From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:22:22 -0500 Subject: 'The Man in the Mirror' Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047A54071507@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
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Published on Monday, July 13, 2009 by TruthDig.com
The Man in the Mirror
by Chris Hedges
In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitatio
n of Michael Jackson's death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that
rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by
vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-
loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever changing Caucasia
n death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of
eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private sel
f. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated.
He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are
at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, d
elusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transfo
rmation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in
the extreme.
His memorial service-a variety show with a coffin-had an estimated 31.1 mil
lion television viewers. The ceremony, which featured performances or tribu
tes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other celebrities, was carried l
ive on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets. I
t was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it
concluded with Jackson's daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front o
f a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl co
uld get a few words out, told Paris to "speak up." As the child broke down,
the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. T
he crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father.
The stories we like best are "real life" stories-early fame, wild success a
nd then a long, bizarre and macabre emotional train wreck. O.J Simpson offe
red a tamer version of the same plot. So does Britney Spears. Jackson, by t
he end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million out-of-court se
ttlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual
abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to co
mmit a felony. We fed on his physical and psychological disintegration, esp
ecially since many Americans are struggling with their own descent into ove
rwhelming debt, loss of status and personal disintegration.
The lurid drama of Jackson's personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoin
g dramas on television, in movies and in the news. News thrives on "real li
fe" stories, especially those involving celebrities. News reports on televi
sion are mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a supporting cast, a
good-looking host and a dramatic, if often unexpected, ending. The public g
reedily consumed "news" about Jackson, especially in his exile and decline,
which often outdid most works of fiction. In "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbur
y's novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching gi
ant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and crimin
al apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged, scripted
, given a narrative and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertai
nment. And Jackson was a great show. He deserved a great finale.
Those who created Jackson's public persona and turned him into a piece of p
roperty, first as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold
-plated casket, are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, sc
ript writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technician
s, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, f
itness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personali
ties who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit. They are the puppet
masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is swallow
ed as reality, without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries
. The producers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles made sure the 18,000 a
ttendees and the television audience (even the BBC devoted three hours to t
he tribute) watched a funeral that was turned into another maudlin form of
uplifting popular entertainment.
The memorial service for Jackson was a celebration of celebrity. There was
the queasy sight of groups of children, including his own, singing over the
coffin. Magic Johnson put in a plug for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shields, f
ighting back tears, recalled how she and a 33-year-old Jackson-who always m
aintained that he was straight-broke into Elizabeth Taylor's room the night
before her last wedding to "get the first peek of the [wedding] dress." Sh
ields and Jackson, at Taylor's wedding, then joked that they were "the moth
er and father of the bride." "Yes, it may have seemed very odd to the outsi
de," Shields said, "but we made it fun and we made it real." There were pho
to montages in which a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela wa
s immediately followed by one of him with Kermit the Frog. Fame reduces all
of the famous to the same level. Fame is its own denominator. And every an
ecdote seemed to confirm that when you spend your life as a celebrity you h
ave no idea who you are.
We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emul
ate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through t
he fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences fo
r our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our
lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we d
ress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as s
tars. We wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught u
s, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal screenplays. We have
learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we re
late to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler<http://www.amazon.com/Li
fe-Movie-Neal-Gabler/dp/0679417524%20> [1], who has written wisely about th
is, argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture
and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture.
Jackson desperately feared growing old. He believed he could control race a
nd gender. He transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormon
es from a brown-skinned African-American male to a chalk-faced androgynous
ghoul with no clear sexual identity. And while he pushed these boundaries t
o the extreme, he did only what many Americans do. There were 12 million co
smetic plastic surgery procedures performed last year in the United States.
They were performed because, in America, most human beings, rich and poor,
famous and obscure, have been conditioned to view themselves as marketable
commodities. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrin
sic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must rem
ain young. They must achieve notoriety and money, or the illusion of it, to
be a success. And it does not matter how they get there.
The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other peop
le's humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Education, building communit
y, honesty, transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a
gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted off any rea
lity show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fam
e elect to "disappear" the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality sh
ow "America's Next Top Model," a picture of the woman expelled during the e
pisode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside bec
ome, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities who can n
o longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows teach,
is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and constant quest for notor
iety and attention. And life is about the personal humiliation of those who
oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased
. Those who fail, those who are ugly or poor, are belittled and mocked. Hum
an beings are used, betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture, which is
pretty much the story of Jackson's life, although he experienced the equiv
alent of celebrity resurrection. This has been very good for his music sale
s and perhaps for his father's new recording company, which Joe Jackson mad
e sure to plug at public events after his son's death. Compassion, competen
ce, intelligence and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are co
mmodities. Those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the pr
ize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve their fate.
The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture. This cult
shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, gran
diosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant fo
r lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guil
t. Jackson, from his phony marriages to his questionable relationships with
young boys, had all these qualities. This is also the ethic promoted by co
rporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided b
elief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individual
ism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the celebration of image o
ver substance.
We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can
do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our frie
nds, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth
are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How
one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall
Street banks and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation's econ
omy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought
stocks to finance their retirement or the college expenses of their childr
en. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality televisi
on program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hun
dreds of millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses. The ethic of Wall
Street is the ethic of celebrity.
The saturation coverage of Jackson's death is an example of our collective
flight into illusion. The obsession with the trivia of his life conceals th
e despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the
moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalitie
s, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wi
ld pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destro
yed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.
The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true powe
r-corporations and the oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic an
d political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis that will create more mise
ry than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and distracted
by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. The fantasy of celeb
rity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain u
s emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for o
ur predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness and k
eep us from fighting back. And in the end, that is all the Jackson coverage
was really about, another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying
culture from the howling wolf at the gate.
Copyright (c) 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com<http://www.truthdig.c
om> [2]. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly t
wo decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning<http://www.
amazon.com/gp/product/1400034639?ie=UTF8&tag=commondreams-20&linkCode
=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400034639> [3], What Every Person Should
Know About War<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743255127?ie=UTF8&tag
=commondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0743255127> [4
], and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.<http:
//www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim> [5] His
most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph o
f Spectacle<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568584377?ie=UTF8&tag=com
mondreams-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1568584377> [6], wil
l be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
