FEEDING THE APPETITE FOR SCHADENFREUDE

It might be too early to write about the depths of Mark Sanford’s damnation, but it is not too soon to write about his pain, however well deserved. Paving the road to his purgatory and perdition has yet to be defined, not so much by the prospect of illegally misappropriated funds as by salacious bikini tans. Learn well, though, that the self-righteous hooting of his lynch-mob breeds its own kind of love affair. It is the affair fed by schadenfreude, the public’s insatiable appetite for the delight in another’s undoing.

Perhaps in this open and unrelenting society, comedy will always be inevitable. Winding up as one-liners in a Conan monologue or a Letterman Top Ten list has become part of the ritual of public exculpation, a flogging before the jeering throng.

Call me a sourpuss, but let me give the tawdry misdeed a different perspective: This situation is a tragedy, plain and simple, not an SNL sketch. A once-respected leader capitulated to misbegotten lust. Who knows the demons at work in his soul? Who knows the conflicts that were prey to his narcissism? All we do know is that he is already suffering all the grief he deserved and then some. He is likely to have forfeited his job, his marriage, his esteem, his authority, his ability to walk down the street without facing murmured scorn or derision.

Once, though, that society has meted out its explicit and implicit punishments, who will be there to give a modicum of solace and encouragement to a hurting, isolated, failed man who gave in to impulses that bespeak tortured unwholeness, not criminality? Who will comfort him, show him some understanding, and restore his sense of self-worth?

It will not be a psychotherapist at hundreds a session. It will, and must, be a person of exceptional compassion, tolerance, and insight. Perhaps it will be someone who has himself been humbled by scandal or impropriety, who knows the internal conflicts and lurking demons. Perhaps it will be a “wounded healer,” one who has himself gained a great ability in comprehend others' troubles thanks to the awareness of his own pain.

Having mercy on a person who has suffered undeservedly is, sadly, a rare quality in our contentious, calloused society. Granting mercy, or even understanding, to one who had done wrong and deserved punishment is even more exceptional. Yet, anyone who has been there knows that everyone needs someone by his side, someone who may loathe the sin yet acknowledge the humanity of the sinner. Those of us who have sinned, especially to the public’s derision, know only too well the paradigm of the pain, the emptiness, and if God grants us, the healing.

“Everyone needs someone,” you say? Even Hitler and child murderers and cold-blooded killers? To that, I have no rational answer, but I do have an existential one that I learned from Elie Weisel. I was privileged to have coffee with Weisel at the time that Ivan (“The Terrible”) Demjanjuk was on trial. Knowing his staunch opposition to capital punishment, I asked Weisel if his opposition extended to Demjanjuk, et al. “No,” he said. “That’s different.” He did not elaborate, and there was a note of finality to his voice. It said, “This should not require further explanation.”

I guess that there is a point of malignant depravity that moves beyond any claim to compassion or even human validation. And I guess that we must rely on some higher instinct with which God has blessed us to know where to draw the line. This, however, I do know: What Sanford did was not mass murder. Likewise 99.9 percent of the sins that feed schadenfreude-hungry audiences a steady diet of scandal, titillating innuendo, lush gossip, comedic scripts and unjustified intimations of our own moral superiority.

OK, OK, so we got a good yuk out of self-righteous public personage getting caught with his pants down. Next week another deserving candidate will be welcomed to the pop chart. But, who among us will see tragedy in another’s downfall? Who among us will be there to wipe their tears and ease their burden?

If the public has a right to the comedic dimension of human downfall and moral frailty, then let them know well enough also to see tragedy as tragedy. For, imputing only comedy to a person’s undoing is the greatest tragedy of all.

THE WASTE OF A LIFETIME

What a waste of a lifetime.

People will find a thousand ways to analyze why a hateful 88-year-old man tried to shoot up a museum devoted to the lessons of man’s greatest inhumanity. We have already heard minds small and large prognosticate about the causes being in a climate of national misanthropy to Freudian traumas dating back to toilet training. I prefer the theory that sometimes evil is simply evil; it plainly transcends psychological or sociological explanation – “two parts Hitler,” my Holocaust-survivor Talmud rebbe, would call it.

In all the rightful questioning, there also resides a bitter lament – please don’t quote me out of context – that we should recite over Erik von Brunn: What a waste of a lifetime. Look at all the good that a man could have accomplished were his mind not preoccupied with hate.
He was obviously a capable man. His vituperative writings are at least intelligible, even articulate – subject, predicate, object. He knows the language that musters the rabble. He carefully thinks through his twisted slurs and paranoia. He’s not a dope. This is not some Cro-Magnon Klansman, but a hatefully intelligent man.

So I repeat, despite my own hate for him and his deed: What a waste of a lifetime. What a crooked evil that led him to the waste of others. Think: Those skills of his, were they rightfully motivated, could have written provocative essays or books, even an illustrative memoir of his apparently tormented childhood. How many people searching for meaning might he have enlightened? How much misanthropy might he have quelled? What if his advocacy were for childhood cancer or illiteracy? What a pity. What a waste of all the good he could have accomplished over 88 years.

The lament is not von Brunn’s alone. It extends to each of us. Every one of us, to a greater or lesser degree, brings some passion or skill to the table. To what good? The physician, bringing compassion to people in need, along with book-learned and clinical skills? So, too, the attorney, the accountant, the craftsman, the skilled and unskilled laborer, the homemaker, the retiree, the rambunctious teenager, the precocious child? What shall we say to defend nonsense, just-for-me-ism, couch-potato-ship, text messaging, apathy, while so much yet good begs to be done?

What a waste of a lifetime.

Once I asked a mechanic what he did for fun. “Go home and kick the **** out of my dog,” he answered. It needn’t be a mechanic, does the answer need to be so horrid, but to some greater or lesser extent, what does it mean to “kick the ****” out of ones lifetime? What a waste.

Each of us has the capacity for evil. Of this, we know only too well. For each of the impulses for evil we harbor, something humane – God or even atheism – cries out with some countervailing potential for good.

Reb Moshe Leib Sassover asserted that every human attribute, however base, could be converted into a virtuous deed. Once upon a time, Reb Moshe was taunted by a disciple to explain how atheism could become honorable. “Even that,” Reb Moshe proclaimed. “For if someone comes to you in hurt, you may not say, ‘Take your problems to God.’ No, at that moment, you must become an atheist, act as if there is no God; that there is only one force that can help this man. YOU!”

The question of whether one wastes a lifetime lived at evil or oblivion is too easily pushed off on demons like von Brunn. It could well be said of each of us who yawn at or desecrate a magnificent, but needy, world. Let not von Brunn’s epitaph become our own.