What do Tiger Woods, his numerous alleged girlfriends, and we, the ogling, obsessed onlookers all have in common? None of us can restrain ourselves.
Woods can’t keep his hands off, as they used to say, the merchandise; the alleged girlfriends can’t control their appetite for revenge, celebrity, and profit-making; and we cannot stop ourselves from greedily consuming every little piece of the scandal that is thrown our way. We are all citizens-in-good-standing of Infant Nation.
What a year it’s been for impulsiveness! There were the further revelations of John Edwards and his girlfriend and their out-of-wedlock child, and Mark Sanford and his girlfriend—and his rambling, uncontrolled paean to crazy love, delivered to the world press. There was John Ensign and his (friend’s wife) girlfriend and his hush money, and David Letterman and his (employee) girlfriend, and Letterman’s alleged blackmailer, who apparently could not control his impulse to blackmail Letterman any more than Letterman could control his impulse to increase his assistant’s workload.
No wonder we are so obsessed with how to raise a child. It's how we project our own catastrophe of infantile adulthood.
There was Joe Wilson impulsively screaming “You lie” (even if he planned his slander, he planned it impulsively) and his liberal counterpart, Alan Grayson, impulsively spewing puerile invective in response. Meanwhile Palin, Dobbs, Beck et al.—the “Foxulists,” as Jonathan Alter wittily called them—made lack of restraint a competing political ideology, in which the disappearing boundary between politics and entertainment vanished once and for all. On a milder note, there was Obama’s impulsive and politically self-destructive trip to Copenhagen to try to win the Olympics for Chicago.
Let’s not forget Serena Williams’ outburst, and Kanye West’s outburst, and the unhinged and uncontrolled escapades of Balloon Boy’s father, and also of the Salahis, who took our culture’s new gospel of interactivity at its word. And everybody else, it seems, is surrendering to the impulse to text and drive at the same time.
Exposure of illicit grasping is so much with us nowadays that it’s time we changed our threshold for scandal. Decades of the most sophisticated marketing techniques known to humankind have made us all quivering flames of appetite. There is probably not a nanosecond of the day when we do not desire something or other. There is probably nothing that we feel we cannot seize or use to satisfy our desires—especially when we are told from every corner of commercial society that we can have whatever we want, and that if we don’t get it, we’re inadequate in some way.
No wonder we are so obsessed with how to raise a child. It's how we project our own catastrophe of infantile adulthood.
One of the many dire products of our late economic boom was to create people who were so wealthy that their moral universe was defined in the starkest terms between wanting on the one hand, and getting on the other—with no room for restraint or disappointment in between. In previous epochs, only emperors had Tiger Woods’ riches. Now we have Sardanapaluses everywhere. The public exposure, mockery, and condemnation of their excesses seems only right, a form of populist justice.
But the enjoyment of scandals that are the product of unbridled gratification has become a new form of gratification itself. Colette once said that Don Juan seduced so many women because he wanted to experience a woman’s multiple orgasms. That might explain Woods’ sexuality. It also might explain our fascination with his sexual exploits. As we obsess over his “sins”—and those of the other sexual miscreants of 2009—perhaps we partake of them. On every front, among the exposed and the exposers, lack of restraint is universal.
We may well be witnessing the advent of a new type of being: Homo impulsivus. If that’s the case, we should stop being outraged—and titillated—by every violation of a social norm. For the social norms have changed. Simply to get on with more serious business, we are going to have to legalize scandal the way some people want to decriminalize drugs. By the time we get to Tiger’s No. 148, we should at least be able to Just Say No.
Lee Siegel, senior columnist for the Daily Beast, publishes widely on culture and politics. He is the author of three books:Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently,Against the Machine: How the Web Is Reshaping Culture and Commerce—and Why It Matters. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.