Hillary, Martha, and Cockroaches

"When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha."

So says Maureen Dowd in her latest column. Her point basically is that women need to be broken to be successful. Meaning, nobody likes to see all powerful women, but once they've been broken and degraded and survived, we like 'em a whole lot more.

I don't think that's true just of women. I think that in general seeing someone suffer makes them more human, makes them easier to relate to. Martha Stewart always seemed too perfect, but now after we've all seen her sans make-up walking out of a jail cell, well you know what? She looks just like we do after a really, really bad day (or month).

Maureen Dowd would have you belive that this phenomenon only applies to women and that it's a bad thing. I'm not so sure on either count. People do not have perfect lives, it's really hard to remember that when all you see of a person is an hour on television after she's had a small army making her look good. It's really hard to remember that someone is real, that she or he suffers too, that money and popularity do not make someone happy despite the smiling images you see on TV. I think it was a pretty valuable lesson to see Martha in that ugly gray sweatshirt and if that makes us like her more (or at all), that's not a bad thing.