Nervous Breakdowns at the Bank and their Benefits

You ever had one of those moments when you felt like it was all you could do to keep from strangling the bureaucratic clerk saying, "I can't remove the overdraft fee, it says so on my screen"?

Don't feel so bad. According to Mental Floss, the actress Charlize Theron owes her career to just such an unseemly outburst:

Charlize was trying to cash a check from her mother, who was in South Africa, but the L.A. bank refused to honor the international check. Charlize pitched a fit of epic proportions, really letting the bank teller have it. As luck would have it, an agent was in line behind her and was impressed by her passionate “performance.” Although she later fired him because he kept sending her scripts for films like Showgirls, it was the break she needed.

From the article How 10 Celebrities Were Discovered.

Political Dementia, The Narrative and Public Policy

Do you have an opinion about Sarah Palin? Does it have to do with her voting record or do you think she's a spunky conservative powerhouse? Do you find yourself chanting "Yes, we can!" without really knowing what we can do?

After hearing hours of coverage of the conventions and candidates, are you familiar with their budget proposals? Do you agree with their positions on media consolidation? Do you know their records on agriculture issues? You probably know this-- there's been a big surge in enthusiasm over Sarah Palin, Obama has struck back over mocking of "community organizers," Hillary Clinton is plugging Obama while carefully trying not to slam Palin. McCain is a war hero and Obama is a rock star. One represents experience the other change.

Brian Unger, on NPR, did a feature today on Political Dementia, an invented mental disorder with symptoms like being unable to tell the difference between the experienced between the inexperienced, good experience from bad experience and worthless experience from valuable inexperience.



Maybe we can just stop all this political nonsense now and choose our candidate reality show style as this clip, aired today on CNN, suggests.



This feature on a Mad TV segment is listed as one of the top stories right now on CNN.com. As is often the case, the comedian manages to point out something that we've barely noticed. Our brand of news as info-tainment lends itself well to storytelling. We like stories about characters and so we debate politicians rather than politics.

A few days ago I sounded in on the Peggy Noonan open mic viral video and its commentary. I did not include a link to her original Wall Street Journal article and its attached response to her unintended moment of public candor.

Along with the much reported criticism of Palin, Noonan and Mike Murphy criticized a whole system which she referred to later in the introduction to her article as "The Narrative."

"It was just after the 1988 Republican convention ended," she wrote. "I was on the plane, as a speechwriter, that took Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, and the new vice presidential nominee, Dan Quayle, from New Orleans, the site of the convention, to Indiana. Sitting next to Mr. Quayle was the other senator from that state, Richard Lugar. As we chatted, I thought, 'Why him and not him?' Why Mr. Quayle as the choice, and not the more experienced Mr. Lugar? I came to think, in following years, that some of the reason came down to what is now called The Narrative. The story the campaign wishes to tell about itself, and communicate to others. I don't like the idea of The Narrative."

But we have become conditioned to The Narrative. The Narrative tells us which character to root for on Dancing with the Stars or Top Chef. The Narrative lets us choose Santino Rice as a Project Runway villian. It helps us to form an opinion as to whether Randal or Rebecca should be The Apprentice. And The Narrative will help us choose a president.

Don't believe that we don't know the difference between celebrity gossip and politics that affect our lives? The moment that illustrated our political dementia best to me did not come during this election cycle, but last winter when the actor, Owen Wilson, attempted suicide.

An announcer on a television network call in show (I'm sorry, I don't remember the program at this point) was asking his viewers to weigh in on whether the Santa Monica attorney's office was correct in withholding the 911 tapes of the incident from the news media. The announcer in question was making the argument that it was in the public interest-- that the public had a right to know because the actor is a public figure.

Owen Wilson is a publicized figure, but he is not going to make any policy that changes my life or yours. That a journalist would even make the argument that the public had the right to hear these tapes shows the extremes to which political dementia reaches. A reporter should understand that the fact that the public is interested does not constitute public interest.

Gawking, gossip and engaging in Schadenfreude are thought of as negative emotions, but they universal enough that we have to assume they fulfill important social functions. The biggest problem with them is when they drown out other, more important discourse.

The Ballad of Jim and Tammy

No examination of the topic of Schadenfreude would be complete without a generous helping of televangelist scandals including "the superbowl of televangelist scandals": The Jim Bakker trial of the late 1980s.

There is nothing people enjoy more than a real life soap opera, and this one had everything. The main characters had a cartoonish quality to begin with, his wife Tammy Faye wore unintentionally comical makeup, and both spoke with soft voices and permanent smiles. There were allegations of sexual impropriety, enough showy wealth to make Robin Leach (the host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) blush, and behind the scenes machinations by rival television ministers.

What I didn't know when I wrote the book was that it also had a theme song. The Ballad of Jim and Tammy, recorded by none other than Tammy Faye. You can listen to it courtesy of WFMU. Enjoy.

Why Do You Build Me Up?

If you heard that an acquaintence or a friend's daughter was having problems with drug addiction and mental illness, acting erratically and was in and out of hospitals, you would probably say, "I'm so sorry. That's terrible."

Replace "friend" with "pop star" and all bets are off. When it comes to Schadenfreude-star-power no one outdoes Britney Spears. Whether you were raised on MTV or you don't know the Spice Girls from Hannah Montana; even if you've never heard Britney sing a note, you probably know she had a meltdown and shaved her head; that she is divorced from someone named K-Mart or something, and that she likes to party with Paris Hilton and leave her underwear at home.

That Britney has inspired the do-it-yourself artists over at You Tube to produce hundreds of Schadenfreude-themed opuses is no surprise. That her tragic young life has inspired a ballet is a bit less expected. Meltdown, a 14 minute dance sequence by choreographer Hubert Essakow for the Rambert Dance Company, portrayed Spears’ constant hounding by the paparazzi, including the moment she shaved her head and culminated in Spears’ character being carried off stage on a stretcher. It was performed at the at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The music was composed by Richard Thomas, the man behind "Jerry Springer the Opera."

Essakow must have had his fingers crossed behind his back when he told the BBC that the ballet was not designed to wallow in Schadenfreude but as "an homage" to Spears.

Gemma Nixon, who danced the role of Britney, practiced by watching the pop star's videos. "I was a bit embarrassed," Nixon told the BBC. "It is sort-of grotesque this persona."

NPR did a feature on the production, and from this page you can also access economic reportage on "cashing in on Britney."

So why do we put stars on pedestels just to knock them off? The online publication Global Politican spoke with a Dr. Sam Vaknin, Ph.D on this subject. (Unfortunately the site offers no credentials for the good doctor, so I'm only going on the assumption that his Ph.D was in psychology and not agriculture.)

"The celebrity's inevitable downfall and corruption is the modern-day equivalent of the medieval morality play," said Vaknin. "This trajectory - from rags to riches and fame and back to rags or worse - proves that order and justice do prevail, that hubris invariably gets punished, and that the celebrity is no better, neither is he superior, to his fans."

Being a celebrity is a terrible, unnatural state that leads to madness and unhappiness. Thank goodness I avoided that tragedy by working at the Piggly Wiggly...

Incidentally, word is that Chris Crocker, the "Leave Britney Alone" guy (whose Wikipedia entry is nearly as long as Britney's), is hoping to turn his 15 minutes of You Tube fame into a TV career.

Schadenfreude History: Geraldo and Al Capone's Vault

This is the twenty-second anniversary of a moment Geraldo Rivera would just as soon forget, but no one will let him. We're certainly not going to let him off the hook here. His overhyped television special "The Opening of Al Capone's Vault" has its own chapter in the book Schadenfreude, Baby!

Geraldo's penchant for showboating and putting his own feelings into a story earned him many critics, even before he opened Al Capone's vault on live TV to find nothing but a couple of empty bottles. That's why his public embarassment was the cause of so much Schadenfreude.

And because Geraldo's style seems to have paved the way for a whole breed of opinionated reporters who now dominate the airways, "The Opening of Al Capone's Vault" has become a symbol of self-aggradizing, celebrity journalism with nothing at its center.

In the following YouTube clip, Geraldo took time away from being hit in the face with with chairs and drawing lines in the sand in Iraq to laugh along with his detractors. (Taking the advice of psychoanalyst Claudie Sies).

And let's give Geraldo his props. As Neil Steinberg wrote in his book Complete and Utter Failure, “the definition of real failure is the presence of true consequences—a fall, as opposed to a neglect to climb.” In other words, you have to get off your butt and try something before you can fail spectacularly at it. Could you get yourself a prime time TV show and a big enough audience for an embarassment of this size? I didn't think so.

The Law of Unexpected Consequences

Well it's tax day, and so it seems appropriate to share a tax related Schadenfreude story courtesty of The Real Estate Journal.

It begins with a clever team of lawyers (I assume it was a team, the original article doesn't say) representing Marilyn Monroe, LLC, who decided they could save Marilyn Monroe's estate a lot of money by convincing California tax authorities that the movie star had been a resident of New York. As a New Yorker, she would not have to pay taxes on the estate in California.

That saved them a couple of bob. There's just one thing: California allows "rights of publicity" after death. That means that even if a person is dead, you still need to license her image on posters, photographic prints, T-shirts, mugs, socks, whimsical clocks... And those rights of publicity have been netting Marilyn Monroe LLC more than $30 million. New York, on the other hand, says the dearly departed have no "rights of publicity."

A court has now ruled that if Monroe was a New Yorker, as her legal team successfully proved, there's no longer a right of publicity for Marilyn Monroe, and photographers who own Monroe photographs shouldn't have to pay her estate. Photographers who have been paying fees since the starlet died are looking for refunds. But hey, they were pretty clever about that estate tax, weren't they?