Humiliation

IN TV's good old days - roughly a million years ago - the original Candid Camera relied on such innocent but hilarious pranks as talking mailboxes to dupe the unsuspecting, much to our entertainment. Today's version of the show goes for the laughs by inducing an air traveler to lie down and pass through a security X-ray machine - from which he emerged bruised, bloody and litigious. One of early TV's landmark game shows, Beat the Clock, had contestants competing under time pressure in various stunts, usually, it seemed, involving pingpong balls and water.

By now, many have seen the horrific photograph from the front page of the New York Post ("Police question man in N.Y. subway train death," Dec. 5). A man clings helplessly to the platform of a New York subway seconds before he is struck and killed by an oncoming car. The man who took the photograph was lambasted and humiliated on the Today Show by the supreme judges, Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie. They questioned, grilled and toasted the photographer. Their assumption was that the photographer should have been attempting to rescue the man who was shoved onto the path of the oncoming subway car. His reasoning was that he took multiple photographs with the flash to try to call attention to the car engineer to get him to stop.

Japanese-inspired reality contests have become a hot ticket for network TV, thanks to the success of ABC's Wipeout this summer. Now comes Hole in the Wall, taking its fall lineup spot at 8 p.m. Thursdays on Fox. For those who have not seen one of the abbreviated sneak-peek telecasts this week, the basic action involves a wall moving toward a contestant at a fairly high rate of speed. In the wall is a cutout. Sometimes it looks like a body, sometimes not. The contestants - a group that includes 400-pound wrestlers - must contort their bodies to fit through the hole or get knocked into a pool of water by the moving wall.

It was late Saturday night and defensive tackle Joe Vellano was asked to think back to the lofty expectations Maryland had harbored in September as it entered a new season with a new coach. Vellano exhaled. "Oh, I know," he said softly, contemplating how the early-season promise had faded. Ten weeks ago, the Terps — coming off a 9-4 year — opened a season in which they believed they could compete for the Atlantic Coast Conference championship. Maryland (2-8, 1-5 ACC)

WASHINGTON - If President Bush wants to get a better handle on the problems he's facing in Iraq and the West Bank, I suggest he study the speech made Oct. 16 by Malaysia's departing prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to a conclave of Muslim leaders. Most of that speech was a brutally frank look into the causes of the Muslim world's decline. Though it was also laced with shameful anti-Jewish slurs, it was still revealing. Five times he referred to Muslims as humiliated. If I've learned one thing covering world affairs, it's this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.

The big man wishes to be struck by lightning and killed at the earliest possible moment. He wishes the entire immediate world to remove itself and leave him in his humiliation. He is built like a lumberjack. He is built to beat up linebackers for laughs. He is standing in this miserable courtroom, with the life he has known effectively finished, because the police found him intimately engaged in the front seat of a car with someone who was a man.What now? In Washington last week, the U.S. Senate votes down one measure to prohibit job discrimination against gays, and approves another measure barring federal recognition of gay marriages.

DALLAS -- Baltimore Blast coach Kenny Cooper felt like yelling. Knocking over water coolers. Tossing chairs against the dressing room wall. Kicking the air out of the nearest soccer ball.But despite one of the most humiliating performances in Blast history -- a 10-2 loss to the Dallas Sidekicks at Reunion Arena last night -- Cooper decided to keep his composure in check.With less than two days to prepare for a Sunday night encounter at MSL leader San Diego, Cooper figured the last thing he should do is jump down his players' throats, pointing fingers at those he felt most responsible for the Blast's worst loss of the season.

SAUL BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION.Ruth Miller.St. Martin's.385 pages. $24.95.Is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow a great man, a luminary who can illuminate us? Or is he a slapstick comedian, a victim of his own shticks? Is he a genius or a jerk?Few American writers possess Saul Bellow's elegantly humane dignity, his personal grace. Few can match his world-recognized accomplishments, which seem to be a fulfillment of the fantasies of characters in his early novels -- or duplications in real life of the success of fictional creations like Henderson or Benn Crader.

Washington.--Again, the time for diplomacy passed.The high-speed diplomatic exchanges failed and were swallowed up by the roar of battle. Soon after the noon deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait passed with an angry rejection from Baghdad, allied ground troops undertook a massive encirclement of the half-million Iraqi force.Again, the baton was passed from the diplomats to the warriors.As the talking stopped and the shooting started, there were in these events the seeds of misjudgment and the strong sense of opportunity lost.

A drunken driver is ordered to carry in his wallet pictures of the people he killed. A wife-beater must apologize to his victim from the courthouse steps, with cameras rolling. A shoplifter is forced to pace outside the market from which she pilfered, wearing a huge sign that brands her a convicted thief.It is justice by sandwich board, tearful apology and posted placard, the modern versions of the stocks and scarlet letters of Colonial times. A small but attention-getting group of judges across the country, fed up with a revolving cast of drug buyers, drunken drivers, johns and shoplifters who never seem to get the message, has been sentencing criminals to shame.

The president-elect was coming to Baltimore, and police officers had their orders. They had to keep the crowds orderly, keep Barack Obama safe and look presentable. Officers needed to be "clean-shaven. " That was a problem for Anthony L. Brown, an 18-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department. He says he has been diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition nicknamed "razor bumps" that can cause infection and scarring "as a consequence of shaving. " That didn't stop the department from enforcing its orders for officers on the presidential detail, according to a $17 million lawsuit that Brown, who is now retired, filed in Baltimore Circuit Court this month.

You have to believe that the pitch for Nickelodeon's first prime-time family movie was something along the lines of "Will Ferrell-light." Gym Teacher: The Movie, which premieres tonight, is the story of a failed Olympic gymnast-turned-gym teacher who faces his last shot at glory in the form of a new National Gym Teacher of the Year contest. Even with Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: SVU, Oz) in the lead on Nick, it still echoes Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro and Kicking & Screaming. The main rabbit-trick of loser-turned-winner comedies is humiliation - the protagonist must be brought low to give his subsequent transformation that heady feel-good lift the genre requires.

Japanese-inspired reality contests have become a hot ticket for network TV, thanks to the success of ABC's Wipeout this summer. Now comes Hole in the Wall, taking its fall lineup spot at 8 p.m. Thursdays on Fox. For those who have not seen one of the abbreviated sneak-peek telecasts this week, the basic action involves a wall moving toward a contestant at a fairly high rate of speed. In the wall is a cutout. Sometimes it looks like a body, sometimes not. The contestants - a group that includes 400-pound wrestlers - must contort their bodies to fit through the hole or get knocked into a pool of water by the moving wall.

There is obviously no way to quantify this, but I regard Bill Clinton as the most thoroughly humiliated person in all of human history. Who else even comes close? Today, it is 10 years since that astonishing day a sitting president gave a nationally televised address in which he admitted that, yes, he'd had a sexual relationship with a young intern, and that all his previous statements to the contrary - to his family, to the media, to the nation - were baldfaced lies. You gazed upon that astonishing spectacle, gazed upon the utter debasement of the highest public official in the land, and you said that here was a situation to which other public figures were surely paying close attention, and from which they were surely drawing the obvious lessons: Keep it in your pants, boys.

The fortunes of the Navy football team diverged in a loss to Rutgers in the second week of last season. Season-ending injuries to linebacker Clint Sovie and safety Jeff Deliz against the Scarlet Knights contributed to a defense that was one of the worst in the country. The Midshipmen finished toward the bottom of the Football Bowl Subdivision in several categories, including last in pass-defense efficiency. With new Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo and senior quarterback Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada trying to keep the offense as potent as it was under Paul Johnson - the Mids led the nation in rushing for the third straight season and scored a school-record 511 points - the return of Sovie and Deliz could allow the Midshipmen to be as competitive in 2008 as they were when they finished 8-5 a year ago. "We've obviously got to get better on defense," Niumatalolo, the former offensive coordinator who was promoted when Johnson left for Georgia Tech, said as practice opened in Annapolis yesterday.

Summertime TV has been dabbling in game shows and contestant humiliation since 2001, when NBC debuted Fear Factor with an episode featuring players lowered into a pit filled with rats. But this year, the networks have taken their game to a whole new level with programs that show competitors getting punched in the face and falling into a pit of mud as they try to climb an obstacle-course wall - or players dressed like bugs getting slammed against car windshields. One entire series is built on the premise of contestants being forced to eat rich foods like clam chowder or cream pie until they are stuffed - and then put through physical paces intended to make them sick.

WASHINGTON -- Among the reports of abuses by government officials at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, perhaps few inflamed Muslims worldwide as much as allegations that copies of the Quran were dumped into filthy prison toilets. Now four former detainees are suing those U.S. officials over those very allegations - and employing a novel argument to do it. Before a federal appeals court in Washington on Friday, they argued that a law passed in the 1990s to emphasize the importance of religion in American life gives them a right to recover damages for torture and faith-based humiliation.

Arab newspapers, responding to the images of a bearded, disheveled and captive Saddam Hussein beamed around the world, noted his humiliation but focused on the continued occupation of Iraq by the United States. The resounding conclusion was that Hussein's arrest would not stem the tide of violence being waged by resistance forces and might even cause it to intensify. Some called Hussein a tyrant who deserved to be deposed, but not at the hands of an occupation army. Arab papers played down the importance of the capture even as they played it big on their front pages, noting that weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found and that U.S. officials must prove they invaded Iraq to liberate its people.

While researching my civil rights book, I gave a brief work-in-progress talk at a woman's club in Baltimore. A member of the audience came up to me afterward to make this observation about the task I was beginning to confront: "You'll never get the ambience of those days." I thought I knew what she meant. Jim Crow discrimination was sustained by a level of passion that might be difficult to convey. And there was the fact that while I had grown up at the end of the Jim Crow era in North Carolina, I had not grown up black.

Nausea, heartburn, headache, body pain and disorientation. Symptoms of the latest flu? No - just the look on the face of the latest woman to "stand by her man," Silda Wall Spitzer, replayed endlessly on TV. In the 21st century, isn't it time for a man who has disgraced himself and his family to stand at the podium by himself? To stand and - as it were - take it like a man? New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's saga is only the latest in a centuries-long line of powerful men who find the need to divert their risk-taking behavior into their personal lives.