Last week, my wife called me into the living room to watch Buzz Aldrin's performance on Dancing with the Stars.  Aldrin, the eighty-year-old former astronaut and second man on the moon, graced the stage with all the style and brio he displayed while clomping around the lunar surface in 1969.  He got the hook.

Aldrin said he went on the show to generate awareness for space exploration.  "I'm interested...in having the public be thankful for the great successes we had in the Apollo Program and look forward to even greater successes in the future." After all, what better way to promote scientific inquiry than with a hoof-off against such luminaries as Kate Gosselin, America's foremost multiple-birth diva before Octomom, and Pamela Anderson, a woman best known for challenging the frontiers of the human bustline.

Snark aside, I don't stand in judgment of the show or the man.  The show may be a cheesy celebrity dance contest, but some of my favorite shows have been even cheesier, including the granddaddy of them all, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."  And though I think Aldrin's true motivation had more to do with ego than the Eagle, the man achieved something remarkable in his life, and if he wants another curtain call before the final blast off, he's earned it.

But he didn't belong there.

Call me elitist if you want, but I'm having trouble getting my head around the combination of show and contestant.  The ten-dollar term for this syndrome is cognitive dissonance, the inability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind simultaneously.  Essentially, you've got this man who can be fairly described as an American hero of uncommon bravery on a TV show which can be fairly described as a waste of the electromagnetic spectrum.  It hurts my brain.

One could argue that there was as much celebrity hype in the space program during the '60s and '70s as there is in reality TV today.  True, but beneath the PR, the two endeavors differ in orders of magnitude regarding requisite skills, inherent risks, and nobility of purpose.  In spite of the patriotic hoopla surrounding the moon mission, Aldrin realized one of mankind's oldest dreams; Kate Gosselin proved that bad dancing and questionable motherhood are no hindrance to promoting a tawdry TV career.

It can also be fairly pointed out that Aldrin is no saint.   He has been married three times and was treated for clinical depression and alcoholism after retiring from NASA.  But the issue isn't character flaws - we're all damaged goods on some level - but whether one is famous because of them or in spite of them.  Aldrin's appearance on Dancing with the Stars may not have tainted his accomplishments but it certainly diminished people's perception of them, and that's a pity.

This wasn't the first time I experienced what I call CVD, Celebrity-Venue Disconnect.  A more egregious example occurred on Oct. 19, 1986 during the ceremonies preceding game two of the World Series between the Mets and the Red Sox, when the first pitch was tossed out by writer, humanitarian, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel.

Unlike the situation with Aldrin which was a discrepancy between legitimate fame and celebrity for its own sake, the discord here was between the trivial and the profound.  I am a baseball fan and ardent Red Sox supporter who has been known to take the sport and its vagaries quite seriously.  But at the end of nine innings, it's only a game whose consequences dissipate quickly and rightly so.  I would've had no problem with Buzz throwing out that pitch; an American icon honored by America's pastime makes sense.  Wiesel represents a different level of emotional and historical reality, informed by tyranny and cruelty, unspeakable horror and the will to survive against it.  It was a jarring and disorienting moment for me when those two worlds collided at Shea.

I don't begrudge Wiesel a fondness for baseball or believe he must remain in a permanent state of solemnity and grief because of his wartime experiences.  No one should be trapped or defined solely by the circumstances of his life.  But through his writings and lectures, he became a symbol of Holocaust remembrance, and on that night, I couldn't forget.

I wouldn't presume to understand what motivated Mr. Wiesel, but if his appearance was meant in part to raise awareness of man's inhumanity to man, the point was lost on the press.  The Sarasota Herald-Tribune from Oct 20, 1986 never mentioned his background or his work, but noted importantly that he "threw a right-handed strike to Met's catch [sic] Gary Carter."  The Lexington, N.C. Dispatch gave more information about Wiesel, but placed the story right next to an item it deemed equally newsworthy - the marriage of Frank Gifford to Kathy Lee.

In the cases of both Col. Aldrin and Mr. Wiesel, the fallout from their forays was surely unintentional.  I have enough respect for both men to believe that they would never purposely sabotage their principles or their stature.  There is, however, at least one case of CVD where the subject knowingly sacrificed his lofty station and did so for altruistic reasons.

In 1973, Natan Sharansky, a Ukrainian-born mathematician, was denied an exit visa to Israel by the Soviet authorities.  He became an activist in the human rights movement alongside Andrei Sakharov and was a founder and spokesperson for the refusnik movement in Moscow.  He was arrested on charges of treason and spying for the US and served nine years in a Siberian labor camp before international outrage and pressure moved the USSR to release him to the West in 1986.  He subsequently moved to Israel.

Sharansky was widely hailed for his courage and defiance and could have easily lived the rest of his life in the role of dissident saint.  He could have returned to academics, hit the lecture circuit, or, like Solzhenitsyn, become a recluse.  Instead, he jettisoned his halo and entered an arena far sleazier than Dancing with the Stars; he went into Israeli politics.

With the collapse of the USSR, a large influx of Russian Jews emigrated to Israeli in the early '90s.  Increasingly dismayed by the way the absorption was being handled, Sharansky and another refusnik, Yuli Edelstein, formed the Yisrael b'Aliyah party in 1995 to help their former countrymen adapt and prosper in their new homeland.  Their motto was "Our leaders first go to prison, and only then into politics."  In national elections a year later, the party won seven Knesset seats, and Sharansky was named Minister of Industry and Trade.  He has held several other government posts since.

He must have realized that by entering politics, he was giving up his protective armor of moral purity.  The Israeli government with its cabinet-level infighting and unwieldy parliamentary system is the civic equivalent of mud wrestling.  Yet he clearly felt that the welfare of his fellow émigrés was worth the loss of his personal dignity.  Whatever you may think of his politics, you have to admire his humility.  And if he ever wants to reclaim some of his former gravitas, he can always audition for Rokdim Im Kokhavim, Israel's version of Dancing with the Stars.