I'm Bad

There is something that, should you want to know anything about me, you probably ought to know. That is that I have an almost pathological aversion to the thing known as "pop culture." I've always tended to shy away from most of the stuff that "everybody" thinks is spellbinding at any given time. So I hope you can understand just how difficult it is for me that I have to begin by talking about the Michael Jackson trial.

A couple of months ago, it was impossible to go just about anywhere without this thing coming up. Turn on the radio driving to the store. Turn on your television and go to any channel. Chances were that if you waited a little while, the Jackson trial would come up. Even the network evening news programs. Even the newspapers. There was no escaping it. I'm already on record as being allergic to pop culture, and even I knew way more than I wanted to know about the trial. On the plus side, at least there were no cameras in the courtroom, so unlike the O.J. Simpson Trial Of The Century of a decade ago, we weren't witnessing the fatuous and tawdry display firsthand with this Trial Of The Century. We just got to see the same "new" footage of him every day walking into the courthouse; walking out of the courthouse, etc., etc. My favorite was the day he showed up several hours late due to some minor ailment or discomfort, and walked into the trial in pajama bottoms and sandals.

Jackson seemed to be genuinely bewildered by the whole thing. He seemed to honestly believe that no one need concern themselves with his behavior, that the whole thing was a witch-hunt. Which was exactly how his attorneys played their defense, and it won the day for the strange, strange man from Gary, Indiana. Because Jackson is fabulously wealthy, but most of all because he is wildly, colossally, famous, it was reasoned that his accusers could only be gold-digging scumbags. Why else would they pick on this ingénue, this man-child, whom we all so dearly love and revere? Our fame-centered culture has certified this man's status as above the law.

If you were alive in the 70s or the 80s, it was impossible to be unaware of a man from Louisville, Kentucky named Muhammad Ali. He was called the most recognizable man on the planet, and it was astonishingly true. There were few places on earth where his name and face were not known. Michael Jackson's fame approaches Ali's in those days, a fact which is all the more surprising when you stop to consider how much his appearance has changed over the last thirty years.

We've all seen the series of pictures that shows Jackson's progressively different face over the years. Try as one might to be non-judgmental, it is very difficult for me to understand the state of mind of a person who would alter their own physiognomy so significantly, and in such unnatural ways. One wonders about the level of self-loathing in a person who would change his own face into something that appears so... alien.

But stars have been fiddling with their looks ever since the close-up was invented. Jackson has just taken it farther and in a weirder direction than anyone has ever done before. Elizabeth Taylor has had so much work done that she's probably been wearing her thighs on her cheekbones for at least a decade or more. Joan Rivers still looks (something) like she looked when she was guest-hosting for Johnny Carson in the 70s. Things like breast enhancement, liposuction and stomach stapling, at one time thought to be fairly extreme measures, are now becoming so commonplace that even ordinary folks are getting them. Which is part of the problem. As I've said so many times before, we've had this "everybody's a star" mentality circulating for about thirty years now, and it's taken pretty firm root. It's complete malarkey, of course, but that's never stopped an attractive notion from grabbing hold of a nation's feeble imagination. I'd suggest that a far more accurate and more therapeutic thought for the public to hold might be something along the lines of "stars are everybody."

One of the by-products of working in television is that you get to meet some pretty famous people sometimes. The standard thing to do in the business is to be as blasé as possible around the famous people, treat them like anyone else. And the surprising thing is that once you find that way of looking at them, the famous people really do start to seem somewhat ordinary.

The television station where I work is the same one that had Jerry Springer as its news anchor. Since being the mayor of our city, and then its top news anchor, Jerry's gone on to even bigger things. Now he's almost as famous as Michael Jackson is. And why? Because he stands around in a studio while "ordinary" folks behave like utter fools for a chance to appear on television. "Ringmaster" Springer has parlayed this into a level of fame that few people get to attain. But I know a little something about Jerry Springer from having worked with him, and I know that he's just a person, as human as any of the rest of us. And I've found this to be true in every case.

The famous people I've met have - to a person - shown themselves to be as human and as ordinary as someone I might work with every day. The ones who walk in with a list of demands, expecting everyone to kowtow to them just look sad, pathetic to me. But there's this thing that happens when we connect a face in front of us with a face we've seen on tv or movie screens, and it can cloud one's judgment if one isn't careful. When we allow that disconnect to happen - the imaginary world of movies and tv invades the real world, and the comfortable fantasy takes charge of the situation - that's when we start to let things get out of hand.

[Pictured: Clive James]

About ten years ago, there was a series on PBS called Fame in the 20th Century. It was written and hosted by Clive James, a Brit who is a shrewd observer of popular culture across the decades. James possesses sharp, desert-dry wit, and he used it effectively to puncture the bubble of mystique that has grown around the famous. The heart of James' thesis was that the evolution of fame over the course of the 20th century was primarily an American invention, and that this American fame has spread all over the globe. When Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford went to Europe after having made several movies, they were incredulous at the adulation they received, and completely unprepared for it. Now stars work hard to maintain some level of anonymity, to the point where some have nearly become recluses.

I work hard not to be impressed by simple fame. Yes, there are famous people whose work I admire. Yes, it would be fun to have a chance to talk with those people and let them know how important their work has been to me. On the other hand though, I work every day with people whose work I admire, and who have a profound effect on me. Some of those people even appear on television, but they're my co-workers. So I try to keep the jumping up and down and giggling to an absolute minimum, which I'm sure they all appreciate.

Fame isn't always a "Get out of Jail Free" card. Just ask Fatty Arbuckle or Winona Ryder. The former, though he was in fact acquitted of murder, his fame wasn't enough to keep his career from imploding at the merciless hands of William Randolph Hearst. A few years after his trial, he was dead. Ms. Ryder, though not hounded to death, is nonetheless the butt of jokes, and her career has taken a downturn as well. Her fame may be big, but it isn't big enough to let people forget her criminal record. And how many people have you heard saying things along the lines of "I'm never going to another Tom Cruise movie," since he had his Scientology fit on the Today Show? You'd think HIS [italics there, please] fame, not to mention his matinee idol looks, would make this just a blip on the screen, but fame's a fickle mistress.

Let's remove the fame element from the Jackson debacle for a moment, shall we? Imagine that there was a man who lived down the street from you who had young children spending nights at his house. Imagine that these kids stayed there with little or no supervision. And most importantly of all, imagine that the man made no secret at all that the children slept with him in his bed. My guess is that you would tell your children to stay as far away from that vile excuse for a human being as they possibly could. Not a soul would blame you for feeling this way.

But if that man can sing and dance and is a relentless self-promotion machine, we might just give it another thought, mightn't we?


[Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are Karl Cable's and his alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher or editors of Cosmik Debris Magazine.]

© 2005 - Karl Cable