Exhibit A:
Posted on 10/30/2002 7:18:30 AM PST by dead
Kurt Cobain's journals reveal a self-important inward focus that seems to be encouraged these days, writes Miranda Devine.
Eight years after Kurt Cobain stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out, the Nirvana frontman's banal innermost thoughts are again hot news. His handwritten journals - to be published on Monday after being sold by his widow, Courtney Love, for a reported $8 million - depict him as shallow, self-important, not terribly bright and utterly self-engrossed.
In his own inadvertent words, Cobain's short and sorry life is a cautionary tale of twin afflictions. One is heroin addiction, whose harrowing toll on Cobain is well documented in the diaries. "I remember someone saying if you try heroine [sic] once you'll become hooked," reads an extract published by Newsweek magazine this month. "Of course, I laughed and scoffed at the idea but I now believe this to be very true."
Cobain's other affliction is less obvious but no less insidious - self-obsession, a disease which affects far more people than heroin does, arguably with equally devastating effect.
Along the way, of course, Cobain became one of the biggest rock stars of all time, the widely proclaimed genius of the grunge movement who embodied the dour anti-commercialism, anti-materialistic Zeitgeist of the post-baby-boomer generations in the '90s.
But his outpourings of angst, and the scribbled lyrics of his hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit, reveal such embarrassingly puerile pap, you wonder where the genius was.
He writes endlessly about himself, his thoughts, his health, draws pictures of himself in various moods, and navel gazes ad nauseam.
Some examples: "I am what they call the boy who is slow. How I metamorphised [sic] from hyperactive to cement is for lack of a better knife to the throat.
"My penmanship seems scatological because of my lack of personality, or excess of personality.
"I've never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form."
His addiction to heroin is just another subject for self-focus, like the birth of his daughter Frances Bean. Even a love letter to Courtney Love is all about him. He is also fixated on his stomach aches, which he blames for getting him into heroin, and he even jokes about "Cobain's disease - my very own unexplainable rare stomach disease named after me".
There was nothing deeper in his long suicide note to his wife and then two-year-old daughter: "I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. I'll be there. I'll protect you. I don't know where I'm going. I just can't be here anymore."
After Cobain's death, there were widespread predictions of a wave of copycat suicides, which never eventuated. There were reports in the United States and around the world of people who had followed or tried to follow Cobain's lead. The day after the memorial service in Seattle, a 28-year-old fan killed himself in that city.
A year later, a Melbourne psychiatrist, Dr Michael Schwarz, told The Age that he had seen dozens of teenagers deeply affected by Cobain's death, including at least 10 who had overdosed.
But statistically, suicide numbers did not rise, which suicide prevention experts attributed to the fact that Cobain's widow and the media emphasised the futility of his death.
At the memorial service, Love asked the audience to call Cobain an "arsehole", and music outlets such as MTV and Triple-J ran anti-suicide messages.
In Australia, the rate of suicide among 15- to 24-year-olds actually fell during the month after Cobain died, according to a Commonwealth Health Department handbook for the media with guidelines on reporting suicide responsibly.
If, fortunately, there wasn't a Cobain-inspired suicide epidemic, there certainly has been a Cobain-style epidemic of self-obsession. Eight years after his death, his brand of lugubrious self-analysis and introspection is no longer frowned upon.
In fact, it is just about mandatory, as illustrated by the proliferation of "grief counsellors" every time life becomes difficult, even for those affected only peripherally by tragedy, like desk-bound Sydney journalists.
After the Thredbo landslide, the streets of the alpine village were chock-full of counsellors sent to shrink the survivors, but who seemed to be walking around aimlessly most of the time.
Every time a tragedy hits a school, armies of grief counsellors are sent in, even though there is no evidence they do any good.
At an Auckland conference two years ago, a British psychologist, Simon Wessely, denounced grief counselling after reviewing half a dozen studies of trauma debriefing and finding it had no effect.
"We are living in a culture of therapy," he said. "I would like to see some commonsense. It's all about not making a drama out of what is already a drama."
In her book Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People, the Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen questions the value of the burgeoning psychological introspection industry. She suggests grief counsellors may, in fact, make people feel worse by encouraging them to dwell on their "inner stresses".
"There are absolutely no data to support the idea that talking about tragic events helps, but there are data that show some people are harmed by talking about it," she says.
"Counsellors will tell them that they can help but, in reality, people can end up ruminating more about the negative things, worrying if they have some psychological illness, and become more debilitated ... People will naturally begin to feel better by drawing on their own resources, something that much of modern psychology prefers to ignore."
The inevitable result of too much introspection is what happened to Cobain. But by showing his psychic pain was largely the product of his heroin addiction and obsessive inward focus, his diaries should help demystify his death.
And they may do more for youth suicide prevention than any government program, simply by reinforcing the message from Love and friends that his suicide at 27 was meaningless and that self-obsession is a health hazard.
In other words, the perfect DemocRat.
Another sad victim of heroine. Cultural Jihad will be using you as a poster boy soon.
Keep Heroine's claws out of your veins, son.
Duh.
Sounds like Miranda Devine just wants to poke a dead corpse a bit.
I don't know about Australia, but this "self-obsession" epidemic was around here in the U.S. well before Nirvana. Cobain's music rocked, who cares about his personal issues? I, for one, like my rock stars to die young and troubled. Saves the embarrassment of seeing what the Stones have become....
Exhibit A:
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