“The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture….This is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the celebration of image over substance. “

Mr. Hedges, you are partially right.  Their has been an “exploitation of Michael Jackson”, both in life and now in death!  No one will ever really know or understand what a 5 year old MJ experienced or felt as he worked his entire childhood, no one will ever understand how it really feels to be mobbed everywhere they go - and for real most people wouldn’t really want to, and no one will ever understand they sycophants and enablers that surrounded this man or the demons that ate at his life! 

What I do understand is that there has been a hostile takeover of America by the corporate oligarchy that has pushed a dumbing down of America, that has pushed a me me me first culture, that has pushed massive consumerism as the cure-all, that has pushed money over people at whatever cost, that has allowed Americans to delude themselves with “things” even as the “corporate oligarchy” is robbing the rest of us blind! 

That there has been a “collective flight into illusion” is no doubt - our corporate owned newspapers push pablum as journalism, “our bought and paid for politicians” do the work of their corporate handlers to the detriment of the society at large - as they divide the electorate hiding behind mendacity and avarice!  The fact that the “public” falls for these lies is a whole other matter!  That after having GWB in office, the right wants to offer up Sarah Palin as a “Presidential Candidate” is further proof of the lows that this nation has sunk.  So while MJ may have succumbed to his personal demons - this nation is still struggling with it’s own moral nihilism and appears to be unwilling to confront it!

He was a twisted little drug addict who molested young boys.  The entertainers used to be kept outside the castle with the gypsies and the lepers. When we started “worshiping” them our society went straight to hell. Some father should of beat M.J. with in an inch of his life! Feel sorry for him? give me a break!

One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was the answer Malcolm X gave to a reporter when asked if he could have any wish, what would it be and Malcolm replied, “To be born white.”

For this white woman sitting in her comfortable white environment enjoying the fruits of her white labor and the privileges her white life afforded her, to pretend to understand what being black in America was and is like, is the height of arrogance.

In John Ford’s film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, the town’s newspaper publisher says, “When the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend.”  Michael Jackson took that to heart, as do most other celebrities.

I love the way Chris Hedges writes. 

I’ve been thinking about the loss of community in our country, discussed in Hedges’ book about American Christian Fascists, as well as by others.  The single family unit has been glorified, deemed by our politicians to be God-made, God-ordered, while community was being eliminated. 

The way that suburban tract homes are built serves to isolate the single family unit, geographically apart from everything unless there is family-provided transportation.  So children are raised in a pre-defined structure of the male-dominant dad, assumed to be the most intelligent and competent, the only person whose views are heard or matter, the female mom, assumed to be a servant and cook and nurse by birth, and the slave-children with no rights who must do as they are told.  And should be grateful that their parents forced them to live in an isolated tract home with only electronic pretend-friends for company.

Without community, people cannot and do not share with others their fears, the losses and sorrows, their strengths, they do not organize and unify to stand as a group to demand better for themselves.  Everyone is locked away in a tract home pretending that all is well. 

For Jackson, there is no doubt most of his problems come from the role of his father who controlled, used, beat, apparently sexually humiliated him, and sent him out into the world doomed to destroy himself.  If the family unit had been part of a community, perhaps someone else might have intervened to save that child.  But within the isolation of the single family unit, Dad raged and beat, Mom prayed, while the children were re-packaged, put to work, exploited, used, and destroyed.

Michael Jackson’s life is a very sad story.  The destruction of community, the tyranny of sexism and religion, the elevation of the single-family unit as being the perfect structure separate and apart from any community, is a big contributor to the story.

http://NABNYC.blogspot.com

Bread an Circuses for escapism. When the economy is in really bad shape, like now, people will do anything to get away from it if only for a time. The Cabal uses that for itself.

I think Hedges is, yet again, full of it.

WHY did paparazzi pursue Diana to her death? Because lots of dumb people would rather read about who she was sleeping with than who our President is negotiating with, what’s going to happen to our taxes, or all the rest of the “depressing” news.

Look at hoopla and Geraldoization of Anna Nicole Smith’s death—think Gatti or McNeil will get the 24 hour Anna/Michael treatment?

The media does this BECAUSE PEOPLE BUY IT!  People and Us aren’t news, yet they survive for decades.  Who CARES if “rich and famous” Fred Schmuck is schtupping “supermodel” Bobbi Bimbo? Or if Phil Putz was dumped by Heidi Featherhead?  Or that Cyndi Sadcase was photographed crying into her root-beer-and-Campari?  Or that Tiffany Towers’ chest is enhanced? (as if it wasn’t obvious?)

All you gotta do is not demand this stuff and the market vanishes.  C’mon, America! We’ve killed the market for steel, cars, houses, pet rocks. I KNOW we can kill the market for inane gossip magazines and TV shows.

I don’t know why people buy and read this shit.  But they do and that keeps the paparazzi going and the tabs going and merry-go-round going.

We all have feet of clay, no matter how much light, gold and silver we may display over our life span. No matter who you see or find out in the world or in your bed with you it is the same. We are many and full of a multitude of things that make us human. All the vagaries of nature good and bad, light and dark and all in between. Some have more of it than others but all have something to contribute to the species. Most will not be noted anywhere except in some peoples memories for a while then lost for all time. And so it goes.

I have found the whole post mortem Michael Jackson spectacle more than a little bizarre, just like his life.  Everyone praised him for being such a talented, awesome human being.  He had three good albums as an adult, was a great live performer, and had a great childhood career.  The rest of his life was spent in a sick, self indulgent life that most likely included child molesting.  I don’t see a lot of greatness there, except in terms of great popularity. 
There are many artists today that are still alive that have produced far greater work, and more of it too.  I feel more than a little disgusted that such a disturbed individual has been deified by so many famous people.

I may be misreading Hedges but in this article and others his theme seems to be there exist a ‘they’ who create and run our economy/culture/politics at the same time as there exist an ‘us’ who are not only at the perpetural mercy of the ‘they’ we perpeually live our lives according to ‘their’ dictates.

In essence, both are acting according to the nature of the beast - according to Plato a two-legged animal without feathers - the ‘they’ having identified the nature of the beast and then exploiting it accordingly, and the ‘us’ reacting out of our beast nature.

So, Mr. Hedges, until you figure out and share with us your formula for changing human nature, reading your essays will continue to be sojourns in let’s-get-depressed-today.

Once again Chris has nailed it.  Understanding the metaphor that M.J’s life represents for the greater issue of the sick Corporate dominance over the world we live in and generally our blind acceptance of it’s mantra.  Brilliantly written and deeply insightful.  Unfortunately,  many who read it will be either too consumed with their own quest for fame or so attached to believing the corporate state propaganda
that they simply won’t get it.  But, thank you for the assurance that reason does still exist in the world of insanity.

However otherwise accurate his word-picture here, Chris Hedges continues to lag way behind ‘the-curve’ of societal disintegration.  He also, as usual, fails to make the critical distinction between the sub-species homo domesticus, of which he is plainly just one more among six-and-a-half billion “individual” members languishing in their various toxic ethno/cultural petri dishes and energizing that ruthless apparatus that exploits and then discards them, and us surviving free wild native Human Beings who belong all together to the Natural Living Arrangement of our Mother Earth.

Anyhow, the INSANE “....pursuit of status, wealth and fame….” has actually prevented the captive peoples from ever developing a soul to destroy.  It has not “....destroyed (y)our economy,” either.  It IS your economy, and it inevitably betrays all of you in its falseness.

For those here who carp about their fellah ‘n’ gal born-inmates who don’t make the “right” choices….what’s in their wallet?

HokaHey!

Another brilliant piece of writing from Chris Hedges!

GoyToy,

I also thought about the book, “A Picture of Dorian Gray.”

For most of the week following the death of Michael Jackson, I turned off my TV. Even Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow joined in on the hoopla.

Sad—the juxtaposition of Nina Simone and Michael Jackson at the Montreux Jazz Festival…

I still remember seeing Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall in July of 2001. When she walked out on stage, she told us that if she were healthier, she’d lead a march down Broadway to protest George Bush and his administration. She never lost her fighting spirit. Nina Simone was a mesmerizing artiste!

The sad fact is that the Jackson coverage was great for ratings and those like us who want news and analysis were starved for two to three days. Only Fox News had some of their regular programming. I watched it without my counter dose of Schultz, Olberman, & Maddow like I normally did. They went for the ratings, not a surprise.

All such court cases concerning alleged pedophilia should be secret. Everyone and every thing in it. Only if it is a guilty verdict should it be made public and only after all the appeals are done. Not before.

Jackson reminded me of Rev. Charles Lutwig Dogeson aka “Lewis Carol” who liked to photograph children, some in various states of undress. The book I read was how during his time of life the views on adults and children changed to what we know today. At the start what Dogeson did wasn’t considered abnormal or ‘sexual’ at all. He liked being around children and wished to recapture that freedom of spirit & non-sexuality children have at an early age, and that the Bible admonishes us to be. Maybe Michael Jackson wanted that and all he did was innocent but was unseemly in our present attitude’s eyes.

Either way I am glad that the worse of it is over. Just the aftermath of the various doctors who may have contributed to this death will be analyzed.

I got very angry over the media, especially CNN,
showing pictures of Michael’s little girl crying
because her daddy died.  He tried so hard to shelter
his children from the media.  It’s a good thing I
couldn’t get in touch with Osama Bin Laden.  I would
have given him the address of the CNN news building
and ask him to fly a few planes into the building.
They didn’t show the little girl crying ONCE.  They
had to show it over and over and over.  I am one
of the few people that happen to believe Michael
Jackson loved children regardless of what the
perverted media like to portray.  I’ve quit watching
CNN and ask those of you who agree with me to also
quit watching the perverts.

I think that perhaps the Reverend Hedges should have just turned off the television. Working yourself up into a verbal froth over a pathetic, but famous individual, is rather silly is it not?

Last Saturday evening, I had the pleasure of attending the Montreux Jazz Festival this weekend. The highlight of the weekend was the Tribute to Nina Simone. The wonderful and beautiful singers: Lizz Wright, Simone (daughter of Nina Simone), Angelique Kidjo and Diana Reeves interpreted the work of Nina Simone. The result was an extraordinarly emotion-filled evening of beautiful songs by powerful and talented women.  It is an evening I will not forget.
However,  this wonderful segment was followed by Quincy Jones and Wyclef Jean milking the passing of Michael Jackson without restraint, and in this writer’s opinion, with the loss of everyone’s dignity, the performers and the audience who, in Pavlovian style, were encouraged on at least ten occasions to “put their hands in the air” if you love Michael Jackson and/or Quincy Jones.
After 45 minutes of this spectacle, I had the better sense to leave the Auditorium Stravinski.
Nothing from the latter part of the evening could ever detract from the extraordinary experience of the opening Tribute to Nina Simone.
There was something truly grotesque about it… and right after the beautiful and moving tribute to the late Nina Simone.

The juxtaposition was truly mindboggling.

Chris alludes to an aspect of news magnified by televison that is skewing the cultural mindset of what “everybody knows.”

Most news viewers believe or unconsciously accept that what is on the news is a a representation of what is real life. I grew up (from age 13) training to be a reporter. It seems like I’ve always known news is generally what is unusual. My acquaintences (treding toward highly educated, progressive folks) more often than not define the “real world” by what is on the news.

My friends who continued working in news claim complete ignorance of this delusion. Add the corporate pressure to sell “the good life,” the news bias (not necessarily always wrong) of “informing” about dangers, and the “popularity” of action over talking heads, one ends up with a superficial world tunneling into the collective psyche.

1) Blaming culture is absurd.  Jackson was surrounded by vultures and was often exploited, however victimizing him belittles self-responsibility.  At some point the individual has to be responsible for his or her own life instead of blaming “culture.”  You said that Jackson “became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated.”  But if Jackson became a mere commodity, isn’t he to blame for allowing such a thing to happen?  Jackson was the one who signed his name to those contracts—and he was the one responsible for choosing the people around him.

2) Maybe the reason why the memorial had such high ratings is because every single media outlet was covering it.  I wanted to watch the news but Jackson was inescapable.  So tell me: If every channel is presenting the same event simultaneously, doesn’t it make sense that the ratings are high?  Viewers had no choice but to watch (assuming the TV stayed on); we can’t control programming.

And boo-hoo to the last paragraph.  Celebrity isn’t powerful: self-delusion that it is powerful, is.  Give credit where credit is properly due.