Michael Jackson, Farah Fawcett & the Coverage & Fame

As Grace mentioned the connection between Michael Jackson and Karen Carpenter immediately came to my mind at the time of his death as well. I have a feeling that the real killer here was his anorexia, the drugs just made it worse.

Interestingly, the coverage of both Fawcett and Jackson’s deaths have been very odd, in my opinion. Very few of those who gave statements in the death of Jackson seemed very real, instead they focused on his career and their connection to it. Quincy Jones made sure to give the number of records sold and which records he worked on before saying he felt like he lost his “brother.” I don’t know about you, but that’s not the first thing I think about when I have tender thoughts of family members. Most of the celebrity “grief stricken statements” seemed more of an opportunity to show off their accomplishments and boil down the whole of Jackson’s life as if he were a cartoon. It’s no wonder one of the lawyers who represented him during the case against him for child molestation described Jackson as “one of the loneliest people,” he’d ever met. The only celebrity statements that seemed remotely like normal human reactions were Lisa Marie Presley, Brook Shields and Elizabeth Taylor’s.

I have to admit that I am cringing through most of the coverage of his death which seems to vacillate between extreme hyperbole (Ann Courie saying there might not be any MTV without Jackson) and turning him into a convenient way for certain celebrities to plug their own talents and importance. To say it is crass is a far too great of an understatement and the fact that the media (which itself seems to have gone the direction of placing its own head so far up its own butt that it hasn’t seen daylight in 20 years) is fanning the flames of this hyperbolic narcissistic feeding frenzy, at least hear in NPD central, Los Angeles.

And the sad documentary (which is made only that much more sad by Farrah Fawcett’s death) also seems a strange macabre ego massage. While I feel very sad for anyone who has health troubles, it seems an odd way to gain celebrity status, which has been happening as of late, some woman in GB did her death as a reality show, another dude the same, and then it seemed, in an effort to rekindle her celebrity, Fawcett allowed the documentary to be made. I’m not sure what is sicker people watching these other people suffer during the last moments of their life or the desire to be watched while walking through death’s door.

For some reason (being under the weather with nothing else on TV) I found myself watching part of the Fawcett documentary which was an odd mix or sadness, beauty (Fawcett’s journal writing about her experience was engaging and poetic) and twistedly narcissistic. She insisted on going home after having major surgery back from Europe to the US despite doctors’ warnings which I found oddly arrogant. After facing a deadly disease, going to another country for expert help, and one can only imagine facing your mortality squarely, she did the unexpected, she ignored their advice in characteristic stubborn star fashion. the normal comforting blanket of celebrity became a strange disconnect from reality, a retreat into her specialness which she paid the price for on the flight back as the doctors had warned.

It’s odd that we’ve now had a 96 hour news black out because two celebrities have died. One more infamous in recent years than famous, the others most memorable moment in the past fifteen years a bizarre seemingly drug addled interview on Letterman with “art” made by her naked body, published in Playboy when she was 50 years old, well past the expiration date on the public’s appetite for her nudity. She then came home after the expert doctors she’d gone all the way to Germany for who told her not to fly home early, which she did anyway (a typical sort of celebrity knows best sort of attitude which I’ve seen a lot here in LA) to her apartment with a giant Andy Warhol portrait of herself in the living room. She claimed to desire her privacy and was angry about people finding out about her health problems – so why the documentary detailing the nitty gritty of it? The answer to this seems to be a pathological need for attention, which appears to be the bane of the famous/infamous’ existance. Farrah’s diary entries, written and read by her in the documentary were very well written and moving, revealed a lot about the sheltered and privileged life she led when she wrote an entry about never having gone through any real sort of health problem and how she wanted her life back. While she did count her many bliessings she also infered her specialness was given by God instead of understanding that her life, as all lives have lessons and one can not rise above being human to be anything other than as special as anyone else. She seemed to lack the insight of her connection to the whole of humanity and there was a constant feeling the reason for the documentary was an indignance with her own mortality, that somehow fame which had made a goddess out of her, could not give her the one thing that a real Goddess would have, immortality. She seemed to be beffudled by the idea that she was human and had an odd percpective that her facing death was somehow anything more than what we all share. We all die. We all have pain. We all suffer. There is no escaping this, yet there seemed to be a part of her that came through that actually thought she would somehow escape the inevitbale almost as if she had never considered it until she was staring it down. And although she seemed mildly humbled when she was feeling her worst as soon as she got good news she abandoned her inner quest back to her throne. It was very odd.

I live in Los Angeles and at this point I’m not sure if this sick fascination with the “famous” is a function of the bizarre and twisted culture of Hollywood that is warping my greater view of American culture or whether American culture truly has become a tabloid, insanely obsessed, strangely narcissistic fish bowl.

As a way to escape the onslaught of Jacskson and Fawcett endless non-news stream, we turned on Bill Maher. Ironically, he actually did talk about Michael Jackson with Billy Bob Thornton, however when that interview was done MJ would still have been alive. But what struck me like another hammer over the head was the first interview with Cameron Diaz promoting her new movie, where she plays a mother who has a second child to save her first one from cancer (she needed a donor match). Interestingly, Diaz revealed a lot about the strange curse disguised as a gift, known to us commoners as “celebrity.” In her comment she mentioned that people (the public) expect her (or any celebrity) to stay the same as when the public “fell in love” with them. That said celebrity, in her case was when she was 22, which she used as an example.  She then went on to talk rather candidly with Maher about her feelings about marriage and children which she said she understood (only and purely) as a biological need to procreate. Seriously, that’s what she thought marriage and family was about. And she said she didn’t believe anyone who got married thought they would actually stay married and anyone who married held onto the security blanket of a possible divorce down the road.

Wow, I thought, she sounds like a 22 year old girl who was very immature for her age.

In a strange way she harkens back to the ancient archetype of the virgin (not what the virgin became but what it was initially which was a woman who had no need of family or men and was considered complete onto herself – she represented the girlhood phase of femininty just as say the bacholor or Peter Pan represents eternal boyhood. However virgins were dedicated to the Goddess and spent their lives in service to the spiritual path of the maiden).

But back to the point I was making about Diaz’s understanding of, let’s be honest, love. Bill Maher also suffers from the same affliction as she, an inability to really connect with others and have true empathy. You may wonder how I jumped to such a conclusion based on the interview and her rather shallow portrayals on film. Well, I’ll break it down. Firstly, there is partial truth to the need for procreation and for most people this is how they leave their mark on the world through their family. However more important than that basic primal desire is what is masked underneath that desire, and that desire is the desire to be one with another living being – to find connection. Sexuality in most ancient cultures was actually seen as a way to connect with the divine through feeling the oneness and the living spirit of God/Goddess in your partner. Sure, now sex has been turned in on itself to control people with, turning their most primal and spiritual desires into something to be disgusted and embarassed about so the 3rd party religious institution can rid a person of their sin and make them holy again through disconnecting them to the very source of the spirit of the Creator. It is through sexuality that we become divine/co-creators or potential co-creators (at least in a physical/symbolic way)  in the ever expanding universe.

It was interesting to see Maher and Diaz, two sides of the same coin, sitting across the table from one another, each wearing a different mask but unknowingly of the same distorted viewpoint. Diaz representing what she said were the many “opportunities” she had been presented with unlike her parents and Maher, who I suspect never got past some twisted Freudian relationship with his mother, both so empty and insecure and afraid to be vulnerable to anyone, preferring to stay frozen in time and in control at all costs. I say this because one of the greatest gifts of romantic love is being out of control, losing your mind and then seeing yourself through the mirror of your partner who challenges you to be a better human being, not neccessarily richer, or a bigger star, but a more evolved soul, something most of Hollywood is completey unconcerned about. It’s interesting here as an aside to note, that the card representing the film/TV industry is the Devil card in the tarot. I had been told this by several readers and then put it to the test only to find it was true. When reflecting on why this would be I realized that the grueling work schedules and focus on material things and status are the greatest fixation for the vast majority of people who participate in the industry. There is a one-upmanship unprecidented in any other field and a vaccous need to be the most famous of the famous, which of course is born of great insecurity, shame and narcissism (which by defination is a shame disorder but that’s another aside).

I’ve seen (because again I lived in LA for a very long time and you can infere what you want…) a pattern among celebrities or people who attain a level of fame. The best metaphor I could come up with was imagine that these individuals are flowers in a field and plucked and pressed in a book, dried to perfection and kept forever in this state. Their life stays frozen. Their spiritual growth frozen, because no one will confront them anymore for fear of their status (by being friends/lovers or whatever of the famous person) will be lost by a blow off. Even the most evolved souls who truly seek out ways to improve their spirits suffer under the weight of being plucked and pressed, losing their roots and being isolated, stared at, admired from a far for appearance only, and being under a constant microscope.

Fame is a killer, like heroine it is addictive and intensly destructive yet most Americans suffer under the delusion that it’s something to be desired and like a magic potion will solve all of their trouble if only they could be rich and famous like the celebrities they adore.  So many people that go into the performing arts do it for the sake of fame and believe the lie that life will be fixed on the other side. A belief I’m sure Kurt Cobain had as so may other rock stars before him, only to find that wherever you run there you are, and being famous doesn’t change you, you  just have a thousand eyes watching every move you make, judging, reporting and admiring, heightening the insecurity and shame felt pre-fame. I’m quite sure this is why so many celebrities (especially musicians who carve their own path and whose success is more dependant on their ambition than actors whose fates are more at the whim of circumstance) die horrible premature deaths, hooked on drugs, unable to enjoy a decent salad due to body dismorphia, completely alone because no one is willing to be honest (although most celebrities would just rid themselves of anyone honest so that’s a self-created problem) and confused, taken advantage of, but hey, they get to live in houses so big they probably only use one percent of the space they own, and wear clothing that costs more than some people’s homes. Seems like a fair trade.

I want to say here that I don’t believe in romanticizing people after death. Perhaps because I know the souls of all individuals proceed and are eternal, I don’t feel there is any use in lying. When Nixon died he became Saint Nixon, Reagan an Angel. We learn nothing from the lives of those we have had the privelage to watch if we do so dishonestly. I am not criticizing these individuals. I am criticizing the disturbing way our culture fixates on certain individuals to the point of their destruction. I truly feel pity for those who spend their lives chasing fame, fortune, and status. It all too often leads to a lonely life spent chasing a phantom carrot. For the souls who have crossed over, all of them, not just those whom we have seen on TV, may their spirits be guided to the light as peace and love consume them.

Many blessings,

Denise

Answering Readers and other things…

I just wanted to address some of the points Jeff has made. I think he really clarifies the differences in the two viewpoints between conservatives and liberals very well. I understand the lack of faith in our government and the fact that there is corruption and stupidity on all sides of every issue in politics. I would never advocate a one party system.

My back was fractured when I was 12 and a disc herniated. I spent the entire year laying on my back, by myself in my bedroom. The only education I received was American history and the constitution as I had to pass (this was in Illinois) a constitution test in 7th grade in order to move onto 8th grade. Needless to say, I got one hour a week from the principle who would come to my home and tutor me. I spent a lot of time reading the constitution, the bill of rights and reading about American History. The ideals and people that founded our nation were profound and beautiful. Our forefathers did an amazing job of working out potential problems. They had incredible foresight. However they did not foresee all things that came up in the last century which have truly corrupted our government. And of course they had built in the 2nd amendment not so people could hunt animals, but so we could have a revolution if the government got out of control. Problem is of course (which of course they couldn’t foresee, perhaps if DiVinci had been one of the founders) the advent of nuclear weapons and military technology that no rag tag militia could fairly fight against. 

I really don’t have total faith in the Democrats. I just think they are less corrupt, more like normal politicians than the Republicans. And not all Republicans fall into that category. And especially regular American people who are not politicians but who identify with the party and vote Republican. They are not any better or worse than people who vote for Democrats. I’m talking only about the leadership of the Republican party; since the Nixon administration there has been a clarion call attracting many corrupt politicians with agendas to exploit the common working American people for their own personal gain on that side of the fence.

There are 2 types of politicians, those who get into politics to serve and lead. And those who get into politics to exploit, loot and are on power trips. I don’t think the Republican party has always been this way, and certainly the vast majority of people who vote Republican are not this way. In actuality I think the Republican party has manipulated many people’s deep love of this country, of tradition, stability, pride and our identity as self-reliant people against us.

But if we left morality up to the wealthy one percent to take care of the poor, the sick and whoever else, do you think they would do it? No. Certainly the feudal lords of Europe weren’t going around giving out loafs of bread to starving children, they were to busy denying them education and prosecuting them for stealing bread so they could put them to work in prison camps. With Democracy and laws, came taxation built on levels of ability to pay, the end of debtors prisons (when you could actually go to prison for life for not being able to pay someone you owed money to, can you imagine how many people would be in jail now if this law hadn’t been changed.) Government can’t solve all of our problems, but it can and should create a moral bone structure to hang our civilization’s body on.

As much as we like to pretend that we are all working on a level playing field with the same amount of talent, intelligence and acumen as everyone else. This is just blatantly untrue. Many of us our handicapped by our environments as children. We seem to be able to muster compassion for the abused child, but as soon as he turns 18 we seem to expect this person to magically be able to shake off the horrors of their childhood and compete in a game fixed by the wealthy.

I grew up in an area of Chicago that was very wealthy and I knew countless kids who were of average intelligence who went to ivy league schools because their parents were wealthy enough to give endowments to those institutions and it was family tradition to go to Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth. Is that fair? No. All the conservatives who claim B.S. on the whole affirmative action thing don’t complain about the wealthy legacy kids who get in with subpar SAT scores and average grades. Because it’s really not that they mind the game being rigged, they just want it rigged in their favor. And the people who are in power in the political arena (especially on the Republican side) are from extremely privelaged backgrounds. This hasn’t always been the case, but in the last 30 years the Republican party has drifted into the lane that promotes corporatism, gives a pass to the wealthiest one percent and turns a blind eye toward graft. The Democrats still have real people participating, like Bill Clinton (despite his personal sex addiction problems and foibles) he was a real guy who was raised by a single mother, in a poor family and through his brilliance and determination made something of himself. This is the America I believe in. This is the America I want to see win out. I don’t want our country to become a feudal one, where the wealthy one percent control us through their lobbyists and corporations. I want all Americans to be represented and to have a voice. I want to stay a democracy and not be bowled over by corporate interests masquerading as moral voices.

You know, the Democrats aren’t all that. They are really annoying and pretty lame. They don’t take the reigns, they blather around, seem to try to bend to too many voices and don’t have the passion it takes to convince others to get on board. This has been their problem now for over 30 years and I totally understand why they upset people who want things to be dealt with cleanly. Democrats don’t do this. For those (and this is the majority of Americans) who want decisive, clear leadership the Democrats don’t always know how to provide this. The Republicans have a huge advantage here, they have a common goal that binds them together which the Democrats don’t have. Democrats go into public service for all kinds of different reasons with all kinds of different agendas and are forced to compromise and work together in a quilt work fashion.

The Republicans have the binding passion of greed which they found a way to sell (ironically) to average Americans as Christian morality. However their policies and private lives show nothing of them living up to their supposed morality.  I’m going to refer you to an earlier post here about the shadow self as it applies to the split that Republicans utilize to sell their advocacy for the wealthiest taking not only the share they already have but more of yours too so that the money can “trickle down.” Or so they want you to believe.

So far I haven’t been to any developing nation or as Jeff aptly stated, communist country, where the money ever managed to trickle down. Once those on top have anything their heart could ever desire at their fingertips why would they randomly want to share it with strangers? This goes against human nature. We are naturally selfish creatures which is why we have laws, moral codes, and religions that teach us how to be more than just self-absorbed, self-satisfying, opportunistic, uncompassionate beasts.

Let me just say here as an example I’ve known many very famous people (through my work). They can have anything they want whenever they want it, no one ever says “no” to them. They often surround themselves with adoring admirers (not all but many do this) and see themselves as better than everyone else. They often get sucked into a weird cartoonish state of being where they are living entirely a life of the ego. They may have started out as good people and are not necessarily bad people, but they loose percpective and do horrible things to others because they  no longer see other people as human beings anymore. And how could they? They are not participating in real relationships anymore, just the ego heroine of fame feeding their insatiable insecurity and making them more and more pathologically narcissistic. 

My point is, we all need to be held accountable. And we live in a very narcissistic culture where value has been placed on being special, famous and wealthy to the exclusion of common sense and common decency. It seems anything goes if you can get rich or famous from it.  I don’t believe in that. I believe in personal integrity and spiritual growth both of those values are almost impossible to hold onto once a person becomes famous or insanely wealthy (I’m not talking comfortable or even rich but in that one percent club wealthy.)

Spiritual growth requires honest mirroring by loved ones and the world around you which the obscenely rich and famous don’t get from others anymore because that person becomes objectified and identified as a symbol, no longer allowing others to have real exchanges. While this is great for the ego, no one ever disagrees with you, you are always the greatest genius and everyone stops to listen to what you have to say, you actually, eventually become something of a persona, an empty shell, and often this can lead to great feelings of isolation, depression and obsessive behavior. Which is why so many celebrities have drug problems.

And of course in the case of the insanely wealthy, everyone wants a piece of their pie, and they can’t trust anyone around them. They never really know if people love or care about them for who they are or for the money they have. You think this problem sounds easy, but it’s actually very messy and dark and leads to behavior like Bernie Madoff who so desperately needed to stay in that special billionare club that he started ripping people off when the market started going down and he realized it was easier to con people than to actually invest their money. This is the sickness that can happen with outrageous overabundance as Christ said, “it’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.” Because the disassociation that happens with that sort of wealth leads to callousness, and  bad behavior.

Average people like my in-laws, who are Republicans, make the mistake of believing that heads of corporations and the super wealthy have the same values they do. Let me tell you, they don’t. Their values are so far a flung from ordinary Americans that they may as well be Martians. There are of course good people who are exceptions and do amazing humanitarian work with the money they have made, but really they are probably less than one percent of the ubber rich.

While we all fantasize that our problems would go away and life would be perfect if we were just rich and famous, the opposite is actually true. Being in the spotlight only magnifies problems and immense wealth creates an emotional telescoping phenomena where your ability to relate to people who are struggling financially disappears and instead of feeling compassion for those people the wealthy find a bizarre righteous anger toward the unfortunate so they can stave off their guilt at not doing anything to help.

So what I want to say is that I don’t believe we can leave people’s lives, health and education up to the potential good graces of the wealthy one percent. I’ll leave everyone with this weird random example. The first time I went to London, when I was in my early 20s I met a guy who was a monarchist. I actually didn’t even know they still existed. He believed that the best form of government was what he called a “benevolent monarchy.” He explained that in that system things got done quickly and the benevolent king to good care of all of his subjects, sort of like a good dad takes care of all of his kids. But then I said, “But what happens if the monarch is not benevolent, like King Henry or Caligula.” 

“Well, I’m talking about a benevolent monarchy,” he firmly stated again.

“Yes, but that’s the problem if its a monarchy the people can’t do anything to get rid of the next in line and what if they’re crazy or a horrible person. In a democracy you can vote a nut jobber out of office. There are checks and balances in place that help eliminate the possibility of someone terrible taking over.” 

 And again his answer was, “Well, I’m talking about a benevolent monarchy.”

What we do in our Democracy with checks and balances, laws and amendments had its counter part in the world of business as regulations and the notion that corporations being led by the best people would perform the best and therefore those leaders would continue to move skyward. But instead with deregulation came easy money through scams, the ability to lie about your company, to cheat your shareholders and to fail upwards based on lies and fudging numbers. 

Our country is as much about capitalism as it is about democracy. And in order for capitalism to survive it needs to have enforceable rules to play by or no one on the world stage is going to want to play with us anymore. Those toxic loans we bought up that have been helping the stock market, are helping because by our government standing behind our corporations we are saying to the world, we screwed up and we won’t let everyone fall down, we stand behind our system and we want to continue playing ball with everyone. If we didn’t do this the entire world economy would fall apart due to lack of confidence in us the champions of capitalism.

Anyway, enough blabbing.

Best wishes to all and many blessings,

Denise