What Is The Best Story?

There are several notable meltdowns and stories of this year...my favorite is now Weinergate. The other nominees:

1. Charlie Sheen's multi-day meltdown-palooza.

2. Lars Von Trier's press conference about understanding Hitler

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger's love child with his maid.

4. DSK rape

5. Weinergate

Are there other nominees? Here is my case for Weinergate...via process of elimination...

DSK story is the weakest because honestly...who gives a shit? The guy is either innocent or guilty and there isn't much more dimension to the story. Also, does anyone outside France know who this guy is? Or care? He is either a creepy old French rapist or some old powerful lothario who is getting screwed over. Again, neither very interesting.

Arnold story is second weakest because there is nothing unexpected about it. The only interesting element is how the guy was able to keep it secret for so long. But now that the secret is out...what more intriguing angle is there?

Lars Von Trier's meltdown was funny to watch and the surreal reaction very entertaining. Here you have this one-two week period of Cannes film festival where the world partially pays attention to the most arty and avante garde element of the film industry and wacky people like Von Trier get center stage. The outcry and banning of Von Trier from Cannes is fantastic. The most noticeable element is the impotence of the entire gesture. In the end...no one cares. No one cares what Von Trier said. It isn't even really very offensive given what one can find on the internet any time of the day. No one will see the movie. No one will notice Von Trier being banned from Cannes, least of all, Von Trier. This is the great part of the story...all these people circling around and talking and banning and taking righteous, meaningless stands. What genius.

Charlie Sheen. It seems like an old story now, but it was so amazing and surreal at the time. We cannot forget this guy dominated the talk shows for a week with interviews that were more like performance art and he introduced new terms into our language like "winning" and "tiger blood." The guy called out Keith Richards and did in real life what regular men fantasize about times 1000. But ultimately, what makes this story weaker than Weinergate, is there is no lasting impact and the issue of whether Sheen would be on 2 1/2 Men again is essentially a non-issue. I know they say people watch this television show, but I have yet to meet a single one of these people.

Weinergate. At first, the only interest I took in this story was the idea that someone hacked into a Congressman's twitter account and posted pictures of a penis claiming to be his. Which is a real issue - identity theft and libel. But the story gets better and more revealing about the times we live each day. Secondly, it became about partisan politics. Liberals rushed to his defense and conservatives were eager to point out "if-this-had-been-a-conservative-he-would-have-been-treated-differently-by-the-press" blah blah blah. Then, Weiner's denials were strange and started smelling funny to anyone who was paying attention, so it stayed in the news. People interested in the truth kept sniffing around and asking Weiner questions. And here is where it gets interesting: he starts hectoring and lecturing and getting self righteous and trying to deflect the attention elsewhere. It becomes a story about the press being vultures and looking to bring people down and keep people looking at the news.

Then suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a surreal press conference erupts. Andrew Breitbart, the hated conservative blogger, gives a 15 minute preamble about the story demanding an apology for everyone who called him a liar before Weiner comes out and admits he did in fact twitter send his penis picture to a college girl. Story breakthrough! Now the story is about the strangeness of social media, it is about a creepy old congressmen, it is about a certain generation's comfortableness with technology and the other generation using it awkwardly.

Now...the story twist...because of the internet and recent memory, you able to go back a few days and watch Weiner's denials. And I would guess more people (myself included) only started paying attention to the story after he admitted to the lies...and so we didn't see the denials in real time, but rather in reverse order. So now, we know the guy is lying and his denials come across as the work of a total sociopath and liar and the story becomes about our political class and the people we elect to office. It is very clear, visual evidence of what we all suspect: these guys are freaking nuts and inhuman.

And then the coda...the similar ending to "The Social Network"...when we hear the story of this other girl from Texas about her online relationship with Weiner and the clumsy, awkward, guy trying to reach out and flirt with some stranger a million miles away and why? It is both pathetic and all-too human, how in this internet age we seek to make these bizarro connections via this networks and end up sending these pathetic pictures of ourselves...I mean it is like the saddest thing in the world...a perfect expression of how man is truly his own worst enemy.