What makes celebrity meltdowns entertainment instead of tragedy? | David Ferguson

When I was in my 20s, I remember my therapist patiently listening to me complain about how out-of-my-depth I often felt around other gay men. I was asking her why they always seemed so effortlessly aloof and cool, whereas I was – and to some extent, still am – a slobbering golden retriever of a person, quivering with eagerness to be your new best friend.

“You’ll waste a lot of time and spoil a lot of happiness comparing your insides to other people’s outsides,” she told me.

I think about this a lot when I see famous people – rock stars, celebrities, politicians – going into meltdown mode. Trainwreck TV is one of our culture’s most avid pleasures. In the words of Edina Monsoon from Absolutely Fabulous, “It’s the only blood sport they haven’t banned, darling.”

Right now, everyone is waiting to see what the next eruption from Kanye West will be now that he’s out of the hospital after months – some would say years – of erratic behavior, bizarre concert spectacles and public meltdowns. It’s almost expected, since the Grammy nominations were announced this week and West was again shut out of the major categories.

A few years ago the spectacle du jour was Amanda Bynes, and before that, Britney Spears when she shaved her head and ended up under psychiatric care.

We’ve shaken our heads and tutted over the breakdowns of Mariah Carey and Courtney Love, Amy Winehouse and Gary Busey, Katt Williams and Dave Chappelle, Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith – any celebrities who have had the misfortune to exhibit symptoms of mental illness while living in the public eye.

We take a certain sanctimonious pleasure in these people’s public disintegration and show shockingly little compassion, as though their wildly successful careers and personal fortunes make their pain more acceptable than that of mere mortals.

If a random woman we don’t know starts babbling nonsense and getting hysterical while we’re out shopping, it’s tragic. We avert our eyes. We tell our families when we get home how unsettling and upsetting it was. But when Spears does it, it’s a Rolling Stone cover story that we consume with the eagerness of kids tearing into a bag of candy.

It’s the same mentality that allows a racist troll like Milo Yiannopoulos to airily wave away the steaming, reeking mountain of harassment his followers and supporters firehosed at Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones, mostly on Twitter. Leslie Jones is a rich and famous actress; who cares if people say nasty things about her on the internet?

At what point do we stop valuing celebrities’ humanity?

Is it an income-level thing? Kanye West has got a lot of money. He’s one of the most well-known performers on the planet who isn’t Beyoncé or Beyoncé-adjacent. He has broken paradigms and yes, over-extended his brand, as it were, in a couple of areas, but he’s also a creative young person with a young family under tremendous pressure who lost his beloved mother nine years ago.

He has written openly about his love for liquor, cocaine and other intoxicants. It does not take a tremendous amount of imagination to piece together what may have happened here to a stressed-out artist in pain.

Let’s pretend for a moment that it isn’t Kanye West, but Keith West, who you knew in college who works for a life insurance company now. What if his mother died in surgery and he began a multi-year downward spiral?

Would you be gawking if Keith got placed on involuntary hold in a psychiatric unit? Would you be sharing links about Keith on Twitter and Facebook and marveling that someone could become such a mess?

Kanye West may be, as President Obama once said, “a jackass” from time to time. But he’s also still a person.

Millions of dollars in the bank doesn’t mean anything when you want your mom and she’s gone, I suspect, any more than the significantly less princely sum in my own checking account does. You can’t buy five more minutes to be with your dead mom for any amount of money, large or small.

So, maybe the next time you start to click on that Perez Hilton link about whichever celebrity’s mind has most recently hit the big bug-zapper, take a second. Ask yourself how you’d feel if your life’s most humiliating, confused, disoriented moment was out there for public amusement.

If the person suffering at the other end of that hyperlink was Keith and not Kanye, would you still click it?

What makes celebrity meltdowns entertainment instead of tragedy? | David Ferguson

I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I"m not Hillary Clinton | David Ferguson

If you are a character in a Victorian novel – which, much to my occasional dismay I am not – you know you’re going to die if, at an otherwise slow plot point, you begin to cough. Within two chapters, your cough will be spraying drops of dark red blood on to your linen kerchief and before long, you’ll be carried off by consumption.

These days we don’t live with the constant threat of tuberculosis and yet, from the way a certain segment of the right wing fever swamp is treating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, you’d think she was Fantine from Hugo’s Les Miserables.

Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, some ghoul named Steve Malzberg – who probably can’t help it that he’s a dead ringer for 90s make-believe car salesman Joe Isuzu – and even Republican nominee Donald Trump have seized upon Clinton’s seasonal allergies and resulting cough as a sign that she is trembling at death’s door, barely able to function.

“People don’t cough like that,” Malzberg insisted on his Newsmax.com podcast last week. People don’t have coughing fits ‘all the time,’ in public that go on and on and on and on and on and on. Not unless there’s something going on that’s not right.”

Please allow me to disabuse you of that notion, sir. Plenty of people “cough like that,” myself included. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 19.1 adults over 18 were diagnosed with seasonal allergic rhinitis – also known as “hay fever” – in 2014 and 6.1 million children.

I’ve got big sinuses. It’s part of what makes my singing voice able to cut through layers of drums and guitars – a network of large, resonant holes in my skull. My late mother sang opera and had a glorious lyric soprano voice that could fill a whole theater and shake the chandeliers.

Twice a year, for 2 to 4 weeks in the spring and fall, those holes in my head fill up with gunk and it makes my face and forehead feel like a huge throbbing, aching, seriously clogged bottle of rubber cement.

If I don’t get enough sleep, drink quarts of water, eat right and keep my stress levels down, that respiratory distress will move straight down into my chest and I will develop a booming, persistent cough.

For some reason, the fall of 2009 was particularly nasty. I’d quit smoking the year before and thought that would make my seasonal battles with pollen and mold less miserable, but that first year, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

That was when I was a late night classical music DJ. My show went out live to the whole state of Georgia four nights per week. I remember it was Thursday, Sep. 10 because I was queuing up John Adams’ solemn, exquisite symphonic remembrance of the 9/11 victims, On the Transmigration of Souls.

“Our next selection,” I began, “is John Ad–” and I was seized with a violent coughing fit. Most radio consoles have what’s known as a “cough button” for just such an emergency. It mutes your microphone until the cough or sneeze or period of hoarseness passes.

But this coughing fit didn’t pass, it just kept going on and on. I killed my mic and started the music because I wasn’t sure what else to do. I was mortally embarrassed and for an awful moment felt sure I was disgracing the memory of all those people who were killed in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

The control room phone rang. I gulped down two swallows of tepid coffee and answered, still weak-voiced and froggy.

“You okay in there?” it was my boss calling from home.

“I’m fine,” I sputtered. “Just fighting for breath.”

He asked if I needed someone to come take over. I said no, I’m fine, it’s already passing. I hung up the phone and it immediately rang again. I picked it up and it was my twin brother calling from his car.

“Boy, that sounded terrible,” he said, laughing. “You’ve really got to quit smoking crack rocks at work.”

“It went out live to the whole state,” I said. “Our listeners probably think I’m dying.”

I wasn’t, though, any more than Hillary Clinton is. The fact is, even an able-bodied, healthy, athletic person like myself can get a cough that sounds like the end of the world. A week later I was back to running four miles a day and breathing like normal.

Sometimes, oh ye right-wing vultures, a cough is just a cough and the woman candidate whose health you’ve never cared one iota about before now is probably just fine, suffering from – as her personal physician disclosed in detail – a round of seasonal allergies.

So, if you’re expecting Hillary Clinton to keel over dead like Mimi, the consumptive heroine of Puccini’s La Boheme, or Hugo’s Fantine, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I think she’s got a couple of arias to sing first.

I cough at all the wrong times. Thank God I"m not Hillary Clinton | David Ferguson