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

[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.