The Intersection of the Despicable and the Silly

I am confident that it has only been in my own lifetime that we have adopted the despicable practice of the publicization of private grief. By this I mean the routine insistence that the mother of the boy who has been shot down in the street be asked, “How do you feel?” and the video tape of her response broadcast as a matter of course on the evening news.

I imagine – or insist that there must have been – a time when everyone involved understood that to the extent the underlying events (the crime, the accident) merited public attention, the grief of friends and relatives could not possibly add anything relevant to the public. Moreover, basic decency would dictate that intrusion at such a time would be a scandal. I insist that there was a time when no such individual would permit it, when no policeman or neighbor would stand by while it happened, when no legitimate journalist would demand it. Indeed, I insist that this would be one of the basic ways one might distinguish between The Washington Post, on the one hand, and the National Enquirer, on the other.

But times have changed. Now, not only is the microphone shoved routinely into the face of the grief-stricken mother but, as often as not, that mother agrees to sit down and be interviewed on camera within hours of the event. And then seems eager for the attention, and indifferent to the spectacle. Perhaps this is the consequence of living in the world created by Oprah, and Jerry Springer, and Montel Williams, where reality is somehow not really real unless we see it on television.

The only proper thing to do is to avert your eyes from this public display, with love and pity for the victims, including those on camera.

I am similarly confident that it has only been in my own lifetime that we have seen the rise of the celebrity expert. By this I do not mean the true expert who, as a consequence of that special expertise, becomes famous. The Chief Medical Examiner of New York or Los Angeles might become famous, or some particularly wacky scientific genius (Richard Feynman comes to mind). Instead I mean the celebrity – the movie star or sports figure – who presumes to deliver himself of his opinions on subjects having nothing whatever to do with their special talent.

On what basis ought one to listen particularly to the political views of Barbra Streisand, or Susan Sarandon? Why should I care? While certainly entitled to form and hold their own opinions – however bizarre – those opinions have behind them no special experience, no special study or expertise so as to legitimately command attention. If it is my opinion that the war in Iraq must be prosecuted with great energy, and it is the opinion of Ms. Sarandon that the troops ought to come home today, the Universe ought really to be at quits, since her opinion cannot possibly outweigh mine, or vice versa. It is plainly absurd for anyone to care what Robert Redford or Meryl Streep think about agricultural pesticides.

The only proper thing to do is to ignore such nonsense.

But today we have the intersection of the despicable and the silly: the publicly grieving celebrity expert. We have this:

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son's death.

Asked what would give him satisfaction, Berg, an anti-war activist and candidate for U.S. Congress, said, "The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush."

[snip]

"I don't think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq," Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. "I think George Bush is.

"George Bush is the one that invaded this country, George Bush is the one that destabilized it so that Zarqawi could get in, so that Zarqawi had a need to get in, to defend his region of the country from American invaders."

His son having been murdered by thugs, Mr. Berg runs to the microphone thrust eagerly into his face, and uses the celebrity unaccountably awarded to him to expound opinions for which he has no particular basis. Cindy Sheehan and “the Jersey Girls” are other examples.

Let me put it plainly, if perhaps not so harshly as has been done by others: If my son is killed by a falling meteor, I do not become thereby an expert in astrophysics, entitled to be heard on questions involving orbital mechanics, or the budget for NASA. And if my son, or my spouse, is murdered by terrorist thugs, I gain no special knowledge regarding military, political or diplomatic matters.