Sordid, Grubby, Crass Celebrity

But a celebrity for all of that. What precisely is it that so appeals to the mass audience that hangs on every inane word, each absurd antic, any embarrassing highlights of the (mostly) American celebrities, young and old, from actors to producers, talk-show hosts and purported pundits of mass culture? They are almost uniform in their level of crudeness, surfeit of lack of taste and morals. So what gives?

Here is a man highly respected for his wit, his ability to to quip off one-liners that has the audience roaring in the aisles with approval. And because he is brashly unapologetic about the excesses of his sexual appetite, preying on women who depend on his good word to maintain their position on his highly popular television show, he is applauded. Not for good taste, but for his canny, foxy perception that he could make his adoring audience laugh it off.

In laughing off his unfortunate habit of coercing women who work alongside him on his Thursday night talk-show, he has successfully nipped that little bomb of indiscretion in its short wick. The audience, too witless to recognize that they've been manipulated by a master sociopath. No, he isn't quite in the league of a rapist or a child molester, or a disseminator of child pornography, but he is in a league of his own.

His audience loves his quick-thinking ripostes, his delicious sense of irony, his aplomb, and David Letterman gave them the time of their applauding lives when he revealed to them in a series of prompts that he is as deserving of their sympathy in this particular instance as he felt himself to be when he unburdened himself to a similar audience about a kidnapping plot and another about a stalker.

Others who have been unfaithful to their wives have "put themselves above their family" in his opinion, but he's in a different class altogether. He's so obviously special, above the kind of criticism that accrues to others somewhat less of a popular icon than he. His actions neither forbidden nor justifiable but publicly neutral and thus permissible, because he is who he is.

On this occasion, his sympathetic and clueless audience let their response to his new revelations of himself as a sexual predator, availing himself of the pleasure of satiating himself in the flesh of the women with whom he works, for compensation of other dimensions, overtake their personal good sense, if not accepted public social propriety.

He cleverly led them down the path of applause for his introduction, another for his denunciation (of his hapless blackmailer), and another for his confession. Brazenly confident that he would prevail: "Yes, I have had sex", he said, and cued the applause. The revelations aired, he said to protect his family. That would be his partner of several decades and their young son, one assumes?

Grobbe Yung. Now that's a title that suits him handsomely.