Branding Through Embarassment
Mel Gibson makes racial drunken slurs, The Pope slams Islam, and Brittany Spears, well, is just a walking embarassment with her lack of parenting skills and a joke for a boyfriend. One has to look on the other side of these events though. The actions are embarassing but the one effect they all have is that people paid attention. People always do.
That is the effect they wanted to happen. Mel Gibson hasnt been in the public eye for a while until his incident making fun of Jews in a drunken banter to police. The pope hasn’t been in the news until his Islamic rant. Britanny isn’t singing anymore so she has to use her child and her moron boyfriend to keep the attention on her.
Now all of these incidents could be coincidence or they could not. The one thing they did do was keep their respective subjects in the public eye. It is fine to embarass yourself once in a while. The thing about embarassment is that it only affects you if you let it. The thing about embarassing acts are they get you noticed. they are only embarassing if they go against the public ideal of normalcy. That’s how embarassing acts work to garner attention.
Someone that takes off their pants and runs around a public fountain will get noticed, and subsequently arrested. But the incident will be on the minds and tongues of everyone who witnessed it that day. No one in their right mind would take off their pants and run through a public fountain. You get into the minds of the viewers because some of them are embarassed for you, some think you are a moron and the rest have an urge to take of their pants as well and run with you.
That is the power of embarassment.
