In Praise of Transgressions

From left: Tom Daschle, Jessica Simpson, and Michael Phelps.

The nation is in a fury over the missteps of public figures like Alex Rodriguez and Tom Daschle. Joe Queenan on why focusing on human foibles is more therapeutic than getting mad at Wall Street — and why everyone should lighten up.

Americans who like their dudgeon high and their blood boiling have worked themselves into a tizzy now that the news about Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use has broken. The Yankee third-bagger’s fall from grace, coupled with Olympic hero Michael Phelps’s shocking admission of drug use and Tom Daschle’s unseemly failure to pay his income taxes has apoplexy aficionados digging into the record books to remember a time when the American people had worked themselves into such a sustained, unmediated level of fury at once-revered public figures. How could they do it? We all keep asking one another. How could they be so stupid? How could they be so callous? And what kind of message does it send to the kids?

Alex Rodriguez has attracted outrage after admitting to past steroid use.

First, let me address the issue of the message being sent to the kids. The kids in question are presumably the ones who spend vast portions of their youth massacring people on video screens, or devouring films about vicious high school girls who actively plot one another’s annihilation, or dressing up like the flamboyant sociopaths they watch on MTV. These are the real kids, the ones that actually inhabit this great nation, not the mythical kids of yore who go through life completely unaware that adults are imperfect creatures until Charles Barkley gets pulled over for driving under the influence or Britney Spears loses custody of her kids or Miley Cyrus poses for some steamy shots in Vanity Fair.

These mythical kids are the ones who do their chores and gleefully read “Ethan Frome” and never talk back to their parents and somehow manage to grow up in 21st-century America without ever hearing about Michael Jackson and alcohol and crime. They were last seen on a rerun of “Little House on the Prairie” in 1981. No, the message that Messrs. Phelps and Rodriguez and Daschle are sending to the kids who actually live in this country is that college-age boys sometimes take a hit off a bong, that professional athletes do occasionally use performance-enhancing drugs — not unlike a lot of high-school kids — and that politicians can neglect to pay their taxes, just like a lot of other people. What they did is certainly wrong, but it isn’t in any way unprecedented, or for that matter, unexpected. It’s not off the charts. In a way, these three very different men may have done parents a great public service; as anyone who has successfully raised children already knows, if you want to send a message to your kids, send it yourself. Don’t expect celebrities to be role models.

This is not to absolve the tactless trio of their offenses; they all stand guilty as charged, as does high-profile tax evader Timothy Geithner, now Secretary of the Treasury, and Nancy Killefer, the unfortunate Obama appointee who failed to pay $298 in unemployment compensation tax on household help back in 2005 and saw her shot as White House performance czarina vanish into the gloaming.

Actor Joaquin Phoenix caused a public stir with his awkward appearance on David Letterman’s show.

No public misdeed is too insignificant to earn our limitless fascination. Actor Joaquin Phoenix caused a stir this week following his appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” His principal offenses: chewing gum and maintaining a generally unresponsive demeanor throughout what proved to be a very painful, unproductive interview. (Mr. Letterman finally said, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.”) And thus ensued a heated debate about whether Mr. Phoenix was acting, on drugs or just spaced out. Meanwhile, in a nearby solar system, the stock market dropped another 400 points.

These misbegotten individuals, their names dragged through the mud, can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that their miscues might have generated slightly less rancor given the perilous circumstances the nation currently finds itself in. After all, virtually concurrent with the disclosure of their misdeeds, the global financial system has imploded, the housing market has collapsed, both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers have ceased to exist, unemployment has reached a level not seen in decades, millions of citizens approaching retirement age have seen their 401(k)s pulverized, and some of the most illustrious banks in American history seem poised to be taken over by the federal government.

Taking a less parochial perspective, North Korea appears to be determined to keep its nuclear weapons while Western officials believe Iran is developing its own program, the resurgent Taliban are now bold enough to launch attacks in Kabul itself, Iraq remains an intractable mess, the Israelis and the Palestinians are at it again down in Gaza, and Osama Bin Laden is still hiding out somewhere. In light of the fact that we are facing one of the worst economic environments since the Great Depression, and are still in the throes of a global war against faceless, stateless terrorists, Michael Phelps can probably be forgiven for thinking that he could get away with taking a hit off that bong. And Jessica Simpson can probably be forgiven for scarfing down a few Twinkies.

What accounts for the shock that greeted the Phelps miscue, the anger that greeted the Daschle disclosure and the rage that continues to be directed at Rodriguez? For one, we the public think that we know these people because we see them all the time on TV. Because of this, they root us in the here and now in a way run-of-the-mill white-collar villains do not. They have violated an old-fashioned code of morality that we can all understand in a way we cannot understand a $50 billion Ponzi scheme or the fact that Iceland has put out a “Closed for Business” sign.

Another explanation for the ire directed at this trio of sacrificial goats is that we enjoy having baseball players and swimmers and pols in our crosshairs, and we aim to keep them there. This is not so much out of a desire for retribution as a desire for therapy. Athletes, movie stars, pop singers and politicians are part of a consistent narrative that runs through our lives. They reach out and touch us, but we also reach out and touch them. This makes them entirely different from thugs like Bernard Madoff, a parvenu scumbag none of us had even heard of six months ago. When our luminaries, our heroes and heroines disappoint us, we feel that we have the ability to punish them because we know where they will feel it most. And so we keep on punishing them. Over and over and over, day after day after day. Until somebody really awful like O.J. Simpson comes along to redirect our rage elsewhere.

From the therapeutic perspective, this is vastly superior to ranting about the latest depredations of Wall Street. No matter how much we froth and foam, none of us can lay a glove on imperious figures like John Thain or the haughty fat cats who run the auto industry or the inept regulators who let Mr. Madoff run wild in the first place. These folks all look the same, they all talk the same and the man in the street would have trouble picking any of them out of a police lineup. We don’t really know them and we never will.

Moreover, the window of opportunity during which the public can heap obloquy on men in suits is brief. Once a generation, when things get really bad, the Kenneth Lewises and the Vikram Pandits stir from their lairs. They drag themselves down to Washington and testify before Congress. They get insulted by Barney Frank. They usually get insulted by a junior congressman from a border state who says, “I don’t know how they do things up on Wall Street, but back home in Paducah…” Then they go home to their mansions and their staggering fortunes and their country clubs and that reassuring, hidden-in-plain-sight obscurity that executives have always enjoyed: Now you see them, now you don’t.

When the heat gets too much to bear, they may retire and move to Switzerland. Or they may sign up as directors on their chums’ boards, which is sort of like retiring and moving to Switzerland. And then we never hear from them again. They get roughed up for a few rounds, they take a few rabbit punches in the clinches, but they always get to keep their money and they usually get to keep their jobs. Unless they go out of their way to rub people the wrong way, they join all the other suits that briefly attracted the ire of the American people and then faded into the woodwork.

By contrast, particularly in the case of Messrs. Phelps and Rodriguez, it’s the human scale of their malfeasance that makes them such inviting targets. Ronald Reagan proved a long time ago that while it was impossible to get the public all riled up because the federal government was throwing away billions of dollars on this or that program, you could get them to blow their stacks by recounting a dubious anecdote about some conscienceless welfare queen on the south side of Chicago who was jobbing the public out of a few grand. This was partly because it was possible to put a human face on the welfare cheater, even if the story was vastly exaggerated, whereas the federal bureaucracy would forever remain vague and amorphous. But it was also because a few thousand bucks here and there was a number the average person could wrap his head around. Unlike, say, $700 billion.

Another reason public outrage has reached such a stratospheric level is because Messrs. Phelps, Rodriguez and Daschle are people who can actually hear our derision, people it is possible for the public to punish. (Or, in the case of the increasingly chunky Ms. Simpson, put under the microscope.) Mr. Phelps has been suspended from competition for three months and has lost a lucrative cereal-company endorsement. (We are assuming, of course, that Kellogg’s canceled the endorsement because of the marijuana scandal and not because they were short on cash.) Mr. Phelps’s pain will pass, but not before he feels some.

Mr. Daschle, who suffered the humiliation of being voted out of office in 2004 while he was shuffling back and forth between being majority leader and minority leader, will not get a chance to redeem himself by revitalizing his country’s health-care system. He will be exiled to the penumbra of history, remembered if he is remembered at all as a small-time chiseler. How embarrassing.

And because so many sportswriters have drawn a line in the sand regarding steroids, Mr. Rodriguez will never be elected to the Hall of Fame, will not go down in the history books as the greatest slugger of all time and will spend the rest of his career hearing nothing but catcalls and epithets wherever he takes the field. Maybe he should retire to Switzerland too.

Let’s get some perspective here. Anyone who follows baseball knows that the game has been filthy for 20 years. You had to be blind not to see it. Moreover, we were all in on it: players, owners, media, fans. The whole country fell in love with the now-disrespected Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, turning a blind eye to their preposterous physiques. We liked seeing all those dingers flying out of the park. And it wasn’t as if Mr. Rodriguez was the only cheater; literally scores, perhaps hundreds, of players took steroids. Mr. Rodriguez isn’t the worst guy that ever lived. He’s not even the worst guy to ever play for the Yankees.

In the end, there is something hypocritical about raking these people over the coals as if they were the first public figures to ever stray from the path of the straight and narrow. Deep down, don’t we all believe that a bit of wild behavior — drinking, smoking, padding the expense account, skimming your taxes — has a salutary effect on human personality development? Isn’t sowing one’s wild oats a revered rite of passage for American youth? If smoking dope is such an offense to our sensibilities, why did we elect self-confessed pot smokers like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton president?

The contrast between Messrs. Phelps and Rodriguez is illuminating; surely Mr. Phelps must be overjoyed that Mr. Rodriguez’s plight has yanked the spotlight away from him. Both men are young, both are good-looking, both have more money than the rest of us, and both are believed to be the greatest athletes to ever compete in their specific fields.

But while Mr. Phelps is a beloved figure whose fall from grace comes as a shock and a disappointment, nobody anywhere is terribly shocked or disappointed in Mr. Rodriguez. Nobody ever liked the guy. Teammates resent his wealth. Yankees fans view him as a choker. Sportswriters have long thought he is spoiled rotten, a prima donna, a symbol of everything that is wrong with Major League Baseball. And nobody has much respect for a man who allegedly cheats on his wife. Especially when he’s been linked to Madonna. Given these particulars, Alex Rodriguez makes the perfect villain. He’s Barry Bonds and then some. Even Madonna stopped being seen with him. Imagine.

Joe Queenan is a freelance writer in Tarrytown, N.Y. His memoir, “Closing Time,” will be published in April.

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