Well, John Travolta’s kid barely turned cold before the carrion consumers of popular culture circled about, each of them wanting to get their little slice of flesh off the bone, answering all the dirty questions that nobody with any fucking common sense bothers to ask in the first place. Is John Travolta boning his nanny on the side (becuase there’s no way a guy can be qualified to take care of a child, amiright)? Was the autopsy through enough? Could the creepy family religion have indirectly caused his death by irrationally causing them to avoid treatment? Yeah, those crazy religious people and their nonsense beliefs. Wake me up when Inside Edition starts talking shit about how half this country thinks we rode dinos with Jesus 6,000 years ago. That might be worth watching, but until then, you’re a bunch of cowardly demagogues who get paid to read a teleprompter. Shut the fuck up and tell me about celebrity birthdays.
It sickens anybody who’s got electric currents running through their brain, but it’s not interesting.The average person sees so much of this garbage during the day to day that it’s easy to become desensitized to it. Once in a while though, there’s something that comes along to tweak your sense of outrage just enough, and for me this did it:
Marcus Garvey, the crew chief of the AMT quad that picked him up before he died, got paid a fuckton of money to talk to every tabloid under the sun about all the titilating details on his last moment. How much blood was on the floor when you picked him up? Was there a pulse? How’d the parents react to the fact that their kid was gonna die? Did they cry? A lot? A little? Did Kelly Preston ask for help? When she did, did she call out to Jesus or Xenu?
What was she wearing? Something hideous, I bet. Got pics?
Now the question here isn’t “is nothing sacred?” That question has long been answered. I’ve touched on this before, but the internet hasn’t just changed values in the financial sense, it’s changed them in the emotional sense. The two are tightly tied together. If a new Porcupine Tree CD can be had for zero dollars and zero cents, well, that’s not really worth anything. And if a flesh and blood record isn’t worth anything once it’s digitized, what’s the use of some fluffy intangible emotion like grief? It’s worth what people will pay for it. Which was quite a bit in this case. The free market rules, don’t it?
Don’t blame the folks that paid for the interview. If they hadn’t paid for it, someone else would have. And don’t blame the guy who sold the story of a little boy’s death for a little extra green – he’s been working his ass off all his life, and society is set up to put people in debt. He’s doing what was right for himself, and his family if he has one. Blame systems. Blame institutions. Blame human nature. This happened because of supply and demand. So, it’s smarter to ask… why is there so much demand for this stuff? Why are people demanding to know how it felt for John Travolta to lose his kid? Don’t they get enough of that in their own day to day lives?
In life, when you love something enough, you lose any and all objectivity. If you’re invested in something, your emotional investment becomes more relevant than the truth. Four of seven years he’s been in the playoffs, Tony Dungy has been one and done. For all you non-sports fans, that means he got bounced out of the playoffs in the first round. He did this with Dwight Freeney, with Marvin Harrison, with Joseph Addai, with Edgerrin James, with Bob Sanders, and with Peyton manning, one of the greatest of all time. His defenses suck every year it seems, so you know what? Maybe he’s not that great a football coach. Football analysts won’t say stuff like this, because they’re very attached to the man. Rightly so. He’s one of the class acts of professional football. He’s a devout Christian, doesn’t act an ass, doesn’t go out of his way to humiliate people. He’s honest and forthright with the press. He’s fought his way through immense personal tragedy, he’s… he’s… he’s not all that great at coaching football.
Your emotions are destroying your objectivity! Name value, nostalgia, our attachment to the way things used to make us feel, it doesn’t just make us trust people that have failed us, it makes us take an unhealthy interest in shit we shouldn’t. After Bush broke up, it only took a good four years of work for Distort Yourself to get pressed, and I’m still amazed at the amount of emotional vapor fans put into it. This is one of the great albums of the decade, and if only they picked this single or that single, they’ll take off and sell 5 million copies and this and that. I couldn’t help but think they were rooting for a record that came our ten years ago and not the one that was in front of their faces – it was an OK CD if you liked Helmet or Bush. The end, and seeing as neither of those had gone plastic in years, it seemed more an evidence of magical thinking and fanboyism than anything else. And look – if you have a favorite band, you’ve probably run into that not so great side project or solo album that fans seemed to invest themselves in its credibility.
There’s nothing wrong with willing yourself to draw a line in the sand, saying I care this much, I’ll listen this hard, here and no further. Nor is there anything wrong with saying I loved something to death a lot when I was 16, and not so much when I turned 24. It’s not a betrayal of who you were, or who they were. Just because you think Tony Dungy is a nice guy doesn’t mean he should run your team next year. Just because you liked Sixteen Stone doesn’t mean Wanderlust is automatically good. Just because you really liked Battlefield Earth doesn’t make you entitled to know how someone’s son died.
The things at the root, the moments that caused the nostalgia, aren’t fluid things we carry with us forever. They’re moments that reside in a set period of time. When we idolize someone or something for the things they were, we’re missing out on what they are, and when we can’t recognize that change, we lose our objectivity.
And nobody wants to be the housewife drooling over corpses.
sure in this life, the ironies can turn so cruel
but right now i’m at a loss to find one to match you
Tags: Bush, Institute, Jesus Freaks, John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Nostalgia, Porcupine Tree, Sixteen Stone, Tony Dungy, Wanderlust