Paula Deen and Aaron Hernandez are suffering fates of their
own making.
By Donald Kaul
Reversals of fortune
can be breathtaking. One minute, people are riding high, surfing the wave of
life. The next, they tip over like capsized canoes.
Take Paula Deen. This
Typhoid Mary of the obesity epidemic made untold fortunes in becoming the
unchallenged champion of southern cooking.
I once turned on one
of her shows and gained three pounds, just watching. But she’s a lively,
cheerful sort, and her down-home charm won her hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of followers.
Until it was revealed,
as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed against her, that she had used racist
language in the past — the “N” word in particular — and allowed racist, sexist,
homophobic, and anti-Semitic jokes to be part of the kitchen talk in at least
one of her restaurants. Then there was that cringe-worthy concept of a “plantation-style wedding” with an all-black wait staff she suggested
for her brother’s nuptials.
The Food Network
immediately cancelled one of her shows and announced plans to sever ties with
her. Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesar’s Entertainment, and QVC, all
huge sources of Deen’s income, quickly followed suit.
Shortly thereafter,
Sears, Kmart, and J.C. Penney said they would stop selling products branded
with her name, which prompted Random House to cancel a multi-million-dollar
book contract with her.
Deen apologized. Then
she apologized some more, desperately trying to stem the damage, but to no
avail. The more she apologized, the more damage there was to stem.
Perhaps the cruelest
blow fell when the pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisk, fired her as its
spokesperson for a diabetes drug. Thus ended the supreme hypocrisy of Deen, a
Type 2 Diabetic whose recipes are virtual prescriptions for acquiring the
disease, getting paid to flog its remedy. (It turned out she’d known she had
the disease for several years but didn’t admit it until the drug company hired
her.)
Her fans still love
her. She’s still hugely popular with the huge people who keep lining up at her
restaurants. But her days as a national figure are over.
Who says there’s no
good news anymore?
There’s another fallen
star who recently plummeted to Earth: Aaron Hernandez. This handsome,
extravagantly talented football player signed a multi-year $40 million contract
with the New England Patriots only last year.
He was 23, just
approaching his prime, and had recently become a father. He survived a rough
childhood and was set up to live happily ever after.
Until last month —
when police arrested him and charged him with being involved in the murder of
one of his own friends. That was shocking, but pro football is no stranger to
off-the-field incidents of a similar sort, often involving gunfire. Usually it
turns out that the player was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But as this drama
unfolded, it became obvious that the victim hadn’t merely been shot, but
executed gangland style and that policed believed that Hernandez might have
been personally involved.
Then, as the story
spun out, police tied Hernandez to the recent drive-by shooting of two other
acquaintances after they’d had an altercation with him. It was possible he’d
been the triggerman, police said. That moved the story from OJ Simpsonville
into Tony Sopranoland.
He was jailed without
bond and the Patriots voided his contract.
In a blink, Hernandez
went from a life of fame and fortune to facing a future in a maximum-security
prison. And from what we know, it wasn’t even for a comprehensible reason. The
killings grew out of two garden-variety barroom dust-ups.
I don’t know whether
these stories have a moral, but I do know this:
When you’re on top of
the world, there’s only one direction for you to go — down.
So watch your step.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org