Posted on 01/01/2004 8:57:51 PM PST by Holly_P
Post O.J., a lot of attention has been paid to celebrities in legal trouble. Analyzing everything from their courtroom attire to whether their pores look healthy can bring everyday people closer to the celebrity's curiously artificial world. But, though this makes us happy, it spells doom for the celebrity.
Exhibit A: Michael Jackson. This new year, television will be inundated with retrospectives on Jackson's career, his troubles and the evolution of his face - this bizarre testament to self-hatred writ in flesh. We'll wonder whether he molested a child. Again. We'll cringe and smile, reducing the vast arc of Jackson's life to the butt of water cooler jokes.
So the important question becomes, why does this highly successful, intelligent and talented performer engage in self-destructive activities? How could he risk all of his wealth and power by acting so irresponsibly? (Whether he considers it "charming" or not, sleeping with young children is savagely irresponsible.) Jackson defenders will say the pop icon is being unfairly criticized by the media, but Jackson does not sleep with children because of the media's unreasonable demands. He commits these indiscretions because of a spiritual illness. I am referring to how the curiously artificial environment of his childhood left him deprived of a moral framework to help arbitrate his whims.
Early on, Jackson was trotted on stage and told to perform. The Jackson family's success was tied to this child's ability. These intense demands and constant scrutiny twisted inward the child's spontaneity and ripped to shreds any semblance of a healthy childhood. In ensuing decades, Jackson corralled nearly $500 million. His wealth and fame liberated him from the rules of social or economic accountability that define most people's sense of self. Never a part of society, Jackson receded into a fantasy world.
"This is a fantasy business. It's not a reality-based business, so they don't have reality checks. Often they seem to go over deep ends. It's not for attention, it's not for money. It seems to be a result of the business," said In Touch Weekly magazine's editor, Tom O'Neil, to an AP reporter.
Most of us spend our teen years testing social boundaries to learn about ourselves. It is from these experiences that we build a moral foundation that arbitrates what to take in and what to reject. This foundation gives definition to our lives. Jackson, by contrast, enjoyed a life quite beyond the normal laws of human decorum. His fame, talent and wealth meant that he would not be neutered by the normal economic boundaries that enmesh the rest of us. It also meant that everything in his life was fraught with a sense of impermanence. He could do as he pleased; therefore, no real value could be assigned to his life. His frame of reference became aesthetic. He drifted from one outrageous fancy to the next. His life was in a constant state of flux. From this perspective, Jackson seems not merely a victim of external factors (i.e., oppressive father, hyper-critical media, etc.), but of his own inability to develop a moral or spiritual foundation.
Still, we gazed adoringly at Jackson precisely because he was beyond the social laws, and we delight in his destruction because it makes us feel as if we've supplanted him.
In a culture that is increasingly vain and materialistic, Jackson's rise and fall is a signpost for our great moral task: the need to carve out an immutable foundation that will help us quell the savagery innate to human beings.
Amen to that. The author is full of bullski, and I'd like to know where he got his graduate degree in psychology to make such a statement as this one: "Most of us spend our teen years testing social boundaries to learn about ourselves. It is from these experiences that we build a moral foundation that arbitrates what to take in and what to reject. This foundation gives definition to our lives." Abraham Maslow would spin in his grave if he read that! Our moral foundation is laid well before adolescence.
I think this is just another facet of the bleeding heart loonies blaming anyone but the perpetrator, reminiscent of them saying after 9-11 that we needed to figure out what we had done to make terrorists so angry.
A perfect counter example to his thesis: Shirley Temple Black. Before she turned 12 she had made more than 40 movies and recieved an Academy Award. She was known and celebrated throughout the world. So how did all this early mega celebrity and "stolen childhood" affect Ms. Temple Black?
From link: She has served our country under four presidents: Richard Nixon appointed her United States Representative to the United Nations in 1969, for Gerald Ford she was Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana and later the first woman White House Chief of Protocol, for Ronald Reagan she served as a foreign affairs officer with the State Department, and George Bush appointed her Ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
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