I ACTED IN A YOUTHFUL AND INAPPROPRIATE WAY

Michael Phelps's Lukewarm Apology Reminds Us That Marijuana Use Has
Become a Normal Transgression, That Athletes Can Never Be Role Models
and That Ordinary Stupidity Is Impossible to Keep Private

So far, Kellogg's is the only one of Michael Phelps's sponsors to
officially dump him for failing to avoid having his photo taken while
huffing from a bong at a South Carolina party this past week. The
Swiss watch company Omega, mercifully free of the residual Puritanism
of North America, declared the news story a matter of the swimmer's
private life and so, "as far as Omega is concerned, a non-issue."
Speedo was paternalistic but ultimately forgiving. "We know that
Michael truly regrets his actions," a spokesman for the company said.
Phelps dutifully apologized to his fans and the public, but the
juxtaposition of "youthful" and "inappropriate" in his apology gave a
hint of his real feelings, which must have been along the lines of
"you have got to be kidding me."

Tell me which is the more appropriate behaviour for a 23-year-old
male: taking a bong hit at a party or swimming an average of 50 miles
a week? The institutional response to Phelps's drug use was swift and
over the top in the way that occurs only when U. S. officials react
to the existence of drugs. The Richland County Sheriff released a
statement saying that it was going to look into pressing charges.
Immediately the cry went up, what of the children? Will the youth of
the world, staring reverently up into Phelps's blank face, decide
that pot is OK? We know the answer to that question already: one
swimmer, no matter how weighed down with glory, won't make any
difference at this point. Pot has become normal, for good or ill. The
difference between Phelps and any other 23-year-old is that Phelps
has a 12-litre lung capacity with which to process THC. What's not
normal is eating 12,000 calories a day.

The most bizarre aspect of the Phelps furor, however, was the idea,
seemingly widely accepted, that athletes are still role models. If
pot is the only drug that Phelps tries, he is genuinely a hero of
modern sports. Every month or so, one amazingly gifted performer or
another does something like walk into a nightclub with a loaded gun
tucked into his sweatpants and, forgetting to turn on the safety,
shoots himself in the thigh. Phelps is no Plaxico Burress, but if
today's children are using athletes as life guides, then today's
children are doomed.

No celebrities, of any kind, are good models for anyone anymore;
constant media scrutiny has assured us of that. Celebrities are
characters in gossipy narratives, not paragons or ideals. Even the
aristocrats can't manage to stay aristocratic, as Harry's little
video of hijinks with his military buddies, released earlier this
year, illustrated so amusingly. It's the only time I've ever felt
sorry for a royal. Of course, it's never OK to say words like "paki"
or "raghead," and his use of those terms has brought up larger, more
serious issues of systemic racism in the British military, but in the
context of a video where the Prince reveals that his pubes are
ginger, we should probably be lenient. The part of the video where he
pretends to be talking to his grandma on the phone -- "Send my love
to the corgis ... God save you" -- is hilarious, the product of a
young man dealing with a uniquely complicated and difficult life
situation with humour.

If you watch Generation Kill, "raghead" is about the nicest word that
comes out of the soldiers' mouths. What could be more normal than a
21-year-old making a subversive, taboo-violating video in response to
a nearly intolerable level of stress? What he did was wrong, but if
you send a young man halfway across the world to be shot at by
perfect strangers and to shoot at perfect strangers, you shouldn't be
surprised if his manners are not perfect. Even if he does dine
regularly with the Queen.

The Harry story, like the Phelps photo, was produced by News of the
World, which seems to have the best connections among the sellout
friends of world-famous celebrities. Like Phelps, Harry had to
apologize for his inappropriate youth; unlike Phelps, he was not
permitted to even hint that "youthful" and "inappropriate" are
practically synonyms, and that it might be holding young male
celebrities to impossible standards to expect them to act like
they're 50-year-old cabinet ministers.

Both Phelps and Harry are victims of the demise of the expectation of
privacy, a demise that affects us all, not just celebrities or young
men. The disaster of the end of privacy is not that it reveals our
extraordinary successes and failures, but that it shows what normal
behaviour amounts to. Young men smoke pot and make dumb videos. If
you didn't know it before, now you do. Hopefully, the one healthy
byproduct of everyone knowing everything about everyone else is that
we'll be a little more forgiving of ordinary stupidity, no matter whose it is.