The Invisible Counterpoint

Sheen is feeling more and more like OJ driving up the 405,” tweeted David Poland earlier today. “I don’t even think people realize they are just waiting for the gun to go off.” Oy. Well, how about a drive down memory lane instead — to a happier, more innocent time when Charlie Sheen actually volunteered to leave a TV show after a healthy payday. (S.T. Vanairsdale, “ Remember Charlie Sheen Really Winning on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” Movieline, 2 March 2011) Every once in a while there appears some celebrity with enough Celebrity to let us feel that if we let loose all our despise upon him/her, s/he can take it all in, and then perhaps kindly die, for a fully restive period of, even-if-short, still-pleasing respite. We've been denied it for quite awhile; keep on getting poor offerings -- already fully dissipated Corey Haim and Gary Coleman -- or being effectively checked, with undeniable momentum-carried-and-respectable-enoughs getting in the way, as Heidi Klum did wi...

Watching Rachel Maddow recite the many good things the healthcare bill does on her show Monday night, I was elated. Hearing that Republicans have vowed to repeal the bill, I was insulted. My insurance pays for lifesaving care. My insurance has saved my life. It is easy and natural to shield oneself from the bloody, painful, grievous facts behind the numbers when one is not, oneself, one of the numbers. Having cruised along healthy for so long, I was able to put out of mind the gruesome, deathly consequences of a broken healthcare system. I can no longer treat it as an abstraction. I take it personally. So I am happy when progress is made and angry when such progress is threatened. Do Republicans know how murderous they sound? When your life depends on decisions made by people whose faces you will never see, based on rules you had no part in making, in a language so technical you cannot parse it, you finally, truly encounter your own vulnerability to the actions of states and instituti...

That concept does seem well in line with Buzz Bissinger's accompanying story on Woods' downfall, and a "hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance." In it, Bissinger speaks of "image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives." So is this image of Tiger, the one who looks ready to get rich or die tryin' , any more real than that of the baby-faced guy in dorky shirts we've seen waving from the green all these years? Or is it possible that Woods, like any of us, is a bundle of many contradictory things at once -- athlete, parent, lover, jerk? (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Tiger’s abs unleashed,” Salon, 4 Jan. 2010) Fortunately, he came to know he was of the fallen, before it was too late . . . re: "Or is it possible that Woods, like any of us, is a bundle of many contradictory things at once -- athlete, parent, lover, jerk?" Fox News wants to make him Christian; you're kinda already offering the same service -- hi...

The Tiger Woods drama can't be bottomless -- or can it? Eventually we're bound to hit bedrock, but fear not, because that day is surely not this one. By the time you finish reading this sentence, another eight women will have come forward to say they tapped that PGA ass, and a lurid video or voice mail will have been released and reached 8 million hits on YouTube. Let's bring it up to speed. We've got endorsement dropping ! A possible VIP coochie-procuring ring! The inevitable busty cougar angle! The suddenly ironic last interview! And three words: Crazy. Ambien. Sex. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Your daily Tiger Woods,” Salon, 15 Dec. 2009) Declaring fealty When myriad steroid scandals were finally overwhelming the flexed bulk of big-leaguers, when every man with a capacious smile was being brought down, Tiger might even have sensed his current morph no longer suited the current taste. Someone said he's a republican. My guess is that we'll see him start dres...