Just Saying, Is All... | The Ugly Truth About Stephon Marbury

(Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

We become what we consume.

Stephon Marbury is a troubled soul. He’s also a troubling social phenomenon. Two months after broadcasting a nervous breakdown on UStream.tv, Marbury at least seems to have stabilized—which would be better news if it weren’t such a disappointment to all the gawkers in cyberspace.

Empathy means feeling the pain of others.

Voyeurism, on the other hand, means making the injury your own.

I won’t pretend to be totally uninterested in the Marbury saga. Everybody loves a train wreck, and it’s hard to turn away from a disaster in progress. But sometimes the hard viewing choice is the right one to make. In a world of infinite programming possibilities, the only decency standards are the kind we establish for ourselves.

A mirror reflects the face of the looker.

A clown reflects the heart of the laugher.

If you stare too long at Marbury’s antics, you’re liable to see a whole lot more than you bargained for.

Sports fans are pathological spectators. National spelling bees, World’s Strongest Man reruns, whatever filler they happen to be running between commercials at ESPN Classic—we watch because it’s on, and because watching what’s on is what we do. The problem, of course, is that habituation tends to breed callousness. Psychologists will cite Marbury’s behavior as evidence of a damaged mind. I’d add that our response to it is symptomatic of a diseased culture.

It’s bad when one fool loses his marbles.

It’s worse when a million find it entertaining.

Marbury may be as crazy as a loon, but it’s the rest of us who have to wear the albatross.

Pity the people that makes a spectacle of itself. To shun lepers is a natural instinct; to spotlight them is a destructive impulse. The ugly truth about Stephon Marbury is in the eyes of his audience, where a single man’s suffering becomes an entire community’s shame. The Internet provides an unprecedented window on the idiosyncrasies of the human condition. What that means for the quality of our human experience is a riddle realists and rubberneckers will have to solve on their own time.

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Bob Dylan never ate Vaseline in front of his laptop, but he could talk for days about alienating audiences:

You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, "How does it feel
To be such a freak?"

Which is an apt question in this age of unfiltered Webcam footage.

Because something is happening here and YouTube knows what it is, and anyone who claims immunity from the revelation is either waiting for the video to load or only just saying, is all...

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