Original Content at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Man-in-the-Mirror-by-Chris-Hedges-090714-736.html
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July 14, 2009
The Man in the Mirror
By Chris Hedges
In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation 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 Caucasian
death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He
could not disentangle his public and his private self. 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, delusions of majesty,
and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation 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 million television viewers.
The ceremony, which featured performances or tributes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other
celebrities, was carried live on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets.
It 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 of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet
Jackson, before the girl could 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. The 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 and then a long, bizarre
and macabre emotional train wreck. O.J Simpson offered a tamer version of the same plot. So does
Britney Spears. Jackson, by the end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million
out-of-court settlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual abuse and
two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony. We fed on his
physical and psychological disintegration, especially since many Americans are struggling with their
own descent into overwhelming debt, loss of status and personal disintegration.
The lurid drama of Jackson's personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoing dramas on television,
in movies and in the news. News thrives on "real life" stories, especially those involving
celebrities. News reports on television 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
greedily consumed "news" about Jackson, especially in his exile and decline, which often outdid most
works of fiction. In "Fahrenheit 451," Ray Bradbury's novel about a future dystopia, people spend
most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and
criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged, scripted, given a narrative
and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment. 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 property, first as a child
and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold-plated casket, 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. They are the puppet masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural
illusion is swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries. The
producers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles made sure the 18,000 attendees and the television
audience (even the BBC devoted three hours to the 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, fighting back tears, recalled how she and a 33-year-old Jackson-who
always maintained 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." Shields and Jackson, at Taylor's wedding,
then joked that they were "the mother and father of the bride."
"Yes, it may have seemed very odd to the outside," Shields said, "but we made it fun and we made it
real."
There were photo montages in which a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was
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 anecdote seemed to confirm that when you spend your life as a
celebrity, you have no idea who you are.
We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and
behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long
to attract admiring audiences for 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 dress, what we
say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would
react. Celebrity culture has taught us, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal
screenplays. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate
to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler, who has written wisely about this, 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 and gender. He transformed
himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African-American male to a
chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity. And while he pushed these boundaries to
the extreme, he did only what many Americans do. There were 12 million cosmetic 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 intrinsic value. They
must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must remain 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 people's humiliation, pain,
weakness and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing are
qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted
off any reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to
"disappear" the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show "America's Next Top Model," a
picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen.
Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities who can no
longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of
unadulterated competition and constant quest for notoriety 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. Human beings are used, betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture, which is pretty much
the story of Jackson's life, although he experienced the equivalent of celebrity resurrection. This
has been very good for his music sales and perhaps for his father's new recording company, which Joe
Jackson made sure to plug at public events after his son's death. Compassion, competence,
intelligence and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are commodities. Those who do not
achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize 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, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for
constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for
remorse or guilt. Jackson, from his phony marriages to his questionable relationships with young
boys, had all these qualities. 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.
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 friends, 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 economy, stole money from tens of
millions of small shareholders who had bought stocks to finance their retirement or the college
expenses of their children. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality
television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds 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 the despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own
lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities,
costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status, wealth
and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destroyed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.
The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true power-corporations and the
oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis
that will create more misery than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and
distracted by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is
not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our
identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and
happiness and keep 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.
