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The Invention of Outrage
by Frank Bruni
IF you’re just catching up on last week’s news, I suggest you sit down. Fast. What you’re about to learn is incredible. Unthinkable. If you drink, grab one. Certain shocks can’t be borne without absorbers.
Kim Kardashian is getting divorced. You read that right. It turns out that the nation’s poster girl for old-fashioned virtues — our little Kimmykins of Sunnybrook Farm — brought something less than steadfast and humble commitment to her marriage, which unraveled only 72 days after a ceremony bathed in klieg lights, lousy with product placements and underwritten with a reported multimillion-dollar payment (which her family has vaguely denied) for television rights. Of course none of that casts doubt on her good intentions. So it’s a real stunner, this rapid and bitter end. A nation reels.
That’s not all. There has been trouble with the Congressional super committee. This group is supposed to slash-slash-slash at the federal deficit like Edward Scissorhands working over a block of ice, but apparently its 12 members have been frozen at the block-of-ice stage. Deadlock. Extension. Before an end-of-week glimmer of hope from John Boehner, these were the words being thrown around in news reports and conversations with an aghast air. Who’d have thought that the Republicans could be so opposed to taxes? Or that Democrats would cry foul? That’s a script utterly without precedent.
If ever you needed an example of how easily, spuriously or conveniently we gin up our outrage, last week was it. As we kept up with Kardashian, kept tabs on a constipated Congress and beheld both the turmoil in Greece and the travails of Herman Cain, we summoned astonishment where there was questionable grounds for it and an ire sometimes out of proportion with the circumstances. So did the players in a few of these dramas and the parasites feeding off them. It was a mad, mad week.
Cain dominated it, to an icky extent, because the overriding farce and inevitable demise of his candidacy make all the attention to it feel diversionary, theatrical, opportunistic. This isn’t the media’s finest hour.
The focus of late has been on charges of sexual harassment against him when he headed the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s. If they prove indisputably true he’s a boor, a bully and maybe a bit of a predator: three more reasons he shouldn’t be president. But we didn’t need them. We had at least 999 already.
That sometimes got lost in the discussion, as did the sad prevalence of men in high places seeking to take sexual advantage of subordinates, or at least behaving insensitively. If Cain is among them, it’s certainly relevant to his fitness for office. But it’s hardly revelatory.
Nor were his shifting accounts of what happened or the possibility that a rival campaign planted the story. Accused people panic, hedge and bumble; political operatives play dirty. The events of last week merely affirmed that and didn’t warrant quite so much breathlessness, some of it from Cain and his chief of staff, Mark Block, who were simply appalled — appalled, I tell you — at reporters’ relentlessness and enemies’ determination. Really? If that reaction was genuine, then we’re missing the biggest Cain story of all. He and his deputies have spent their lives until recently on Mars.
Last week there was horror at the heft and 24-carat shine of the golden parachute Jon Corzine had tried to arrange for himself, though that was considerably less anomalous than a destructive snowstorm before Halloween. In a criminal court in Los Angeles, there was continued stupefaction at the unorthodox ministrations of Michael Jackson’s doctor. Wasn’t everything about Jackson unorthodox? Freaky, even? Alas, to concentrate on that would be to dilute the thrilling outrage over his denouement.
Greece once again seemed to hold the world’s financial health in its hands, and so there was fresh scrutiny of how it got itself, and the rest of us, into this mess. The gist: those Mediterranean ne’er-do-wells behaved gluttonously and unforgivably. They racked up mountains of debt — unlike anyone on this side of the Atlantic! They coddled themselves with a lavish social welfare state — unheard of in Western Europe!
The Greek tragedy is one of degree, and the Greeks are magnified versions of the rest of us, paying a magnified price. To cast them as villainous outliers may be cathartic, but it isn’t honest or entirely just.
Honest. Just. Such lofty adjectives all but demand a pivot back to Kardashian. For those of you unfamiliar with her rise to renown, here’s a crash course: naked in a sex video leaked in 2007; naked in a 2007 issue of Playboy; a reality show; another reality show; a friendship with Paris Hilton; a cupcake flavor in her honor named Va-Va-Va-Nilla; clothes for Sears called the Kardashian Kollection; a book titled “Kardashian Konfidential.” She really knows how to work a konsonant.
Beyond that her talents are ambiguous. Like other celebrities famous for being famous, she means nothing and can thus mean everything, an empty vessel accommodating all manner of observations, a malleable moral for many stories.
IN the wake of her separation announcement I watched Facebook light up with comments from gay people saying she had provided an inadvertent argument for same-sex marriage, because the institution couldn’t be treated with any more disrespect than she, an avowed heterosexual, had shown it. I got a widely circulated pitch from a publicist hawking a “national expert on the psychology of relationships” who could address the impact of Kardashian’s divorce on “the legions of younger generations that are following this and view Kim as a role model.” Legions? Role model? Oh please.
A branding expert prattled on CNN about the tricky maintenance of a lifestyle brand like Kardashian’s. A professor at the University of Southern California opined in The Wall Street Journal about “how much the marketing universe of the Kardashians has in common with the real art world,” comparing her to the artist Jeff Koons. And star-struck magazines and so-called news shows gasped: was it possible the wedding had been a sham?
Amazingly, Kardashian herself, usually so publicity-shy, spoke up: “I would never marry for a TV show, for money, for anything like that. And I think that’s really ridiculous, that I have to even, you know, kind of defend that, but, you know, I guess that comes along with what’s, you know — when you film your wedding for a reality show.”
She sounded outraged. You know?
Sex vedio exposure... fast marriage and flash divorce... Anyway, it's normal for those so-called elites/stars....
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