Politicians Falling From Grace
BY CLAIRE BARTHOLOMEW
On May 2nd, actress Amanda Bynes had 499,000 Twitter followers. Now, she has more than three million followers. Why the sudden jump in Twitter popularity? Her recent tweets, of course. Her claims that she plans “On Having Surgery On My Whole Face Straight Up” (June 27) and “Suing Every Magazine Lying About Me” (June 21) are strange, to say the least. She’s also taken to attacking various celebrities, from Drake to Rihanna. Before she began erratically tweeting, she had almost entirely faded out of the public’s consciousness, having formally retired from acting in June 2010. But in these past few months, she has drawn an incredible amount of attention for her uncharacteristic behavior. Almost every news outlet that covers pop culture, from TMZ to The Huffington Post, runs frequent articles on her latest scandal.
Lindsay Lohan, meanwhile, emerged from her sixth known stay in rehab this month, and already every celebrity gossip site out there has posted tirelessly about her future career choices and whether she can really stay clean this time. Her “fans” watch her anxiously, wondering when she will slip up. They lie in wait for her next harried court appearance; they catalogue her every public outing, secretly hoping she will begin to “act crazy” again. She has become the celebrity people keep up with purely in case she falls.
Bynes and Lohan are the latest in a string of celebrities who’ve “gone off the rails.” And like every off-kilter celebrity before them, they’ve illuminated one of the darker things about humanity: our voyeuristic fascination with people falling from grace.
Perhaps it’s a bit like what they say about watching a train wreck: you can’t look away. Perhaps we are hardwired to be fascinated by destruction; perhaps we worry that such a decline could happen to us one day, and we want to guard ourselves against it by learning exactly how it happened.
Or, perhaps, we simply enjoy seeing people with status and power fall. After all, we’ve put them on a pedestal for so long. They are considered the more successful, more “put together”, more influential versions of ourselves—they are what we could be if we applied ourselves and had a little more luck. Perhaps it’s a relief when they bow under the pressure of our expectations. People once heralded President Barack Obama as a beacon of hope, a man who would change the course of the United States. Now, 49% of Americans disapprove of his performance in the Oval Office. Every major newspaper in the country consistently vilifies the man who inherited a broken economy and struggles against a fractured Congress he has no power to mend.
There’s a twisted kind of satisfaction associated with watching a once-beloved public figure crash and burn. This may explain why, paradoxically, public figures sometimes become more famous because of their falls from grace. Everybody loves a scandal. If you Google “Anthony Weiner scandal,” you get more than 89 million hits. Google “Bill Clinton scandal” and you get more than 324 million hits. Tellingly, Scandal, an Emmy-nominated TV show about a political “fixer,” garners almost 3 million viewers in the all-important 18-49 demographic because it hones in on our secret desire to watch important people mess up.
Depressingly, we seem to relish public figures’ mistakes. Congress has a 17% approval rating, struggling to perform even basic duties. Yet satirical news programs such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report seem to revel in our political system’s decline. Recently, Stephen Colbert gleefully cited a study by the Sunlight Foundation that found that Congress is getting dumber, and Jon Stewart made up his own Urban Dictionary-approved words to describe Congress’ unbelievable lack of productivity. What does it say about humanity that we get excited when our public figures fail us?
Our instinctive response when a public figure begins to stray from a respectable path is to watch their every move, chastising them as they falter. But all this does is fuel the fire. Public figures are humans, too. They might seem larger than life, but they deserve our respect. After all, maybe the problem is with society itself. We shouldn’t cheer others’ misfortune; we should challenge them to do better.