By Rose Graner
Entertainment Editor
In a recent interview with “60 Minutes,” Lady Gaga declared that her fans “Want to see me fail… to see me fall onstage.”
We, as a culture, love to watch our supposed “heroes” fall, both literally and, more to the point, metaphorically. We also love to be vocal about how concerned we are about that, how worried we are about the direction our culture is heading in.
In reality, the greatest cultural flaw we possess is that we are so willing to give in to a hypocritical urge to declare that whatever meaningless, petty, human impulse we have– even the impulse to watch a figurative train wreck– is a matter of life and death and that it spells out the inevitable end of our culture.
In short, the obsession that we should feel such shame for such an obsessive interest in is our glee at our own supposed cultural destruction and not, as the Los Angeles Times recently suggested in an article on the coverage of the recent Charlie Sheen fiasco, our love of the typical celebrity crash-and-burn.
When it comes to the American obsession with celebrity we admit that we were much more sophisticated in earlier eras. Most tabloids of the era knew that the 1950s- and 1960s-era actor Rock Hudson was gay but were too downright civilized to reveal that and, thereby, subject him to the witch-hunt that would have resulted.
It’s not actually so terrible that we live in a society that is accepting enough to have tabloids willing to break such a story. An interest in the downfalls of others is a completely natural, human interest.
One would probably have to delve deeply into Jungian psychology in order to get to the roots of that interest, but it is undeniable that it has existed for countless years without any society burning to the ground because of it. The play “Oedipus” certainly demonstrates that an interest in a hero’s downfall has existed since far before American culture ever was dreamed of.
In short, the true flaw we as a culture exhibit through our interest in others’ downfalls is one of self-centeredness. We love to assume that we reached this mindset first, that it has extreme implications, that everything we do is so important that it means the life or death of our entire culture.
Actually, it doesn’t. All it means is that we’re human beings with the same base interests as everyone else. Isn’t that a supremely American ideal, that underneath everything, we all share the same needs and interests?
The only thing in this situation that will actually lead to some sort of cultural breakdown is if we become so ashamed of being human that we try to distance ourselves from our baser interests. We need to stop gleefully waiting for a societal breakdown while hypocritically bemoaning the fact that we do embody some basic, admittedly flawed, traits of humanity.
The essence of the problem here lies in the fact that we are hypocritical, not that we are obsessive or insensitive. An interest in destruction is unreasonable, but it is not an inherently awful sign of some sort of cultural End Times.
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