A Plea

Dear world,

Please shut the fuck up about Tiger Woods and what may or may not be his infidelities. I don't - and no one should - care. 

There's something sick and perverse intrinsic to our culture that loves, desires, salivates and almost orgasms at the chance to publicly tear someone down, to take every skeleton in their closet and not only bring them out bone by individual bone but then kick those broken skeletons around and invite a team of forensic investigators to further comb the now empty closet for additional infractions. I don't know what it is; we love to see icons brought to pieces and the red-eyed fervor with which people demand it happen is sadistically similar to what I imagine witch-hunts in Salem and tribunal Inquisitions in Europe were like. O! How better off we'd be if we all focused on our own lives with the same amount of scrutinous eyeballing as we do the paramours of our bent voyeurism. 

The stranger thing about America is that Tiger will rise again and the adoration thrown at him well be magnified and multiplied compared to what it was. As quick as the culture is to send out opprobrious recriminations and dash their heroes to salt, they're even quicker to forgive, to welcome the fallen deity back into the pale spotlight they'd preferred him before. It's our modus operandi: the culture finds someone they love somewhere in the midst of pop stardom and catapults him or her from mere athlete or mere performer, turning them into a social and moral beacon, an icon, a symbol for the mythical and mostly nonexistent American Dream, a symbol for all things sterling and pure and righteous, and then as it's finally revealed that this individual isn't all that, that he or she is in fact a regular human being, or worse, a downright despicable person who just so happens to excel at a sport or have a simply breathtaking voice and a handiness when it comes to performances, the culture is then filled with roiling rage, resentment, indignation. They are, in their own minds, duped, cheated, lied to, the emperor not so much pantless but offensively criminal, a history of fraud and deception in addition to his total nakedness; but we are, as a society, complicit in the creation of this icon. We turn them into what they become. We create this plastic, deeply flawed image of them and once it's inexorably shattered, we're shaken. I often wonder if this is something innately American or a (sadly) human characteristic altogether. Perhaps this is how morality became established for early humans, through public judgment and denigration; the public wants to stone you for your actions, ergo your behavior and your attitude probably sucks and it would be a good idea to refrain from doing that again. 

And then what? We demand explanations. We demand to know what happened. Was a crime committed? No? What about the crime against us? Doesn't matter. Crime or no crime, there needs to be conferences, addresses made to the nation with the speaker equal parts shamed and emboldened, pretty apologetic letters ham-fistedly stuffed in the mailboxes of every household in America, those inside watching and reading along, their hands held amid whispers that "this too shall pass." The figure categorically owes the public, as has been stated in this particular instance, a precise and detailed testimonial of everything, right down to the bowl of cereal he had the morning of.  Apologies, looks of remorse, sorrow, incalculable shame and failure, assurances to improve, to become a better person, a better husband, to cut his nails more often, to drink more mineral water, to not drive so fast, to eat less meat (it makes us carnal!) to smile more, to be better, a better listener, a better thinker, a better father. He has to coddle the public as if their fragile psyche were at stake (it might be). 

But!

There's no need to worry.  Thanks to America's short term memory, crippling attention deficit disorder and constitutional fickleness, that failure and contrition needn't last forever; we wouldn't want it to anyhow! Where would be the fun in that (nobody likes a Debbie Downer or in this case a Timorous Tiger)? Instead, we ask that you rather speedily pick up your pieces, rebuild yourself and reformulate your image once again; rise back to the echelon we shouldn't have ever in good conscience thrust you before, but what the hell. We want, in addition to the tabloid-splattered and gossip-heavy sensationalist stories of your demise, the heroic feat of your phoenician ascension from the ruins. Because you are, after all, a man who makes millions of dollars for swinging a small club at an even smaller ball and why anyone would expect anything more from you or anyone being fed obscene amounts of money for doing one isolated task for entertainment's value is truly beyond me. The irony of this now standard cultural phenomena is that while we think it exposes the person in question, what's really exposed is us, the culture, our petty juvenility.