Forgiving Tiger, Terry and You

Stars sometimes fall to earth because they're, well, they're just people. Surely this is a tired topic. But I feel compelled to weigh in, as a fellow person who has often taken a hard look in the mirror and at photos tagged with my name on Facebook and not always loved what I've seen.

For now, let's leave lucrative brand sponsorship deals aside, wherein it's all about a lilywhite reputation, which is generally fictitious anyway.

There's a more complex question to consider: what is the tacit social contract between public figures we admire, and us? Do we expect wholesomeness? Moral rectitude? Perfection? People to model ourselves on? Or might we learn to admire people in whom we can see some of ourselves? In ancient Greece, even the gods were, well, human.

The behaviors of athletes, actors and politicians that so outrage us are nothing new. It's just getting harder to cover it all up. In a world of ever-eroding privacy, embarrassing photos on social networking sites, and the uneraseable public memory that is the internet, I wonder whether an era of forgiveness could one day dawn.

Go on: let your eyes roll. How utopian and naive of me, right?

There's an interesting idea I came across recently, a suggestion that our obsession with celebrities and their exploits is in itself a kind of cover-up. A distraction from much darker stuff that's being committed by the invisible super-rich and super-powerful who sit in the air traffic control tower of contemporary society. Why get worked up over what's going down in the back reaches of the Amazon, or in the back offices of Westminster, when you can freak out over Chelsea captain John Terry having a good old fashioned affair?

Here in the UK, the buzz around removing Terry from his role as England captain has almost too-obvious parallels with the current feeling about our Prime Minister. We aren't happy with the status quo of government. We don't know when an election will be called. Until then, we express our collective (and perhaps justified) political frustration through the metaphor of sport and celebrity. Similarly, the revelation of Mr. Woods' exploits offered a welcome distraction from growing economic disparity, bank bonuses, and Wall Street returning with alarming speed to its old and dangerous ways. Some would say that this is exactly the point of sport and celebrity. To provide a collective emotional outlet.

But a collective emotional outlet doesn't solve the real problem.

I'm not saying I condone what these gentlemen have done or not done, nor would I necessarily choose to pay them (or any human being, for that matter) exorbitant sums to represent my brand. But they're guys with big egos who happen to be really, really good at something to which the rest of us aspire. So marriage (and maybe best mate-ship) aren't among their gifts. So what? That simply puts them in the company of Zeus, Athena, and their ilk. Still worthy of awe. It's just a different kind of awe.

This leads me to think about the oft-reported stories of those unfortunate university grads who have lost out on jobs because of supposedly character-revealing photographs and/or videos that circulate through social networking sites and were viewed as part of a background check by Human Resources. Those of us of a certain age read these everyday dramas in the freesheets and shake our heads, thinking, geez look how stupid these kids are. It's the contemporary equivalent of "in my day we listened to music -- today the kids just listen to noise." IE, perhaps we're a bit out of touch.

Because isn't having some over-the-top fun -- even at the expense of our dignity -- part of how we become well-rounded people? The same is true of making big mistakes. Even marriage-destroying mistakes. Depending upon how we deal with the fallout, making mistakes can be one of the most powerful ways that we learn and become who we truly are.

Already, a younger generation is prepared to overlook certain aspects of its peers' multimedia data shadows. Because hey, silly stuff happens and generally gets photographed and uploaded. There's a difference between what's criminal and what's embarrassing.

Idolising -- or even just hiring -- flawed individuals requires a shift in cultural context. And this may be exactly what's emerging from a generation that takes ubiquitous connectivity for granted. Thus, if technology won't let us forget and move on, if we can't untag every unsavory moment captured in digital media and consigned to servers in perpetuity -- and increasingly, our every moment, unsavory or otherwise, IS sitting on a server in perpetuity -- then we might have to rely on our cultural and ethical values to do the forgetting. Or even better, the forgiving.