THE SOUL MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE CULTURE OF VICTIM BLAME

By (O)CT(O)PUS

If ye endure chastening,

God dealeth with you as with sons;

for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

But if ye be without chastisement,

whereof all are partakers,

then are ye bastards and not sons.

(Hebrews 12:6-8)

Celebrity gossip and tabloid news have never interested me. After weeks of nonstop Michael Jackson media noise, I made myself a promise to avoid the subject … until this caught my attention:

"How often would he beat you?" Martin asked.
"Too much," Michael revealed.
"Would he only use a belt?" Martin asked.
Covering his face, Michael replied, "Why would you do this to me? No, more than a belt."
"I was scared, so scared that I would regurgitate," he added.
"What would produce that sort of reaction in you?" Martin asked.
"His presence, just seeing him," Michael said.

This dialogue is from a 2003 interview conducted by Martin Bashir. Here is Michael Jackson revealing a stolen childhood when he was the youngest member of the Jackson Five … beatings by strap and metal cord, rehearsals run like military drills, memories of being locked in closets, of being told by his father that his nose is “fat and ugly.” In short, his was a childhood marked by physical and emotional abuse, fear and humiliation, and ultimately trauma.

For years, media focused on Wacko Jacko, the Freak. A leering public witnessed his Dorian Gray transformation from child star to grotesque. Tabloid gossip condemned him with rumors and innuendos, maligned him for his flamboyant self-indulgences, and vilified him long after a jury acquitted him of child molestation charges. The real story of Michael Jackson is not about these sensationalized tabloid accounts but about the long-term consequences of child abuse and our celebrity culture that engages in victim blame. Why should we care about the tragedy of Michael Jackson’s life and his inner struggle?

The eminent child psychologist, Alice Miller, has waged a lifelong crusade against “poisonous pedagogy,” an outmoded parenting style aimed at breaking the will of children and turning them into obedient subjects by means of coercion, manipulation, and cruelty.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is an example of what Miller calls the burden of inherited wisdom that inflicts strict upbringing upon diabolical offspring for the purpose of forcing submission. Unlike adult survivors of abuse and torture, children do not always recount what has been done to them. Often, they feel shame. Sometimes, their memories contrive to forget their torments or deny or repress them outright. Nevertheless, those memories are preserved inside the victim in excruciating detail … only to emerge later in bizarre, seemingly irrational, or even violent behaviors.

When a cruel upbringing is represented to children as righteous and proper, they will grow into adults who will avenge themselves without qualms by inflicting the same cruel practices on their own children or charges. Society will revere and commend these newly minted authoritarians as upstanding, God-fearing enforcers of the community standard. Thus, sadism is allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation under the cover of piety and patriotism and always accomplished with an injunction:

This is for your own good.

In her crusade against cruel childrearing practices, Miller reminds us that it takes time for scientific and social knowledge to gain acceptance, more time to reach those with less schooling or less access to information, and even more time to reach those whose own repressed experiences prevent them from accepting an uncomfortable truth [1].

Seemingly irrational behaviors headlined in tabloids are not irrational when understood as signs and symptoms of abuse and trauma. Why should it surprise us when a “lost child” casts himself as Peter Pan reincarnate, surrounds himself with a Neverland construct of perpetual childhood, and chooses children, no matter how specious and suspect, as peers and playmates - all in an effort to reclaim a stolen childhood!

Why should we be shocked by an addiction to plastic surgery to correct an imagined defect in appearance … and remake the “fat and ugly nose” ridiculed by his father at an age when adolescents are extra sensitive about their physical appearance!

Why should we be surprised by Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse of prescription drugs - craved and consumed in prodigious quantities ostensibly to numb feelings of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem!

Let us avoid the temptation to characterize Michael Jackson in diagnostic terms, which are best left to qualified and licensed mental health practitioners. The inherent dangers of popularizing psycho-speak is simply this: Diagnostic terms are very often misunderstood by laypersons and misused by others whose purpose may be to engage in character assassination.

Abused children are never victimized once. They are victimized repeatedly when the guardians of conformity and public morality dismiss their signs and symptoms as character flaws and target them for ridicule and scorn, further reducing them to silence. Once compromised, the prodigal child turned adult is an easy target for continued abuse and exploitation, as Chris Hedges explains in this perspective:

Those who created Jackson’s public persona and turned him into a piece of property … are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit (...) The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal … which is pretty much the story of Jackson’s life …

As Chris Hedges reminds us, a successful celebrity raking in millions of dollars is a money tree to the legions of media vultures in the food chain. Media is a shallow, fast-moving stream intolerant of our need to pause, analyze, and understand the accelerated grimace of a culture turned monstrous.

The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Violence is learned in the home. Obedience is a condition of beatitude. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world. When we finally treat our children with the dignity, love, and nurturing they deserve, only then can we dream of a world free of violence and tyranny.

Reference:

[1] Alice Miller (2001). The truth will set you free. NY: Basic Books.

Online Resources:

Child abuse and mistreatment - The Alice Miller Official Website.

For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence - This book is available legally online - highly recommended.

The Andrew Vachss Official Website - A lawyer and novelist who writes about child abuse as the root of violence … its cost to individuals and society.

Humbling The Privileged

There's an old saying, that I'm sure most everyone has heard, that goes something like this -

Don't presume to judge someone or to understand someone (something) until you've walked in their shoes.

The philosophical spirit behind this saying, it would seem, is to encourage sympathy and understanding - maybe even empathy - for the plights, the realities of others. It cautions against "being holier then thou" and echoes the sentiments of "there but for the grace of God go I."

Taking a cue, then, from these good ole axioms, I would like to suggest (insist) the following. That every single member of the House and of the Senate and health care lobbying groups and their employers - irrespective of party affiliation - be forced to spend a year living WITHOUT health insurance if they fail to do the right thing, the compassionate thing, the moral thing in a timely fashion and pass health care legislation that gives the god almighty PRIVILEGE of health care to all.

Yes you out-of-touch individuals in Washington and you sanctimoniously greedy health care lobbyists and those health care executives you work for - it is that simple. Wear the shoes of the uninsured and underinsured and find out how it feels. How it REALLY feels. How it impacts your quality of life.

Then sit back, folks, and watch how fast they come up with legislation when it suddenly becomes about THEM.

The perpetual foreigner

It's funny how the people who spend their lives trying to destroy democracy in America insist that everyone who stands in their way hates democracy in America. Barak Obama, regardless of what kind of a president he will turn out to be in the long run, certainly is an obstacle to the far right and their dubious objectives and of course, to the racists. Someone who doesn't give a damn about the country might find some humor in the myth making and the rebarbate logical fugues that characterize the believers and the creators and the marketers of Obamahate, but I'm not one of them. Unfortunately however, I seem to be on their mailing lists.

I wrote the other day about one US Army Major Stefan Cook who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan in order to generate enough publicity so that his claim that Barak Obama was foreign born would make the papers and boost publicity for the fabricated myth. His case was thrown out of court as expected, but the crusade wears on and it may soon be that you will receive another e-mail diatribe attempting to prove with every fallacy in the book that Obama's three week trip to visit a college friend in Pakistan proves he was travelling under a foreign passport, never had or had renounced his US citizenship, was born in Africa and must have received foreign funding of his education and travels -- which in turn proves a conspiracy to make him president a quarter century later: the same conspiracy begun 50 years ago with the intent of taking an African, Muslim baby and making him the president of the US sometime in the next millennium. It's the same conspiracy that involves the Honolulu newspapers and the Hawaii bureau of vital records.

The serial fallacy proceeds from a false premise: that it was illegal for a US citizen to travel to Pakistan in 1981. It wasn't. Supporting false premises are that it was part of a round the world cruise, which it wasn't and that it would cost a fortune to crash with a college buddy for three weeks, which it doesn't. It's worth reading the screed at Snopes.com simply as an example of poorly crafted, disjointed and clumsy fallacy and a lesson in the power of bigotry to overcome one's ability to spot it.

I should point out that Snopes has debunked so many of the products of the hateful underground that it itself was recently the subject of an e-mail and blog assault attempting to "prove" that it's owned by Liberals and so it's facts weren't facts even if independently verifiable.

I've made it my practice to denounce these never-ending viral e-mails and to hit reply all when doing it. I've irritated people, I've infuriated people, I've lost friends, I've made enemies -- but I've kept some sense of self-respect because I've not let lies and slander and subversive plots pass me by unhindered. Whoever it really was who told us that all evil needs to prosper is that good people look the other way was absolutely right. I hope you'll throw these things back at the perpetrators and the traitors as well.

KB2GSD -- Silent key

Others have been talking all day about the man I consider to have been the best Television news anchorman and perhaps the best TV journalist ever: Walter L. Cronkite Jr. That there is no one like him today seems obvious, that we as a country have allowed his style of journalism to be replaced by bought and paid for opinion, psychodrama and angertainment is less obvious but true none the less.

With Cronkite you felt you got the story, not his opinion or the opinion of the corporation who owned the station or the party that owned him. You rarely saw his emotion, but sometimes you did: when for a moment it seemed like John Glenn hadn't survived re-entry, when Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by Mayor Daley's goons at the Democratic convention and of course when he finally had to read the news that John F. Kennedy had been declared dead. Listen to Hannity, or O'Reilly or almost any TV talking heads today, and you have to mourn a lost tradition. Who amongst them today would the public vote to be the most trusted man in America?

There was more to him however. There was Cronkite the Radio history enthusiast, there was KB2GSD as his fellow radio amateurs knew him, powerful spokesman for Amateur Radio, a strong voice for community involvement and patriot and there was Cronkite the yachtsman and sailor who donated his beautiful custom built yawl Wyntje to the Norfolk Marine Institute and the Tidewater Environmental Program to help troubled teens. By early this morning, QRZ.com had listed him as KB2GSD/SK -- the SK is for silent key.

Do they make men like him any more? Sure they do, but you won't find them in politics or TV journalism, which have of course become the same thing.

KB2GSD de N4HO FB OM AR ES 73

Hypocrisy house

Republicans deal with the almost daily revelations of sexual scandal in the "family Values" party by reminding us that there are Democrats who cheat as well. Of course the Democrats aren't the ones claiming that government should be more intrusive into the private sex lives of private citizens and they haven't made that nebulous phrase part of every party platform for decades, nor do they seem to be so brazenly promiscuous. So I'm sure that the latest evidence that the Family valuers may be running a veritable school for scoundrels on 133 C Street SE in Washington DC won't have any more effect than Larry Craig's wide stance on their claim to moral authority.

The house in question is owned by a shadowy "Christian" group called The Fellowship, one of those insisting that we are a Christian Nation and should have "Christian Values" without of course giving us any idea what those might be or why they might be different from non-Christian values. They assert that our leaders should be led by God rather than by the will of the electorate which is shockingly reminiscent of the government our founding fathers found to be anathema, and of course it's their God as interpreted by them.

But it's a rooming house as well as a lobbying and indoctrination center and Congressmen board there and claim to find it a place to study the Bible and the commands of Faith-based lobbyists. Moral pillars of the community who have resided at the house on C Street, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford and Chip Pickering are and have been involved in extramarital affairs. Need I point out that three out of five is a considerable majority? It would be enlightening to compare the rent they pay with similar rents on that street of elegant brownstones - and of course interesting to entities such as the IRS. Is there quid pro quo or votes for rent?

To me, the question of whether religious conviction is a marker for moral hypocrisy and turpitude is less important than the fact that at least 5 Senators and Representatives may being subsidized by a lobbying group posing as a Church. The Fellowship, which has been criticized for supporting such tyrants as Suharto, is run by the Coe family who take down large salaries. David Coe, the presumptive heir to the throne, has suggested that members of The Family are here to learn how to rule the world.

Of course it's only my opinion, but I'm convinced that the constant howling about socialism and Marxism and Liberalism and secularism from the Right is a smokescreen for organizations like this who are declared enemies of democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion and are runningMadrassas teaching revolution, one congressman at a time.

FRIDAY ROUNDUP

I spend a large chunk of time every morning cruising the bloggerhood, trying to get a take on the pulse of America (and avoiding actually doing any work for as long as possible!)

There is quite the diverse group of writers out here with some noteworthy posts and while this is not by any means a complete list, I thought I’d give a h/t to some of those I found most interesting this week.

First H/T to Time for his expose on a story that our resident cephlapods haven’t yet mentioned. Hmm, could it be they are trying to hide their darker side?

One of my favorite daily reads is Blog d’ Elisson where you will sometimes find something strange, maybe something gross, but always something entertaining. Whatever you find, I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Libby over at The Impolitic (my real life older sister, BTW) is keeping an eye on all the doings across the political spectrum and leaves no stone unturned. Go on over and get your daily dose.

Over at Who Highjacked Our Country, the posts run more like a forum and usually spark some lively debate – today’s topic; healthcare reform.

Also posting on healthcare reform with a slightly different viewpoint is the ever civil Jennifer at Thinking Out Loud. While you may not agree with everything posted there, please be respectful when commenting; it’s that kind of blog.

TAO at A Radical Perspective also has an excellent post on healthcare reform, so don’t miss it.

James’ Muse at Music & Musings has done an interesting post with a different twist on illegal immigration and will no doubt be generating spirited debate for days.

Shaw at Progressive Eruptions has done a most exemplary job covering everything Sotomayor.

And finally, Matt at Osborne Ink has a thorough and informative post on Zero-Sum Republicans. Go see him, but Matt, if you read this, FYI, still can’t post comments at your place so you need to keep working on that new format.

My apologies to anyone I’ve missed, but I DO have to go to work some time!

Hell no, he won't go!

Quite frankly the idea that our military has become an evangelical camp-meeting scares me more that the Obama presidency scares the people who think he's a Muslim secret agent or that the Hawaii Bureau of Vital Statistics cooked up a fake birth certificate and the Honolulu newspapers recorded his birth forty some odd years ago as part of a plot to make Baby Obama the future president. It's not just theBiblically deluded nature of such people but also the uncontrollable urges they have to believe things for reasons hard for others to understand.

It's hard to know whether U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook really believes the fantasy or whether he simply doesn't want to go to Afghanistan and couldn't bring himself to wear a dress. I would have to assume that he does believe. He claims that he has tremendous support from fellow soldiers -- 90% is his frightening claim.

He would get on the next plane says he if only it could be proved that his birth certificate was real. That's a remarkable statement and if birth certificates needed to be proved beyond establishing that the birth was properly registered, we could easily disallow every president. Quite a can of worms, this is and perhaps it's better to ask for some evidence that, like John McCain, he wasn't born in the USA. Of course there isn't any evidence beyond that malignant viral meme that seems to spread from loony to loony like lice in a flop house.

Of course it isn't just the loons and psychos keeping the idea alive. one of the favorite tricks of our scandal addicted media is to presentnasty, stale old memes in new bottles and so we often have Fox hinting that "people are saying" when they aren't and we have Lou Dobbs, fresh out of stories about the Mexican Menace saying "new questions are being raised." No they're not, Lou, it's the same insane calumny coming from yet another psycho. and shame on you for trying to keep the meme alive for fame and profit.

Of course and as we expected, a Federal judge threw the case out this morning and the Federal dumpster already contains the smelly remnants of other similar suits, but thanks to Lou and Fox and the Army of Believers the idea will survive and perhaps longer than our republic. It's not completely new of course, Clinton faced opposition from some in the military based on some some notion that he wasn't really the President. What does it tell us, I have to ask, that the notion that the SCOTUS decision to stop counting ballots in Florida and the serious evidence of voting machine fraud made W's presidency illegitimate has faded away? Maybe it tells us that the great ship of insanity lists heavily to the right. New questions are being raised, you know -- and people are saying.

SOP

It would be hard to substantiate a claim that the United States of America hasn't been a country safe from foreign invasion, at least since the war of 1812 ended, although politicians have been shouting "danger" and starting profitable wars to ward it off for a long time. Even during the infamous first year of this new millennium, more people died of influenza in the US than in the World Trade Center; more than ten times as many on the highway. There's no money in perspective however and there's no safety for the Republican party in it either and so we still have dishonest intellectual lightweights like Liz Cheney claiming that "We" have kept the country safe since September 11, 2001 by launching the second most expensive war in US history and torturing prisoners while essentially refusing to do a damned thing about the surviving perpetrators.

Her crime boss father may or may not be able to keep a straight grimace telling us tall ones like that, but she is and although she has no way of knowing much of anything (unless the old man has been giving away State secrets,) she claims that getting close to Cheney's crimes is demoralizing the CIA which is putting us all in further danger, danger, danger. Yes, the bogeyman will crash more planes into New York if we try to prove that her father broke the law by authorizing torture, lying to Congress and a host of other unprecedented crimes.

The evidence however is that the CIA isn't demoralized at all, but of course we have Fox and Friends to further the fallacy as they always do. It's their own private sector version of Screwing America for Profit, or from the viewpoint of the GOP, it's SOP.

Lizard-Musings about the Way We Live Now

First: the last few decades suggest that we want the benefits of a modern, advanced society but we refuse to align our governmental practices and our tax base with that desire. We want things for which we (especially the middle and upper classes) have no intention of ever paying. The services we want are good things to have (access to health care, for instance) and in my view there's no problem with government at all levels being part of implementation; the trouble is that we refuse to pay for what we want. This is a problem that really could sink the republic: when government fails to deliver the goods demanded, Americans may then turn to extremists who make wild promises and promptly forget all about them when they attain power. Rich as we are collectively, it seems as if the slice of our material means that we are willing to dedicate to the social goods we want isn't sufficient.

Or consider the following if you don't like the above argument about percentages: neither do we seem very resourceful in finding ways to come up with the necessary money without resorting to painful taxation – how about doing away with most components of "the war on drugs," at least insofar as that benighted effort focuses on possession and use of marijuana? (I don't use the stuff – never have; I just don't consider its use socially destructive, especially compared with alcohol. And I don't say this in wide-eyed innocence of the so-called drug culture: hard drugs like heroin and meth leave a trail of individual and collective destruction in their wake. They should not simply be legalized.) My guess is that refraining from such foolish, doomed pursuits would net us a sum in the tens of billions per year, perhaps enough to pay for a huge chunk of our health-care needs. Furthermore, if we simply adopted the philosophy that only the violent and otherwise most despicable of offenders belong in a cage, we could save an even greater sum. Spending thousands to try and then incarcerate someone for stealing a few items from a convenience store makes no sense whatsoever – surely there are better ways to deal with such bad behavior without condoning it. Our obsession with such nonsense stems less from stinginess and antigovernmentalism than from a failure of both common sense and compassion, and it costs us dearly. And I'm not even considering the elephant in the room, our military spending habits – I am all for a strong and thoroughly modern military, but we spend as if we are preparing for a combined full-scale Klingon - Borg invasion.

Second: the federal legislative branch is scarcely up to the task of dealing with the above problems of social will. Cloture in the Senate has gone from an occasional procedural tactic to a deadly weapon wielded by the minority party against the hopes of the majority. Those of us who live in California are now suffering through an extreme version of this debility: it takes a 2/3 vote in California to pass a budget. And since it's almost impossible to attain a 2/3 majority in today's polarized environment, nothing can be done most of the time. There are a few procedural tricks, but evidently they don't work very well. The Governator and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes in a time of recession (which is understandable), and the Democrats are set against gutting education and key social programs (also understandable). So here we are, waiting for inveterate opponents to come together and agree to a compromise they both loathe. We are now issuing IOU's that the major banks no longer want to redeem before maturity. The more fragmented and uncivil towards one another we become, the more damaging are all demands for legislative supermajorities.

My question, then, is as follows: might it best suit a weakened republic (one perhaps, alas, in a period of decline?) to quicken its upper legislative branch, making it a 51/49 proposition to pass legislation in both houses? Or at to least make cloture a 55/45 or 53/47 proposition? We need to do some big things in near-desperate times, and the way congress presently works, I'm not confident that we can do them, Big Al and Old Arlen notwithstanding. It is well and good to imagine wise men in periwigs playing the role of Lords to a mercurial House, but I'm not convinced that the Senate, as it now behaves, won't be the republic's ruin. What do you think? Is 60/40 cloture antiquated, or sort of like giving a box of loaded rifles to a roomful of lunatics? Or is it still possible within that constraint for an effective president to do some old-fashioned LBJ-style bully-pulpiting, arm-twisting and wheeler-dealing, thereby getting some big things done when he knows he has nearly 2/3 of the people on his side?

Guys like us

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played!
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!

We should worry. There are doubts. We don't know enough about her. She's "ethnic" and therefore might have "empathy" for other ethnics and therefore she might be prejudiced against us - and lets face it she's dangerous because we can't know how people like that think. Do we want someone with a special social or gender or ethnic perspective instead of a regular American anyway? It's not that we're prejudiced, it's that she probably is because, well you know. . . aren't they all?

And you knew where you were then.
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Change the "she" to a "he" and you have the same whiny, timorous Archie Bunker mentality that assured us their fear and loathing of Obama had nothing to do with the fact that he was a Ni -- I mean African American.

Turn on C-Span this morning and you have the same white collar bigotry from the same, expensively dressed, white Anglo-Saxon senators from the same tradition and the same party that fought school segregation, supported restricted real estate markets and hotels and caressed their bibles while telling us it was and should be a felony to marry outside your race. The same people whose family values trump yours, who want you to affirm their religion regardless of what you believe, who would never, however be so rude as to use a racial epithet whenblackballing you from the club. The same tailored suits who pretend to solemn deliberation to hide their knee-jerk prejudice. She's just not suitable, not one of us, don't you know old chap. It's nothing personal.

A wise Latina woman? Not at my country club, not on my court.

Didn't need know welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!