So maybe I am getting to be a grumpy old man

[fpb]

I guess maybe I sound like Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells. But I ask you:
- Michael Jackson behaves so as to make it almost certain that he was a paedophile. He destroys his face in a crazed attempt to make it look less like the pure and very black kid he was and more like a caricature of a white person. He dies of a disastrous combination of unhealthy living and drugs. He is practically canonized, underage kids - especially blacks - carry his face on their t-shirts and put it on their walls, and it is his doctor, who is no doubt a villain but did what he was told - who is scapegoated for his shameful death.
- Boy George abducts, rapes and tortures a male model. He is quite rightly sent to jail - if for a ludicrously short term. Within a few months of being let out he is all over the BBC and other channels, grinning all over his ugly pasty face, and being consistently treated as a respected veteran of the industry.
- Rihanna is brutally beaten within an inch of her life by the kind of boyfriend whom an old-fashioned father would have horsewhipped out of the county. Now her latest album is about sado-masochist sex and the pleasures of pain, all intended to make money.

We profess to hate racism, to hate rape, to hape sexism and violence. And yet, when a black singer insults his own descent by trying in public to destroy his own skin colour and features, blacks insist on making a hero out of him. When a woman celebrates sexual cruelty and seems to condone actual violence done against herself, the press and television give her space. When a man becomes guilty of the abduction and rape of another man, he is treated as though he deserved to be treated as a gentleman. Is it possible to have a more mixed set of messages?

Comments

Just grumpy?

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

No, you're right.

[ani-bester.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is, this is a much shorter list than it could be.
People don't want their celebrities to be wrong, so they get away with all kinds of BS that we'd never tolerate from non-celebrities. It's disgusting. More so, disgusting that the court systems allow it.

I remember being envious when, in Japan, one of the members of one of the most popular bands was found with drugs. Not only was he removed from the band, all merchandise and cd's in which he took part were recalled and never re-sold, thus denying him royalties.

In Korea, the lead singer of the most lucrative boy band of the time got a DWI and the entire band was removed from the line up for the studios Christmas CD's.

In both cases, the pressure was on the studios to send a message even if it cost them. In the US and Europe, there just isn't that kind of moral outrage, and I don't know why.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The fact is that I have gone not only for the most outrageous violations, but for those that really violate every contemporary PC principle. If there are three things that are supposed to be against every modern value, they are rape, paedophilia and violence against women. I am agnostic myself aboug drugs; I think outlawing them is wrong, though I don't approve of their use either and I never touched any. But there is hardly a pop singer, a Hollywood actor, or a right-on tv or radio personality who could not extemporize for half an hour about the awfulness of racism, paedophilia, rape, or violence against women. We are all supposed to feel the same, and personally I do. So why the get out of jail card - literally, in some cases - for celebrities who break these fundamental moral laws of our time? So far as I can tell, there is only one deadly sin in our time that brings immediate and untroubled condemnation, and it is having the words Sarah and Palin in your name.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

This sort of repulsiveness is why I've pretty much given up on the entire celebrity media industry. I haven't gone to a movie theater in years, I seldom watch any TV except the weather and the news (and even then I grab the remote at the first whiff of any sort of "entertainment" or "celebrity" news), and when I'm given a gift certificate to get music, I almost always use it on old favorites from my childhood, typically by people who either have slipped into obscurity or who have passed from this life without making a disgusting scene of themselves.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Of course you're right.

Te lo dico io perché

[(Anonymous)]

Doesn't make sense? I'll help. In year of our Lord (Jesus Christ who raised the dead), 2011, there is only one sin... and that is hypocrisy. So the artistes can do whatever they please, just as long as they don't preach.

In so many words, the easiest of all sins, has become the gravest. And the devil is laughing in the wings.

Chi e' che parla italiano?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think, on a more mundane level, that the media have become dependent on the stories these people generate, and that if they were to treat them as pariahs as they ought, they would have to find other stories. So they keep on givin them get-out-of-jail-free cards.

Re: Chi e' che parla italiano?

[(Anonymous)]

I found mention of you at VFR - Lawrence Auster's View from the Right, concerning the Military running Egypt since the days of Mamelukes... (my grandfather piemontese used to call me a "mamaluke" whenever I acted silly or looked doofy). I hypertexted and had the pleasure of reading your very interesting posts. So now you're bookmarked!

Il mio italiano è rudimentale, ma mi permette di seguire la politca deliziosa - e poco seria - del Bel Paese (dove Ferrara l'ateo, il Horowitz italiano, è il più santo e parla di Kant spalleggiato da Iva Zanicchi per distruggere Umberto Eco). Che raffinatezza!

Anyhow, the issue above is also connected to the present Berlusconi imbroglio and the left suddenly becoming so hugely moralistic.

My friend, we are governed by moods and attitudes: reason flew out the window ages ago.

I think it's connected to what C.S. Lewis said:

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."

What happened to the Enlightenment?

The answer is in the lines of the world's most expensive artwork: Jackson Pollock's No. 5, 1948 (140 million dollars - a lot of Ferraris!) all done in a drunken Frenzy by this erstwhile darling of the Postwar Italian Gagà!

Pollock's No. 5 or perhaps that other artistco-cultural "landmark": Duchamp's fountain, a store-bought Urinal (retailing at $1,800,000).

There you see modern man in all his splendor.

When a urinal gets placed next to a Rembrandt next to a can of turds with the Sound Track provided by a John Cage, it is "ozioso" to look for moral meaning. That stuff is left to Walker Texas Ranger!

Re: Chi e' che parla italiano?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I see a big difference between Pollock and Duchamp and his descendants, although I would say - and I have said - that Pollock was the end of the road for Modernism and that after him there was nothing left to say or do in that direction. That is, in fact, just why the field was left to the poseurs and the gesture merchants. If you are interested in comics, get a copy of THE JACK KIRBY QUARTERLY #15 and read my article there.

Re: Chi e' che parla italiano?

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks Fabio. I believe you. Nihilism has psycho-historical phases (altro che Asimov!). They're outlined pretty well by Eugene Rose (Father Seraphim), the California beatnik who became a Russian Orthodox Christian and wrote a book called "Nihilism")

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html#5

Those figures are to popular culture what alta moda is to pret-a-porter. It's the popular culture that worries me, but at the same time, it's also popular culture with its childlike innocence that might one day say: "The King has no clothes."

I can't offer much advice, because I'm only at the first stage of turning my world upside-down. For instance Health Care to me means not what Obama or the Republicans might come up with, but what would happen if I fainted out in the street. Would anybody stop and ask "Hey Mister, are you all right?"

I remember 100 years ago a hippie friend of mine put it to the test in Paris. In the city of lights and fraternité absolutely everybody just walked by.

Buon Lavoro

oops I have to confirm that I'm a human - altro che canzoni partigiane!

Re: Chi e' che parla italiano?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You do realize, don't you, that you are still "Anonymous" to me?
As for falling over and nearly dying, don't ever try it in England, that's all. Speaking from personal experience...

Re: Chi e' che parla italiano?

[(Anonymous)]

Ciao again Fabio,

Oops, sorry, I'm Steven, 58 years old, father of two girls, profession translator, romano di Englewood New Jersey. I'll become a Utente LiveJournal and call myself Frittomisto.

Take care