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Ashe acquiesced to the inevitable. He made the TV rounds in the days after his AIDS announcement, and he kept his dignity -- not easy in an exercise in which the line between richly cartooned gossip and basic responsible journalism (who-what-when-where-how) all but dissolves. Television has a genius for the intimacies of personal-redemption chat. It formalizes the primitive newspaper gossip column into a ceremony and a sacrament. The Archpriestess Barbara Walters comes with producer and camera crew to hear confession. She is empowered to grant absolution on behalf of the American people, playing first Inquisitor, then Fairy Godmother in the space of a segment. There are other clergy: the Archpriestess Diane Sawyer, the Archpriestess Oprah Winfrey. Credible Cardinal of High Policy and Emergency Confessions (" . . . better come clean, call Nightline") is Ted Koppel. Then there is His Grace Phil Donahue, the barking, mike-ready Bishop of Prurience, whose vestment for one of his shows was actually a dress.
The premise holds that getting at the truth (a candidate's sex life, an actor's drug addiction, Elizabeth Taylor's Hundred Years' War against fat) is also riveting entertainment. The pseudo-religious purgatorial ordeals of the rich and famous are worth millions. In some ways, such spectacles are what Americans have instead of tradition or moral community.
Are these vivid messes harmless? Is it possible that these agonistics serve a higher purpose? Maybe. One of the motifs of American life in the late 20th century is a sad, destructive disconnection. The fraying of family and community is visible in homelessness and granny dumping and children shooting other children without even attaching much importance to the act. It is evident this year in Americans' disgusted alienation from the presidential campaign.
"Real life" ordeals are more interesting today, and more bizarre, than anyone's fiction. But the phenomenon of ritual celebrity ordeal seems to foul up the judgment of journalists.
If a star volunteers, out of vanity or some other need, to tell all, the story may be interesting, even helpful to others. Arthur Ashe did not volunteer. He did not invite the world in. A pattern of revelation that routinely puts the most intimate details on public display has nearly obliterated an appreciation of both the right of privacy and the obligations of kindness.