the two finalists do is interesting. And it continues to amaze, and skeeve me out a little, that people will reveal their most intimate secrets on television. Many bloviations have tried to explain how this is a symptom of deep societal illness, but in the end … it’s their choice and it’s amusing. I’m not proud of watching it, but I don’t sit in front of the TV wearing sackcloth and ashes, either.

A lot of the secrets, of course, involve sexual proclivities or bodily functions. It’s the kind of thing you’d tell nobody except your spouse, maybe. Yet, these people are telling Jerry Springer, several fellow game show contestants, the production crew, the studio audience and God only knows how many television viewers. It’s sort of the ultimate in oversharing.

On the other hand, the secrets get out. They get out to a lot of people who really have no need to hear them (like me), but you can’t accuse these people of hiding anything.

It’s an interesting show to watch with your significant other. Karon and I, being somewhat older than your average “Baggage” contestant, really have no hidden secrets in our pasts. Everybody says that, but in our case it’s true; we’re old enough to know that hiding something from a partner who’s intimate in every way is a recipe for a really uncomfortable discussion, if not disaster. Nothing in either of our pasts is terribly shocking anyway, but we know the virtue of full disclosure. And besides, honesty is just easier.

And what’s more, secrets are pernicious things. In the first place, as the old saying goes, the problem with lying – and that’s basically what keeping a secret is – is that you have to keep track of the lies you tell so you can repeat them.

But the really bad thing is that secrets, especially about the distant past, only retain power because of their very secrecy. If you have to go through life dreading that word of some past indiscretion or weirdness will get out, that indiscretion or weirdness retains a power all out of proportion to its importance. It can reach across years with its crabbed, gnarled hand and mess up your life.

That’s particularly true of family secrets. I know of a large family that has a huge scandal in its past. The scandal dates back at least 70 years, but even now perhaps fewer than a dozen people in the entire family know about it. But it came up obliquely in one branch of the family and wreaked major havoc with some of the relationships in that branch.

Now, everybody who had first-hand knowledge of the secret is long dead, although some still have children living. And maybe, after all this time, there isn’t a real good reason for everybody, including the children of those directly involved, to know. But still, the fact that a secret more than half a century old can still affect the lives of subsequent generations tells me that keeping the secret may not have been a good idea.

In the end, though, it’s not my call. If it doesn’t affect me, I don’t exactly have any moral standing to publicize it.

And I’m sure as hell not going on any game shows to tell it, or for that matter any secrets about myself. Besides, any secrets I have would be so dull that anyone hearing them would find me less interesting.