The Sympathy Circle

Because you read the newspaper this will come as no surprise to you, but the news this week was literally the same as the news last week and the week before.  This is not a reflection on what happened this week, which may or may not have been unique and interesting.  It is just one more indication (as if we needed one) that news is entertainment, and that we crave predictibility in our entertainment above all else.

The nominal “big” story of the week was 7 year old Jessica Dubroff flying her overloaded airplane nose-first into some street in Wyoming.  While utterly predictable (hello Christa MacAuliffe and Samantha Smith), to me this story is also funnier than the collected works of the Coastal Coalition.  The main actors are almost parodies.  The plucky kid, the publicity-hound dad, the new-age Mom.

While funny in and of itself, this story is also useful because it allows us to be referees at the new national pastime - Sympathy Circle.  The rules of the game are easy - pick a real-life story, simplify it just enough so that it doesn’t make sense anymore, then decide with much harrumphing and furrowing of brows just who among the players in the story should be inside our Sympathy Circle.  Players inside the circle receive that most coveted of prizes - the detached sympathy of strangers - while characters placed outside receive public humiliation at the hands of wiseguys like myself and Mike Barnicle.

This week produced a bumper crop of high-stakes Sympathy Circle players.  Jessica Dubroff - in, Jessica’s parents - out (especially Mom).  David Kaszcinski - in, Ted and Momma Kaszcinski - out.  Some players have so much gravity that they can suck players who were previously inside the circle back out again, as Michael Jackson did to Lisa Marie Presley simply by marrying her. 

It might appear that Sympathy Circle is just another form of celebrity abuse, like stalking or editorial cartooning, but it often produces surprising results, one local guy being a prime example.  A twenty year old suburban college boy gets drunk and wanders off into a swamp to die of hypothermia - a prime candidate for the kind of glib scorn now being heaped on Momma Dubroff.  When I was a college drunk, I expected (and perhaps courted) that kind of treatment and was rarely disappointed.  Yet, somehow this kid landed inside the circle, taken to heart by people who don’t even know where Scituate is.

This is clearly an odd occurrence because the media through which the game is played is always digging for reasons to eject players from the circle.  Breaking the story that puts a player in the circle is worth ten points to a reporter, but breaking the story that ousts the same player from the circle is worth twenty.

All of which brings up the question, how do you win at Sympathy Circle?  The easiest way to win is to have something awful happen to you.  The success of this strategy has spawned a rash of cheating.  In the last week alone two people have been caught claiming to have some dreaded disease merely to win the sympathy of strangers.  Both have now been properly placed outside the circle.  The main attraction of this strategy is its huge payoff.  If your particular misfortune is potent enough, your victimization might earn you the designation of hero.  This holds true even if you did nothing more than sit in a chair while the rocket ship exploded underneath you.  When I went to school heroes were required to do something to earn the designation, but since then the standards have been loosened somewhat.  Today, being in the wrong place and having something bad happen to you is often sufficient.

The surest route to victory, and unfortunately the road least travelled, is to deserve the sympathy.  This is the route our guy took.  He lived well, had a nice family, didn’t hurt anybody, then one night, at an age when people do that sort of thing, he got drunk.  Then he took a wrong turn and ended up dead with people like me dissecting his actions.  But a funny thing happened on this guy’s trip to glib contempt.  He never made it.