Tiger’s fall and race

I cannot pretend to understand the fascination folks have with celebrity, but it doesn’t take much special knowledge of mass psychology to understand the schadenfreude at the heart of celebrity culture. We build up our celebrities so that we can tear them down, and we seem to take special delight in the latter part of that proposition. Whether it’s a tabloid blasting furtive pictures of a slightly overweight starlet on a tropical beach or a politician caught on a security camera with his pants around his ankles, we can’t help ourselves in watching the mighty fall – and cheering on their descent.

That’s how I viewed the Tiger Woods affair, just another sorry example of the publicity machine rolling over a “star.”

But, then, yesterday while viewing the new Robert DeNiro movie in the East Village, a whole new component of the Woods embarrassment presented itself to me. The DeNiro movie, Everybody’s Fine, is a pretty standard sentimental holiday movie, a veritable movie version of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” DeNiro’s character, Frank Goode, is a retiree and recent widower who attempts to visit his four children after each of them dropped out of a family reunion. Upon visiting one daughter, DeNiro is shown playing with his grandson on a miniature backyard golf course. After the kid chips one onto the green, DeNiro says something like “You’re a regular Tiger Woods.”

At that moment, you could hear a chorus of derisive snickers erupt from the sparsely peopled theater. A laugh at the expense of the mighty golfer? Certainly. But it was also a spontaneous moment, a kind of collective surprise at how deeply Woods’s indiscretions could be felt in the culture at large. After all, the movie was released on December 4. Woods’s fateful traffic accident occurred less than a week before. What a difference a week can make!

It wasn’t too long after this that I began to hear the tell-tale sounds of an argument behind me. I turned in the shadowed interior of the theater to see a black man standing provocatively close to a seated white man; he was yelling at him, apparently taking exception at the man’s audible pleasure with the Woods reference. After some heated words and some crazy, threatening gestures, the black man shuffled out of the theater, mumbling his disgust with the theatergoers in a display of anger and hurt more characteristic of a James Baldwin story than an East Village theater in 2009. It was then that I first came to realize that the Tiger Woods affair has some pretty heavy racial angles to it.

It’s been 15 years since the O.J. Simpson trial uncovered nasty residual race-based attitudes from both blacks and whites. Tiger Woods is no O.J. Simpson, but I can imagine that won’t stop folks from picking at scabs. All of this is to say that, Barack Obama notwithstanding, race relations is still an issue that inflames. ‘Post-racial,’ while a nice concept, is more aspirational than real. The 2008 presidential election was not unimportant, but it will take lifetimes of patience and kindness to create the society that some think came into being on November 4, 2008.