Now that Joe Lieberman has replaced Tiger Woods as the most hated man in America, it’s time to contemplate the fickle hand of celebrity. Joining us in our deep thoughts on the subject, in which someone must quote Andy Warhol, is public scold and media conscious Neil Gabler, who weighs in with an essay on the whole Tiger thing in this week’s Newsweek. 

Oh you don’t know Newsweek? It used to be a respected newsweekly, Avis to Time’s Hertz, though generally less cheesy and more idiosyncratic. Until this year when in a moment of magazine harakiri it redesigned itself into obloquy. The idea seemed to be to make the magazine more relevant in this internet age when people need a newsweekly the way they need cassette tapes. But with its we’re-a-monthly-disguised-as-a-weekly mindset the new Newsweek looks as hip as Ozzie Nelson with set of bongos. Magazine designers I know have described its redesign as a fiasco of New Coke proportions, but maybe you hadn’t noticed. 

Anyway, Gabler says it’s okay that we’re fascinated with celebrity after all and that the 15-minute fame of Tiger’s mistresses fulfills some national blah blah. Honestly, I haven’t finished the piece, partly because I hate looking at the magazine so much, but also because I have never forgiven Gabler  for his slightly hysterical argument — advanced in the 2000 book Life: The Movie — that the then-new virtual realities of video games and yes, the internet would destroy life as we knew it. (Unlike the virtual realities of, oh, the novel, the opera, the soap opera…) That and the fact he wrote such a long book about Walter Winchell, a villain of Lieberman like proportions who history has for the most part forgotten. 

I guess Tiger owes Joe one. Maybe he can loan him one of his bimbos. The most depressing thing about l’affaire Woods to me was not the epic nature of his infidelity (I didn’t know his “character” enough to expect otherwise, did you?) but the routine sameness of the women he cheated with. Honestly, I can’t tell them apart, and I suspect he couldn’t either. Maybe that was the point. 

I’m not being fair in my analogy, I know. Tiger just screwed his wife, and his own career as a spokesman for anything, uh, wholesome. Lieberman, by flip-flopping on an early Medicare buy-in and rendering the health care reform bill that will come out of the Senate fairly toothless, has fucked us all over. And made a million bucks from the insurance industry. Way to go, Joe!