Dulia, Hyperdulia, or Hyperbole?
July 3, 2009, 8:12 am
Posted by Robert P. Imbelli
from a story in today’s New York Times:
the Jackson family and city officials and those from the Staples Center prepared a grand forum for public adoration of the singer. The event will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
I’m a bit surprised by all this adoration of Michael Jackson by the black community. I thought they had written him off for not being black enough. He was an incredible talent but a poor role model, to say the least. My answer is Hyperdulia (now that I know what it means–it’s amazing what you can learn here).
Idolatry — a bit like Princess Di. The hagiographical outpourings are very embarrassing! MJ was a victim of the decadent pop culture — the same kinds of perversions. dependencies and personality defects we saw in Elvis and others. Of course he had some talent when younger, but he squandered it. The cult is a symptom of the vacuity of today’s ‘culture’ — a desperate effort to fill the void.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-et-onthemedia3-2009jul03,0,7154995.column
Not sure which, since it’s kind of tricky to compare something like MJ or Princess Di in pop culture (mourning of a celebrity) to older folk culture (veneration of deceased person). Basic quality in the latter is “holiness” (however it is defined in different cultures). For the former, it’s talent (MJ) or, hmm, no particular talent (Di).
One difference for sure is the emerging phenomenon of the “commentator,” whatever it’s supposed to mean. Money quote from LAT article, which offers the word “celbutainment”:
“We have seen this character, and this movie, before. From the halls of the O.J. Simpson trial to the shores of every celebrity happening since, “experts” and “insiders” stand primed and willing for the next live stand-up. They thrive on one part chutzpah, one part opportunity and one part complicity — by a celebutainment media that seldom, if ever, presses the talking heads about what they really know and how they know it.”
The black community is not unanimous in its adulation; see Courtney Milloy’s column in the “Washington Post”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062802328.html
“The cult is a symptom of the vacuity of today’s ‘culture’ — a desperate effort to fill the void.
Fr, O’Leary –
Indeed. It seems to me that great Western prosperity has brought great Western boredom to all levels of our society, so the hunt is on for happy role models and almost any sort of distraction will do. MJ was a master of suggestion. His lyrics weren’t much, but his gestures sent all sorts of messages without saying a word! He was rich enough to satisfy all his childish dreams. He was “bad” enough to suggest forbidden even decadent pleasures, Yet he had a sweetness about him so he wasn’t judged as others are. He was a study in opposites promising something for all the jaded folks with no hopes of Heaven. Neverland indeed..
Impressive article in the Washington Post, Fr. K; the tragic consequences of self-rejection.
I always believed him guilty of sexual abuse; the mother made a terrible witness in the last trial.
Painful, scarred life – may MJ rest in peace.
Perhaps it’s time for a revisionist evaluation of the iconoclasts.
Where are they, now that we need them?
Patrick,
I spied one lurking over at the NCR blog: http://ncronline.org/blogs/young-voices/american-idols
Peggy Noonan, who is often very thoughtful but whom I also often disagree with, made two interesting observations about the Michael Jackson phenomenon of the moment.
During this past Sunday’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, she said something to the effect that one reason Michael Jackson was getting this kind of farewell is that we realize that we won’t have celebrities like him in the future. She said he was of a time when the culture was less fragmented. She recalled that not only did she watch his performance at the Motown 25th anniversary celebration, but her parents and her 10-year-old daughter were watching as well.
Also, in the green room discussion after the show, available on the Web, she said, “One of the reasons — we live in a media environment -– and one of the reason we have also given so much attention on TV, etc., to those who left us in the past week is that it’s an an easy way to fill media time to summon and put on the air the tape of Michael dancing, of Farah laughing, of Ed McMahan saying “Here’s Johnny.” I hate to be so reductionist, but when life is made easier for television producers, it changes what we see.”
Celebrity culture is a sickness just as our money culture. You are unlikely to get the time of day from anyone if you lack either. Religious leaders normally are catering to celebrity and almost always to money. The human condition as it were.
Michael embodied the human condition in all the ways we describe original sin. He had many redeemable qualities. It is just his embarassing moments were on public view whereas ours may be discreetly hidden.
I say he merits in many ways the mercy of the Lord.
The Jackodolators should look honestly at the sordid aspects they want to whisk away. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/michael-jackson-bad-and-very-dangerous-1731258.html
Does anyone else recall Benny Hill’s brilliant (and prescient) character Tex Cymbal King of Pop? What I find distressing is the psychic virus that seems to have infected millions. One can only hope that it will pass with time.
The article J. O’Leary links to is sordid indeed.
Why are the facts, the details, the reality, so immaterial to fans? It is beyond my comprehension.
The article J. O’Leary links to is sordid indeed.
And also way over the top. Michael Jackson was not Hitler.
Why are the facts, the details, the reality, so immaterial to fans? It is beyond my comprehension.
Probably because, in spite of John Niven’s rant, it is legitimate to look at an artist’s work without looking at his life. And all of Michael Jackson’s work of any significance was done before he deteriorated into the person Niven describes. Also, there is no hint of pedophilia in Jackson’s songs or videos. He wasn’t selling his personal life. He was selling great pop music and dancing. Even if you dig for the kind of details Niven wants to rub our noses in, what Jackson is alleged to have done (and I certainly believe he did) is distant and vague compared to the vivid and arresting recordings and videos.
Also, many of the most thoughtful people I have seen commenting on his life, while not excusing his behavior, view Michael Jackson not as an evil person, but as someone who was himself seriously misused as a child and seriously damaged as a result. I find it difficult to think of Jackson as the kind of monster Niven thinks he was. He was much more twisted and pathetic than he was evil.
Niven did not exaggerate — he just repeated the accusations made by the boys who claimed to be molested by MJ and found them entirely credible, as do I. I also believe Niven when he says he is not a member of the hang-’em-high witch-hunt brigade.
Pedophiles are not evil persons, usually, and it is nice that sympathetic understanding is forthcoming in this case; but MJ was surely deluded in thinking that his sexual grooming of boys was just jolly brotherly fun, and some of the excusatory fans seem to subscribe to his delusion. I do not think it is advisable to make moral exceptions for celebrities or geniuses; what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. “It is legitimate to look at an artist’s work without looking at his life. And all of Michael Jackson’s work of any significance was done before he deteriorated into the person Niven describes.” No doubt, but the description itself seems to be rejected by the fans, who are rewriting history, fulfilling MJ’s dream. ” Also, there is no hint of pedophilia in Jackson’s songs or videos. He wasn’t selling his personal life.” Alas, things are rarely so simple; his love-the-children ideology will always be undercut by the sordid details that emerged, and the erotic licentiousness of his dancing and singing may seem less innocuous when we recall that is also spiced his intimate colloquies with kids. “Even if you dig for the kind of details Niven wants to rub our noses in, what Jackson is alleged to have done (and I certainly believe he did) is distant and vague compared to the vivid and arresting recordings and videos. ” Look, ‘rub our noses in’ and ‘distant and vague’ is EXACTLY what people say about accusations of child abuse brought against the clergy, even when the victims are standing before them showing their scars; this constitutes classic denial. Niven did not have to “dig for” the details — they were all over the media only a short time ago. At least you do not deny that the accusations were credible, but you somehow want to deny that they are of any moment. Niven would agree with you that MJ was “much more twisted and pathetic than he was evil” — his Hitler analogy was on the point of logic and consistency, not suggesting parity of wickedness — but the adulators are not willing to recognize this. It seems that to call MJ twisted and pathetic is as big a crime as to call Princess Di similar things during the days of mass hysteria after her death. I share Carolyn Disco’s astonishment at all this double-think. I guess now we can understand that Catholic bishops are not the only people who indulge in it. Of course it may be the case that social policy toward pedophiles is vicious and that it killed MJ, but if people want to make that case let them make it in an upfront way.
Bob Herbert in today’s New York Times concludes his column with these words:
“The Michael-mania that has erupted since Jackson’s death — not just an appreciation of his music, but a giddy celebration of his life — is yet another spasm of the culture opting for fantasy over reality. We don’t want to look under the rock that was Jackson’s real life.
As with so many other things, we don’t want to know.”
Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04herbert.html?_r=1
Having read the link describing Jackson’s pedophilia, I will modify my position. There is no excuse for such flagrant and continuous abuse of children.
I hadn’t read the accusations either. Yes, guilty as charged.. However, having seen the Bashir interviews I’m more convinced than ever that MJ was literally crazy. Those conversations to me showed him to be capable of incredible denial, andthat he denied those accusations so believably implies that he was even crazier than I thought or the King of Liars. One has to wonder if he was sexually abused as well as beaten by his father.
Fr. O’Leary, your point about the bishops and denial and the public’s denial is well taken,. HOwever, I don’t think the bishops are crazy, which is why the laity is much angrier at them than we are at the perpitrators..
It is not clear to me what those who are up in arms want. Michael Jackson had established his reputation as a singer, songwriter, and dancer before there was any evidence of his alleged sexual abuse of young boys. His music lives on through his recordings, and many of his live performances are available on film as well. He is viewed by critics to have had a significant impact on popular music, and many performers acknowledge him as an influence. The allegations of child abuse were no secret, and I do not see the media sweeping them under the rug now. But Michael Jackson just died, and private behavior had and has nothing to do with his contributions as an artist and a performer.
Michael Jackson was a superstar, probably one of the last, and for good reason. His death was bound to get a lot of media coverage. Were the allegations of Jackson as a child abuser — never proven in court — supposed to be given equal time with the coverage of Jackson the artist?
Not in any way to minimize child abuse, but estimates are that 10% of boys and %25 of girls are abused at some time in their childhood, most frequently by members of their own family or by others known to them. Only about 10 percent of the cases of child molestation are by strangers. So, although we are unlikely to know who they are, it seems to me we are at least as likely to know people who have abused children as we are to know virulent anti-Semites.
Perhaps I have been watching the wrong news coverage, but in everything I have seen, the child-abuse allegations have at least been alluded to, usually with the presumption that they were based in fact. Further more, Jackson has been revealed to be a much more serious abuser of drugs than I ever knew. I had never paid much attention to his personal life, and the revelations (or rumors) about his children (if they are indeed his) have been further evidence of what a disturbed human being he was.
Anyone who claims to be celebrating Michael Jackson’s life has clearly not been paying attention, since it was a strange, unhappy, pathetic life. But anyone who is celebrating his life as an artist at this moment, as a way of reacting to his death, seems to me justified in setting aside for the moment his purely private behavior that took place after his creative period.
I guess now we can understand that Catholic bishops are not the only people who indulge in it. Of course it may be the case that social policy toward pedophiles is vicious and that it killed MJ, but if people want to make that case let them make it in an upfront way.
Joseph S. O Leary,
The responsibilities of the Catholic Bishops are quite different from the responsibilities of the fans of a dead pop-music star. Just as I think the bishops who did little or nothing to stop known child abusers among the ranks of the priests under their authority, I think anyone who was an enabler for Jackson’s alleged abuse of underage boys may very well have been more morally culpable than Jackson himself.
It doesn’t appear to me in any way that American society’s harsh treatment of those who sexually abuse children had anything to do with Michael Jackson’s death. From what we know so far, it is more likely it was his obsession with and apparently unfettered access to prescription drugs. But I do think there is a kind of schizophrenia about the way America looks upon sexual abuse of children. As I said in an earlier string on Michael Jackson:
And serious though sexual abuse of children is, I do think there is a hysteria about it that makes things worse for everyone involved. Many children do not reveal that they have been sexually abused, but for those who do, the reaction of the adults around them will play a major role in how the child deals with the experience. Remaining calm in front of the child is extremely important, and hysteria is to be avoided at all costs.
Let us suppose that Jackson was rather talented and as a person no worse than most of us. It still seems to me that the reaction to his death is excessive and overwrought, an expresssion of fanatical devotion–”fan” is short for “fanatic”–and to my mind any fanatical devotion to another human being is misguided and indeed pathological. But then I tend to think the cult of celebrities generally is a form of cultural pathology,
Soli Deo gloria, “To God alone glory”, is not a bad motto.
David wrote …. But Michael Jackson just died, and private behavior had and has nothing to do with his contributions as an artist and a performer.
A person’s intelligence, or artistic ability, or physical attributes are pretty much a gift and not earned, and at best people can be credited with good management of these, but people do have more so a control over their private behavior. To adore someone because they’re good at singing and to ignore their abuse of kids just seems weird.
David Nichol, you ARE minimizing child abuse. You are making excuses. You want to talk about his art. You want to defend those who adulate him.
Crystal Watson and Rita E. Ferrone,
It is not clear to me what you want. Are we to investigate the behavior of performing artists before we allow ourselves to be moved by their acting, singing, and dancing? All of Michael Jackson’s important work was done before there were any allegations of child abuse. Are we to erase history?
Also, I believe people who are emotionally scarred by being abused as children are less than fully culpable when they themselves, as adults, abuse children. It does not mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions. But as I said, if child abuse had no consequences, there would be no reason to oppose it. And one of the consequences is that it frequently is one of the causes an abused child becomes an adult who abuses children. Maybe you call that making excuses, but I would just call it an acknowledgment that abusing children often has consequences for them not only as children, but for the rest of their lives.
I heard a good sermon this morning, saying that faced with events like MJ’s death we should be silent and ask what God is telling us in such events. The preacher held that the razzmatazz cheapened MJ in death. On one hand, I cannot help thinking that MJ would be delighted to create such a sensation (‘good career move’); on the other, the MJ tragedy is replicated in a thousand lives, not only in Hollywood, so it is hardly necessary to seek in it a mystic epiphany.
David Nickol, there are lots of untested dogmas about child sexual abuse — such as the idea that abused normally become abusers. A psychoanalyst assures me that sex abuse of kids sometimes has no effects, or can be attended by good effects — there are no iron laws in human behavior. I was struck by a story in the New Yorker some 10 years ago about a priest photographing a boy who posed silently for him at a public baths; from the story it seemed to me that the boy, who testified tearfully in court and at the time considered all adults to be devils, was traumatized more by the janitor who reported the incident and the outrage of the parents than by the foolish behavior of the priest. But this is a factor that people who embark on undue intimacy with children should also take into account — the explosive social potential.
Is there any evidence that MJ was sexually abused as a child, in any case?
I think his troubles with kids killed him in the sense that his drug dependencies became very grave after the traumatic public proceedings. The trauma was that someone who very much needed to be loved and admired was identified as the most hated scapegoat in our society: the pedophile.
Art and morality (or character) are not easily separable. Pasolini’s “Gospel of St Matthew” is a classic film, but I admit that it loses much of its power for me because I recall the later sleazy offerings of the same director. Wagner’s music is intoxicating, yet one has constantly to make allowances for the thumbprints of his nasty side that are all over it — especially the vicious antisemitism (he urged somewhere that the German people should have the heroism to trample on scruple and exterminate the Jews) that leaves its mark on the characters and music of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger and the Untermenschen like Alberich and Mime in the Ring Cycle; and the false religiosity of Parsifal doubles one’s qualms about earlier works such as the Flying Dutchman and Tristan with their pseudo-Buddhist yearning for extinction; in the end one is left with Lohengrin.
Precisely because of the power of artists we need to be on the alert in dealing with them, just as we are with great but sometimes sinister thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Freud (sorry, only German names come to mind). The highbrow arts are surrounded by critical discourse that encourages such moral discernment. The world of pop seems to go scotfree even though it is rife with appeals to animal passion and even incitements to violence.
David,
I was abused as a child, didn’t get any counseling until I was an adult, but I haven’t grown up to abuse anyone else. I’m not saying such experiences don’t scar a person, but there is probably no one more aware of the damage sexual abuse can cause than someone who has been abused – I’d think that would at least give a person pause.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t appreciate the talents of a talented person. But speaking only for myself, talent alone isn’t enough to generate adoration in me.
David Nickol, there are lots of untested dogmas about child sexual abuse — such as the idea that abused normally become abusers.
Fr. O Leary,
Actually, if I implied that those abused as children tend to become abusers themselves when they grew up, that is a distortion of what I understand to be the case. What I think is true is that those adults who abuse children generally were abused themselves as children. Most children who are abused don’t grow up to be child abusers, but I do believe most who abuse as adults were themselves abused as children.
Is there any evidence that MJ was sexually abused as a child, in any case?
I don’t think there is evidence Michael Jackson was sexually abused. But apparently he was physically abused (beaten) by his father. Also, as I believe Peggy Noonan put it, his father treated him as a “commodity.” He never was allowed to be a child, and as a consequence, he clung to children and childish things his whole adult life.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t appreciate the talents of a talented person. But speaking only for myself, talent alone isn’t enough to generate adoration in me.
Crystal,
I would tend to agree with what Joseph Gannon said above (July 4th, 2009 at 10:04 pm). Anybody who “adores” Michael Jackson is engaging in irrational behavior that I don’t pretend to understand. If somebody asked me what of whom I am a “fan” of, I would have to say that I am a fan of the television show Lost, of the crime writer Michael Connelly, all of whose books I have read, of Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of a number of opera singers, most of whom no longer perform, of Patti LuPone, of Gwen Ifill (I alway watch Washington Week in Review) — that kind of thing. Right now I think very highly of President Obama, but I am well aware that he may not live up to my expectations, and I am not going to be crushed if he doesn’t. If anything, I think I may go too far the other way when it comes having heroes.
Having said all that, though, I think that the Michael Jackson fanatics are in awe of his talent and his public performances (for reasons I can well understand) but that the person they “adore” is a creation largely of their own imaginations, and while I might find that very strange, I would not expect them to find a place for child abuse in the Michael Jackson of their imaginations. There are some pop stars whose alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide are romanticized, the they truly do seem to be celebrated for the unfortunate aspects of their lives. I think Michael Jackson is being idealized by most of his fans in spite of his disturbed and self-destructive behavior.