Just before 11 a.m. on Friday, February 19, the volume of equities traded on the New York Stock Exchange fell slightly. Fifteen minutes later, the backlog appeared in a burst, and for a short time the frequency of trading was more than double the day's average. Surely, an event which held Wall Street enraptured must have been critical to firms' profits. Given the events of recent weeks, it's not surprising that something suitably momentous could have come to light. Perhaps Greece finally acted upon its debt, or the Fed made an announcement which could determine a firm's future profitability. But no, the only event which occurred during that 15-minute period was rather less important to, well, everything: Tiger Woods's press conference.
Much of the U.S., and indeed, a good portion of the world, has been enraptured by the ongoing fiasco surrounding Woods, his sex life and his continued break from professional golf. Such strange mass obsessions about others' lives are all too common in our society, but the Wall Street incident shows that Woods's maelstrom of terrible publicity is starting to draw in those who normally wouldn't have People magazine delivered to their door. The public's response to the golfer's predicament is just another example of how deep some of the more distasteful facets of celebrity culture are ingrained in Western society. It seems that we have nothing better to do than worship average men as heroes, and then act shocked when the false gods fall, engulfed in the flames of horrible publicity.
When one thinks about the situation objectively, none of it really makes sense. For some reason, Woods decided that he had to apologize to the public, whom he hadn't done anything to hurt. Even more bizarrely, a large fraction of the public decided that his apology was their business, and in many cases they decided not to accept it.
What is even odder is that the very people who have followed Woods' athletic career are among the least interested in his current mess. From what I gather, people who actually cared about Woods' golfing skills are annoyed at him only because he's not golfing, which is perfectly understandable. At the end of the day, golf fans don't care that Accenture dropped him and replaced him with amphibians, or that he has a penchant for coitus. Golf fans just want to see him out there hitting balls and winning tournaments again.
Those following Woods, then, are those who cared nothing for him before his problems, or those who idolized him as a hero and a god, rather than merely the golfer he is. Members of the former group are wallowing in self-righteous schadenfreude and are rather distasteful, but their interest is unsurprising: they are the demographic that keeps tabloids in business. What separates Woods' from other celebrity scandals, though, is that the second group actually appears larger than the first. A shocking number of people actually seem to have thought this man was a god; they deserve their rude awakening. Elevating men to the status of heroes is to ignore their flaws. One day or another, everyone makes a mistake and crashes their car into a tree.
The Woods affair, while a particularly strong example, is just the latest in a string of events which confirm celebrities' bizarrely significant role in Western society. Remember Michael Jackson's death? Of course you do, even The Economist called it one of the biggest stories of 2009, overshadowing such insignificant events as Operation Cast Lead and the ongoing war in Afghanistan. And both stories have more legs than, for example, the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack. When adultery commands more of the public's attention than national security and armed conflict, one cannot help but be concerned.
It is easy to explain away society's obsession with celebrities and scandal by appealing to Western values. If we're materialistic and preoccupied with the present, then of course we'll care about such frivolous things. And yet, as Friday's securities trading records show, enough people are so concerned with Woods that they let the details of his life distract that from that most American pursuit: making money. We invade celebrities' privacy, curtail their freedoms and let the mindless bilge that results from such invasions saturate the mainstream media. And even if one ignores how celebrity culture voids everything we, as a Western society, are meant to stand for, the question remains: Do we really have nothing better to do?