JACKSON
NATION: I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FREAK
GrassTopsUSA Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder
07-02-09
In the end, what was Michael Jackson – male or female, black or white, adult or infant, Diana Ross or Howard Hughes?
Get beyond the anorexia (at death, Jackson weighed 112 lbs), the addiction to prescription pain-killers (he was injected with Demerol
three times a day), the cosmetic surgery and skin-bleaching, and the allegations of sexual assault on children – and Jackson still was so
profoundly weird as to suggest previously unexplored depths of the word.
Last week, at age 50, Michael Jackson transferred to another dimension. He will be missed. The celebrity/side-show-attraction was the
perfect metaphor for what America has become – the U.S. of Freak.
Interviewers asked: “Will Jackson be remembered as an entertainer or an eccentric?” But, the moonwalker is much harder to characterize.
He was an “entertainer” best known for cancelling concerts, a chronological adult who could only relate to children (emotionally and
sexually), a man-child best known for his antics – dangling his infant son off a balcony, assuming a fetal position when threatened
by reality, marrying women who were less important to him than his signature sunglasses, and endlessly whining that he was a victim
–
this from a man who’d earned half-a-billion dollars over the course of his career.
When the tabloids began calling him “Whacko-Jacko,” the artiste whimpered, “I’m a person, not a Whacko-Jacko.” When someone feels
compelled to make public declarations of his humanity, he’s gone way beyond eccentric and is about to
apply for permanent-resident status in
The Twilight Zone.
This is not to cast aspersions. America has become a freak show – where
15-year-olds have body-piercing, newly elected officials are assigned a personal
parole officer, and celebrity
is a synonym for nauseating.
We have celebrity freaks, political freaks, freaky athletes who torture pit bulls and freaks with a short shelf-life (like
the women who kill their children so they can party).
Our culture adores abnormality and treats the normal, the wholesome and the sane as social diseases.
Toleration is hardly enough. We must celebrate perversion.
Thus, kindergartners march in Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade. Men who’ve had themselves mutilated and emasculated to resemble women are
a venerated minority.
Men who wear dresses, brassieres and pantyhose are in touch with their inner
selves, we are told. The more revolting the behavior, the more the
political and cultural elite insist that it be lionized.
Those who speak up for normality (even in a whisper) are excoriated as bigots, hate-mongers and provocateurs. Miss California
lost her crown for observing that she believes marriage is what it is. Dissent from the aberrant is treated as a crime against humanity.
Politics has become the Elephant Man with favorability ratings.
The past year alone has seen a New York governor with a valued-customer card from hookers, an Idaho senator who tap-danced in
bathroom stalls, an Illinois governor who tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat, and a South Carolina governor who fell off the
face of the earth for five days while he admired tan-lines in Argentina. A few years ago, a New Jersey governor resigned
after it was disclosed that he’d made his gay lover the state’s homeland security director.
Once upon a time, every Republican wanted to be Ronald Reagan. Today, many might be mistaken for Warren G. Harding.
Democrats do what comes naturally. The party’s philosophy is based on a rejection of morality and a denial of reality.
Thus one Democratic ex-president – impeached for perjury, who made the White
House his love-nest – earned $40 million in
speaking fees in his first 5 years out of office, while the other gets moist at the thought of
necking with another Hamas or
Hezbollah thug.
Perhaps the party is best represented by the current chairman of the House Financial Services Committee – who lived with a male
prostitute (AKA: “Hot Bottom”), who ran an escort service out of the
Congressman's DC condominium. Now, the Congressman lectures us on fiscal
responsibility and sound banking practices.
Cinema has gone from “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Casablanca” to “Land of the Lost” (where the hero is ingested and
excreted by a dinosaur) and “Transformers II” (where a midget robot gets amorous with a leg of the buxom heroine). Hollywood
grows ever more addicted to CGI. Who needs dialogue, character development and plot, when you can simulate the end of the
world with a computer?
Obama isn’t quite sure who this Megatron is, but wants to negotiate with him anyway. He’ll begin by apologizing for whatever
we did to create the current climate of hostility.
Television features sexy vampires, horny housewives, sitcoms whose humor is centered on the bedroom and bathroom, and “reality-TV”
which threatens to give exhibitionism a bad name.
In the land of the freak and home of the grotesque, half of all teens will use an illicit drug before they finish high school;
14% of 12-to-17 year-olds have had what’s termed a Major Depressive Episode; among 15-to-24 year-olds, 19 million new STD
infections (we used to call the venereal diseases) occur each year; and 31% of girls will become pregnant before the age of 20.
Almost 40% of all births are out-of-wedlock (despite middle-schoolers doing
condom-and-banana drills). In a
nation that spends hundreds of billions annually on public education, there are 42 million illiterates and 50 million functional
illiterates.
Last year, we
elected Bizarro President, who insists that America is no longer a Christian nation
and pledges to fight the slander of Islam wherever it rears its ugly head. He was too busy proclaiming June Gay Pride month and
plotting to destroy our economy (to deal with the imaginary threat of global warming) to acknowledge pro-democracy demonstrations
in Iran until they had been going on for weeks.
Michael Jackson
would have ended up in a psycho ward, were it not for the general nuttiness of
the nation at large -- a culture on the verge of a meltown and a society
approaching a mental-breakdown.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
