Michael Jackson, death larger than life

It’s not every day that I think on the subject of death but as both Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett have died within hours of each other, death has become larger than life. As it often does, the glare of celebrity has transformed the ordinary into something extra-ordinary. Last year in the United States there were 565,650 cancer deaths – still 9 million people tuned in to watch Farrah’s Story. The circumstances surrounding ‘The King of Pop’s Death’ are still unknown but Tim Arango at the NYT compared the icon’s death to “The Kiss in Times Square” memorialized by Alfred Eisenstaedt, after the Japanese surrender ended World War II. A kiss is just a kiss but some kisses are more memorable than others. Death is a part of life, but some deaths touch more lives than others. I will always remember where I was when I heard the news of Princess Di’s death, John F. Kennedy junior’s missing plane, and now, the gloved one’s untimely death. Perhaps our fascination with celebrity death’s is an attempt at voyeurism into the afterlife.

The King of Pop

Madonna, the Baby-buyer

Madonna shouldn’t be allowed to buy children. 

Even poor and destitute ones.    

On the other hand, said-orphaned children should not be prevented from a bright future based on the hypothetical risk of child trafficking.

In nailing the coffin shut on Madonna’s adoption plea, the puppet-to-delirious-human-rights-groups *judge* explained that:

By removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children, the courts by their pronouncements could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals who would take advantage of the weakness of the law of the land.

The risk to trafficking is hypothetical to four-year-old Chifundo “Mercy” because Madonna is clearly not a child trafficker. And would this “unscrupulous individual” be Madonna who already adopted a son from Malawi under its “weak” law? Sounds like punishment for the first adoption.

 

Although we can tick off child trafficking as a threat, Mercy isn’t safe from is growing up in an orphanage without family members to provide her primary care. This means that in a country such as Malawi she will also have scant access to education, first as a girl, and probably-never as a girl child without family. Girl children without education don’t educate their children; have less means to promote the survival of their infant children; and are more at risk to AIDS – a huge problem in Malawi (and this is the short list).

Obviously there is no cut-and-dried solution to orphans (in Africa in particular). Groups who are calling for people to donate money to aid agencies as a solution, seem to have selective memory regarding the process and politics of humanitarian aid. That is, Mercy may never get the aid. Unscrupulous relatives may exploit her for the aid. The orphanage will also have to spread the aid around.

Although it remains to be seen if Madonna will win the appeal she can still do more (than the school she already has) to help orphans in Malawi. Madonna can and should set up a trust for Mercy if she really cares about the child as her own daughter.

Meanwhile there are many countries that don’t impose a residency requirement for the legal adoption of children.  
 

Madonna should fuel up her jet and adopt there.

Should Rihanna and Chris Brown be PosterChildren for Domestic Violence?

The twist and turns of the Chrianna scandal ebbs-and-flows from outrage, disbelief, indifference, boredom, and finally, a whole lot of denial.

Like most people I am sick of hearing about these two. What’s the big deal? In Hollywood people are arrested, permanent tourists in posh Rehabs, publicly shamed, unrightfully glorified and vilified — all in a day’s news cycle.

But with the never-ending saga dominating blogs I’ve decided to respond, again. I guess there is something about this incident that hasn’t happened to our satisfaction. I guess this is why we keep recycling a litany of possibilities, hoping that one sticks.

Many would like to see that *boy* in jail. But as America is always in a rush to put black boys in jail I am strongly against this option. Secondly, many are waiting for Rihanna to step up and be the cover girl for teenage domestic violence. My response to this is, why Rihanna? Why not Halle Berry, whose first ex-husband beat her so badly she lost part of her hearing in her left ear. Why not Nancy Wilson, Janet Jackson, or Tina Turner?

Finally the biggest question of all, who is responsible for the morality of our (collective) youth? 

I am responding to a post in the Atlantic, re-posted on facebook, in which the writer appears to imply that the Crihanna situation is not a useful model of dating violence: It’s a bad idea to assess your society through lens of people whose business is fame, s/he writes.

I can infer what s/he means that since their image is constructed so is the response. What this writer seems to take for granted is that we are all constructed. There is no such thing as self — only subjectivities. The fact that so many young girls approve the physical abuse of women provides hard evidence that something has gone horribly amiss in our society. It often takes the plight of celebrities to wake people from their slumbering consciousnesses, and I’m all for the resurrection.

What happens in famous relationships, under the glare of the spotlight, provides some insight on what happens in any given household across America. Though I wasn’t there the night of the Crihanna incident, I was in a similar situation when I was 19. I also knew other young women in identical relationships. And I’m sure there are other people reading this who can name a few women they know in a similar situation.

Let the assessment begin!

I don’t think the Crihanna scandal is far from reality at all. So why shouldn’t we be alarmed at the results from the recent survey of 200 teenagers by the Boston Public Health Commission:

Forty-six percent (46%) said Rihanna was responsible for what happened; 52 percent said both bore responsibility, despite knowing that Rihanna’s injuries required hospital treatment. On a facebook discussion, one girl wrote, “she probly ran into a door and was too embarrassed so blamed it on chris.” 

The reaction of adolescent girls in this Boston school and elsewhere prompted Oprah, Tyra, and a dozen other pop-media gurus to pose the question, what is going on with our girls? Yet the author in the Atlantic called the outcry a rush to judge today’s youth.

There is a lot of alarm over the fact that some study found 40 percent of kids “blame” Rihanna. This strikes me as the age-old tactic of marrying the latest controversy to the ever-present sense that our kids are more amoral than we were.

While this may not be a representative sample, I think it’s enough to ring the alarm. Numbers don’t lie although they can be misleading, but how about the increase of Chris Brown’s albuym sales since the night of the incident? His fan base is solidly female, mainly pre-teens and adolescents. The author doesn’t want to base the conclusion that teens don’t take dating violence serious enough based on surveys and albums sales; but what can awe infer from this?

Surely we can infer something. Since society and family units are responsible for the subjectivities that people embody, could we infer that the misogynistic structures of society have been internalized by girls and boys? Could this internalization be the root of the mis-recognition of gender-based violence as the fault of the victim?

Could we say the absence of men in the home has led to the increased vulnerability of girls? Could we say that these girls are willing to tolerate abuse to become the *official* girl of any Body, even if that some Body threatens her life with abuse and risk to STIs because of unequal knowledge-power to negotiate condom use?

We could say a lot of things but as writers we have a responsibility to say something [of use]! We should shy away from knee-jerk reactions and the response to this incident as one having to do with the fictional construction of generation. There is no true line between generations, we all are existing in the same time and situation, and parents of teens are the ones who should be ultimately advising their children on how-to-do-the-right thing.

This soap opera has opened up an opportunity to talk about teen violence.

Let’s talk before more girls get hurt.