Posted on 11/24/2003 2:41:08 AM PST by kattracks
The latest Michael Jackson controversy perfectly mirrors the shallowness and exploitation at the center of the entertainment business. Jackson now seems to have become the three-dimensional picture of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, the man who looked forever young but kept a picture hidden that recorded his layers of crime and sickness. Jackson's reputation carries the foulings so emblematic of our time, revealing themselves in spiritual pustules.It is a strange tale. Jackson evolves from cute little exploited boy and lead singer in a bubble gum group of brothers all the way to a progressively eccentric and repulsive tabloid favorite.
In terms of color, Jackson went beyond Clarence Clemons' observation that to be successful in rock you need to look black but sound white. Jackson's ascension to the King of Pop was made possible by his having made himself look like a pale, androgynous Disney character.
His plastic surgery and his fey refusal to grow up rhymed with our culture's death camps of cosmetic surgery that so purely express the evermore contagious insecurity of human beings in the face of time. Those expensive camps in which one is not gassed but cut up are where so many, to use the cliche, reinvent themselves.
Jackson surely did that. He changed his look; he acquired new companions: a midget child star, a chimpanzee, Elvis Presley's daughter (who left him, saying that their marriage was never consummated).
Now a second set of child molestation charges. Whether Jackson is guilty or not, there is a basic truth about the entertainment business today: to be the King of Pop is to be the King of Pedophilia.
I say that because pedophilia is the essence of the pop music industry, where children are exploited in every possible way by products arriving in the form of lyrics or images or dehumanizing perspectives.
Our children are made hungry for things they cannot digest. Their narcissism is used against them, which is the exact technique of the pedophile who says to the child that he or she - unlike all those other kids! - is mature enough to be treated like an adult and to do things that other kids either don't understand or are too lame to appreciate.
Our children are told that hostility, vulgarity, shock and sex are the weapons that best express their freedom from the adults who - hidden inside the industry like the Wizard of Oz - are setting them up to consume even more demeaning products.
From any angle, Michael Jackson is no longer the man in the mirror. He is now the mirror itself.
Originally published on November 24, 2003
to be the King of Pop is to be the King of PedophiliaIf we accept this premise, that it's all pedophilia, then we are forced to either:
a) take actual pedophilia less seriously
or
b) institute Taliban laws against music and dancing.
Now....how long before someone comes along with the "innocent until proven guilty" theme? As if I would be a juror, and therefore have no right to a single thought on the matter!
Absolutely true. That doesn't excuse this individual performer's behavior, of course, but in a sense, he got into trouble for really doing what he was essentially selling all along.
The New Disney has existed for less than twenty.
Getting parents up to speed on what NewDisney and its "entertainment" brothers are all about does not at all require banning music and dancing.
Maybe not in the infirmary, but after some time in the Yard, he will probably look a lot different.
Though with his money that will never happen...He'll be at some golf camp/country club/house arrest.
Here is what I fail to understand: If someone ever accused me of abusing children whether I was innocent or guilty, I would never, never allow myself to be in the company of a child, ever again, thereafter. Yet, escaping the earlier allegation(s), he dove right back in. This baffles me.
They also had the courage to print the names of the savage football players who attacked their younger teammates from Mepham High School
He said he "told everybody" back in '93 that Michael would strike again.
He said he has personally heard at least one other kid to "Go F- Off!" when Mikey was trying to hump one of them out behind the house at NLand.
He first suspected Mikey when he saw kids sleeping with him.
He said nobody at the ranch would talk about the pedophelia (they covered for Mikey) and that he was building a case when Mike got busted the first time.
He is the author of My Three Years With Michael Jackson.
This came out this morning on the Today Show.
The Brit Awards, 1996. Michael Jackson, dressed in white and bathed in celestial light, is healing poverty-stricken children onstage. At least, that's the idea behind the ludicrous stage show for the megastar's turgid 'Earth Song' - everyone at home just sees one man's grotesque delusions and some stage-school brats. By the time Jackson "blesses" an actor portraying a rabbi, "ludicrous" has become plain offensive.
Luckily for the nation, there was a man on the inside - Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, enjoying a post-'Common People' popularity wave that meant he could have walked into any British household and successfully demanded tea and sexual favours. Appalled by Jackson's self-aggrandisement, Jarvis leapt onstage, pretended to flash his skinnily iconic arse, had a dance, then sat back down. It was only at the aftershow party that he was asked to accompany police to the station, accused of assaulting child performers. The country awoke to breakfast news telling them that their adorably camp hero was actually a child-walloping thug. Of course, it quickly became apparent Jarvis had been deliberately maligned. "I do not go onstage and start shovelling kids over barriers because that's not my style," he announced, with characteristic flair.
A huge show of public support followed. The contrast was clear: Jackson was out of touch, humourless and artistically bankrupt; Jarvis, leader of the common people, was reckless, righteous and did what every viewer would have done. It was a shining example of how great pop stars possess an innate sense of what is expected of them. Jarvis Cocker, in all his arse-waggling glory, was never going to be Jesus Christ. But at least he had the right initials.
-Eric
Did you see how Jackson got the current accuser to call him "Daddy"?
ie:The Cat in The Hat-now showing. Do we really need to take a child's classic ,which is used as a learning tool , to present an R rated movie.
Can't Hollywood come up with their own story lines to sell sex, and ranchy hummor. If they wanted to saterize a child's classic for the entertainment of adults, why are they selling this movie to kids as young as 5?
This is schizophrenia. But I guess there are enough confused adults out there who will support this garbage. I suspect the majority of the people who paid good money to see this movie this weekend are the simple minded who are being fed an old favorite with sex, so they will finally enjoy it, or they want to see sex, and they want to pat themselves on the back for helping their child learn to read at the same time.
I see this movie did $40 million yesterday. It isn't just that the movie industry and their cohorts who are peddling smut to kiddies that are the downfall of polite society, it is the vary parentss, who will gladly take part in corrupting their own children, and pay for it to be done, who should look in the mirror. Parents who are trying to be cool will take a child, who is too young to comprehend sex ,and the impacts of sex and sexual hummor to see a movie based on a learning tool, but full of nonesense sex and adult hummor. Then these same people complain about how their 13 year old is provocative, distand and dis-intrested in being serious.
When peopel fill their child's life full of sexual overtones and adult situations, they should not be surprised when the kid is looking for love in all the worng places, and ignores boundries later in life.
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