Howard Stern

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes traditional American views and responses to outcasts, and tries to understand how the "King of All Media", Howard Stern, can be hated by so many, yet so influential on contemporary culture. The paper suggests that it is precisely Stern's willingness to live on the edge and push boundaries that makes him a true social revolutionary.

From the Paper:

"According to Webster's Dictionary, an outcast is "one who is cast out or expelled often, a degraded person." American Heritage calls an outcast anyone who "has been excluded from a society or system." While these definitions describe how an outcast appears, they simultaneously undermine his true significance. They fail to recognize him as a psychological phenomenon who impacts society in the most profound way. The outcast, while, by definition, banished to the outer limits of the social sphere, nonetheless succeeds in consistently capturing the attention even of his fiercest enemies. He is at once a social misfit one to be avoided at all costs and the object of tremendous curiosity. The outcast consciously and purposely goes against the grain of society, pushing the rules to the limit and exposing to the human race everything that it denies about itself. Yet, despite all this, or more correctly, because of it, society is drawn towards the outcast, ostensibly to ruin him and to protect the moral structure of the community, but, more deeply, to struggle with him, to attempt to reconcile internally the reflection of the outcast that each person sees in himself."

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