Mourning Becomes Entertainment - The Travesty at the Winter Olympics

Mourning becomes Entertainment


Am I the only person in the world who believes that Olympic skater Joannie Rochette should not have performed on the Olympic stage following the untimely death of her mother?

I do not blame the young woman. She, I’m sure, wanted to honor her mother through her performance. I blame her handlers, and NBC. They knew that this poignant bit of drama would raise the visibility of the event and I’m sure did all they could to encourage her to get back on the ice.

When someone close to you dies, the right thing to do is to withdraw in solitude with your family and mourn quietly. She is young. There will be other contests and other Olympics for her. But to perform when the grief is so raw and immediate, when the body is not buried, is simply unthinkable. Have we morphed into a culture so enamored with the notion that performance is all and that the show should always go on that we cannot conceive of a decent interval of grieving?

Instead, the Olympics audience became no different than bystanders at an auto accident, gawking at someone in deep pain, getting a phony catharsis out of the tears of a young woman we neither know nor truly care about.

The Greeks distinguished between bathos and pathos. Bathos was grief that we feel when stirred up by triggers – like the image of a young woman weeping on ice. Pathos is when we experience those emotions after having earned them. The world cannot really share the grief of this young skater; they did not know her or her mother. They are not her family. For the audience to witness and feel this “sadness” was to get unearned catharsis. It was, “entertainment” for us. And it should not have happened.