From Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Rupert Murdoch to Joe Paterno, how the mighty fell in 2011. Modern constructs – global economy, mass media and sports mania – may have influenced the circumstances. But the plot lines of these figures’ collapse were as classical as it gets.


Power and prestige shielded the respected International Monetary Fund chief, the feared Australian-born media mogul and the revered Penn State football coach from the impulse toward moral responsibility or outrage and that might have cost them their jobs but enhanced their stature as human beings. The sexual assault accusations of Guinean-born hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo that derailed Straus-Kahn’s French political ambitions in May, the phone-hacking scandal that brought down one of Britain’s oldest newspapers in July and the child sex abuse allegations that toppled American college football’s winningest coach in November share their roots in leaders’ willingness to overlook individual acts that may have seemed beneath their concern when they happened, then spiraled out of control.


While each of the above instances came to light because individuals dared to speak up at great personal risk, the year’s events also reminded each of us how small we human beings are on a global scale. 2011 rumbled to a start with

Dominique Strauss-Kahn (top), Rupert Murdoch (middle) and Joe Paterno (bottom) all fell from their perch in 2011.

an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that reduced people in one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth – Japan – to the most basic level of existence. (Age-old conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa kept millions of our fellow humans in exodus, in refugee camps, in desperation and fear.


On the domestic front, a tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri and wiped out 159 lives in May; Hurricane Irene inflicted floods along much of the East Coast in August; and freak October snowstorms forced a large swath of the same region to freeze in the dark, surrounded by the fallen limbs of trees that hadn’t yet shed their leaves. Similar tree damage and power outages in December, minus the snow but driven by hurricane-force winds, struck many occupants of greater Los Angeles as a dress rehearsal for the inevitable big earthquake.


Arab spring
But organized movements of people also – with stunning results – overtook nature and history. A convergence of long-held resentment, pent-up passion and technological facilitation gave rise to sustained popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Heads of state once considered intractably mighty fell, or fled.


As the year turns, the full consequences of those changes – partially manifested in Nobel Peace Prizes to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman, and in the violent deaths of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden – are still playing out. The demise of two bogeymen to the West, one under confusing circumstances that are still being investigated, the other in a surgically precise U.S. Navy Seals operation, might have translated into triumph for anyone else who’d occupied the Oval Office when their deaths happened. In the vertiginous political culture of the United States, President Barack Obama could barely pause to take credit. Belittled by a noisy chorus of Republican opponents – including former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, whose campaign threatened to eclipse the rest of the field before oh, about 999 … accusations of sexual misconduct compelled him to bow out – the president has struggled to overcome another formidable challenge, the economy he inherited after a near-decade’s worth of bad policy.


Americans tend to focus on the matters closest to home, and throughout this year, the most pressing matter for many of us was home – hanging onto one if we lost our jobs, trying to bail if its boom-era valuation exceeded its worth, trying to borrow for one when no bank would offer a loan. The state of home and its inhabitants worried Americans into a troubling state of affairs: for the first time on record, this country logged more deaths tied to prescription drug abuse than from auto accidents. Considering the pre-healthcare reform price of many prescriptions, that’s a startling phenomenon. Most people were not in a position to pay $150,000 a month to a personal physician, and a Los Angeles jury harbored no sympathy for Dr. Conrad Murray. They determined that the cardiologist accepted that fee to administer a hospital-grade anesthetic to Michael Jackson. In November a judge sentenced Murray to four years behind bars.


The Occupy Movement
Not everyone medicated themselves into oblivion or acquiescence. Simmering frustration over decade-long wars, persistent unemployment, the ever-higher costs of public and private higher education, medical care and a decent standard of living reached a near-boil in the outbreak of “Occupy Wall Street”-inspired pro-tests. No doubt that strongly held opinions about the demonstrators‟ tactics, philosophy, and premise – and the varied “clear ‘em out” responses of city governments and police from Lower Manhattan to Los Angeles – enlivened plenty of family gatherings this Thanksgiving. Many observers equated this anger on the left with the right-leaning fury of the Tea Party; even more asked what took everyone so long to get angry.


At the very least, the emotion and arguments over Gilded Age levels of income inequality, social immobility and narrowing access to opportunity, from both ends of the ideological spectrum, will help heat up the atmosphere for the coming presidential election.


But not, one hopes, too hot. The November arrest of a man with a messiah complex suspected of firing a high-powered rifle at the White House causes one to wonder just how much rhetorical warming may help push low-level anger toward catastrophic action.


And although we may never know what prompted the act, many commentators linked Jared Loughner’s alleged attack early in the year on an overheated “us-versus-them” approach to political differences. When the smoke cleared on that January Saturday morning in Tucson, 20 people who’d participated in one of the most mundane acts of democracy – meeting their elected representative outside a supermarket – lay dead or wounded. The apparent target, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survived a bullet to the brain. Although her political future is uncertain at this writing, her symbolic resonance is not. She sparked one of the year’s few inspiring domestic political moments when, eight months after the shooting, she arrived on the U.S. House floor just in time to cast a key vote on the federal debt ceiling.


Giffords’ husband, now-retired astronaut Mark Kelly, also demonstrated the resonance of reaching beyond oneself. During his wife’s convalescence he resumed training to participate in the flight of the Endeavour, the final mission of the U.S. space shuttle program. That closed chapter of 50 years’ exploration serves to remind us that, small as we are, mere human beings are still capable of extraordinary things. Especially as we recall that a movement for human dignity and civil rights in this country (brought to visceral if problematic life in one of the year’s most talked-about movies, “The Help”) achieved mainstream exposure at about the same time the space race heated up – and continues to inspire activism around the world.


The writer is a senior news editor at Southern California Public Radio. This is a reprint from the Black Alumni Network Newsletter of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.


Notable deaths of 2011:
Authors, journalists, entertainers and entrepreneurs
In the closing days 2010, Teena Marie, “Ivory queen of soul,” Billy Taylor, Jazzmobile ambassador and CBS “Sunday Morning” contributor;


In JANUARY, Dave Hardy, New York Daily News, journalist-author Kay Mills, Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver; journalist Leon Wynter journalist/author/educator Samuel Yette;


FEBRUARY, the last World War I combat veteran dies at age 110; bombshell Jane Russell; Harvard chaplain and “The Good Book” author Peter J. Gomes


MARCH, Hollywood star and humanitarian Elizabeth Taylor; Louise Davis Stone, wife of journalist Chuck Stone; gender bending VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro; pioneer newsman Thom Greer


APRIL, Manning Marable, died days before he published revealing Malcolm X biography


MAY, Gregory Lewis, old-school journalist; Don Barden, Detroit entrepreneur; Gil Scott Heron, “B movie,” “The bottle,” “The Revolution will not be televised”


JUNE, Jack Kevorkian, pioneered assisted suicide


JULY, former first lady Betty Ford, made substance abuse
rehab respectable … U.K. singer Amy Winehouse … Count Basie sax man Frank Foster


AUGUST, Dorothy E. Brunson, co-founder of Inner City Broadcasting; NFL great Bubba Smith


SEPTEMBER, Troy Davis executed by state of Georgia; Soulful singer Vesta Williams


OCTOBER, Steve Jobs, Apple co-creator; Fred Shuttlesworth, civil rights icon; Derrick Bell, Harvard law professor; Al Davis, “da Raiders” owner revolutionized NFL; Vic Miles, WCBS-TV newsman


NOVEMBER, CBS “60 Minutes” curmudgeon Andy Rooney; boxing great Joe Frazier; musical artist and actor Heavy D, born Dwight Errington Myers.


DECEMBER, Stanley Robertson, pioneering black TV executive with NBC; Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora.

Compiled by Wayne Dawkins, editor of the Black Alumni Network Newsletter of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism


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