Crazy is the new normal

I just don't know how poetic I can be about this, but it's just seems that as of late - i.e. the past few years - crazy, or for that matter underage and pregnant, among celebrities is tenderly overlooked, smoothed out onto the palate of reality like peanut butter on toast.

Michael Jackon. I am very sorry to see anyone die prematurely, make no mistake. But honestly, the guy was freak-kay. Who looks like that, the monstrous white flesh, the carved away face. Yet, millions of fans mourn and I guess they've found his so-called killer (Does the fact that he was a full blown drug addict mean anything to anyone? I guess from now on, we can blame the dealer, very conveinent, maybe I should start smoking crack). He may never have molested children but it seems more than coincidential that he was tried twice for this crime.

The truth was that Jackson had ceased to be a functioning rational adult a long time ago, or may actually never have acheived that. For one reason or the other, he was mentally messed up, addicted, crazy. But instead of pulling for tough love and being honest about his behavior, the world at large, the masses, the media, refuse to see him in that light, refuse to hold him accountable.

There are others: Britney Spears, Whitney Houston - all but forgiven for crazy, Liz Taylor, and the most henious of course is OJ Simpson. He's in jail now, so that's good, I guess.

I think we can blame to some extent the whole celebrity culture; we put them on pedastals, draining them of talent and privacy, pumping them with adoration and cash which their acutely narcissitic personalities subsist on. On some basic level they themselves are banal, and they know it, but the clothes, shoes, glitter, bling, clout disguise this.

It's tragic really. Our country was created out of a desperate need to throw of the cloak of monarchy and its oppression and disregard for individual rights, the ideas of enlightment a triumph over medieval monotony. Yet, over two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence is written, we find that the body of banality rejected so long ago is recreated in the form of celebrity. Maybe human beings need that vehicle of metaphor, that is celebrity.